Adult Movie Theatres in Cincinnati

What is open right now

Nothing that belongs in this directory. Hustler Hollywood trades at 18 East Seventh Street downtown, Monday to Saturday until midnight, and there is a second Hustler shop on Elm Street. They are retail. The company’s branch up at Monroe states plainly that it has no video booths, and nothing downtown has a screen or a booth either.

The nearest one open is in Detroit

The prosecutor and the publisher

The feud started in 1972 between Larry Flynt and Simon L. Leis Jr, a former Marine who became Hamilton County prosecutor and regarded pornography as a threat to the community. Flynt launched Hustler in 1975 with the most explicit photographs he could get.

In 1977 Leis charged him with obscenity and won. Flynt was sentenced to seven to twenty-five years, a sentence for publishing a magazine, and it was later overturned on appeal on a technicality.

Leis went on to become sheriff of Hamilton County and kept at it until he retired in 2012. When Hollywood filmed the story in 1996, his part was played by the political operative James Carville.

Then they charged an art gallery

In the spring of 1990 the Contemporary Arts Center showed The Perfect Moment, a touring exhibition of photographs by Robert Mapplethorpe. Cincinnati prosecuted the museum and its director, Dennis Barrie, for displaying obscene material.

It was the first criminal trial of an art museum in the United States over the contents of an exhibition. It ran from 24 September to 5 October 1990, and on the last day eight jurors acquitted both the gallery and Barrie. The prosecution could not convince them the photographs lacked artistic merit.

Winning cost the Contemporary Arts Center more than $200,000 in legal fees. That is the other half of how a city clears this trade out: not every case has to succeed, if defending one is expensive enough.