Adult Movie Theatres in San Jose

What is still open

Not counted, and here is why. Bascom Bookcase at 336 South Bascom Avenue, (408) 292-3686, has an arcade in the back, but the last person to mention it did so in 2014 and we will not list a room on twelve-year-old evidence. The shop is alive, with a review from August 2026. Lover’s Paradise on Winchester Boulevard in Campbell advertises a theatre on its own website, but not one of its customers has ever mentioned a room, and every review is about the counter staff. Cupid’s Corner on Blossom Hill Road is a shop.

The city line did the work

Every other page on this site has a mechanism: an ordinance, a licensing scheme, a distance rule, a midnight closing, a judge. San Jose has a boundary.

The city prohibits nudity in its adult clubs. Santa Clara County does not. The Pink Poodle has traded for about half a century on South Bascom Avenue, on a pocket of unincorporated county land just outside the city limits, which is precisely why it can do what the clubs a mile away cannot. The family’s account puts its founding in 1971, and a dancer and a manager were arrested there under a county ordinance about nakedness in premises serving drink as early as May 1973.

Next door at 336 South Bascom is the adult shop with the arcade in the back. We have not walked the parcel boundaries and will not claim the shop is in the same pocket as the club, only that the whole stretch is where this trade settled, and that it settled there for a reason.

Compare Los Angeles, which wrote a dispersal ordinance and defended it to the Supreme Court, or Toledo, where it took a raid. Nobody here had to do any of that. The trade moved four hundred yards and stopped being the city’s problem.

Two Pussycats, one block apart

Downtown San Jose had an adult strip on South First Street, and two of the houses on it belonged to Pussycat Theatres, the California chain that ran around thirty cinemas and put a cat-girl on every marquee.

Pussycat 2 at 400 South First opened on 1 June 1948 as the Gay Theatre, six hundred seats, named after the daughter of the man who dreamed it up, which is a name that has aged into something its promoter could not have planned. It joined the chain in the 1970s and closed in 1989 as downtown was being put back together. Then it was the F/X nightclub with the marquee restored, then the Usual with the neon stripped off it, then Spy, then Angels, and by 2015 the Ritz, a live music room. A contributor in November 2022 reported it shut but standing, marquee and stage intact.

Pussycat 1 at 366 South First is the better story, and it is short. The building started as a shoe shop. Shaw Theatres opened it as the Camera 1 on 7 August 1970, a straight cinema. Pussycat Theatres took it over later the same year and ran it as an adult house for about twelve months. Great Western of Tarzana held it until 1975. And on 3 September 1975 it became the first Camera Cinema.

Read that date against the one above it. The arthouse chain that showed this valley its foreign and independent films for the next thirty years was founded in a room that had been the Pussycat 1 five years earlier. Camera closed it in May 2004 and it became an art gallery with a performance space.

Others on the strip did not do as well. The New Paris at 25 West San Salvador Street is a car park. The Studio went to adult films by the end of 1975. The dates in this section come from a community-edited record and contributors disagree with each other on the shoe shop and on whether the Gay Theatre opened in 1948 or 1949, so treat them as close rather than certain.