Adult Movie Theatres in St. Louis

What is open right now

Closed this year: Spankys Video on North Lindbergh, Pure Pleasure in St. Charles, and New Release Video on the Highway 94 outer road.

The trade crossed the river

St. Louis sits on a state line, and the bank opposite it is not governed by one big neighbour but by a scatter of very small municipalities, each with its own council, its own licensing and its own police force. That arrangement has consequences, and the clearest of them is a village called Sauget.

Sauget was incorporated in 1926 under the name Monsanto, by the chemical company of that name, for the express purpose of giving its plants a light regulatory environment and low taxes at a time when local government wrote most of the rules. It was later renamed for Leo Sauget, its first village president. The plants made it the largest producer of PCBs in the country before those were banned in 1977, and the site is a Superfund clean-up.

The point is that Sauget was designed from the start not to regulate things, and a hundred years later that design is still working. The village had 141 residents at the 2020 census. It has a police force of fifteen full-time officers, which sounds absurd until you count the roughly six thousand people who arrive at its clubs on a weekend night.

Nothing in this directory is quite like it. Las Vegas pushed its adult trade off the Strip and into the surrounding county. Washington stopped issuing permits and sent it forty miles to Baltimore. St. Louis sent its across a river into a company town built to have no rules, and the company town was already there waiting.

What that leaves a visitor

A city of three hundred thousand with one venue in it, and a second one that carries the city’s name on the wrong side of the state line. Anyone searching for this in St. Louis is going to end up on a bridge.

It is also why the club listings for this region look so much healthier than the cinema listings. The venues that crossed the river were the ones selling drinks and live performance, because that is what a permissive licensing regime is worth. A screening room does not need a liquor licence, so it had no particular reason to move, and mostly it just closed instead.