Adult Movie Theatres in Bridgeport

What is open right now

A clinic in New Haven that lasted two days

On 1 November 1961, Estelle Griswold, who ran the Planned Parenthood League of Connecticut, opened a birth control clinic in New Haven with Dr C. Lee Buxton. A Connecticut statute made it an offence to use any drug or instrument for the purpose of preventing conception. They were arrested inside two days, tried, convicted, and fined one hundred dollars each.

On 7 June 1965 the Supreme Court threw the statute out, seven votes to two, in an opinion by Justice William O. Douglas. He could not point to a clause of the constitution saying privacy, so he argued it lived in the penumbras and emanations of the guarantees that are written down. It is one of the most argued-over sentences in American law and it did the job: from that case forward there is a constitutional right to privacy.

Four years later it became about films

Police in Georgia were searching Robert Eli Stanley’s house over illegal bookmaking. They found three reels of 8mm film in a bedroom drawer, found a projector in the next room, set it up, watched the films, and charged him with possessing obscene material.

On 7 April 1969 the Supreme Court reversed, unanimously, in an opinion by Justice Thurgood Marshall. Mere private possession of obscene material cannot be made a crime. The line everyone remembers: if the First Amendment means anything, it means that a state has no business telling a man, sitting alone in his own house, what books he may read or what films he may watch.

That is worth sitting with for a second, because it explains the shape of this entire site. Nobody in any of these forty-one cities was ever arguing about what you do at home. That question was closed in 1969 and it has stayed closed. Every fight on every page here is about the other side of the door: the building, the street, the licence, the distance to a school. The private right is absolute and the public one was never granted at all.

And why that made the venues disposable

A right you can only exercise at home is a right that needs no premises. The moment the film could come to the house, first on tape and then down a wire, the legal protection was already sitting there waiting for it, and the buildings became optional.

Which is the quiet reason so many pages here end in a car park. The ordinances get the blame and they earned some of it, but the strongest thing anybody ever did to the adult cinema was to guarantee, in 1969, that you would never have to leave the house to see one. Albuquerque had eight hardcore cinemas in 1975 and two venues now, and no ordinance in the world moves a number that far on its own.