Adult Movie Theatres in New Orleans

What the city has instead

The French Quarter’s adult trade is live, licensed and on stage: strip clubs and bars, several blocks of them, which is a different business from the one this directory catalogues and needs no listing from us to find. What it does not contain is a room with a screen or a shop with booths.

The last venue of the kind that would belong here was out in New Orleans East, at 5400 Crowder Boulevard, trading over the years as Crowder Blvd Adult Book & Videos and as International Video, with a room at the back and around a dozen booths. Its listings, updated in May and June 2026, say closed.

The raids that made a First Amendment case

Two months after being elected district attorney, in August 1962, Jim Garrison began raiding the adult establishments of Bourbon Street. The target was B-drinking: dancers working men into buying wildly overpriced drinks. The raids made his national name, five years before he became the only prosecutor ever to bring a case over the assassination of John F. Kennedy.

What happened next is the part worth keeping. Garrison fell out with the criminal court judges of Orleans Parish and said publicly that they were starving his vice raids of funds because of their ties to organised crime. He was convicted of criminally defaming them. In 1964 the Supreme Court reversed it unanimously, holding that the freedom to criticise elected judges and other public officials is protected by the First Amendment.

Every other legal fight in this directory was about whether these venues could exist. New Orleans produced one about whether you are allowed to shout at the judges who let them.

The one cinema that tried

The Toulouse Theatre, at Toulouse and Chartres in the Quarter, opened on 16 October 1970 and was shut by June 1974. It was then sublet to George Echols, who ran an adult theatre company that also operated the Paris, and it reopened that August showing gay adult films.

Through the mid-seventies it alternated, gay programmes then straight ones, and it closed in the early 1980s. That is close to the whole history of the adult screen in a city whose adult trade is otherwise two centuries deep.