Adult Movie Theatres in Las Vegas

Open, and all of it off the resort corridor

The stage show is written out of the rules

Nevada law lets a city or a county confine adult bookstores and adult cinemas to named zoning districts. Every government in this valley has used that power, and none of them used it the same way.

The Strip is not in the City of Las Vegas. Las Vegas Boulevard South, from roughly Sahara Avenue down past the airport, is unincorporated Clark County, and the county allows an adult business in one place only: light-industrial land inside a single mapped overlay district, drawn on a map held by its planning department. The resort corridor is not in it. That is a zoning class and not a buffer. This trade goes on industrial land, and the resort corridor is not industrial land.

Inside the City of Las Vegas the rule is different again. A sexually oriented business is allowed in two zoning classes and has to keep a set distance from a church or house of worship, a public or private school, a children’s care facility, a teen dance centre, and a park or playground.

Then there is what the codes do with a stage, which is the opposite of what this town’s reputation suggests. Clark County’s definition of an adult business does not reach the presentation, showing or performance of a play, a dance, an erotic dance, a drama, a ballet, a concert or a similar performance, in any theatre, concert hall, fine arts academy, school, institution of higher education, business or similar establishment, so long as the performance is there as expression and not to sell sex for a business.

The City of Las Vegas writes it narrower and harder. Its definition of a nude show does not reach the display of specified anatomical areas in the showroom of a resort hotel and casino, on four conditions: more than three hundred rooms, a showroom seating at least three hundred, the casino entertainment tax paid, and an address in the city’s downtown casino district. Meet those and a topless showroom is not the thing the chapter is about.

So the law here never put a buffer between this trade and the stage shows. It defined the stage shows as not being this trade, and sent what was left to industrial land. A business that was already trading when a rule arrived is treated differently from a new one, in every code in this valley.

Fremont Street, and an alley off the Boulevard

The Flick opened at 719 East Fremont Street at the end of 1969 and was running pornography from 1970. By early 1976 it had two screens.

The 4 Star, at 112 North 4th Street, opened on 20 February 1969 with a studio picture, They Came to Rob Las Vegas, and later became an adult movie house. It closed in the early 1990s and the city demolished it.

The City of Las Vegas put its distance rule in place on 16 April 1978 and gave businesses that were already trading five years. The notices went out in November 1982 and the deadline fell in April 1983. The Flick fought the rule and lost: the Nevada Supreme Court decided against it on 31 March 1988 and refused a rehearing that April. The building later held a laundromat and then a 99-cent store, and the block it stood in was demolished.

The Gaiety opened on 18 August 1972 as the Strip Center Theatre, in an alley behind 1304 South Las Vegas Boulevard, and took the Gaiety name nineteen days later on 6 September. It was still showing adult films in 1977, to a mixed audience. The building was standing and unused in 2009.

Clark County wrote its own version for the unincorporated areas in the early 1980s. It was challenged in the federal courts, reached the Ninth Circuit in 1983 on a procedural point and went back down again. The county replaced that whole approach in the 2000s with the overlay it uses now.

The peep window lasted until 2019

Showgirl Video was a book and video shop with a coin-fed peep window, on the downtown stretch of Las Vegas Boulevard. It traded from 1983 until August 2019 and was reported at the time as the last peep show in the area. Its marquee went to the Erotic Heritage Museum and the building was to come down for a dispensary.