Where we stand in April 2026.

Our dream remains to create a retail store somewhere in Pittsburgh that would specialize in sex toys and sexual health accessories, and provide a general-purpose space for meet-ups, classes, and whatever other stuff people want to use it for.

Broadly speaking, this comes down to four sequential questions:

1. Why do this?
2. Can we do this?
3. Do we want to do this?
4. How do we do this?

We’ll skip over the ‘why’ for now, because we have at least a baseline sense that it’s a good idea. Before we figure out the ‘how,’ though, we need to determine the ‘can.’ I've been told I have a nice can, so let's find out.

In order to open a store, we would need a market of potential customers, a location to do it, a bunch of money to pay for it all, and most importantly knowledge of the statutes that we need to stay within to legally operate.

The market clearly exists. We still have our survey making the rounds (please give it a look and share if you haven’t already). The results we have seen so far confirms our suspicion: a population of folks definitely exists in the city who would really benefit from this store being here.

We also aren't overly concerned financially. I (Siobhan) have been serving time for the last couple decades working in Corporate America. I have a small bit of money saved up - nothing amazing, but enough to get the dildo rolling, as it were. The rest can be covered by straightforward business loans or investments. All this is to say that financially we have our ducks in a row, or at least can with a bit of maneuvering that we are fully capable of doing.

On to the real bumps in the road.

We want to buy a building. There are a number of reasons for this, but mainly we want to be able to fully control our environment and we don’t want to have to contend with any landlord scrutiny over the business or our customers. Retail real estate within the city is hard to come by, especially when we want to also have room for multi-purpose education or meeting spaces, too. At the end of the day, no matter how much money we have we can’t just manifest a building if there simply aren’t any (well, I guess if we had enough money we could build something, throw some luxury apartments and a Shake Shack in there and we would be fine). Maybe we could try to rent a space, but the risk will be much, much greater. There isn’t much we can do but wait for an opportunity to pop up.

The final problem is much less clear. We aren’t even sure what kind of regulation would cover a sex shop like this, let alone what restrictions we might be held to. We have consulted lawyers about this (and our efforts to contact relevant city council members have heretofore gone unanswered), so it's an open question that we are working on. That said, if anyone knows a good queer lawyer who would want to stand up for sexual health in Pittsburgh, please send them our way (info@queenofwands.store). We’ll post a more thorough examination of the public ordinances in the City of Pittsburgh later.

The legal situation is a gray area at best, and our fear is that someone with a sufficiently angry bee in their bonnet could construe The Queen of Wands as fitting under a particular legal definition, which would then force us to follow certain rather impossible zoning restrictions. It would be pretty easy for a particularly puritanically-minded individual to get us run out of town on that basis, then sleep soundly at night knowing they saved us all from yet another acknowledgement that sex exists.

So what’s a sex-positive queer to do, then?

On the building front, not much. There isn’t much to do but wait and hope that fate provides us with an opportunity. If anyone happens to be sitting on a prime retail building somewhere in Pittsburgh and would be willing to sell it to some queers with a big dream and a barrel of water-based lube, by all means get in touch (info@queenofwands.store).

As far as the law goes, we’ll keep poking around. We are very interested in the pair of romance-focused bookstores opening in the city this year. Those businesses may provide a good foothold into the “sex can be okay” future that we all (hopefully) want. Supporting those places may be key to ensuring we will be able to exist sooner than later. We will keep trying to get in touch with the councilpeople who represent the districts we are hoping to move into. At the end of the day, it may just come down to asking for forgiveness instead of permission - buy a building, open the store, and hope nobody has a problem with it.

In the meantime, we’ll keep yinz abreast (or abutt, if you’re more into that) of our progress. We will keep posting interesting stuff here (I have a multi-part deep-dive into bath bombs on the way), so stay tuned for that. We are also toying (pun intended) with the idea of buying a cargo van to start a sort of mobile adult store (a lewd truck, if you will). Maybe instead of having a store to visit, we’ll do house-calls.

What do you think? Would you like to see a tasteful adults-only toy truck at an event some time soon? Do you think we should hold out for a building so we can follow through with our other plans to have classrooms and meeting spaces? Do you happen to be an expert in zoning laws around sex toys? Whatever the case, please talk with your (adult) friends about this idea. See what they think about having better locally-owned access to sex toys. This is a hyper-local idea, and so it should start with hyper-local relationships and community building.

If nothing else, you’ll have an interesting conversation with your neighbors, which will be one little step toward this world being a better place, and that’s our ultimate goal.

Ta ta for now.