Adult Movie Theatres in San Antonio

Texas · last checked 16 October 2026

No cinema and no booths anywhere in San Antonio, and there have not been since the 1970s. What the city does have, and what is open and busy tonight, is two places built around rooms instead of screens: a bathhouse on North Zarzamora and a couples club out on Perrin Beitel. The trade here did not die. It stopped being something you watch.

What is still open

The Z

Play space

1402 North Zarzamora Street, San Antonio, TX 78207

What it is: Bathhouse, men only
Has: Private rooms, booths, lockers, a sling
Price: Around $17 for a day pass, more with a locker
Hours: Noon to midnight
Phone: (210) 223-2177

Small, and honest about being small. The regulars describe a limited budget spent sensibly rather than a grand place, with friendly staff and a mixed crowd across ages.

One recurring complaint worth passing on, because it is the sort of thing nobody tells you until you are standing there: the booths do not lock, and people look in. If anonymity is the point for you, that is the thing to know before you pay.

Last checked 16 October 2026 · Reviewed again in February 2026

Player's Club

Play space

11431 Perrin Beitel Road, San Antonio, TX 78217

What it is: Lifestyle club, couples and single women
Has: Playrooms, a screened area, themed nights
Hours: 9pm to 2am, later at weekends
Phone: (210) 691-2050

A long-running on-premise club rather than a bar with a back room. Couples and single women most nights, single men only on certain ones, so check before driving out.

Reviewers over several years keep mentioning being walked through the layout by staff on a first visit, which tells you both that it is bigger than it looks and that turning up cold is normal.

Last checked 16 October 2026 · Reviewed in January 2025

The shops are shops. Adult Megaplex on San Pedro, Zebraz on North Main, Texxx on the east side: seventy-four reviews on the first of those and not a single mention of a booth. None counted.

Nine months in 1973

San Antonio had a proper run of adult cinemas and lost nearly all of them inside a single year, which no other city on this site did.

23 MarchMr. X opens at 1608 North Main Avenue, a theatre and a shop in one.
MarchThe Open Door opens at 816 San Pedro, up at Five Points.
2 AugustThe district attorney serves twelve of the city's adult cinemas with civil suits.
By year endBoth houses are shut. Most of the other ten do not last much longer.

One year, 1973. Other cities in this directory lost the trade over thirty years. San Antonio lost it over nine months.

The number is the striking part. Twelve houses, in one action, on one day in August, reported by the San Antonio Light at the time. Not a raid and not a prosecution of a single owner, which is how it went in most places. Twelve civil suits at once, and the business did not come back.

What the buildings became

Mr. X, 1608 North Main Avenue, opened 23 March 1973 and shut the same year. The building is still in the trade: it is Zebraz, an adult shop, which makes it the rare case where the address survived and only the screen went.

The Open Door, 816 San Pedro at Five Points, opened that March and closed that year. It is a nightclub now, Sin City.

The Joy at 221 West Houston Street downtown had the longest life and the oldest start. It opened in 1940 as an ordinary cinema, had closed by 1957, went over to Mexican vaudeville, and came back on 17 January 1969 as an adult house with a double bill of Days of a Stripper and Aqua Girls. It has been demolished.

The Olmos, 4205 San Pedro, is the sad one. It was the flagship of the Santikos chain, which at one point ran most of the cinemas in San Antonio, and it spent its last years as an X-rated house before closing in 1984.

The rule that governs what is left

San Antonio regulates this by the clothing. Under the amendments the city council passed in December 2012, an entertainer wearing less than a bikini top makes the premises a sexually oriented business, with everything that follows: licensing, and a thousand foot separation from protected properties such as schools and churches.

The council also raised the penalty for breaching the ordinance from a Class C misdemeanour to a Class A. More than a dozen clubs sued, calling it another attempt to close them; the city called the changes technical.

Those rules are from 2012 and we have not checked what has been amended since, so treat them as the shape of the regime rather than today’s exact text.

Sources

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