Adult Movie Theatres in Wichita

What is open right now

Three more carry Wichita addresses without a dated listing between them: Xcitement Video on West Pawnee and another on East Harry, and After Dark on South Broadway. The Oliver Street Xcitement is reported gone.

The city that licenses instead of arguing

Forty-five cities in, this is the rarer approach. Most of the places on this site chose a fight: a distance rule, a censor board, a prosecution, an amortisation deadline giving everyone six months to move. Wichita went the other way and wrote a licensing schedule.

The second one is the interesting entry. An adult motion picture arcade is defined by machines that show the material to five or fewer patrons per machine. That is a definition rather than a permission, and it exists to sort one licence from another. But read what it assumes. Wichita’s code takes it as ordinary that five people might be gathered round one booth screen.

Put that next to Charlotte, where North Carolina makes it a criminal matter for a booth to hold more than one person anywhere in the state. Honolulu allows two, but only on Saturdays. Cleveland invented the closed booth and then spent decades removing the doors. The same object, in four cities, with the permitted occupancy running from one to five.

And licensing is why there is anything left

The pattern holds across the site and Wichita is the clearest example of the good end of it. Dallas licenses and publishes the register, and has five venues. Washington stopped issuing permits in 1977 and has none at all.

A licence is a bargain both sides understand. It gives the city records, inspections, a fee and an address it can find, and it gives the business something no distance rule ever offers, which is permission to exist and a reason to invest in the building. Six screening rooms in a city of four hundred thousand people is what that bargain looks like when it holds.