Adult Movie Theatres in Las Vegas

What is open right now

Why there is none of this on the Strip

Nevada law lets a county commission confine adult bookstores and adult cinemas to named districts, and Clark County has done exactly that. Adult uses are allowed in C-2 commercial zoning and nowhere else, and inside C-2 three further distances apply:

• 300 feet from any other existing adult use.
• 200 feet between a customer entrance and any residential district.
• 500 feet from a pre-existing public school, library, place of worship or non-adult theatre.

That last clause is the one that does the work here, and no other city in this directory has it. Las Vegas Boulevard is wall to wall with non-adult theatres: showrooms, residencies, arenas, every hotel with a stage in it. A rule keeping adult venues five hundred feet from ordinary ones removes the Strip from the map before anybody gets to the schools and churches.

Which is how a town whose entire advertising budget is built on sex ends up with its one adult cinema in a commercial block off Valley View, next to nothing at all.

It was downtown, and the Pussycat man built one

The Flick, near downtown, opened in November 1969 showing independent films and was running pornography within the year. By early 1976 it had two screens.

The 4 Star opened downtown on 20 February 1969 and is the interesting one. It was built from scratch as an adult house by David F. Friedman, who had co-founded the Pussycat chain in Los Angeles three years earlier. The same man who opened the first Pussycat on South Hill Street put a purpose-built porn cinema in downtown Las Vegas, and it lasted into the early 1990s.

The Gaiety opened as the Strip Center Theatre on 18 August 1972, in an alley behind 1304 Las Vegas Boulevard, and took the Gaiety name three weeks later. An alley behind the Boulevard is about as close to the Strip as this trade ever got here.