Adult Movie Theatres in Fort Lauderdale

What is still open

Three searches, and the shops that came back without a room in them are worth naming so you do not drive to one. Rock Hard on Wilton Drive, now trading as My TropX, has neither booths nor viewing rooms, and a customer put it sharply: it is not a seedy joint, it is the Lover’s Boutique. Secret Moments at 2652 E Oakland Park Boulevard runs to 3am and nobody in sixteen years of reviews has mentioned a booth. Megasex at 5611 N State Road 7 is named by directory sites as having two sections of booths. We could not stand that up. The only customer mention of a booth there is from 2020 and reads as a wish rather than a description, and the shop’s own web address no longer belongs to it. The Adult Store in Lauderhill and Hustler Hollywood are shops.

The room a judge called private

On the evening of 26 July 2018 Hollywood police raided the Pleasure Emporium after an anonymous complaint and arrested ten men, eight of them accused of masturbating in the back room and two of performing oral sex on each other. Six others had been arrested in a sting there in February. The department then released the men’s names and photographs to the press, and outlets ran them.

One man was outed and lost his job. Another, according to his lawyer, had left Cuba believing America would be more accepting, and was suicidal after the arrest. The Miami Herald took its mugshots down after being asked about it. Television clips stayed up.

Then, on 18 October 2018, Broward County Judge Ginger Lerner-Wren dismissed a charge, finding that the Pleasure Emporium is not a public place under the Florida indecent exposure statute, and that patrons who go into the private viewing theatres, where consensual activity happens in front of other consenting adults, have a reasonable expectation of privacy.

What made it private was not an argument about morals. It was three physical facts, put in front of the court by the defence. There is a locked door. There is a sign above that door with the word private on it in very large letters. And you pay to go through it. A room you have to be let into, that announces what it is, and that you bought your way into on purpose.

Hollywood police said they respectfully disagreed and that the establishment is open to the public. The State Attorney’s office said it would review the record. Some of the men had already pleaded guilty before the ruling came down, and their lawyer, Rhonda Gelfman, said she would go back and help them.

Every other page on this site is about a rule built to take privacy out of these rooms. Ohio shuts the doors at midnight. North Carolina allows one person to a booth. Colorado Springs wants a clear sightline from the counter to every corner. Toledo cut the doors down. Pompano Beach, four venues up this page, has half doors that will not close. Broward is the one place where somebody with a gavel went the other way.

Three doors, and nobody stays behind one

The same building sorts its theatres by who you came for, and says so on the doors.

Nothing else in this directory does this. Everywhere else there is one room and you work out the crowd once you are inside it, which is the thing that keeps most people in the car park. Here the building has done the awkward part for you before you have taken your coat off.

And then the labels stop mattering. The customer who listed the three doors added, unprompted, that you can go into whichever one you want and that plenty of men go from one to another to another. The signs are not a wall. They are a starting point, which is all anybody was ever asking for.

Three hundred and seventy-four copies of Rudolph

Fort Lauderdale’s rule is unlike any other on this site, because it does not describe a room at all. It describes a shelf.

As reported by the Miami New Times in September 2013, a shop only counts as an adult establishment in this city once adult material passes thirty per cent of the items it has on display. Under that line it is an ordinary shop. Over it, it has to sit five hundred feet from any park, church, school or home.

The reporter went to a shop on SE 21st Street that stands three hundred and ninety-seven feet from a swing set in Poinciana Park, and found out how it gets away with it. Upstairs is a wall of nothing: a hundred and twenty VHS tapes of an X-Men cartoon, Regis Philbin workout videos, a tutorial on drying food, Baby Mozart cassettes, and three hundred and seventy-four copies of a Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer Christmas compilation. None of it will ever sell. It is not there to sell. It is there to be counted.

A member of staff explained the test as he understood it. Lingerie does not count. Lubricant does not count. In his words, basically anything that is not shaped like a penis sits on the other side of the ledger. He put his own shop at about twenty per cent.

Every other city in this directory wrote a rule about the back room, and the trade answered by changing the back room: shorter doors, brighter lights, a sightline to the counter. Fort Lauderdale wrote a rule about the front of the shop, and the trade answered by buying Christmas videos in bulk.

Thirty miles south there is no such ledger. The same reporting quotes a building specialist for the City of Miami saying that a shop selling one adult object there gets the zoning category that puts it on the edge of town. One object. No percentage, nothing to dilute, no reason to stock Baby Mozart. He added that the distinction had only come in around 2010 and that shops already trading were left alone. Miami has three rooms on its page. Broward has six.

We cannot tell you that is the live rule today. That reporting is thirteen years old. The city’s adult use provisions sit at section 47-18.2 of its land development code and we could not retrieve the current text of it, so we are not going to state a threshold as law. What we can say is that Broward has six rooms open, which is more than any metro here but one, and that we have found nothing connecting the two facts. It would be a satisfying story. It is not one we can show you.

The drive-in that turned into a flea market

There is almost no record of an adult cinema in Fort Lauderdale. One name survives. The Centennial, at 3551 W Broward Boulevard, was a gay male porn cinema running in the mid 1970s and billed in a Miami Herald advertisement of 18 June 1976 as the Centennial Adult Theater. A contributor who found that advertisement thinks it also ran straight films and live stage shows. The building is demolished. We have no opening date, no seat count and no closing date.

What Broward has instead is one of the strangest afterlives in this directory. Betty and Preston Henn opened the Thunderbird Drive-In on 22 November 1963, one screen, with a fence down the middle of the car park separating white customers from Black ones. It gained a reputation for showing adult films, which bothered the drivers who could see the screen from the road.

In 1966 Henn came back from a trip to the West Coast and added a flea market beside it. The flea market ate the drive-in. Eleven screens by 1980. A food court in 1979, enclosed and air conditioned a decade later with a stage in it. A circus playing that stage from 1989 to 2006. Screens twelve and thirteen in the 1990s, a fourteenth by 2005. Eighty acres. Around twelve million visitors a year.

Hurricane Wilma took several screens in October 2005 and only thirteen came back. In 2023 a suspicious fire burned screen five and the drive-in closed for good, sixty years after it opened. The flea market is still there, on the same ground, open this weekend.

Nearly every building in this directory ended the same way: dark, demolished, a car park, a church. This one got absorbed. The thing motorists complained about in 1963 is now a swap meet the size of a small town, and the screens it grew around outlasted the complaint by six decades.