Adult Movie Theatres in Dallas

What is open right now

All five are one operation. Directories present them as five separate choices in five parts of town, and in a sense they are, but if one disappoints you the others will not be different.

A licence is not an open door

Dallas keeps a register of licensed sexually oriented businesses and publishes it. The January 2022 edition lists nine under the heading adult bookstore, arcade, theater, including two called Xposed Adult Theater and Lido Adult Theater. A licence in a 2022 memo is not evidence that a door opens in 2026, so neither is listed above.

The city knows the difference perfectly well. Its own register has a column for what a business is licensed as and another for what it is actually doing, and that second column contains entries reading active licence and closed down, holding licence not operating, and simply not operating.

That is the whole problem with this subject in one municipal spreadsheet. Almost every guide to adult venues is, in effect, a copy of somebody’s licence list. Dallas is unusual only in being honest about the gap.

Why Dallas licenses them at all

In the 1980s Dallas adopted a comprehensive ordinance covering sexually oriented businesses: adult arcades, bookstores, video stores, cabarets, motels and theatres, plus escort agencies, nude model studios and sexual encounter centres. Every one of them needed a licence, and certain people were barred from holding one.

The operators sued, and on 8 January 1990 the Supreme Court decided FW/PBS, Inc. v. City of Dallas. Six justices agreed that the licensing scheme was a prior restraint without adequate procedural safeguards: nothing in it guaranteed a licence would be granted or refused promptly, or that a refusal could be taken to a court quickly. Under the standard set in Freedman v. Maryland in 1965, that made the scheme unconstitutional on its face.

The city did not lose everything. The Court upheld pulling motels that rent rooms for under ten hours into the scheme, accepting that Dallas had a factual basis for it.

Set beside Los Angeles, the pair explains most of how American cities handle this now. Dallas lost in 1990 on how it licensed; Los Angeles won in 2002 on how far apart it kept them. Cities learned to do the second thing carefully and the first thing with a clock attached.