Adult Movie Theatres in Honolulu

What is open right now

What Hotel Street was before it had a cinema

From December 1941 to September 1944, the few blocks of Hotel Street in Chinatown ran an openly regulated brothel district. Not tolerated, not overlooked: administered, by the Honolulu police, the territorial government and the military together.

The scale is hard to take in. There were around 400,000 service personnel in Hawaii by 1944, and something like 30,000 men a day passed through Hotel Street. The price was three dollars for three minutes, and it was three minutes because the system was built to make it three minutes. The best known woman on the street, Jean O’Hara, is credited with the bull pen: three rooms worked in rotation, one man undressing, one man with her, one man dressing.

Read that list again, because it is the part people skip. The territory licensed these women, took their dollar, required their medical inspections and profited from the whole arrangement, and in the same breath forbade them from keeping money in a bank or sending any of it to their mothers.

The strike, and what they asked for

On 28 August 1942 the women of Hotel Street went on strike. It lasted twenty-two days, in a territory under martial law, in the middle of a war, against a system the police and the army were jointly running.

They were not asking for more money. They were asking to be allowed out of the brothels: to live somewhere else, to go into shops, to be treated in public as people rather than as a licensed category. They won a good deal of it.

One of the things they won was the right to go to the pictures. That is a small line in the histories and it stops you dead on a site like this one. Twenty-five years later a cinema opened on the same street showing films they could not have been seen at, and it lasted until the mid-2000s, and the room it was in now sells cocktails and hangs art on the walls.

Three things on one street

Almost every city in this directory has one layer to it: a strip that filled up and then emptied. Hotel Street has three, and they barely overlap. A state-run brothel district that closed in 1944. An adult cinema on two floors from 1969 to the mid-2000s. A cocktail bar and gallery now.

The surviving venue is nowhere near any of it. It is upstairs in Waikiki, four miles east, among the hotels and the shopping. Which is the pattern the whole site keeps finding: the trade does not die where it started, it moves to wherever nobody is looking, and in Honolulu that turned out to be the tourist end of town.