Adult Movie Theatres in Madison

What is still open

Nothing this directory counts. Three searches, and the one worded for a theatre or an arcade came back completely empty. That has happened once before on this site, in Virginia Beach.

Selective Video at 2709 W Beltline Highway and Selective Video 2 at 3220 Commercial Avenue are the two with video in the name. A customer once described the Beltline store as a quarter lingerie, a quarter toys, a quarter films and a quarter tobacco, and most of the recent reviews are about vape pens. Somebody asked on the Beltline listing whether there were viewing booths or theatres. Nobody has answered.

A Woman’s Touch on the east side is a sexuality resource centre with fifty-three reviews and a reputation for being the opposite of a back-room shop. The Romantix on Maple Grove Drive is still trading, and it is the subject of the section after next. None of them has a room.

The nearest rooms are in Milwaukee and Chicago.

Ten per cent

Madison’s zoning code decides whether a shop is an adult book or video store by measuring it. Section 28.211 says the adult side has to be a significant part of the business, and then defines significant as more than ten per cent of the available floor, wall and display space. Cross that line and you are an adult entertainment establishment, with all the location rules that come with it. Stay under it and you are a shop like any other.

Now look at the part in the middle of that sentence. The ten per cent includes space devoted to the viewing of videotapes or films. A row of booths is floor space. A theatre room is floor space. In Madison the room itself counts against you before anything is on the shelves.

Fort Lauderdale’s rule counts what is displayed, and the trade there answered by stocking boxes of Christmas videos to dilute the shelf. You cannot dilute a booth. In Madison any shop that wants a room for people to watch in is an adult establishment by definition, and the only way to be ordinary retail is to have no room at all.

We are not telling you that is why Madison has none. The code does not ban a booth. It moves a shop with one into a different zoning category, and we have not been through which parts of the city that category allows. What we can say is that the rule is written so the room is the first thing that tips you over.

A sex shop in a Family Video, selling no porn

In the summer of 2022 a Romantix opened at 3154 Maple Grove Drive on the southwest side, in the building a Family Video had left empty. Neighbours objected, the local alder took the calls, and the city’s zoning administrator, Katie Bannon, looked at it and ruled that it was a general retail store.

The reason was the ten per cent. According to the local reporting, the store would sell no adult films, no adult books and no adult magazines, and would have no viewing booths. A representative for the company said they had gone through the stock and counted even the products whose packaging showed nudity, and the total was far below the line.

And then the detail that makes it. Bannon pointed out that the Family Video it replaced had had a section at the back for adult videos, and that had stayed under ten per cent too. So the building was never classed as adult when it rented pornography, and it is not classed as adult now that it sells sex toys.

Family Video was the last video rental chain in America and closed all of its remaining stores in January 2021. On our Dayton page one was built on the site of a demolished adult cinema. Here one closed and a sex shop moved in. The chain kept turning up on the same ground as this trade, which says something about who was renting from those back rooms.

The thing a Romantix of 2022 has taken out of the store is the very thing this directory is looking for. No films, no booths, nowhere to sit. A national chain opened in a neighbourhood that did not want it by being, deliberately and measurably, not that.

The Majestic, for a few years

The Majestic at 115 King Street opened as a vaudeville house in December 1906, built by Edward and Otto Biederstaedt. It is the oldest standing theatre in Madison. It had an organ for the silent films and went over to sound around 1929.

At some point after that it showed pornography. The theatre’s own history says only that there were a few years when it showed films with the letter X rather prominently after the title, which is a graceful way of putting it. A man who remembers the 1970s says the whole block had a poor reputation then and the Majestic was a porn house.

After that it was a nightclub, and somebody who knew it says the nightclub ended after shootings and other trouble. New owners, Matt Gerding and Scott Leslie, bought it in 2007 and it reopened for live music on 29 September of that year. It is a concert venue now, the seats gone downstairs, with a classic film now and then.

We have no start date and no end date for the X years, and we are not going to invent them. What is worth saying is that the oldest theatre in the city came through all of it. Vaudeville, silents, talkies, pornography, a nightclub that ended badly, and then back to a stage. It kept the marquee the whole way.