Adult Movie Theatres in Birmingham

What is open right now

The state that banned the object instead of the room

Every other city in this directory fights about premises. How far from a school, how many feet between two people, what hours the door may be open, whether a booth needs a door on it. Alabama took a different line entirely, and left the premises alone.

The Anti-Obscenity Enforcement Act dates to 1989. On 29 April 1998 the legislature amended it to criminalise distributing, or possessing with intent to distribute, any device designed or marketed as useful primarily for the stimulation of human genital organs, for anything of value.

Sherri Williams, who ran adult shops in Decatur and Huntsville, filed suit on 29 July 1998, three months after it passed. She won in the federal district court in Alabama, and then lost the appeal. She won again below, and lost again on appeal. The Eleventh Circuit upheld the statute in 2004 and upheld it once more in Williams v. Morgan in 2007, and in October 2007 the Supreme Court declined to hear the case at all. In September 2009 the Alabama Supreme Court turned away a challenge under the state constitution.

Nine years, four rounds, and the law stands. Shops sell the things as novelties or as educational items, which is the accommodation everybody has settled on, and a drive-through trade grew up around it.

Why that leaves Birmingham better supplied than most

Because a distance rule closes buildings and a merchandise rule does not. Washington stopped issuing permits and has nothing left. Houston doubled its buffers to 1,500 feet and pushed the survivors onto freeway frontage roads. Alabama never told these two shops where they could stand, and both are still on the same downtown streets, open fifteen hours a day.

It is the clearest natural experiment on this site. The state with the most restrictive shelf in America also has one of the better-supplied downtowns in this directory, because it wrote its law about a product rather than a place.