Adult Movie Theatres in Columbus

Ohio · last checked 16 October 2026

One place in Columbus still has booths: an independent bookstore on Trabue Road, open until nine. Nothing in the city runs late, and nothing in Ohio does, because state law closes every adult business at midnight. The chain that started here in 1971 and now has around fifty stores across the country puts arcades in several of them and in none of its Ohio ones.

What is still open

Trabue Adult Bookstore

Booth arcade

3615 Trabue Road, Columbus, OH 43228

Has: Private preview booths
Price: $10 for two hours, last published figure
Hours: 10am to 9pm daily
Phone: (614) 628-0088

Booths at the back of a bookshop, which is the ordinary arrangement. The useful detail from the most recent account is that the staff enforce the state rules on what may happen inside them, and are said to do it without making a scene about who you are or how you are dressed.

The price is the last one anybody published and it is old, so treat it as the order of magnitude rather than the number. The hours are current.

Last checked 16 October 2026 · Booths described in a review dated July 2024

The Lion’s Den stores and the Cirilla’s stores around the city are retail. No booths, no screen, and in the Lion’s Den case that is the company’s own answer rather than our guess. Not counted.

The midnight rule

Ohio Revised Code section 2907.40 says a sexually oriented business may not be open between midnight and six in the morning. Breaking it is a first degree misdemeanour. The only way out is a liquor permit, and taking it means giving up nude performance, so it is an exit for a club and no use at all to a bookshop.

It arrived as Substitute Senate Bill 16, passed by the 127th General Assembly in 2007, a few miles from the shop on Trabue Road.

Nothing in it bans a booth. It does something more effective. The hours a booth arcade actually earns its rent are the ones nobody else is open, and this law removes all of them. What is left is a shop that happens to have booths, trading at the same times as a pharmacy, and that is exactly what Columbus has.

A Columbus company, and where it puts its booths

The Lion’s Den began in 1971 as a single adult bookstore at Morse and Westerville roads in Columbus. It is now one of the largest adult chains in the country, around fifty stores across twenty-two states, run from Worthington just north of the city.

Customers kept asking the same question on its listings, and the company kept answering it in public. Some stores have arcades. The Ohio ones do not.

Mineral Wells, West Virginiahas an arcade
Ghent, West Virginiahas an arcade
Leesville, South Carolinahas an arcade
Bowman, South Carolinahas an arcade
Las Vegas, Nevadahas an arcade
Every store in Ohionone

The Lion’s Den, answering customers about its own stores. The list is three to four years old and the company says to check its locator for the current one. The last line is the part that has not changed.

That is the midnight rule measured by the people it applies to. A company with fifty stores and a head office in the state knows exactly what an arcade is worth under those hours, and the answer is not enough.

What happened to the Garden

The building at the top of the Short North was a stable in the 1850s. It burned, was rebuilt from 1917, and reopened in 1920 for silent films, vaudeville, dance and operetta.

Its long-time owner died in 1967 and by 1970 it was a striptease house. A church group bought it in 1996 and started the repairs, sold it to investors in 2007, and it then sat empty for several years.

Short North Stage took a long lease in July 2011 and has run its seasons there since, through fifteen years of restoration. A new marquee went up in January 2026.

Worth being precise about what the sources actually say. The Garden’s adult era is recorded as burlesque and striptease, live rather than projected. No source we found puts adult film on that screen, so this page does not claim it did.

Sources

Something here wrong or out of date? Tell us and we will check it.

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