Adult Movie Theaters

This chapter covers the history of the adult movie theater in the United States, focusing on its heyday from the 1960s to the 1980s. The adult movie theater was the result of legal, technological, and social change and emerged as obscenity became increasingly deregulated in the early 1960s; later, urban “clean-up” campaigns and home video/internet developments began its slow unwinding. Although adult theaters were widely perceived as disreputable places until the mid-1970s, the so-called “porno chic” moment rehabilitated their public image for a brief period, until the feminist “sex wars” framed them as sites of patriarchal oppression for women. Alongside this, gay male adult theaters took on their own cultural meaning, as sites of gay liberation and an affirmative view of public sex and community. Ultimately, this chapter argues that adult theaters must be narrated not just through the lens of debates around morality, sexuality, and gender but also through that of political economy, in which pornographic movie theaters were part of larger struggles involving real estate and capital flows, which ultimately determined the trajectories of urban space.