Adult Movie Theatres in Lubbock

What is still open

Two adult shops, no rooms, nothing we would send you to. Cindie’s, part of the same chain we found in Shreveport, and an Adam & Eve, both ordinary daytime retail. Angelwitch is a cabaret, which is not one of the four things we count.

We also ran the search that rescued Huntsville, where a working arcade was hiding in the video rental category under the same heading as a shop selling second-hand game discs. Lubbock has five businesses filed there and all five are what they say they are. Nothing is hiding. It has gone.

The most documented booths in America

On most pages of this site we are reduced to reading a stranger ’s review from four years ago to establish whether a room exists. For one shop in Lubbock we have a federal appellate record, and it is extraordinarily specific.

Crystal Cinema sold videos, magazines and novelties and ran private booths for watching adult films. In December 1996, Corporal William C. Bates of the Lubbock Police Department and the City Health Inspector went through it for a permit renewal, and the opinion records what they found.

There was no manager’s station of the required dimensions with an unobstructed view of each booth. And then the sentence that explains the entire architecture of this trade: the store’s lack of overhead lighting and closing doors to the video viewing booths prevented employees on duty from monitoring patron activities within the booths.

Somebody asked a shop in Long Beach two years ago whether the booths had doors, and nobody ever answered. This is the answer, written down by a court in 1998. The doors are the whole question. A booth with a door that closes cannot be monitored, and a booth that cannot be monitored is why the rules exist.

The inspectors also found material in several booths that they suspected was semen, and sent it to a laboratory, which confirmed it. The Health Inspector let the shop keep trading on condition it monitored the booths properly and cleaned the premises. Returning on 19 December, the inspector found numerous booths in the same state, tested again with the same result, and watched a customer in a booth who appeared to be masturbating.

We report that flatly because it is in the public record of a United States Court of Appeals, and because it is the only place in a hundred and sixteen cities where the question this entire directory circles has been answered by laboratory test. Everywhere else it is a question nobody will answer. In Lubbock it is an exhibit.

It was not the semen. It was the form.

Here is the part that matters, and it is not what you would expect from everything above. None of the inspection findings is what closed Crystal Cinema. The permit was refused because the application was incomplete.

The application was denied on 10 January 1997 for incompleteness. Crystal was told in writing it could appeal to the city’s Permit and License Review Board. There was also nothing stopping it finishing the form and applying again the same day.

It did neither. It sued instead, arguing the ordinance was unconstitutional on its face and as applied. The district court disagreed and found that Crystal lacked standing, because it had caused its own injury. On 16 July 1998 the Fifth Circuit affirmed, in an unpublished opinion that is not precedent, and the reasoning is three sentences long in substance: Crystal voluntarily chose not to submit a completed application, so the injury is the result of its own failure or refusal, so there is no causal link between the ordinance and the harm.

These are steps that Crystal simply chose not to take.

The court also held the forty-five day decision period exceedingly reasonable, which it compared with a sixty-day scheme it had already approved in Denton County and a fifty to fifty-seven day one the Supreme Court had rejected. The whole constitutional argument turned on calendars.

Then it happened again

Nine years later, two more Lubbock businesses went the same way, and this time it was the county rather than the city. Fantasy Theatre and C&L Bookstore filed their permit renewals with Lubbock County on 22 November. The applications were denied for lacking certain information. The businesses appealed and stayed open to a hearing on 22 January, then filed what they called new applications. Sheriff David Gutierrez denied those as untimely. The Sheriff’s Office ordered both to close the next day.

They sued the county in federal court, and the case was dismissed. The reason, as the local reporting put it in March 2007, was that their attorney did not file the right papers.

They refiled. In May 2007 Fantasy Theatre went in seeking an injunction to have its permit restored, its attorney John Fahle saying he believed the county’s position was not consistent with the county’s own regulations. We could not find any report of how it ended. Neither business appears in any current listing, which tells you how it worked out in practice and nothing about how it worked out on paper. The county commissioners later revised the permit process.

One last thing, and we want to be careful with it because it is a coincidence and not a cause. The city ordinance that started Lubbock’s permit regime, number 8874, was adopted on 23 January 1986. The sheriff ordered Fantasy Theatre and C&L Bookstore to close on 23 January 2007. Twenty-one years to the day, by two different authorities who had nothing to do with each other.

What we could not establish

Whether any of these rules still apply. Everything quoted above about manager’s stations, lighting and sightlines comes from a 1998 opinion describing a 1996 ordinance. It is thirty years old. We have not read Lubbock’s current code and we are not going to tell you what today’s rules say on the strength of a decades-old court file.

How the 2007 case ended. The reporting stops at a hearing in May 2007 with no ruling given.

And what this page is really short of. A person. Every other page here has somebody in it, asking a question in a review box or answering one. Lubbock has a corporal, a health inspector, a city secretary, a sheriff, two attorneys and a panel of three circuit judges. The only customer who appears anywhere in the record is a man in a booth on 19 December 1996, observed, and never named.