Adult Movie Theatres in Salt Lake City

What is open right now

Nothing in scope for this directory. The city has a well-established adult retail trade, and some of it has been going a long time: Blue Boutique has traded since 1987 and has four shops in and around the city, Mischievous has been going more than thirty years, All For Love for over twenty-five. They sell toys, lingerie and accessories. None of them is a venue you sit down in.

The nearest one open is in Las Vegas

The state that appointed a porn czar

In 2000 the Utah legislature created a post inside the Attorney General’s office: the Obscenity and Pornography Complaints Ombudsman, known to everyone including the newspapers as the porn czar. The job was to help towns and counties understand and strengthen their own pornography laws, and to advise them on restricting it locally. No other state has done this.

Paula Houston, a prosecutor from West Valley City, was appointed in 2001 and held the post until 2003. She was the only person ever to hold it.

The office ended the way most offices end. The Attorney General’s department had to find $750,000 of savings and the post was made redundant. It stayed on the statute book, vacant, for another fifteen years, and the legislature finally struck it out of state code in 2018.

And then declared it a public health hazard

On 19 April 2016, Governor Gary Herbert signed S.C.R. 9, which the legislature had passed unanimously, making Utah the first state in the country to declare pornography a public health hazard. The resolution calls for education, prevention, research and policy change.

It is worth being precise about what it does and does not do. It bans nothing and allocates no money. It is a statement of position, and several other states have since passed versions of it.

Which leaves Utah as the clearest case in this directory of a state that legislated at the level of principle rather than premises. Los Angeles measured feet between buildings, Tampa measured feet between people, Washington stopped issuing permits. Utah made a declaration, staffed an office, and the venues had already gone anyway.