Adult Movie Theatres in Chicago

Illinois · last checked 24 September 2026

Chicago proper has one place left with booths, open around the clock in River North. The nearest thing to an actual adult theatre is twelve miles west, in Melrose Park, and it is a theatre, an arcade and a spa under one roof. The city’s famous venue, the longest-running gay adult theatre in the country, closed in 2015 over a lease.

What is open right now

Te-Jay's Adult Books

Booth arcade

53 West Hubbard Street, River North, Chicago, IL 60654

Booths: 14, eight of them with gloryholes
Channels: 123
Hours: 24 hours, seven days
Trading since: 1989

Locally owned since 1989 and still going, a few blocks from the river. It is a shop with an arcade rather than a screening room, and it publishes its own numbers, which most operators do not.

Last checked 24 September 2026 · Listing refreshed June 2026, 39 reviews

15th Ave Adult Theater and Spa

Theatre

2125 North 15th Avenue, Melrose Park, IL 60160

Hours: 10am to 2am Monday to Saturday, 10am to midnight Sunday
Phone: (708) 410-2095
Also: Arcade, bookshop, spa, party room

An adult theatre, a video arcade and a bookshop, plus a spa area with lockers, showers, a steam room and small private rooms, and a party room with a stage and a dance floor that runs monthly lifestyle nights.

It is the most complete venue of its kind within reach of Chicago, and it is the reason the answer for this city is not simply “an arcade on Hubbard Street”. Read the geography note below before you set off.

Last checked 24 September 2026 · Listing refreshed September 2026, 25 reviews

Two things the listings get wrong

Melrose Park is not Chicago. It is a separate village about twelve miles west of the Loop, and every directory that answers “adult theater Chicago” with the 15th Avenue venue files it under the city without saying so. It is worth the drive and it is still a drive.

The Bijou is closed. It shut on 30 September 2015 and it is still carried as a Chicago adult cinema by guides that have not checked. There is nothing at 1349 North Wells to go to.

Forty-five years, ended by a lease

The Bijou Theater at 1349 North Wells Street in Chicago in 2011, a narrow four-storey Victorian greystone with a bay window and a blue neon Bijou sign over the entrance, with an adult movies shop next door. — 1349 North Wells Street in 2011. A narrow Victorian greystone in Old Town, with the blue Bijou sign over the door and an adult bookshop in the next unit. Photo Stephen Hogan, CC BY 2.0.

Steven Toushin opened the Bijou in 1970 in Old Town, and by the time it closed it was the longest-running gay adult theatre and sex club in the United States. Forty-five years, in one building, never shut: it traded twenty-four hours a day.

Screen: 15 by 18 feet, silver
Seats: 77, anchored, cushioned
Hours: 24 hours a day
Run: 1970 to 2015, forty-five years

The Bijou at 1349 North Wells, as it was. Seventy-seven fixed seats is a cinema, not a back room.

It was not only a cinema. There were live shows with adult performers and appearances by gay porn actors, and there was a cabaret, written and directed by the drag entertainer Miss Tiger, which had no sex in it at all. A sex club with a theatre programme is an unusual thing to run for four and a half decades.

What ended it was mundane and, for this subject, unusually specific. The Bijou lost its lease on the Wells Street building, and it could not simply move down the road, because its licence was tied to that address. A business that had survived every change in the trade since 1970 was ended by the fact that its permission to exist was not portable.

No ordinance, no raid, no court. Most of the venues on this site went the same quiet way, and the Bijou is the clearest case of it: the paperwork stayed with the building.

Sources

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