Adult Movie Theatres in Asheville

What is still open

Nothing this directory can stand up, and one thing we are leaving open in the next section rather than counting.

Bedtyme Stories at 2334 Hendersonville Road in Arden has served western North Carolina since 1998 and trades nine in the morning until eleven at night, every day. Somebody asked on its listing whether there are video arcades to watch porn. The answer was no, there is not.

Lover’s World Adult Superstore at 64 Tunnel Road runs until eleven, and midnight at weekends. It is the subject of a section below. VaVaVooom and Boutique Royale are boutiques, and the first of them gets written up by women for not having the creepy feeling.

Asheville does still have a cinema, and we have checked it this week. The Fine Arts on Biltmore Avenue is showing four films between the 23rd and the 29th of this month. It is not an adult cinema. It used to be, and the last section of this page is about what the building has been.

The one we cannot stand up

Fantasy World, 1822 US 70 Highway, Swannanoa, telephone (828) 299-3088. Locally owned since 1998. Noon until eight, Monday to Saturday, closed Sundays.

What people have written about it over the years is specific enough to be worth keeping. Admission was three dollars and then you fed dollar bills into the machines, which is the cheapest door in this directory apart from the two dollar arcade that closed in Dayton. The back room held four or five stalls about two feet square with no doors on them, which North Carolina’s one person to a booth rule, set out on our Charlotte page, makes unsurprising.

One customer in 2013 thought that was an improvement. The open stalls were better, he wrote, than earlier when things were enclosed. We have spent a hundred pages on cities that took the doors off these rooms and that is the first person we have found who was glad. Another man, writing in 2015, thought the same room was pitiful and told people not to bother.

A straight man who went in 2021 described the etiquette better than anybody. He kept being approached in the dark and kept saying he was good, and nobody touched him, and he called the whole thing surreal and said he would go back with a friend. That is three sentences and it tells you more about how these rooms actually work than most of the ordinances we have read.

And then, on 27 September 2024, Helene. Swannanoa was among the worst hit places in the entire storm. Along the US 70 corridor the local fire chief put it at six or seven businesses destroyed outright and said he was not sure they would come back. Two years on, storm-damaged commercial buildings were still standing on that road, and the village’s Ingles, which was its main shop, has never reopened.

The last human account we have of Fantasy World is dated 2 September 2024. Three and a half weeks before the water. Its listing still shows opening hours, but listings always show opening hours, and we have been caught by that before.

So we are not counting it, and we are not writing it off either. If you are in Buncombe County and you know, the number is above and we would be glad to be told. We would rather show you the gap than guess at a business on a road that lost half its shops.

The same silence, right across the country

Lover’s World on Tunnel Road looks like a local shop. Its website is suzies.com, and the person who answers its reviews signs herself Joanna E., which is the same name and the same company that answers for Suzie’s Adult Superstore in Stockton, California, a shop we wrote up earlier this month. The replies are word for word the same template, down to the capital letters on MASSIVE.

Which lets us do something this directory has not been able to do before: watch one operator handle the same question in two states.

Two questions have ever been asked of the Asheville shop. Does it have a video arcade or adult theatre. Is there an arcade or a movie room. Neither has a single reply under it, from the company or from anybody else, while the reviews above them get a cheerful paragraph within days.

We have found this pattern in Columbia, in Pompano Beach, in Stockton and now here, and we have never been able to say whether it is policy or just nobody checking that tab. Seeing the identical template on two coasts does not settle it either. It does mean the silence is not a local quirk. It travels with the company.

The window they put back

The Strand opened at 36 Biltmore Avenue on 24 October 1946, eight hundred seats across the floor and the balcony. It had two ways in. White patrons used the main box office. Black patrons bought their tickets at a separate window and were allowed to sit only upstairs.

It was renamed the Fine Arts on 8 June 1962. By the early 1970s it was showing XXX, under that name, and it kept at it until 1986, when by the local account it was finished off by video cassettes rather than by any ordinance.

It sat for ten years. Then a man called John Cram, who ran the gallery next door, bought the old porn house and put it back to work as an independent cinema. It reopened on 13 December 1996.

And then, in 2001, they did the thing that makes this page worth writing. They restored the colored entrance box office window. Not covered it, not quietly rebuilt over it. Put it back, deliberately, so it could be seen. The Center for Diversity Education at the university uses it to teach people about the history of racism in Asheville.

Nearly every building in this directory deals with its past by disappearing. Worcester’s came down for a beer garden. Springfield’s became a Walgreens. Fort Wayne’s went through seven names until nobody could tell what it had been. This one kept the worst thing about itself on the front wall on purpose, and still runs films.

Helene took its power, its water and its internet in September 2024, along with most of the city’s. We checked this week and it is showing four pictures between the 23rd and the 29th, including a restored cut of Ken Russell’s The Devils, which was banned in more places than most of what played there in the seventies. Eighty years, and it is still the only cinema in downtown Asheville.