Adult Movie Theatres in Durham

What is still open

Not counted, and worth knowing anyway. Frisky Business Boutique at 1720 New Raleigh Highway is a shop with a classroom attached and an eleven to ten licence, and we come back to it at the end. Adam & Eve has a Durham store and it is retail. Pegasus, Phoenix, Capital Boulevard and the Triangle Adult Super Center all have Durham addresses in somebody’s directory and none of them is in Durham; they are on the Raleigh page where they belong.

One person at a time, by statute

Most of the rules this directory runs into are municipal. Durham ’s is not. North Carolina wrote the capacity of a viewing booth into its criminal code, and it is three lines long:

No person shall permit any viewing booth in an adult mini motion picture theatre to be occupied by more than one person at any time.

That is G.S. 14-202.11(b), and an adult mini motion picture theatre is defined two sections earlier as an enclosed building with viewing booths designed to hold patrons, showing films that are mostly what you would expect. The duty is on the operator, not the customer. It is the shop that is told not to permit it.

The same section does something else that explains the shape of every adult business in this state. No building containing one kind of adult establishment may contain another, and no building where sexual devices are sold may contain an adult establishment at all. Whether a shop counts at all turns on a preponderance test: what most of the stock is, by weight or by volume.

Nine bookstores sued over that in the late seventies and won at first instance. On 4 December 1979 the Fourth Circuit reversed and upheld the statute, and the case is worth naming here because of who is on the caption. Among the defendants are W. A. Allen, Sheriff of Durham County, and T. B. Seagroves, Chief of Police of the City of Durham. The brief for the bookstores was filed in part out of Durham. The court recorded what the shops had already done to comply: bought in non-sexual stock to shift the preponderance, and dropped sexual devices altogether.

Compare Lincoln, which banned the booth door so that nobody could be unobserved inside. North Carolina left the door alone and banned the company. Two states, two statutes, and both arrive at the same room: one person, by themselves.

Three seats

You can read that law in the furniture. For eight years the complaint about Durham’s rooms has not been the films, the price or the staff. It has been the seating, and it is always the same complaint.

A bar stool is a decision. You cannot settle on one, you cannot share one, and you cannot do much from one, which the reviewer in May 2021 said in considerably plainer words than that. It is the statute turned into an object. One person, upright, facing the screen, not staying.

The couch has been asked for twice by two different people five years apart, in almost identical terms, and it has never arrived. In August 2026 a first-time visitor who had never been to a backroom before, and said so, went in nervous, met somebody, enjoyed it, and left with one complaint: the booths are too small and there is nowhere to sit, and was there not meant to be a bigger room with a sofa you could share.

Nobody is asking for better films. They are asking for somewhere to be, with somebody, for longer than it takes. That is what this entire directory keeps finding, and Durham is the only city where people have spelt it out as a furniture request.

What Durham answers, and what it will not

There are eight questions on Xsightment’s page. Sort them by subject rather than by date and the pattern is absolute.

The answered ones were not answered by the shop. They were answered by other customers, briefly and usefully, and in one case with an offer: asked about lesbian films, somebody replied that there are a few, that you can choose from many in the booths, and that they would be in there later that day and would go and look properly.

Now read the other list. Three of those have dates: the crossdresser question has been sitting for seven months, the couples question for four, and Monica C.’s question about whether women are welcome for a year. The same people who will walk into a shop and audit the film catalogue for a stranger have said nothing to any of them.

In Long Beach nobody answers anything, which is just a closed trade. This is worse and sadder. Durham has a room, the room is documented down to the stools, and the one thing nobody in it will put in writing is who else is allowed in.

Which brings back Frisky Business Boutique, a shop out on the New Raleigh Highway with a classroom in it, a teaching schedule, late hours and eighty-seven people giving it four and a half stars. The one adult business in this city that is unmistakably for everybody is the one with no room in the back.

What we could not establish

Whether anything in Durham departs from the statute. We have quoted the law and we have quoted what is published about two shops. We have not been in either building, customer reviews are not evidence of what a business permits, and neither shop has ever said anything of the kind itself. We are not drawing the line between those facts and neither should you.

Whether Xsightment has a theatre. Somebody asked that exact question and nobody answered. A curtained area for six to eight is not a theatre and is not nothing, so the venue above is filed as an arcade.

Whether Durham has booth rules of its own. The statute expressly leaves local regulation open and we did not find any. That is not the same as there being none.

And the obvious one. Whether a woman, a couple or a crossdresser would be made welcome at either address. Four people asked that question in public before we got here, and the answer is not in any source we can reach. If you go and find out, tell us and we will put it on this page, because somebody has been waiting a year for it.