Adult Movie Theatres in Long Beach

What is still open

Four shops, no screen rooms established, and three of them sit within about a mile and a half of each other in the east of the city.

• Temporary Satisfaction, 3314 E 7th St. Eleven to seven, closed Sundays. The owner replies as Crystal L. and was asked outright whether there is an arcade or theatre. The answer was no we don’t.
• Romantix, 1712 E Broadway. Noon until one in the morning, every day. Three people have asked about a room. Nobody has answered any of them.
• Lover’s Paradise Adult Superstore, 3322 E Broadway. Ten to ten, midnight on Fridays and Saturdays. One question on file, about booths, unanswered, by an owner who replies to reviews within days.
• Bottumz Up, and two Lovers branches, which are a lingerie and toy chain. No room signal on any of them. Bottumz Up’s question page returns a server error, so we could not read it at all, and we are telling you that rather than counting it either way.

The nearest confirmed answer about a room is eight miles west, and it is also no. That one is further down this page, because it turns out to be the interesting one.

Seven questions on one street

Yelp lets anybody ask a business a public question. On these three Long Beach shops, this is every question about a room that has ever been asked, and what came back.

Two things in there are worth slowing down for.

The first is that Crystal L. answered the room question. Asked whether there is an arcade or a theatre, the reply was no we don’t, straight away, no hedging. And then two more people came back asking specifically about holes, in a wall or in a booth, and those two are still sitting there. Same shop, same owner, who had already answered the general version of the question.

The second is Julio L., who appears twice on that list, at two different shops, on the same errand. One question at Temporary Satisfaction about booths with an entry hole. One at Romantix eleven months ago asking whether there is anywhere you can watch porn. Neither answered. And in the middle of the list, Trevor R. is not even asking about the shop. Trevor R. is asking the shop’s comment box whether anybody knows where to find one in the whole of Long Beach or Los Angeles, which is a question you only type into a shop listing because there is nowhere else to type it.

Every shop has one thing it will not say. It is not the same thing.

Drive eight miles west out of Long Beach into Harbor City and there is a shop called Pleasure Island, and the owner there replies as David F. and answers everything. Asked the best day to come, the answer names Thursdays for restocks and Sundays for a quieter shop. Asked how you get into the back room, the answer is we buzz you in, eighteen and over, described as the more fun section. A locked room, discussed openly.

And the booth question, asked twice, years apart:

So that is an operator who will answer the question Long Beach will not. And there is exactly one question on that listing left sitting with no reply from the shop. Do they sell poppers.

Which is the question the Long Beach shops answer. Crystal L. answered it twice, once with a yes and once with a stock update for a brand. On the Romantix listing a customer answered it in detail, explaining that you have to ask for head cleaner because they will not sell to you if you use the other word, and seven people marked that helpful. At Pleasure Island, where the owner went quiet, a customer stepped in with the same advice: call it cleaner, by law they cannot sell you poppers.

Both ways round, the operator leaves one gap and a customer fills it. In Long Beach the gap is the room and the customers do not know the answer either, so it stays open for seven years. Eight miles west the gap is a small bottle, the customers know exactly what to say, and it closes in one reply.

We have written about operator silence several times on this site, at Columbia, Stockton and Augusta, and we had to correct it once already at Melbourne, where a company manager answered the room question straight in two states on the same day. Long Beach corrects it further. It is not the trade and it is not even the company. Every one of these operators is talkative. Each has one subject it will not put in writing, the subject differs from shop to shop, and what they go quiet about is whatever could be read back to them later by somebody official.

One listing says arcade. We are not counting it, and here is why.

Search for booths in Long Beach and Lover’s Paradise comes back carrying the tag on their website: arcade. That looks like the answer to the whole page. It is not, and we have been caught by this exact thing before.

Lover’s Paradise is a Suzie’s store. The owner replies as Joanna E. with the same template used at Suzie’s in Stockton and at Lover’s World in Asheville, down to the number one rated adult store in whichever city it is and the capitalised MASSIVE selection. On the Long Beach listing one of those replies asks a customer to send something to info@suzies.com, which is the first hard confirmation of a chain link we had previously only inferred from the wording.

That matters because the tag is read off the chain’s website, not the Long Beach shop. In Asheville the same mechanism produced on their website: theater for a shop with no evidence of a room, because another store in the chain, a continent away in Stockton, does have one. One company, one website, one tag, pasted across every city it trades in.

And the question actually asked about the Long Beach shop is the only thing on that listing nobody will answer. Robert H. wrote it two years ago, and it is the most informed question anybody asks on this entire site: are therer video booths in this place? And if so, do they have doors? Somebody who knows that the doors are the part that gets taken away.

What we could not establish

No Long Beach ordinance. On most pages here we can quote the local booth rule. We searched twice and got back the codes of a dozen other California cities and nothing from Long Beach. Those other codes all do the same thing, requiring the lower part of a booth door to stay open to view, or the booth to be visible from a manager’s station, or banning closed booths outright. We are not going to assume Long Beach has one because its neighbours do.

California’s own penal code came up twice in those searches, and it is worth saying what it is not. The section in question is about live performances and about preserving a city’s right to regulate, and it does not mention booths, partitions or openings at all. There is no statewide booth rule to point at. Whatever applies in Long Beach, Long Beach wrote, and we could not find it.