Adult Movie Theatres in Harrisburg

What is still open

One we are not counting. Adult World at 3932 Jonestown Road in Harrisburg is a shop and a nude strip club under one roof, open eight in the morning until midnight, no alcohol, ten dollars on the door. A customer in 2014 wrote that you pay at the dirty movie counter, which tells you there is a video side to it, but in fifteen years nobody has described a video booth there and this directory does not count strip clubs. If you know different, tell us. Further out, Excitement at Reading and York and the Adult World at Bethel are the next things along the interstate.

Who gets in

Three rooms, half an hour apart, and the thing that actually differs between them is not the films or the price. It is the door.

Everywhere else on this site that question gets answered badly or not at all. Here all three have an answer and all three will give it to you in writing before you drive anywhere, which is worth more than it sounds.

Twenty-five times

There is a review of Hobbeze written by somebody in Carlisle, and like a few others we have found on this site it exists in more than one version, so you can watch it change. We do not know what pronouns the person who wrote it uses, so we have left them out rather than guess at somebody who is standing right there in the text.

In October 2024 the review said: a crossdressing man, coming every couple of weeks, loves the theatre, been twice so far, will keep coming back.

In November 2025 it had been rewritten. Transgender now, rather than crossdressing. Dresses sexy and goes into the theatre and feels very relaxed there. Loves it when it gets busy. If you like being out in the open while you have fun, this is the place.

I’ve been here probably 25 times. Best place around.

Thirteen months, twenty-three more visits, and a different word at the end of it than at the start.

Now put that beside the rest of this directory. In Stockton the owner of an arcade said six years ago that he does not generally let women in the back, for obvious reasons, and has never answered the woman who asked a year ago whether that had changed. On a Bakersfield cinema’s listing a trans woman asked whether it would be a good place for her and got one reply, from a man who said he had never been in either and felt awkward going alone. At a Hollywood, Florida shop a woman asked two years ago whether she could come dressed as she likes. Nobody has answered her either.

In Lebanon, Pennsylvania, nobody had to ask. They just went, and then they went twenty-four more times, and the only thing they wanted to tell strangers about it was that it is the best place around.

The Keystoner

At 1205 North 3rd Street there was a small cinema. It opened before 1914 as the Royal under Isaac Marcus, three hundred and fifty-two seats, and it was still silent when it shut around 1932. It came back as the Star, closed again in 1960, and turned to art films.

On 31 December 1964 it reopened as the Star Art with a British nudist picture called Sunswept. It ran Russ Meyer and the Olga films, and a boy who was at school between 1963 and 1966 remembers getting past the eighteen rule with a French-language identity card. He also remembers the audience, which was entirely men, and the room, which was threadbare and had one level of seats.

By the mid 1970s it was hardcore, and particularly Alex de Renzy.

Which is where the newspapers come in. De Renzy had a film called The Keister. According to the man who was there, both Harrisburg papers would not print the word, so in their advertisements they changed the title to The Keystoner.

They took a rude word out of a pornographic film and replaced it with the nickname of the state. Nobody reading the paper could have been confused about what was on at the Star Art. The point was never to hide it. The point was that the word itself could not go in the paper.

It closed on 30 December 1976, with Tina Russell films on the last bill. Twelve years minus one day after it opened as an adult house. It came down in 1977 and the street is the Midtown district now, which somebody who remembers the old one describes as trendy.

That age check in 1963, got round with the wrong kind of card, is worth holding onto. Sixty years later a state capital four hundred miles south passed the first law in America requiring an identity check before you look at pornography online, and we wrote about it on the Baton Rouge page. The door changes. The boy at the door does not.