Adult Movie Theatres in Melbourne

What is still open

Nothing this directory counts, in a county of six hundred and twenty thousand people with a space centre in it.

Hot Flixx at 3369 Sarno Road is the real shop here, nine in the morning until two the next, every day, with thirty-three reviews and a better rating than almost anything else on this site. Somebody asked on its listing whether there are any video booths. The business manager answered: sorry, we do not have any video booths at this location. Hold that last phrase, because it matters further down.

The county’s other adult businesses are clubs. The Red Leopard at Satellite Beach and the Lido at Cocoa Beach both trade until two and neither shows a film to a room. The nearest arcades are a Lion’s Den at Fort Pierce, about sixty-five miles south, and Thee Fantasy Shoppe at Daytona Beach, about seventy north, which stays open until four in the morning. Orlando is an hour inland.

There is no history to give you either. Brevard’s recorded cinemas are the Van Croix, the Palms, two drive-ins and a 1924 house in Cocoa that is a playhouse today, and not one of them is listed as having shown adult films. If this county ever had an adult cinema, it is in the Florida Today archive and not anywhere we can reach.

A code for a thing that is not here

The City of Melbourne keeps an Adult Entertainment Code at Chapter 4 of its ordinances. It defines an adult booth as a separate booth inside an adult entertainment establishment that anyone can get into, whether or not there is a charge, and says the term includes a peep show booth or arcade. It then says what one has to be.

On top of that the premises must have one or more manager’s stations with an unobstructed view, by direct line of sight, of every area a customer can reach except the lavatories, and the lighting is specified in footcandles measured thirty-five inches above the floor, which is roughly the height of a seated person’s face.

We have read a lot of these now. Greenville County wants a scale drawing accurate to six inches. Toledo cut the doors down to four feet. This one is the most complete, and it is enforced in a city where the largest adult business will tell you in writing that it has no booths at all.

Paragraph f, and the word nobody writes

Go back and read the last one again. Walls or partitions of solid construction without any holes or openings.

That is a gloryhole clause. It is the whole of the thing, written into a municipal code, and it never once uses the word. A reader who did not know what these rooms were would take it for a building standard about structural integrity.

And then paragraph c, which is stranger. The seats must be individual and separate, and the code goes out of its way to spell out what that rules out: not couches, not benches, not any seating configuration allowing or providing for the seating of multiple persons on the same item of furniture. Somebody sat down and wrote a sentence whose entire purpose is to make sure two people cannot sit next to each other.

We wrote up Corpus Christi today as well. The one room still open there is all couches. A customer counted ten to fifteen men and three couples on a Saturday night and the regulars told him that was a thin crowd. Different state, different rules, and the furniture is the whole argument.

Melbourne also writes down why. Most codes leave the reasoning out. This one has a long numbered findings section, and finding nineteen says that removing the doors from adult booths and requiring sufficient lighting advances a substantial governmental interest in curbing the illegal and unsanitary sexual activity occurring in adult theatres. An earlier finding says the acts happen especially in places that provide private or semi-private areas, booths or cubicles.

That is the clearest statement of the mechanism in this entire directory, and it is worth being fair about it. The city is not pretending the rule is about anything else. It thinks people have sex in these rooms, it thinks the private space is what makes that happen, and so it has required that there be no private space. The rooms in Brevard then closed, or never opened, and a code describing them in six paragraphs sits in the book with nothing to describe.

The same manager, two answers

We have been building a thread across this site about operators going quiet when somebody asks about the room, and today it needs correcting.

The questions on the Hot Flixx listing are answered by Allison B., Business Manager. She explains the curbside system at length and gives the phone number, she says you must be eighteen and will be asked for identification if you look under thirty, and when asked about video booths she says there are none at this location.

Her curbside answer points customers at a web address beginning avw, and Allison B., Business Manager is also the person answering for Adult Video Warehouse at Pompano Beach, three hours south, where she wrote: yes, we do have booths, open twenty-four seven. She even volunteered that the busiest hours there are eight in the morning to seven at night.

Same company, same person, opposite answers, both of them straight. Yes at one store, no at the other, and the word location doing the work in between.

Put that beside the chain we found this morning. Suzie’s in Stockton and Lover’s World in Asheville are the same company with the same owner replying, and the room question goes unanswered in both states while the retail questions get a paragraph. So it is not the trade that will not say. It is some companies that will not say, and others that simply tell you.