Adult Movie Theatres in Dallas

The eight that are open

Four of the eight are New Fine Arts stores and one operation: Suite A and Suite B at 1720 West Mockingbird, Shiloh Road and Northwest Highway. The group publishes the same prices across its stores, $10 a person to watch and a $20 deposit on a private room, so the four stores are one choice in three places. Bliss, Lido, 910 West Mockingbird and Odyssey are not part of that group.

What the second column says

The register the city put out in January 2022 has a column for what a business is licensed as, and a second column for what that business is actually doing. Across the cabarets on that list, the entries in the second column include active licence and closed down, holding licence not operating, and active licence and vacant strip mall.

One of those licences is attached to an empty lot and another to a vacant strip mall. The city holding the fee is not the city opening the door, and Dallas writes the two down in separate columns.

Four subsections, cured in a month

The licence was written in June 1986. Ordinance 19196, Chapter 41A, adopted by the council on 18 June 1986, put nine kinds of business under a licence from the chief of police, from arcades and bookstores to escort agencies and nude model studios. The chapter classifies seven today.

Three sets of operators sued within weeks. On 12 September 1986 Judge Buchmeyer upheld the ordinance apart from four parts of the licensing scheme, which he called minor exceptions, severable and curable by amendment. One of the four turned on whether an applicant who had managed such a business had shown he could not run one in a peaceful and law-abiding manner, a test with no standard in it anybody could measure.

The city amended the four on 12 October 1986 rather than appeal.

January 1990, the clock and the route

The operators took the licensing scheme to the Supreme Court and won there. On 9 January 1990, in FW/PBS, Inc. v. City of Dallas, the Court held the licensing requirement unconstitutional because the scheme had neither a deadline for deciding an application nor a quick route to a judge when one was refused. The ordinance did tell the chief of police to approve a licence within 30 days, but it set no time limit on the inspections the decision waited for, so the scheme could put off issuing a licence indefinitely.

Six justices agreed on that result and three on the reasoning. The three held that a scheme like this one needs two of the three safeguards from Freedman v. Maryland rather than all of them: a decision in a short fixed time, and prompt review by a court, but no duty on the city to be the party that goes to court. How much of the licensing scheme fell with the requirement went back to the Fifth Circuit.

Dallas did not lose everything. The Court upheld bringing motels that rent a room for less than ten hours under the same licence, and declined to second-guess the council’s judgment about it.

Two weeks later the city dropped the inspection it had made a precondition and wrote in an appeal to a state district court. Section 41A-5(a)(6), where that condition stood, reads in full: Reserved.

What the chapter says it is not for

Chapter 41A says, in its own first section, what it is not there to do.

it is neither the intent nor effect of this chapter to restrict or deny access by adults to sexually oriented materials and performances protected by the First Amendment, or to deny access by the distributors and exhibitors of sexually oriented entertainment to their intended market.

A city that licenses something has decided it is lawful. Dallas went one further and wrote down that the chapter is not there to keep adults, or the businesses that serve them, away from each other.