Adult Movie Theatres in Lincoln

What is still open

Nothing else in the city has a room. The other Romantix, 3247 S 10th Street, is the shop that replaced the one that burned downtown, and the company said when it opened that there would be no video arcade booths in it. A customer writing in 2016 confirmed the same thing from the other side of the counter, and missed the old one. It is trading: somebody put a glass door through at half two in the morning on 15 April this year.

Doctor John’s has two Lincoln addresses, 710 N 48th Street and 2410 NW 12th Street, and Adam & Eve is at 4327 East O Street. All three are retail. No booths, no screen, no back room.

The city took the door off

On 10 March 1986 the Lincoln City Council passed ordinance number 14335. It defined a picture arcade, and then it said this:

No person shall maintain any picture arcade unless the entire interior of such premises wherein the pictures are viewed is visible upon entrance to such premises. No partially or fully enclosed booths or partially or fully concealed booths shall be maintained.

Read it again, because it is doing something unusual. It does not ban the films. It does not zone the shop to the edge of town or set a distance from a school. It bans the room being private. Every other city in this directory regulates where this trade may happen. Lincoln regulated what you can see from the doorway.

The shop it was written for was the Adult Book Store and Cinema X Theatre at 921 O Street, run by ABC Books, Inc. The court record describes it exactly: thirty-three coin-operated booths, each for one person, each about three feet by three feet, each with a full-length door that closed and locked. Twenty were eight-millimetre film booths where the film was projected onto the inside of the door once you shut it. Thirteen were video booths with the monitor on one wall.

At the public hearing the chief of police, Dean Leitner, told the council the booths had apertures through the walls, and what those were for. That is the whole case for the ordinance in one sentence, and the city never argued the films themselves were obscene. It said so plainly: this is about the architecture.

ABC Books kept the doors on. It was convicted three separate times and kept them on after that too, at a hundred dollars a time. So the city stopped prosecuting and sued for an injunction instead, arguing the premises were a disorderly house under its own nuisance ordinance. On 14 June 1991 the Nebraska Supreme Court agreed on every point: the rule is content neutral, it is not a prior restraint, it is a valid restriction on the manner of speech, and a business that breaks an ordinance openly and repeatedly has made itself a nuisance. The injunction stood.

The rule is still live. It sits in the current code as Chapter 5.27, re-enacted by ordinance 15466 on 5 March 1990, and the 1990 version is wider than the one the court upheld: enclosed booths are now banned not only in an arcade but in or around, or in conjunction with one. The fine went from a hundred dollars to five hundred, with every day counting as a fresh offence. The code’s own citation for the original ordinance misdates it by nine centuries, to March 1086, which has been sitting there uncorrected ever since.

Where the privacy went

A ban on an enclosed booth does not reduce anybody’s wish to be unobserved. It only decides where the opaque thing is allowed to stand. In Lincoln you can watch it move.

Amber is whatever you cannot see through that year.

The middle panel is somebody’s note from 2008 about the O Street store, and it is the only description we have of what compliance actually looked like: the booths were still there, the doors were gone, and there were artificial trees arranged to block the view. A shop obeying the letter of a sightline rule with houseplants.

Then on 12 December 2010 the building burned. It went up on a Sunday morning in single-figure temperatures, took most of the afternoon to put out, and was a total loss. Nobody was hurt and the used record shop next door survived. The cause was never determined, and a year later it still had not been.

Seven months after that, Romantix reopened on South 10th Street just below Van Dorn, next door to a Subway. A local station asked what would be in it. There would be DVDs and mostly women’s apparel, and there would be no magazines and no video arcade booths. The company’s Steve Brown, asked about the neighbours, said the store had a privacy fence and covered windows so you could not see in.

That is the third panel, and it is a strange thing to read in order. The privacy the city spent five years prising out of a three-foot booth reappeared twenty-five years later as a fence around the car park. It is the same promise, moved outdoors and pointed at the street instead of at the aisle.

March 2021, and the same two words

On the 25th and 26th of March 2021, Lincoln police ran an undercover operation in the arcade room at 2929 NW 12th Street. Officer Erin Spilker said the criminal investigations unit had been getting tips about public sexual acts in it. Citations went out that May.

• 25 for indecent exposure
• 5 for public indecency
• 2 for inmate of a disorderly house
• 2 employees, for maintaining a disorderly house

Those are the figures in the trade report we could read, which runs them under a headline saying over a dozen people. The Journal Star headline says dozens. The numbers do not reconcile and we are not going to pick one for you.

Look at the bottom two lines of that list. Disorderly house is Lincoln Municipal Code 9.48.010, and it is the exact provision the Nebraska Supreme Court used in 1991 to shut ABC Books’ booths. Thirty-five years later, a different company, a different building, on the other side of town, with rooms the city’s own ordinance had already forced open, and the charge is the same charge.

Lincoln made the booth illegal in 1986 because closed booths produce anonymous sex. The booths have been open for thirty-five years. We are not pretending that proves the ordinance failed, because nobody can count what did not happen. What can be said is narrow and it is enough: the city got the doors off and it is still sending officers into the room.

Two questions, seven years apart

There are two questions on the NW 12th shop’s Yelp page. Steve W. asked whether there is a theatre, seven years ago. Sammy J. asked whether there are booths, three months ago. Neither has an answer under it, from the shop or from anybody else.

The shop is not quiet. A business manager replies to the reviews, usually inside a day, by name, including to a one-line note saying the service was fine. The two questions about the back room are the only things on the page nobody has touched.

We have seen this before. In Long Beach seven questions went to three shops, and the only one anybody answered was the polite one. The pattern in Lincoln is tighter than that, because here the same shop answers everything else. A company that will tell you about the vibrators and not about the room is telling you something about the room.

What we could not establish

Whether the rooms are open now. This is the one that matters and we do not have it. March 2021 is the last dated evidence. We have counted the venue as open on the strength of that, the hours, and the shop’s refusal to say otherwise, and if you think that is generous you are not wrong.

How the 2021 cases ended. The trade report that listed the citations finished by predicting most of them would be dismissed, and offered nothing in support of that. We found no reporting either way.

And one we would love to settle. Oscar Wilde lectured in Lincoln on 24 April 1882, in a hall on the 900 block of O Street. A researcher who went through the city directories concluded that the hall and the lot that burned in 2010 are the same place, and put both at 941 O Street. The Nebraska Supreme Court and the Journal Star both put the adult store at 921. So either the building where Wilde spoke spent its last decades as Cinema X and then burned down, or it is the one next door, and we cannot tell you which.