Adult Movie Theatres in Knoxville

Tennessee · last checked 21 October 2026

Nothing in Knoxville has a booth or a screen. Five shops were opened and read and every one of them sells things and nothing more. What the city has instead is the only firebombing in this directory: the cinema that brought Deep Throat to Knoxville burned in 1975, and the other adult house on the same street is now the city’s restored concert hall.

What is still open

Nothing this directory counts. Adult Mega Store at 120 South Peters Road, (865) 769-2403, trades 10am to 11pm and is clean, well organised and well reviewed. Adult Video Superstore at 515 Lovell Road, (865) 671-3836, opens at nine and runs to eleven, and has a decade of complaints about faulty stock and no refunds, most recently in August 2026. There are two Romantic Escapades stores, the North Broadway one running events for customers, and an Intimate Treasures. All shops. No room in any of them.

The nearest room is fifty miles north

Adult World

Theatre

383 Luther Seibers Lane, Pioneer, TN 37847

From Knoxville: About 50 miles north, up the interstate near the Kentucky line
Has: An arcade, booths with gloryholes, and a theatre
Note: Smoking is permitted in the back
Hours: 10am to 10pm
Phone: (423) 563-0254

Listed because it is the closest thing to Knoxville with a room in it, not because it is in Knoxville. It is not, and fifty miles is further than this directory normally counts.

A man who went with his girlfriend in June 2026 called it laid back and said the booths and the gloryholes were good. The best account is from September 2025: an hour before closing on a weekday, one couple and a few older men, and the wife caught him looking, turned to her husband, and waved him over to the theatre.

Two things to know. Smoking is allowed in the back, which in 2021 gave an asthmatic customer an attack, and he was clear about it in writing. And when it first opened it sold a magazine of local names and telephone numbers, which it has since stopped, and somebody is still disappointed about that.

Last checked 21 October 2026 · Booths and gloryholes described on 30 June 2026

Somebody burned it down

Gay Street Cinema

Closed

215 South Gay Street, Knoxville, TN

Opened: 25 September 1969
Seats: 150, in a converted shopfront
Showed: Straight films, despite the street name
First in Knoxville with: Deep Throat, late 1972
Closed: 1975, after a suspicious fire

A shop unit with a hundred and fifty seats in it, which is about as small as a cinema gets. In the early 1970s Gay Street had two adult theatres and this was the northern one.

It closed in 1975 after a fire. One contributor to the cinema record writes that the fire was suspicious. Another says it was said to have been started with a firebomb.

Both of those are unverified. They are user comments on a community-edited site, one of them explicitly secondhand, and we have not seen a fire report, a newspaper story or a charge sheet. We are putting it on the page because nothing else in forty-odd cities comes close to it, and we are telling you exactly how thin the sourcing is.

Last checked 21 October 2026

If it is true, it is the only case in this directory of the trade being ended by someone setting fire to it. Everywhere else the weapons are an ordinance, a licence, a nuisance order, a distance rule, a tax return, a purchase offer. Knoxville would be the one where somebody decided not to bother with any of that.

The other one is now the concert hall

A few blocks south on the same side of the street stands the Bijou. It was built in 1909 as an addition to the Lamar House Hotel, a building that had served as a Civil War hospital. It did vaudeville, then second-run films, and it was the Bijou Art Theatre from 1935 to 1975, which is the period when it was running X-rated pictures.

It is a restored theatre today, a Knoxville landmark, and people go there to see bands.

That ending is one this site keeps finding. Pittsburgh has the Harris, which showed adult films in the 1960s and reopened as an art cinema in 1995. Lexington has the State, which spent the 1970s on pornography and is now an annex of the arthouse next door. San Jose has a Pussycat that became a live music room. The grand old building gets saved and the converted shopfront gets demolished, or in this case burned.

One film, five cities

Knoxville’s first screening of Deep Throat in late 1972 puts it at the front of a sequence this directory keeps running into.

KnoxvilleLate 1972
The Gay Street Cinema is the first in the city to show it.
Grand Rapids30 March 1973
The Savoy's new second screen opens with it.
Syracuse1973
Herman Hausman takes a fine of $26,878 for showing it rather than agree to stop.
Wilkes-Barre23 September 1973
The district attorney halts a screening at Cinema 309.
Spokane1977
County deputies seize a print at the Dishman. The operator is acquitted at every trial.

One film, five cities in this directory, and a different authority trying something different in each.

The film is not interesting. What is interesting is that five different authorities in five different states each reached for a different instrument, and none of the instruments worked. The Syracuse owner paid and carried on. The Spokane operator was acquitted every time. The Grand Rapids screen opened anyway. Cinema 309 in Wilkes-Barre is open this morning, fifty-five years on.

And the one place where the film’s cinema actually stopped is the one where the building caught fire.

Sources

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