Adult Movie Theatres in Manchester

What is still open

Not counted. The two shops on the US 1 Bypass in Portsmouth, Moonlite Reader at 940 and The Fifth Wheel at 851, both trade 10am to 10pm and are well kept, and neither has a room anybody has described. Moonlite Reader refitted its Portsmouth store in spring 2020, which tells you where the money went. XXXposed in Windham and the three shops in Portland, Maine are shops.

An arcade dying in public

This directory is mostly archaeology. A venue was open in 2019, it is not open now, and nobody recorded the day it stopped. We have said that about Reno, about Little Rock, about Rochester. The actual process is always invisible.

Seabrook is the exception, because eight people walked into the same building over eight years and each wrote down what they found.

Look at what fails and in what order. First the cleaning. Then the stock. Then the booths themselves, one machine at a time, until the complaint is that barely any channels work. The telephone goes. The payment system changes to money up front, which is what a business does when it cannot rely on the equipment delivering what it sold.

And it is still open. That is the part worth sitting with. Eight years of this and the doors are still unlocked ten till ten, because the rent is presumably cheap and the booths still take money from whoever turns up.

One customer in July 2024 offered a theory about the owner that we are not going to repeat, because it is an anonymous accusation about a named business and we have nothing to check it against.

Across the road from the Rex

Forbidden Fruit is at 20 Amherst Street. The Rex is at 23 Amherst Street. They face each other.

The Rex opened on 30 May 1940 with 496 seats, an independent second-run house run by Lucien Descoteaux. Shea Theatres remodelled it as the King Cinema, and by 1980 it was called The Movies, playing revivals, odd first runs and a weekly midnight Rocky Horror. It shut in the mid-1980s, became a nightclub called Club Liquid and then Realm, and then the city got involved: Manchester Development Corporation bought it for $412,500 in 2018 and lent the money to do it up. It reopened in early 2020 as the Rex again, a live venue run by the same people as the Palace.

So on one side of a narrow downtown street there is a restored 1940 cinema with public money in it, and on the other side a shop with video booths in the cellar. Both are open. Neither has anything to do with the other. That is the whole state of this trade in one photograph, if anybody ever takes it.

What we could not pin down

Manchester’s adult cinema history is the thinnest we have met. There is no documented adult house with a name, an address and dates.

What there is: a local writer who remembers the Strand as the porn house, running soft core and censored prints, and still going when the State and the Rex were the last downtown cinemas. We could not find its address or any date for it.

A contributor to the cinema record says the Palace on Hanover Street began screening adult features in the 1960s before it became college classrooms and then, in 1974, the performing arts theatre it still is. The same local writer doubts that, and says it turned its lights off at the end of the decade, before hardcore reached the city. We cannot settle it.

The State at 1118 Elm Street, which opened on 27 November 1929, became the Queen and then Cine 1 & 2 and was demolished in 1978, was a mainstream house in everything we read.

Compare Syracuse, where there is a judge’s name, a fine to the dollar and a demolition date, or El Paso, where the drive-in’s first adult double bill is on file. Some cities kept the paperwork. This one did not, and we would rather say so than guess.