Adult Movie Theatres in Greenville

What is still open

Nothing this directory counts, in the largest metropolitan area in South Carolina. We searched three ways. The two worded for booths and arcades came back with six results and three results, and most of what they returned was in another state.

Out of Bounds at 1608 Easley Bridge Road in Greenville is the most interesting shop in the state and we have given it its own section below. Nichole’s Exoticwear at 409 N Main Street in Mauldin has been going since the 1990s, shuts on Sundays, and when somebody asked on its listing whether it was a swingers club the answer was that it is a lingerie and novelty store.

Pandora’s Boxxx at 209 Westgate Mall Drive in Spartanburg still rents adult DVDs in 2026, which is worth a moment on its own. Six months ago somebody asked the question this whole site is about, in five words: does Pandora’s box have viewing booths. The answer came back from somebody speaking for the shop, and it was no, we do not. That is the only clean answer anybody has given in this metro.

Where the rooms actually are. Every booth the searches turned up is over a state line. Fantasy World at Swannanoa and Carolina Video Exchange at Gastonia are in North Carolina. Elations at Athens is in Georgia. From Greenville you can drive an hour in three directions and find a room, and none of them will be in South Carolina. The only one we have found in this state is thirty miles west of Columbia, a hundred miles away.

Plus or minus six inches

This directory has shown you a lot of rules. Ohio shuts the doors at midnight. North Carolina allows one body to a booth. Toledo cut the doors down to four feet. Fort Lauderdale counts what proportion of the shelf is pornography.

None of them is written like this one.

Read the third item again. Before you may open, you hand the county a scale drawing of the inside of your building, marked to an accuracy of six inches, showing where the light fittings are. Somebody at the county then holds that drawing. If you move the desk, you have to ask them first.

And then look at what the drawing is for. Every line of this is about one thing: making sure that at every moment, from a desk no bigger than a small bathroom, a member of staff can see every square foot of floor a customer is standing on. Not what is on the screens. Where the people are.

It is still in the county code. Several of these sections carry an editor’s note saying they have been modified by judicial decision, which is the next section. Note also that this is the county’s ordinance. The City of Greenville keeps its own separate code and we have not been through it.

Nine sites, or four

The county passed it in February 1995, wrote to every adult business in the county telling them they were in breach, and gave them a year. At the end of the year none of them had complied, so the county ordered them closed.

Five of them sued. A strip club called The Landing Strip, a place called Taboo’s, a social club, and two others. The case is Harkins v. Greenville County, heard by the South Carolina Supreme Court on 21 September 1999.

The argument came down to counting. The businesses brought an expert who said there were only four or five sites in the whole county where an adult business could legally sit. The county brought an expert who said fourteen, plus a couple of hundred in the parts of the county that are not zoned at all. The trial judge found nine, and over a hundred unzoned, and held that was enough.

The Supreme Court let the zoning stand and struck the permit scheme instead. The ordinance gave the zoning administrator thirty days to decide, which is a specified and reasonable period, but it gave you no prompt way into a courtroom if he said no. That makes it a prior restraint on speech, and the Court reversed. On rehearing it added a line making clear that only the licensing part was unconstitutional.

So the specification survives. The sightlines, the footcandle, the one person to a room, the Sunday closure, the six inches. What the court took away was the part that let the county decide who gets to build it.

They copied Columbia’s homework

There is a sentence near the end of that opinion that we did not expect to find.

The Court observes that the Greenville ordinance is basically a duplicate of the Richland County ordinance it had already looked at twice in the early 1990s. Richland County is Columbia. Greenville took the capital’s rulebook and put its own name on it.

And the Court said so, in the Conclusion, in as close to a telling off as a supreme court gets. Richland is wholly zoned and Greenville is not, so the two are not the same problem. Municipalities different from Richland County, it wrote, cannot merely copy the ordinance and expect to meet every constitutional requirement. Each body must look at its own situation and do the legal work.

This also corrects something we wrote. Our Columbia page says that we went through the Richland County code looking for a booth rule and found none. That was honest about what we could reach, and it now looks like a limit of our reach rather than a gap in their law. If Greenville’s is basically a duplicate of Richland’s, then Richland almost certainly has the same sightlines and the same one person to a room, and we simply could not retrieve them.

Which makes the pair of pages stranger, not clearer. Columbia has a rulebook we could not read and a widely repeated belief about booths that we could not source, and one arcade thirty miles out of town. Greenville has the same rulebook, published, litigated to the state supreme court, and nothing at all to apply it to. Two cities, one ordinance, no rooms.

The only gay sex shop in South Carolina

On Easley Bridge Road there is a shop called Out of Bounds. A customer in 2019 described it as the only gay sex shop in South Carolina, and called that quite a distinction.

It has six reviews and every one of them is about the staff. The owner is called Dean. People mention him by name, and Scott, and write that if the shop does not have a thing it will find it for you. One review notes the shop’s long record of helping people in the community who are having a hard time. Another counted the kilts.

It has no room in it. It closes at eight, and at six on a Sunday. It is a shop, and we are not counting it as anything else. But in a state where the last page we wrote was about a man being told, wrongly, that booths are illegal in both of his counties, it is worth knowing that the Upstate’s contribution to this trade is a well-lit shop where the owner knows your name.

Betty Boop, and the Pizza Inn next door

Greenville did have one, and it opened on 22 June 1973 at 8 Legrand Boulevard. The Flick Cinema.

It started as an art house showing classic films, and by the account of somebody who remembers it, the inside was decorated for exactly that: Betty Boop wallpaper, celluloid prints all over the walls. An amusement company took it over and turned it to adult films, which is the single most common story on this site and one the Bakersfield page sets out at length.

Two details are Greenville’s own. There was a Pizza Inn in the same building, with its own entrance. And when a former employee tried to open a rival adult cinema in town, it was shut down quickly.

The Flick closed in 1990, five years before the ordinance. Not zoned out, not raided, not prosecuted. Home video, same as Allentown and Dayton. The building is a private club now, called the Castle.

That is the order of events and it is worth being plain about it. The cinema died in 1990. The county wrote its specification in 1995. By the time anybody in Greenville had drawn a diagram accurate to six inches, the thing it described had already gone. We are not saying the rule is why there is nothing here. By the dates, it arrived after the fact, and it has been waiting ever since for a building that never came.