Adult Movie Theatres in Columbia

What is still open

In the city itself, two shops and nothing behind them, and they keep strange hours for shops. Video Xpress at 2717 Two Notch Road, (803) 256-1110, and This Is It Video & Lingerie at 2831 Broad River Road, (803) 750-1174, both trade from eight in the morning until two the next, seven days a week, which is an eighteen hour day to sell lingerie in. Neither has a booth. A customer at the first one in 2020 called it a hidden gem and said the building feels secure.

Further out, Lion’s Den at Bowman is forty-five miles southeast and a customer there praises the video booths, and Fantasy Land at Santee is on the way to the coast. Charleston is a hundred and ten miles down the same road and Charlotte is ninety miles north.

The law that nobody can state

On the listing for the shop on Two Notch Road, somebody asked whether there are video booths. A customer answered that there are not at this time, and added that video booths are illegal in Richland and Lexington Counties. Those two counties are Columbia. That answer has sat there for two years.

We went and looked for it in three places.

Richland County. The sexually oriented business ordinance sits at sections 26-201 to 26-216 of the county code. It is about permits and licences, and it makes it a misdemeanour to operate within a thousand feet of a church, a school, a residential district boundary or a residential lot line. Elsewhere the zoning code confines these businesses to General Commercial and Heavy Industrial land. We found nothing in it about booths.

Lexington County. Article 10 of the zoning ordinance defines an adult arcade, as a place with coin or electronically operated machines showing images to five people or fewer at a time, and separately defines an adult peep show as a theatre where material is viewed from an individual enclosure for a fee. Having defined both, it then regulates where they may sit, requires a permit, requires a sign with the word Adult on it, and says nothing at all about doors, partitions or how many people may be in a booth.

South Carolina. In the 1997 session a bill was put up that would have added section 16-15-312 to the state code. It would have banned any door, curtain, drape or partition that stopped you seeing into a booth from outside, and required the whole room to be lit and continuously open to view. It is the same instrument Colorado Springs uses and Toledo used. It never became law. There is no 16-15-312 in Chapter 15 today, and nothing in that chapter mentions adult business establishments or viewing booths.

So we cannot confirm it, and there is a working arcade operating half an hour west of the city in a town that is mostly in Lexington County, advertising its booth prices in public. We are not calling the man who wrote that answer a liar. He may be repeating something a member of staff told him, and a member of staff may be repeating something the owner believes. That is how this usually works.

Even the city could not explain its own rule

There is a precedent for vagueness here and it goes to the top of the state.

In City of Columbia v. Pic-A-Flick Video, decided by the South Carolina Supreme Court on 24 April 2000, the city went after a video shop with two branches inside the city limits under its adult business zoning rule. The owner accepted that some of what he sold met the ordinance’s definition. What he denied was that selling it was a principal business purpose of the shop, which is the phrase the whole ordinance turned on.

The ordinance did not define that phrase. No court in South Carolina had ever construed it. And when the city was asked in court what it meant, the city’s own zoning administrator could not explain how the city applied it. The injunction was refused and the refusal stood.

Twenty-six years later this metro has two shops trading eighteen hours a day, one arcade thirty miles out, a county rule about distances, a county rule about signage, a state law that was never passed, and a widely repeated belief about booths that we cannot source. Fort Lauderdale counts the shelf. Ohio watches the clock. North Carolina counts bodies in a booth. Columbia has a phrase nobody could define.

Three people have asked, and nobody has answered

On the listing for the shop on Broad River Road there are five questions. One is about enhancement pills and it has an answer.

The other four include these three, left three years ago, a year ago and five months ago by three different people: whether there is a theatre playing films, whether there are theatres or gloryholes, and whether there are video rooms.

None of them has a single reply under it. Not from the shop, not from a customer, not from anybody passing. Three strangers, spread across three years, walked up to the same window and asked the same question into the same silence.

We keep finding this. A trans woman asking on a Bakersfield cinema listing whether she would be all right there. A woman asking a Hollywood, Florida shop whether she could come dressed as she likes, two years ago, still unanswered. People will put the question in writing under their own name on a public page because there is nowhere else to put it, and then nothing comes back.

Twenty days at 1017 Washington Street

Columbia had two cinemas that served the African-American community exclusively, and this was one of them. It started in the silent era as the New Lincoln, around 1919, and was simply the Lincoln to the people who went. In the sound era it became the Capitol, three hundred and fifty seats, run by the Bijou Amusement Company.

On 15 July 1970 it reopened as the Cine-Art, an adult theatre.

On 4 August 1970, the Columbia police seized the film it was showing. The film was I Am Curious (Yellow).

That is twenty days. Not twenty years of gradual decline into a zoning fight, the way Lexington and Hartford and Pittsburgh went. Three weeks between the new name going up and the police walking out with the reels.

I Am Curious (Yellow) is one of the most fought-over films in American obscenity law. Customs seized it at the border. Grove Press took it through the courts state by state, and in Maryland an evenly divided Supreme Court let a ban stand without an opinion. Columbia was one line in a campaign being run in dozens of cities at once, and the building that caught it was a Black cinema fifty years old that had been something else for about a fortnight.

We do not know when it closed or when it came down, only that both happened. There is no date, no last programme and no photograph of the end of it. What survives is two sentences from a contributor who found the newspaper: the day it became a porn house, and the day the police came.