Adult Movie Theatres in Minneapolis

What is open right now

Nothing that belongs in this directory. Lickety Split, at 251 Third Avenue South, has been trading under that name and as Broadway Books for over thirty years, but it is a shop: dance wear, toys, gifts. No screen and no booths.

The nearest venue this site has confirmed is Te-Jay’s Adult Books on West Hubbard Street in Chicago, open twenty-four hours, about four hundred miles away. That is less a suggestion than a measurement of how far Minneapolis now is from the nearest room with a booth in it.

Three floors on 2nd Avenue

SexWorld opened in 1993 at 241 Second Avenue North in the Warehouse District and became the thing everyone in the Twin Cities had been to once. At its largest it ran to three storeys: the shop, and above it the Dollhouse, which put on live peep shows. It traded twenty-four hours a day until its final months.

It closed permanently on 29 June 2025 after thirty-two years, blamed on general trading conditions and on new rules governing the sale of THC products, which had become part of the business.

Live peep shows are close to extinct in America now. Of every city on this site, Minneapolis had one of the last, and it survived until the year before last.

The city that tried to make it a civil rights case

Every other city in this directory fought this trade with zoning, licensing or the police. Minneapolis tried something else entirely, and it started in the same place all the others did: a zoning committee.

In October 1983, after years of unsuccessful local protest against the adult businesses downtown, the committee heard from Catharine MacKinnon and Andrea Dworkin. The council then hired them to draft an amendment to the city’s civil rights ordinance. It defined pornography as the sexually explicit subordination of women, graphically depicted, and treated it as a form of discrimination on the basis of sex, so that a person harmed by it could sue the people who made and sold it.

That is a different argument from anything else on this site. It is not about distance from a school or the hours a shop may keep. It says the material itself is an act of discrimination, and it hands the remedy to the person harmed rather than to a licensing department.

Indianapolis picked it up. On 1 May 1984 Mayor William Hudnut signed a revised version aimed at violent pornography, and it was challenged almost immediately. In American Booksellers Association v. Hudnut the Seventh Circuit held that it violated the First Amendment, and the Supreme Court declined to hear the appeal, which left that ruling standing.

Dworkin and MacKinnon used the publicity from Minneapolis to take the campaign national, and the ordinance is still argued over four decades later. It never governed a single venue in the city that produced it.