Adult Movie Theatres in Tampa

What is open right now

The city that measured people instead of buildings

Tampa’s fight was not with cinemas. It was with Joe Redner, who owned the Mons Venus and is widely credited as the father of the nude lap dance. He and the city council had been at each other since the 1980s, and he has said he was arrested thirty-six times on obscenity charges over the course of it.

The council’s answer arrived in December 1999: an ordinance, passed five votes to nothing, requiring adult dancers to stay six feet from customers and from each other. Six feet was chosen deliberately. It was far enough to rule out any contact and simple enough for a police officer to judge from across a room.

It was enforced hard at first. More than two hundred arrests followed in the first thirteen months.

And it is still law. The six-foot rule has never been repealed, and it is not enforced. Tampa kept its reputation as the lap dance capital of the country with a lap dance ban on its own statute book, which is a fair summary of how most of the rules in this directory ended up: written in a hurry, argued over for years, and quietly left alone.

Why that matters to a directory like this

Every other distance rule on this site is about property. Los Angeles took its 1,000-foot dispersal ordinance to the Supreme Court and won in 2002. New York measured 500 feet from schools and churches. Clark County added a clause about non-adult theatres that emptied the Las Vegas Strip.

Tampa is the only one that reached inside the building and set a distance between two people. It is also the only city where the venues with screens in them came through the whole thing untouched, because the fight was never about them.