Adult Movie Theatres in Wichita

Open in Wichita, with rooms

Ten years of padlocks and warrants

The trade arrived on 2 September 1966, when the Vogue Art opened at 417 East Douglas as the city’s first adult cinema, in the building that had opened as the Marple Theatre in 1908. The Victory at 607 East Douglas followed in 1967 as the Victory Art Cinema.

The first weapon was the padlock. On 8 March 1973 a judge ordered the Nomar Theatre at 2141 North Market closed for two years over its films, and the sheriff shut it with seventeen dollars’ worth of padlocks, then padlocked two more of the city’s adult cinemas soon after. In April 1975 the City Attorney, John Dekker, went after the Hollywood Cinema in the Parklane Shopping Center. The theatre had turned to X-rated films; he sued to seize two of them and to have it declared a nuisance, and the court took its print of Deep Throat as well. Judge Howard Kline ruled it would be padlocked, and it closed at midnight on 9 January 1976.

Two months later the Kansas Supreme Court took the padlock away. On 6 March 1976 it held that the state’s nuisance law could not close a building over obscene films, because a padlock stopped films that had not yet been shown: a prior restraint on free expression.

In early 1977 Wichita police seized films from the city’s adult cinemas under warrants and made patrons give their names. On 10 June 1977 a federal judge barred forcing patrons to give their names, arresting staff in a way that shut a theatre down, and seizing a theatre’s money and tickets wholesale. The Vogue Art had already gone: it closed on the afternoon of 10 February 1977, after vice detectives took another set of its films.

Stephen Joseph, an assistant district attorney, prosecuted adult-store cases in Wichita in 1977 and 1978. In November 2005, by then a defence lawyer, he told the Associated Press that more than thirty years on both sides had convinced him prosecution could not close adult video stores. “We couldn’t get it done,” he said.

Four kinds of licence

Wichita licenses adult businesses under Chapter 3.05 of its city code, in four kinds: the adult bookstore, the adult motion picture theater, the adult hotel and the adult motion picture arcade. Each needs a licence and pays an annual fee.