Adult Movie Theatres in Charleston

What is open right now

The only fight on this site that has not finished

Every other page here is history. A council voted in 1989, a court ruled in 1968, a building came down in 1984. West Virginia’s entry is from two years ago and nobody has settled it.

West Virginia makes it a felony to knowingly distribute or display obscene matter to a minor, carrying up to $25,000 and five years. Like most such statutes it carves out exceptions, because otherwise a biology textbook and a Renaissance nude both become a prosecution waiting to happen.

The debate ran nearly an hour in the House on 16 February 2024, and the vote split almost entirely on party lines. Librarians told the committee it would expose them to prosecutions they could not afford to defend. Opponents said the practical target was books with LGBTQ themes. Supporters said some material in school and library collections is not suitable for young children.

It went to the Senate Judiciary Committee, which never took it up. The House then tried to attach it to a separate bill about artificial intelligence and child abuse images, and the sixty-day session ran out before that came to a vote. The exemptions are still there.

Why a directory of cinemas should care

Because it is the same statute, aimed somewhere new. For fifty years the obscenity laws in this directory were pointed at businesses that sold the material on purpose: the shop on the highway, the cinema by the bus station, the arcade with the booths. Those are nearly all gone, and in Charleston the last one closed this year.

The law did not go with them. It is still on the books, still a felony, and the live proposal is to point it at a public library instead. Cincinnati already ran that experiment in 1990 with an art museum, which was acquitted and still spent over $200,000 getting there. That is the part the vote count does not capture. A prosecution that fails is not a defeat for the people bringing it.