On the Origin of the Kissing Booth
Hi all!
Long time no write. A mixed bag of excuses from me: I got lazy, I wasn't happy with the quality of content I was putting out, I wasn't sure that I was supposed to be "creating content" at all. Still fuzzy on that last one.
At any rate, I intend on mailing little treats to your inbox whenever I feel so inclined. I hope to polish them a little more before they get there, but we'll see how that resolution lasts. Anyway, here are some words about something that's piqued my interest as of late.
On the Origin of the Kissing Booth, or: Who The Hell Let This Happen
I'm always fascinated by odd cultural touchstones (Toto's "Africa", anyone?) but the one that really flummoxes me is the kissing booth. I don't even have to explain it here--I am certain that we're all familiar with the trope; in film, in book, in whatever other media you consume, surely you've heard about it or seen it portrayed. Girl at a fair, pay a price and she'll kiss you.
I truly--truly--cannot understate how much is going on in that previous sentence. How do you get someone to sign up for this? Why would you want to? Why would you want to stand in line in public, showing the world that you are willing to pay for this? Are there age restrictions? Consent? Diseases? Freaks who will inevitably take this too far? And that's not even thinking about the girl in the booth! I think if this was just some weird, fetishistic trope that old man producers came up with as a plot point, that'd be the end of the story. But...it's not. Or at least, it doesn't seem to be.
The Wikipedia page for kissing booth is incredibly bare-bones (and safe for work, I promise). There's a one sentence introduction to the concept, tagged with two sources: a 2009 fair where a booth did its share, along with other attractions, to raise money for breast cancer research, and a dead link to a similar charitable event. That's not much in terms of history! The only piece of knowledge further back is a 1971 instance of a "Hug a Homosexual" booth gone unvisited that made the news only because two lesbians kissed in front of it.
Surely the trope has to go back further, right? Here's the Google nGrams (which searches digitized media from centuries ago for words or phrases) chart for the phrase:
For a trope that seemed (in my mind) commonplace in the mid-20th century, there's not too much recorded writing about it. The oldest reference I could find was this gem from a copy of The Freethinker, a "British secular humanist magazine" (per Wikipedia). (Side note: the opening lines of the magazine's statement of purpose, from its founder G.W. Foote [a Catholic now to be sure!] are incredible:
The Freethinker is an anti-Christian organ, and must therefore be chiefly aggressive. It will wage relentless war against superstition in general, and against Christian superstition in particular. It will do its best to employ the resources of Science, Scholarship, Philosophy and Ethics against the claims of the Bible as a Divine Revelation; and it will not scruple to employ for the same purpose any weapons of ridicule or sarcasm that may be borrowed from the armoury of Common Sense.
What a dweeb. Say a prayer for his soul!) Anyway, here's the quote from the 1890 issue that we're more concerned with:
Pious people will adopt any means for the laudable end of raising the wind for God. At Matticuck (U.S.), the church, being in need of funds, set up a fancy fair, with a kissing booth. Twelve of the prettiest girls in the church were induced to play the part of kissers at twenty-five cents each. It took tremendously. In less than a quarter of an hour there was a line outside the kissing booth extending to the end of the church, and many of the kissed, on emerging from the tent, ran round and got in the line again, ready to pay a second time for another kiss. The receipts of the booth brought in a good round sum to the Lord. But all the other church and chapel people were very angry. The girls were publicly denounced by the pious people who were not in it as "bold hussies" and a disgrace to the town.
A brief editor's note: $0.25 in 1890 roughly converts to $7 today. I wanted to present this fact as something shocking, but then I considered how many people would probably pay $7 to kiss someone today. Not great.
Unfortunately, I wish I had more history to relay. JStor, Google Scholar, everything seems empty. I even clicked through 10+ pages of Google results with nothing but some forum conversations to show for it. The general consensus is that kissing booths were a thing in the mid-20th century, and still exist in some places. Public opinion on these sites seems to be--get this--split by gender, with seemingly equal parts finding it either disgusting or harmless fun.
Some assorted kissing booth content I found along my dive: there's....a lot of booths/advertising for them for sale on Etsy? There's also a now closed diner in New Jersey by the same name (going to assume health code violations); you can buy an 8x10 print of a 1930s kissing booth on Amazon, and here's where I make a joke about society going to the dogs.
I'll let Gerard P., from a Yelp forum thread on the question of whether or not kissing booths are prostitution, finish it off for me:
I hope he's doing well.
If you find any more information about this history, or have any wild conjecture of your own, don't hesitate to write back. I hope all of you are taking care of yourselves despite our very frustrating national inability to.
In Christ,
Hunter "now would be a very bad time to have to explain my Google search history" Lastname