Adult Movie Theatres in San Francisco

Open now: two clubs and three arcades

Booth doors cut down in 1984, sex-club locks allowed in 2020

In 1984, at the height of the AIDS epidemic, the city went to court against its bathhouses, booth arcades and adult cinemas as a public health nuisance. The court let them stay open on conditions: monitors on the staff, education for the patrons, and the bottom 24 to 39 inches cut off the door of every video booth, cubicle and room so the monitors could see in. Most of the bathhouses closed anyway.

In 1989 the city dropped the case against most of the defendants and the order was lifted for them. In 1997 the health department adopted standards for commercial sex clubs and parties much like it: staff to monitor every area, and no booth, cubicle or room that could be locked. The standards in force in February 2020 still had both rules.

In 2020 the Board of Supervisors limited them. Article 47 of the Health Code, in force from 31 August 2020, recites the 1984 order in its own findings, then limits what the health department may demand of the city’s sex venues:

Health Code § 4703(c), since 31 August 2020

The Minimum Standards may not:

1. (1)Require Adult Sex Venues to monitor patrons’ Sexual Activities;
2. (2)Regulate the presence, construction, size, or type of doors in areas where patrons are permitted to engage in Sexual Activities; or
3. (3)Prohibit the use of locks on doors to individual video cubicles, booths, or rooms where patrons are permitted to engage in Sexual Activities.

The department’s current standards say that sex clubs, commercial sex venues and parties may offer rooms, booths and cubicles that lock, with copies of the keys kept for emergencies.

The Planning Code followed in June 2022. It gave the sex venue a use of its own, the Adult Sex Venue, separate from the Adult Business, which is the code’s name for adult bookstores, video stores, theatres and encounter studios. The district tables now control the two separately, and they do not always agree. In the Castro, the code permits a sex venue on any floor, and an adult bookstore only on the ground floor and only with the Planning Commission’s approval.

In December 2024 the city repealed the bath-house permit that the Police Code had required since 1973.

Cinemas, a revue and a peep show, all closed

In KRON news film of 14 August 1969, a police officer says 24 theatres of this kind are operating in San Francisco. Market Street Cinema at 1077 Market Street, built as Grauman’s Imperial in 1912, turned adult in 1972, closed in 2013 and was demolished in July 2016 for condominiums.

Jim and Artie Mitchell opened the O’Farrell Theatre on 4 July 1969 in a former car dealership at 895 O’Farrell Street. In 1972 they premiered Behind the Green Door there, a film made for $60,000 whose star, Marilyn Chambers, was the woman on the Ivory Snow soap box.

When home video took the film trade in the second half of the 1970s, the brothers did not fight it. They built live rooms instead: the Ultra Room in 1977, then the Kopenhagen and New York Live. By 1980 the O’Farrell had popularised close-contact lap dancing, and it became the norm in strip clubs across the country. A San Francisco porn cinema set the pattern for an industry.

The city fought it. Dianne Feinstein, mayor from the end of 1978, wanted obscenity cases pursued hard. Police raided the theatre in 1980, and in February 1985 police raided it again during an appearance by Marilyn Chambers. The district attorney declined to charge her, and it was the Feinstein administration’s final attempt.

What the city could not do, the family did. On 27 February 1991 Jim Mitchell shot and killed his brother Artie at Artie’s home in Corte Madera, in Marin County. He was convicted of voluntary manslaughter, sentenced to six years and released from San Quentin in 1997. He died in 2007. The theatre closed in October 2020, fifty-one years after it opened, after the pandemic shutdown came on top of earlier money troubles. The building had been on the market since 2018.

The Nob Hill Theatre at 729 Bush Street opened in 1968 and closed on 19 August 2018. It showed gay films, and when it closed it had the only regular male strip revue in the city. In March 2026 the building stood empty and was up for sale.

The Lusty Lady at 1033 Kearny Street was a live peep show. Its dancers unionised in 1997 with SEIU Local 790, and from 2003 the workers owned it as a cooperative. It closed on 2 September 2013 after a dispute with the landlord over the rent.