Adult Movie Theatres in Boise

Open now: Chinden Boulevard and Overland Road

Other shops:

Hours as each shop publishes them, checked 29 October 2026. Ring before a late drive.

Garden City, incorporated 22 May 1949

Boise would not license gambling. In 1947 the Idaho legislature let cities and villages license coin-operated amusement devices, the capital shut them out, and on 22 May 1949 the Ada County commissioners approved a new village on the river flats at its edge. The promoters were Boise businessmen who said they wanted an amusement center. What they opened, just past the city limits, were gambling houses, and by 1951 Life was reporting that the take had paid for a park, a water system, a city hall and a police force.

On 23 December 1953 the State of Idaho had the village itself in front of the Idaho Supreme Court, on public morals and public nuisance. The gambling ended. The village eased its building codes, and what came in was junkyards, slaughterhouses, nightclubs and adult bookstores, with a nickname to go with them: Saturday Night Town. It became a city in 1967.

Two Garden City adult bookstores reached the Idaho Supreme Court. The Attorney General had brought proceedings against them under the state’s Moral Nuisance Abatement Act, and the district court held that abatement was a constitutional way to deal with obscene material, found most of the State’s exhibits obscene and enjoined the remaining defendants from selling them, while striking the Act’s forfeiture provisions as a prior restraint. On 29 May 1981 the Supreme Court reversed and sent the case back, holding that a one-year closure or forfeiture of property was not a prior restraint where it followed a court’s own finding that the material was obscene. What waited on that finding was the closure and the forfeiture, not the injunction the district court had already granted. The bookstores attacked the Act in federal court, and on 30 October 1981 the District of Idaho declined to hear the challenge while the state case was still running.

The final bill at the Boise Theatre, August 1973

The Boise Theatre stood at 913 West Main Street with 339 seats and one screen, in a building that had been a row of shops, a saloon and a café before it was a cinema. Its last performance was on 14 August 1973, and the bill that night was two features: Suburban Wives, a British sex comedy two years old, and Moonlighting Wives, a 1966 Joe Sarno picture that film writers file as early sexploitation.

The Boise Redevelopment Agency took the building down in the 1970s, in the downtown clearance.

What started on Halloween night in 1955

On 31 October 1955, after an investigation by a private detective, three men were arrested in Boise. The Idaho Statesman, the city’s only daily, carried the arrests on 2 November, and on 3 November its editorial board told the city to crush the monster.

What began as allegations about sex with teenage boys widened into a search for any man in Boise who was homosexual or thought to be. By the end sixteen men had been charged. Fifteen were convicted. A jury acquitted one. The sentences ran from probation to life.

About fifteen hundred people were questioned, in a city of about thirty-five thousand.

John Gerassi published the standard account in 1966 and the title has been attached to the city ever since. A generation of gay men in Boise grew up knowing that the perception alone could ruin a man.