Adult Movie Theatres in Stockton

What is still open

Nothing else in the county has a room. Intimates & Adult Superstore at 203 North Houston Lane in Lodi, fifteen miles north, trades nine in the morning to midnight and is a shop, and a well-run one: the owners use the listing to chase up a customer’s special order by part number. Beyond that the nearest rooms are Sacramento and the East Bay.

For obvious reasons

This is the exchange, in order, from the Secrets Boutique listing.

Read what the two men said. Neither of them was asking for himself. One wanted to know whether trans women could come in and pointed out that anybody who walks through that door already knows what is behind it. The other made the argument straight: there is gay sex going on back there, nobody is obliged to take part in it, and women should get the same deal.

They are arguing with the owner, in public, under their own handles, on his shop’s page, about who is allowed into a room in Stockton. And the owner, who comes back within days on whether he stocks a particular toy, has not said anything since.

Obvious reasons is doing a lot of work in that sentence and it is never unpacked. We have heard the same phrase in a courtroom one page over. When Columbia, South Carolina went to the Supreme Court over a video shop, the whole case turned on a phrase in the city’s own ordinance that the city’s own zoning administrator could not define. Everyone is supposed to just know.

We are not going to pretend we cannot guess what he means. A room full of men, a woman walks in, and the operator does not want to referee it. That is a real problem and it is his shop. What we would say is that he is the only person in this directory who has been asked that question four times by four different people and the only one who has ever given any kind of answer, and the answer he gave has been sitting there for six years getting argued with.

They will tell you about the DVDs

Across the last few cities we have written up, a pattern has turned into a rule. The people who run these places answer the shop question and go quiet on the room question.

At Suzie’s the owner has answered how old you must be to come in, how the DVD collection is (huge), and in Spanish, how to order online and get free delivery over ninety-nine dollars. Left unanswered: whether there are booths to rent and watch films, what the arcade and theatre cost, and whether there is a gloryhole. The only person who has ever explained what the theatre room is for is a customer, who wrote that it is to watch the video and have some fun with it. Seven people marked that helpful.

It is the same in Pompano Beach, where a manager will tell you the busiest hours for the booths and has ignored four separate questions about gloryholes. The same in Columbia, where the only answered question on one shop’s page is about enhancement pills and three people asking after a theatre got nothing at all.

It is not shame, we think, and it is not secrecy, because the room is right there and the arcade is a listed category on the business page. It is that nobody wants to be the one who wrote down what the room is for.

157 West Adams Street

Most of the cinemas in this directory used to be something else. A movie palace, an art house, a neighbourhood second-run with a respectable name over the door, and then one day the programme changes underneath it.

Stockton’s was built for the job. The Bijou opened at 157 West Adams Street in 1974, independently run, an adult cinema from its first night. No earlier life, no name to live down, no foreign films in the fifties.

In 1982 the Pussycat chain took it over, which by then had around thirty houses across California. They ran it until January 1993 and then locked the doors.

The building did not sit empty. By 1994 a local man had put a brewery in it and brought the Valley Brew name back to Stockton. It changed hands in 1997 and was remodelled. It has had a fire since and we cannot confirm from here what state it is in today.

Nineteen years as a porn house and then, inside twelve months, a brewery. Everywhere else on this site the gap is decades of boarded windows, or a car park, or a church. Here somebody looked at a room built in 1974 to seat men in the dark and saw the right shape for tanks and a bar.