Two decades after the dawn of internet porn, adults-only movie theaters still exist. And you’re not going to believe what’s going on — and who’s getting off — inside them.
All (Theater) Comers Are Welcome
At the end of a highway-adjacent industrial park in suburban Chicago, inside a nondescript rectangular building demarcated by a lone glowing sign, down in front of a dozen or so rows of theater seats, just past the glowing throb of DVD pornography projected onto a giant video screen, on through an open doorway off to one side, in the center of a cement structure nicknamed “the GB room,” a lingerie-clad blonde in her early thirties smiles as the 15th of the evening slides over. The “GB,” in case you can’t guess, stands for “gang bang.”
Another engorged member — one in an explosive series — plows the blonde’s bald nether-portal, and in the course of this rotating “spit roast,” she’ll manipulate more erections than she can count on both hands, and even more will ejaculate on her exposed flesh, often assisted by the tugs and tickles of other participants, while the BJs and poundings just keep on coming.
Throughout it all, the blonde repeatedly makes loving eye contact with her husband, who stands pantsless, proud, and aroused as he instinctively directs genital traffic in and out of his spouse’s sopping holes.
Elsewhere in the theater, women kneel in peep-show booths, ecstatically devouring anonymous arrays of hard-ons to splashing orgasms. Tiny private rooms contain more intimate, but no less prolific, padded-bench bacchanals. Showers and saunas in an adjoining spa area host all manner of wet commingling and fornication.
Participating in all this flesh-pressing is the expected throng of single men, but they are more than equaled by male-female couples, transsexuals, cross-dressers colloquially known as “t-gurls,” and — shock of shocks — bona fide biological women possessing real functioning vaginas who have not only shown up solo, they’ve actually paid a full admission price to strip down and hop in on the evening’s orgiastic enjoyments.
This scene, improbable as it may seem, is just another typical night at the movies for a devoted and rapidly expanding subculture of carnal adventurers who have turned America’s handful of still-functioning adults-only theaters into a thriving network of calculated group-grope get-togethers and spontaneous eruptions of anything-goes, on-the-spot sex. What’s maybe most surprising of all: They really want you to get in on all this fucking fun.
The fact that porn theaters still exist in this age of on-demand erotica when everyone’s phone is essentially a portable smut machine is, in itself, an eye-opener. But they’re out there, and some for a very long time (the Cinema Kings Highway in Brooklyn, in fact, is nearing its half-century anniversary as an adults-only entertainment emporium).
The earliest movie theaters to run salacious material in the United States were 1960s “art houses.” Often these were just storefronts where “nudie cutie” documentaries about clothing-free naturist resorts were projected onto white sheets, peppered by an occasional high-minded import from libidinously liberated Europe.
By the early 1970s, America’s social mores had evolved so that hard-core-porn cinemas successfully pushed the legal limitations of obscenity.
The 1972 blockbuster Deep Throat spawned a shadow-Hollywood X-rated film industry that dynamically prospered over the ensuing decade, accompanied by a nationwide circuit of full-blown movie theaters to showcase its productions.
Come the turn of the decade, though, home video emerged as the next great entertainment revolution, driven almost entirely at first by a mad rush to buy and rent porn cassettes. At last, the horny masses could safely and secretly consume dirty movies at home. Subsequently, from 1982 to 1986, X-rated theaters were shuttered at pandemic rates, and what few showplaces remained just seemed like curious filth pits for perverts at odds with the times.
As early as 1991, the. porn theater was an antiquated notion — a joke, even. After Pee-wee Herman got busted that year for turning one such Florida auditorium into his personal playhouse, the universal reaction was, “Doesn’t Pee-wee own a VCR?” Two decades later, in 2012, Hollywood funnyman Fred Willard befell a similar fate at the Tiki, a long-festering Hollywood yank parlor. This time, the most common reaction was to wonder if Willard was too elderly to understand how to look for porn online. But a small, knowing segment of the public instead surmised that something else was going on. Chief among the hip-to-the-hump scene was, and is, a mysterious online overlord who calls himself Dr. Emilio Lizardo.
Named for a megalomaniacal scientist played by John Lithgow in the 1984 cult film The Adventures of Buckaroo Banzai Across the 8th Dimension, Dr. Emilio Lizardo is a jaunty, immediately likable New York native turned Midwest transplant who, since 2009, has run the online hub of this new dimension in twenty-first-century sexual revelry, Dr. Emilio Lizardo’s Journal of Adult Theaters.
Lizardo describes himself as “a national sales and marketing guy [who works for] a Fortune 50 company by day.” He looks to be somewhere in his forties and, amusingly, he really does resemble the mustachioed avatar that represents him on the blog. Movie theaters and sex have been two of Lizardo’s most driving lifelong fascinations, and he recalls vividly the initial occasions when those twain did meet. “My first trip to an adult theater was in the mid-eighties when I was still in college,” he says. “It was an old place in a rough neighborhood of Buffalo, New York — the Capri Art Theatre. The feature was Prisoner of Paradise, a classic starring John Holmes and Seka. I was scared to death walking in by myself, on a rainy, awful fall night. It was weird, it was wrong, and I was hooked.”
“My first encounter was at that same theater a few months later,” Lizardo continues, “when a couple had settled into two seats toward the front of theater. At one point, the woman, who was in her mid-forties, looked back at me and motioned me over. I scooted down to their aisle and took a seat next to her. She reached over, unzipped my jeans, and stroked me as she did the same to her guy with her other hand. Without a word being said, she jerked me off all over her tan raincoat. My adult-theater cherry was taken. And I was even more hooked than ever.”
Traveling coast to coast for work over the subsequent years, Lizardo routinely hit adult theaters across the nation, amassing knowledge and experiences of who, what, when, and where audience members were transferring the images on-screen into real-life action in the aisles. His contacts grew. Lamenting a unifying forum for what Lizardo and his compatriots deem “this thing of ours,” he launched the Journal and has been the all-seeing, all-knowing eye at the center of the porn-theater sex storm ever since.
“Recently, I traveled to Philly for a work event,” Lizardo says, “and I visited a very popular adult theater in southern New Jersey. The theater announced my visit on their Yahoo! Group. By the time I got there, there were around 20 people in the store proper that had questions, and I did a 30-minute Q&A session for them. I met a bunch of very nice people and a very hot couple — hello, Cindy from Delaware!”
“Elsewhere in the theater, women kneel in peep-show booths, ecstatically devouring anonymous arrays of hard-ons to splashing orgasms.”
Lizardo is more online ringmaster than proprietary catalyst, though, when it comes to dishing on the scene and setting up soirees. “To date, I have had almost 200 unique reporters and over 1,800 reports from the adult-theater scene,” he says. “I’ve only written about 60 ‘House Call’ reports detailing my own adventures. The rest are from other frontline contributors — all those business people, law-enforcement officials, politicians, and soccer moms out there. On average, I publish two to three reports per day, along with event announcements, action photos, upcoming news, and an up-to-the-minute database of active adult theaters.”
Stressing the strictly enforced no-prostitution policy of the venues, the regular, burgeoning presence of single women in it just for their love of the game is a first in the annals of American public-sex practices. Even at the most hedonistic heights of the swinging seventies, females virtually never ventured into erotic play spaces unaccompanied.
Lizardo credits the internet for inspiring the new boldness, both in the porn-theater network and the larger sexual atmosphere of the times. He’s been pleasantly amazed to witness the changes since organizing events at the Art Cinema in Hartford, Connecticut, and at the 15th Ave. Adult Theater in a western suburb of Chicago.
“In May 2014,” he notes, “the 15th Ave. Adult Theater hosted a ‘Lingerie & Sexy PJ’ party. The event drew 53 couples, and several dozen singles — men, women, and t-gurls. Some were brand-new to the adult-theater scene, and other veterans to this thing of ours.”
“By purposely blurring the lines of a swing club and the adult-theater scene,” Lizardo reasons, “owners of adult theaters can offer an option to adventurous couples that there is another type of venue at which they can fly their freak flag.”
In terms of play spaces and party settings, many of the locales are, indeed, actual movie theaters that project actual porn on actual big screens, some of which have been active for decades. Gatherings go down (pun, as always, intended) in other X-rated businesses, such as adult bookstores and video-booth peep shows, as well.
Flying her freak flag forever at full staff is Piper the Gloryhole Princess. The pretty, petite brunette passionately visits adult theaters equipped with video booths that enable her to live up to her regal title.
“I grew up in a normal town, with a normal family, and did normal things. I never even had a boyfriend in high school,” Piper says. “I have been into the glory-hole/theater-sex scene — I hate the word ‘swinging’ — for 12 years. After this fantasy of two men got me off a few times, the man who loves me told me that I could do this if I wanted to.”
After they posted photos of their practice on line, a veteran couple reached out. Following an encounter with the man, both couples hooked up at an adult shop, with Piper leading the woman to a peep-show booth. Every variation of partner-swapping sex ensued, with Piper realizing, as she licked another woman for the first time, that she’d evolved into “Super Slut,” and that she loved it. Ever since, Piper’s reigned as one of the scene’s most prolific participants.
Another supreme female porn-theater fellationist is vixen Velvet Skye. A MILF porn star in her professional life, Velvet runs a cam site and patronizes adult theaters for her own edification, defining herself as “a sex therapist helping both men and women with their fantasies, questions, problems, and fears — not to forget ‘slut’!”
Velvet first visited a porn theater with her partner in the early 2000s. After stripping nude and sitting back in a chair with her eyes closed, she felt palms and fingers all over her body.
“Someone took my hand and placed it on him,” she remembers. “I just automatically started stroking. The guys all waited their turn and, one after another … I knew I was hooked.”
Velvet alternates between random drop-ins and pre-announced visits, and says, “It’s all about the fantasy scene you have in your mind. The guys are very accommodating and will do whatever you ask. And there is always an abundance of guys.”
For special occasions, Velvet announces a time and a theater where she’ll be servicing all comers, typically attracting 20 to 40 eager Peters. “I really love the anonymity of the glory hole,” Velvet says. “I really do not want or need to see their faces.”
Yes, even amid such an air of erotic anarchy, simple rules of etiquette apply, although all involved say they rarely ever need to be spoken. Respect and understanding permeate the scene. Newcomers are usually eased in to the proceedings, many times by some of the lifestyle’s most celebrated figures. And despite the licentiousness of the scene, safer-sex practices are usually followed. “Safe sex in an adult-theater environment is facilitated a few different ways,” Lizardo says. “In certain adult theaters, condoms are provided free of charge in baskets throughout the theater. In all the other theaters, condoms are the No. 1 seller over-the-counter and are displayed typically in bulk containers since they sell so many, and in many varieties. I have noticed the same approach to safe sex in adult theaters as you will see at swing clubs from the patrons. I wish I had a nickel for every time I’ve heard a woman ask a potential male suitor, ‘Do you have a condom?’”
Jean, 27, and Scott, 33 (not their real names), are a married couple who broke into porn-theater sex by way of the caring hand (and gland) of Dr. Emilio Lizardo in March 2013. Upon discovering the Journal of Adult Theaters, they were sufficiently aroused to go to a nearby venue, where they witnessed a gang bang in action, prompting them to hook up in a video booth. After reading about herself later as “the hot blonde” who looked on in an account of that night on Dr. Lizardo’s site, Jean and Scott took up the lifestyle full-time, increasing their kinks and come-counts with each trip.
To date, Jean’s favorite night out took place at a theater in Tampa. “The most fun was that I got to call all the shots and had four dicks at my command at the end of the night. It is a departure from normal life, because I am generally soft-spoken and not very commanding. In this setting, I am forceful and get what I want. Scott loves seeing me in this role, and it allows me to live out my wildest fantasies. That’s what makes nights like that our favorites.”
They also make sure to credit the scene’s ruling guru. “Dr. Lizardo has been very helpful to us,” Jean says.
“Without his website, we probably never would have gone. We’d like to thank him for all he’s done.”
As the United States redefines its former hard-line societal taboos surrounding marijuana and same-sex marriage, does Lizardo see porn-theater sex making its way toward being just another mainstream erotic option?
“One of my goals for the Journal is to provide a risk-free entree into the world of adult theaters and the fun that can be had in that environment for couples,” Lizardo says. “I hope my site is opening the eyes of people who would not normally engage in a conversation about adult theaters, let alone attend one. It’s okay to go inside one. Honest. You just might be surprised at how much fun you could find.”
“In five years,” he adds, “I hope the adult-theater scene rivals the most popular swing clubs in the country as an outlet for everyone’s sexual wild side, with a twist. The adult-theater scene is defined at times by its anonymous nature. My goal is to lighten up the scene, to let couples and singles alike know it’s okay to attend an adult theater with your girl, your guy, or another couple. Socialize, and let loose!”
First off, in fairness to the original author we should make clear that we edited this article for presentation in this more open to the world location. Should you find a copy of a May, 2015, Penthouse Magazine somewhere, you will find a lot more … um, detail … in that version.
Oddly — or, y’know, happily — enough, Dr. Emilio continues his adult wonderland blog to this day. Well, it had continued to “this day” of republication at least. Honestly, should your own personal level of sexual awakening allow it, visiting an actual adult theater can be a mind-bending experience. You really have not experienced everything in your life until you sit in a room full of relative (or perfect) strangers watching 50’ sex organs sloshing about on a giant screen at the front of the room. Even for people well-versed in this industry, going to something like a premiere for a big-budget adult movie at an actual movie house can be … pretty darned weird, actually. As for people playing in the seats, well, sit toward the front so that can all happen behind you. Or not.
