Adult Movie Theatres in Fort Lauderdale

Six rooms open in Broward

Four shops inside the city sell adult stock. Secret Moments at 2652 E Oakland Park Boulevard, open to 3am. Midnight Toy at 2941 E Las Olas Boulevard. Hustler Hollywood at 1500 E Sunrise Boulevard. My Tropx at 1514 NE 4th Avenue. All four trading, checked 29 October 2026. None of the four has a theatre or booths.

Three hundred and seventy-four copies of Rudolph

In September 2013 a reporter for the Miami New Times went up to the upper floor of a shop on SE 21st Street and counted what was on the shelves. Three hundred and seventy-four copies of a Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer Christmas compilation. At least a hundred and twenty VHS tapes of an X-Men cartoon. Regis Philbin workout videos, a tutorial on drying food, Baby Mozart cassettes.

None of it was going to sell. It was not there to sell. The article said that Fort Lauderdale then measured a shop by the share of adult material it put on display, and that under a line of thirty per cent it was not an adult business at all. So the stock upstairs was there to be counted.

A member of staff explained the test as he understood it. Lingerie fell outside it. So did lubricant, and so did anything that was not obviously a sex toy. He put his own shop at about twenty per cent.

Most rules about these businesses are about the back room: the doors, the lights, the sightline from the counter. This one was about the front of the shop, and the trade answered it by buying Christmas videos in bulk.

Thirty miles south the arithmetic was different. The same reporting quotes Vincent Rodriguez, a building specialist for the City of Miami, who said a shop selling one adult object there drew the stricter of the city’s categories. One object. Nothing to dilute, and no reason to stock Baby Mozart.

The album that was obscene for two years

Broward County’s big fight over obscenity was not about a cinema or a shop. It was about a record.

In February 1990 the Broward County Sheriff’s Office, under Sheriff Nick Navarro, opened an investigation into the 2 Live Crew album As Nasty As They Wanna Be after complaints from residents. A judge signed a probable-cause order, deputies went round the retailers, and every retail store in the county stopped selling the record. In March the sheriff took it to court.

In June a federal district court held the recording legally obscene and was explicit that its decision criminalised nobody’s conduct and charged nobody with anything. In 1992 the Eleventh Circuit reversed it. The album was not obscene.

Two years, a whole county cleared of one record, and then the record came back.

Five houses, and where each one stood

Most of the county’s adult cinema history is not in Fort Lauderdale. Five houses are on record across Broward, and two of them were in the city.

The Southland had the shortest run. It opened in 1970 as a dollar house, ran mainstream for thirteen years, took a new operator in January 1984, went adult in the November and was shut eleven days later.

The drive-in that turned into a flea market

Out on West Sunrise Boulevard in Lauderhill, between I-95 and the Turnpike, Betty and Preston Henn ran the Thunderbird Drive-In from November 1963. One account has its outdoor screen showing adult films until at least 1973.

In 1966 a flea market opened beside the screens. The screens multiplied, the market grew round them, and in 1984 the whole place took the name of the market: the Swap Shop. Fire hit the drive-in on 4 April 2022, and by March 2023 it was described as closed. The flea market still trades on the same ground.