Adult Movie Theatres in Albuquerque

What is open right now

Closed in the last year: Pussycat Video on Central Avenue NE and its second shop on Eubank Boulevard, Adult Video on Avalon Road, and Adults on Rio Bravo, which had six video peeps and a large theatre. That is four venues gone from one city inside twelve months.

Eight cinemas, and forty weeks of Deep Throat

In 1975 Variety counted eight full-time hardcore theatres in Albuquerque. Among them was a porno-twin on Central and the Backdoor II, which ran twenty-four hours a day and played Deep Throat for forty consecutive weeks.

Hold that against Memphis, where federal prosecutors put the same film on trial in 1976 in a city it was not playing in, and convicted one of its actors. A jury in Tennessee was deciding whether the film was criminal while it was in its ninth month of an unbroken run in New Mexico.

What came next in Albuquerque was an argument about crime. A police department study claimed the crime rate near the East Central porn shops was seven times higher than in the neighbourhoods next to them. It controlled for nothing, and it took no account of how poor that part of the city already was.

That is worth marking, because a court eventually said so out loud. When Indianapolis made the same kind of argument about robberies, the Seventh Circuit threw it out in 2014 for exactly this: no controls, no significance, and no comparison against other businesses keeping the same hours. Albuquerque made the argument twenty-five years earlier and won with it.

The deal, and what was done to it

In 1986 the state senator Manny Aragon brokered a compromise. Eight X-rated shops, among them the Pussycat, Madam X, the Pleasure Palace and the Eros Arcade, could carry on trading if they made themselves less conspicuous.

The vote came 19 July 1989, to a standing ovation from more than 250 people who had come to watch. Mayor Ken Schultz also backed an effort to keep adult advertising out of the city’s newspapers.

The phrase is the thing. A deal that is repealed was real until it was repealed, and the people who kept their side of it kept it for something. Null and void from its inception says it was never worth anything, and that the neon they dimmed and the back doors they cut into their own buildings bought them nothing at any point.

Eight, eight, two

Eight hardcore cinemas in 1975. Eight shops shut by one vote in 1989. Six venues trading here a year ago, and two now.

Central Avenue carried Route 66 through this city from 1937 until the road was decommissioned in 1985, and the venues gathered along it for the reason everything else did: it was where the traffic was. One is still there, running two screens around the clock, on a highway that no longer officially exists.