Adult Movie Theatres in Portland

What is open right now

One caveat on Taboo’s third branch, at 2330 SE 82nd Avenue. Its own site says the arcade cannot open for private viewing until the state allows it and that the shop is retail only for now. That reads like a notice nobody has taken down since the pandemic, but it is what the operator says today, so we are treating that arcade as shut. The shop itself is open either way.

The last cinema, and what happened to it

The Oregon Theater at 3530 SE Division Street was the last operating porn palace in Portland and it closed in March 2020. In 2023 the building reopened as the Tomorrow Theater, a cinema and multimedia space run by PAM CUT, the film centre of the Portland Art Museum.

So if a listing sends you to SE Division expecting the old arrangement, you will find an art museum programme instead. That is a better fate than most of the buildings on this site got, and it is still not what you were looking for.

Why there is so much left here

On 21 January 1987 the Oregon Supreme Court decided State v. Henry, and it decided it unanimously, seven to nothing. The court held that Article I, section 8 of the Oregon Constitution is broader than the First Amendment: it protects expression on any subject whatever, in words or pictures or film, and contains no exception for obscenity. The state’s obscenity statute was therefore unconstitutional, and the charges against Earl Henry were dismissed.

That is why Portland looks the way it does. Every other city on this site lost venues to some combination of rent, video and a local government with a zoning code. Portland had the same rents and the same video recorders, and none of the legal pressure, and it still has four arcades trading while Los Angeles has one room with thirty seats in it.

The same ruling is the usual explanation for the city having so many strip clubs for its size. It is one decision, and you can still see it on the street almost forty years later.