Adult Movie Theatres in San Francisco

What is open right now

Worth knowing: Folsom Gulch, SOMA Secrets and Mission Secrets are all Secrets Boutiques shops. Directories list them as four independent choices. They are one operator with three addresses, plus the club on Jones Street, which is unrelated.

Three that closed, and still come up in searches

The Mitchell Brothers O’Farrell Theatre at 895 O’Farrell Street closed permanently in 2020, beaten by the pandemic on top of money troubles that predated it. A conditional use application was filed in June 2024 to open an adult venue in the building again. Nothing has opened. Listings still carry it.

The Nob Hill Theatre at 729 Bush Street closed on 19 August 2018 after fifty years. It was the only regular male strip revue in the city and it ran one of the better-kept video arcades in San Francisco. Gary Luce and Larry Hoover had bought it six years earlier and retired. The building is being redeveloped into housing.

The Lusty Lady at 1033 Kearny Street in North Beach closed on 2 September 2013, and it is the one with the best claim to mattering outside this trade. Its dancers organised in 1997 as the first successfully unionised sex business in the United States, under the Exotic Dancers Union and SEIU Local 790. In 2003, after management cut their pay and they struck, the workers bought the place for $400,000 and ran it themselves as a cooperative with elected team leaders, which is how it operated for its last decade.

The building that changed the business

Jim and Artie Mitchell opened it on 4 July 1969 in a converted Pontiac dealership in the Tenderloin. Three years later they premiered Behind the Green Door there. It cost $60,000, took $2 million in its first year and eventually grossed over $50 million, helped enormously when the press worked out that its star, Marilyn Chambers, was the woman on the Ivory Snow detergent box.

Then the videocassette recorder took the film business apart. The brothers did not fight it. They stopped relying on film and built live rooms instead: the Ultra Room in 1977, then the Kopenhagen and New York Live. It was New York Live that popularised close-contact lap dancing by 1980, and from there it spread to essentially every strip club in the country. A San Francisco porn cinema invented the thing the whole industry now runs on.

The city fought it for years and lost. Dianne Feinstein, mayor from the end of 1978, pushed hard for prosecution. A raid in July 1980 arrested fourteen patrons, six performers and seven employees on prostitution charges. The last raid came in February 1985, during a Marilyn Chambers performance, and prosecutors declined to bring charges.

What the city could not do, the family did. In February 1991 Jim Mitchell shot and killed his brother Artie. He was convicted of voluntary manslaughter, sentenced to six years, and left San Quentin in 1997 having served half of it. The theatre stayed open through all of that, and for another twenty-three years after, which is its own kind of answer about what the place meant to the people who ran it.