Adult Movie Theatres in Indianapolis

What is open right now

Gone recently: Southern Nights Video on Commercial Drive, and the AdultMart branches on Keystone Avenue and elsewhere in the city. A shop on Harding Street by the I-465 exit has been building preview booths and waiting on a city permit, so it is not on this list yet.

The law that treated pornography as a civil rights violation

Every other ordinance in this directory works the same way underneath. It regulates where a venue may stand, what hours it may open, how far apart two people must be. The Indianapolis ordinance of 1984 did none of that. It started somewhere else entirely.

Andrea Dworkin and Catharine MacKinnon wrote it in 1983 for Minneapolis, where the mayor vetoed it twice. The Indianapolis City-County Council then asked the two of them to rewrite it for Indiana, and Mayor William Hudnut signed it into law in 1984.

It defined pornography as the graphic sexually explicit subordination of women, in pictures or in words, falling into one of six described situations: women shown enjoying pain or humiliation, women shown taking pleasure in rape, women shown mutilated or hurt, women penetrated by objects or animals, women degraded or tortured in a sexual context, women presented as objects for domination. Obscenity did not come into it. Neither did community standards. The theory was that this material is an act of discrimination against women, and a woman harmed by it could bring a claim.

Judge Sarah Barker of the federal district court held it unconstitutional on 19 November 1984, before it ever took effect, on the ground that it was not confined to any category of unprotected speech. The city appealed.

Two theories, one judge, the same answer

On 27 August 1985 the Seventh Circuit agreed, in an opinion by Frank Easterbrook. What makes it the case everybody still reads is that he did not dispute the premise. He allowed that this material may well influence how women are treated. He held that it made no difference: the government has no power to restrict expression because of the idea it carries, and a law that permits one view of sexuality and forbids another is doing precisely that. The Supreme Court affirmed in 1986 without hearing argument, which made it binding law.

The second attempt was as unsentimental as the first was philosophical. The city required licensed adult bookstores to close from midnight to ten in the morning and all day on Sunday, arguing the late hours brought armed robberies. The Annex on East 38th Street sued.

The trial court accepted the city’s figures. The Seventh Circuit did not. It found the city had never controlled for anything else that keeps a street busy after midnight, that the difference in robberies was not statistically significant, and that nothing showed an adult bookstore to be riskier than a liquor store or a convenience store keeping the same hours. It reversed and ordered an injunction against enforcement in 2014.

Twenty-nine years apart, and nothing in common but the courthouse. One ordinance was an argument about what pornography does to women. The other was an argument about robbery counts. Indianapolis lost both, and the shop that won the second one is still open on East 38th Street.