Adult Movie Theatres in Des Moines

What is open right now

Three more carry Des Moines addresses and have no dated listing between them: Adult Emporium on East Army Post Road, trading since 1994, Bachelor’s Library on East Euclid, and the Gallery at 10th and Cherry.

The state that took the law off the books

Iowa had a general obscenity statute until 1973, when the courts struck the provisions down for being too broad and too vague. Plenty of states were in that position after the Supreme Court redrew the rules that year. What Iowa did next was unusual.

The replacement law took effect on 1 July 1974. It defined obscene material and made it an offence to give it to anyone under eighteen. Distribution to adults was not made criminal. It was not restricted, licensed, zoned or limited. It simply was not addressed.

For the next three and a half years Iowa was about as permissive on this subject as anywhere in the United States, by deliberate choice of its legislature rather than by accident or neglect. Set that against Rhode Island, which arrived somewhere similar in 1980 by deleting the wrong paragraph and not noticing for twenty-three years.

And the prosecution that went ahead anyway

Jerry Lee Smith was charged under the federal statute covering the mailing of obscene material, for items sent between Des Moines and towns in southern Iowa. The federal law does not care what a state has decided. It asks a jury whether the material offends contemporary community standards.

His argument was the obvious one. The community is Iowa. Iowa’s own elected legislature had considered this exact question and concluded that adults could have this material, which is about as direct a statement of community standards as a state can make. A jury should not be free to find the community stricter than the community said it was.

On 23 May 1977 the Supreme Court rejected that, five votes to four, in an opinion by Justice Harry Blackmun. State law cannot conclusively define contemporary community standards. Those remain questions of fact for a jury, decided case by case on what the jurors understand their community to tolerate.

Which is a strange and rather bleak result to sit at the centre of this subject. A state may legalise something completely and a federal jury drawn from that same state may still convict a man for it, because twelve people’s sense of their neighbours outranks the statute their neighbours voted for.

The same move, three times on this site

Memphis is federal prosecutors choosing which community to be judged by, and picking the strictest one available. Oklahoma City is a state judge calling a film child pornography and a federal judge reversing him eighteen months later. Des Moines is the mirror of both: the state says yes and the federal court says that is not for the state to say.

There is no settled answer anywhere in those three. The venue on NE Broadway has been quietly open all along, twenty hours on a Saturday, with doors on its booths.