When my friends and I turned 18 in the early aughts, we decided we were tired of our parents’ basements. We found our new hang on the north side of Cedar Rapids.
Sure, Adult Shop North was the place where people in town picked up their lubricants, toys and triple-X movies, but it also had a back rec room area with a pool table and a high tolerance for indoor smoking. We were regulars every Friday night and sometimes even Saturday nights, too. I’d get off work at Bishop’s Buffet at 9:30 p.m., and by 10 p.m. we were showing our IDs to the stoner 28-year-old working the overnight shift.
Inside, we were surrounded by every type of pornography that could be legally sold in the United States. None of it interested us as much as the pool table, which we’d occupy as late as 4:30 a.m. Individuals and couples of all orientations would pass through our room to access a pair of private viewing spaces, referred to in the biz as “adult arcades.” The later the hour, the busier they got.
It was all a little overstimulating, but it planted in me an interest in adult films of the 1970s and 1980s, posters from which covered the walls of Adult Shop North. A few of the posters still had the local marketing graphic taped on, including one that read, “See it at Danish Book World – XXX Theater – Cedar Rapids.” Those films were time capsules of a different era; many actors looking for supplemental income would take roles, rolling the dice to see if they would still have a place on Broadway when it was over.
Porn shops aren’t exactly rare in the Midwest, and there are still plenty of billboards advertising adult superstores along the interstates. Many still have private viewing rooms, including the Romantix locations in Des Moines and Iowa City, and, of course, Adult Shop North, which remains open in Cedar Rapids, along with its counterpart Adult Shop South on the opposite end of town. Both were established in 2002.
Adult theaters, however — the kind that allow a group of strangers to come together and watch a pornographic movie or three on the big screen — are few and dwindling. Before the internet and home video, erotic films attracted audiences of all stripes. Everywhere adult theaters sprouted, they met opposition from local authorities; whether or not they endured, they usually succeeded in clarifying the limits of free speech in a particular municipality. The same can be said of sex-positive bookstores, especially of the feminist and LGBTQ-affirming variety, many of which also faced the full force of local planning and zoning commissions.
To the best of my knowledge, Iowa’s last adult cinema closed shortly after I visited it for the first time, some three and a half years ago. I wouldn’t learn why until this week, when I had the chance to talk to the theater’s longtime owner.
“I really hated to let the place go,” said Earl Baugh, who retired to Arizona. “It was my Cheers.”
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One early fall morning in 2022, I traveled from Des Moines to Waterloo for a meeting at Morg’s Diner on Mulberry Street — a greasy spoon that’s lived up to its name since 1960. Afterwards, I noticed a small, aged storefront across the parking lot with no windows and a pair of sports cars parked outside. It was labeled “Cinema 16 Theater,” though the one-story brick building hardly looked like a cinema.
Another sign read, “THEATER, ADULT ARCADES & RETAIL STORE,” and a neon “OPEN” sign buzzed above a three-foot red Playboy bunny logo. Taped-up fliers declared, “Special 3-Day Pass for only $22,” “Male & Female Enhancement Pills,” “WE CARRY novelties, DVD’s, Arcades, Oils, Lotions, Games, Fetish Kits and Love Swings.”
Another sports car pulled up, and I watched an older man in a polo and nice Levis walk inside. I had nowhere to be, so I followed.
Adult retail stores all smell the same. Before the 2008 indoor smoking ban, they reeked of tobacco smoke that yellowed their drop-down ceilings. Every piece of fabric had a coating that reminded me of the pre-treated furniture one gets to prevent pets from soiling them. Now, they smell like cleaning chemicals: bleach spray, Resolve, everything harsh — the type that burns your nostrils to reassure you the chemicals are doing their job. The retail room inside Cinema 16 was no different.
Spinning racks were stocked with sex toys. A shelf full of VHS tapes included both hardcore pornography and a few Disney titles in clamshell cases. Magazine stock looked like it dated back to the mid-1990s. A customer with messy hair and a large brown raincoat was flipping through the piles while having a chummy conversation with the large man behind the counter.
I approached, asking if there really was a movie theater in here. The employee confirmed it. “We got six single arcade viewing rooms, one double with a third-party watch window, and the big room in the way back.”
He said his name was Bear. He looked to be around 40 years old, with a beard and long hair. Behind him were stacks upon stacks of dusty papers, DVD cases and what looked like a takeout container from Morg’s next door, with leftover sausage and pancakes inside. On the wall was a photo of the owner, Earl Baugh, smiling next to former Iowa governor Terry Branstad. I’d later learn Baugh was given a business award from Branstad for his successful line of dry cleaners — and not, sadly, for the Cinema 16.
I asked Bear what movies they showed; there was no schedule displayed, no “Behind the Green Door opens on Nov. 1” type notices. Rather than the vintage porn-chic classics I imagined, Bear said they typically marathoned DVD compilations with titles like Super XXXtreme Volume 18. He’d hit play and let it run for hours on the theater’s high-powered video projector. Patrons could pay $15 and spend the whole day in the theater. There were usually six to 10 people at any given time. Today, there were five.
The place “gets crazy” during private parties, though, the messy-haired gentleman chimed in. Waterloo has a strong swinger community.
“They have swinger parties here in the big theater. We can easily get 40 to 50 people in there and they rent the whole room out,” Bear explained. “They will sometimes run out and grab some toys off the shelves to take back to the room. I would just keep a tab on a legal pad and charge them at the end for everything they took.”
Bear stepped out from behind the counter to show me the place. First, he took me into the arcades, built out of cheap particle board with glued-on door handles. The six single-occupancy rooms were the size of portable toilets, sliding-bolt locks on the inside. A chair — plastic with metal legs, like you’d find in a classroom — sat directly in front of a screen about the size of a laptop, with a coin deposit to activate. On the concrete floor by the chair leg was a roll of toilet paper and a small trash receptacle.
The seventh room was double in size to facilitate voyeur/exhibitionist pairings. A second chair behind a sliding glass window offered a backseat view of the first occupant as they did their thing.
Bear led me past makeshift walls with cleaning sprays hanging from retail hooks. With one arm, he pushed open a particle-board door. I wasn’t prepared for what I saw.
Movie theaters are typically designed with entrances in the back, so when people are coming and going they don’t let the outside light in or distract the audience. This was not the case at Cinema 16. The door opened to the right of the screen, and as I entered, I made eye contact with every person in that small auditorium, including the man who’d walked in right before me. I slunk back out.
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Cinema 16, also called Mini Cinema 16, first debuted in 1970 with a screening of 1969’s The Divorcee. An advertisement for the grand opening boasted “plush seating,” “beautiful carpeting,” an “intimate adult atmosphere” and “the ultimate in adult film flair.”
The original location was west of the Cedar River at 624 Commercial St, opened by Des Moines cinema magnate and film producer Richard L. Davis. Around the same time, Davis was fighting the Ames City Council to open the Studio III adult cinema, which proved short-lived, and the Mini-X in Des Moines in 1971, which survived until the ‘90s. At every turn, he faced opposition from local officials characterizing porn films as “obscene.”
In 1970, Waterloo Mayor Lloyd Turner argued a 1939 city ordinance allowed him to refuse to license Cinema 16 in defense of “public morals.” A district court judge ruled the ordinance was unconstitutional, amounting to government censorship. That didn’t stop the next mayor, Leo Rooff, from citing it again seven years later to fight Cinema 16’s relocation from Commercial Street to its final home in the Franklin Gateway Neighborhood, on the same block as Morg’s. Rooff attempted to persuade the city council to vote NO on Cinema 16’s license renewal.
“The Mayor and I both fought in World War II to protect our freedoms,” Rooff’s ally Freeman Moser, Jr. wrote to the Waterloo Courier in March 1977. “If the Supreme Court hadn’t smiled at the porno issue, the mayor and council would have had an easier job shutting down a business that does nothing but harm our community. God is against this business. Many chapters in the Bible are devoted to what he did to people who engaged in such activities as are depicted on the screen of Mini Cinema 16.”
The campaign failed, though Rooff went on to become one of Waterloo’s longest-serving mayors. Cinema 16 moved into the century-old building at 315 E 4th St, with a 700-square-foot addition built for good measure.
Similar battles were fought in Cedar Falls, Cedar Rapids, Des Moines, Ames and Mason City over the following few decades as the “golden age of porn” reached Iowa. Even the small town of McGregor briefly saw their local cinema turn into the “Strand Adult Theater,” showing XXX double features, in 1974. (The Strand wasn’t new to showing provocative films; it opened as a silent film cinema in 1916, long before the 1934 Hays Code.)
A crackdown on morality during the Reagan presidency put adult theaters and other fruits of the sexual revolution in the culture-war crosshairs. These included sex shops, sex-positive bookstores and gay bathhouses, all framed as hotbeds of perversion and HIV/AIDS transmission.
Infamously, Pee-wee Herman actor Paul Reuben was arrested for indecent exposure inside a porno theater in 1991. The only adult theater in the sleepy city of Sarasota, Florida, South Trail Cinema had just finished showing a triple-feature of Catalina Five-O Tiger Shark, Nurse Nancy and Turn Up the Heat when a handful of undercover sheriff’s deputies descended on Reuben.
This incident did little to elevate the entertainer’s reputation, nor that of adult picture houses, which were generally regarded as antiquated and seedy. Those that remained were regularly targeted by politicians, police stings and robberies.
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While closing up the Waterloo theater around midnight on Aug. 6, 1997, Cinema 16 manager Larry Casto was confronted by burglars and killed by a single stab to the chest. The 46-year-old’s body was found the next morning. Neighbors remembered him in the Waterloo Courier as a friendly comic book enthusiast. A Des Moines man, Sean Castine, was charged with the crime. Casto was one of four Iowans murdered on the job that year, including a hotel maid, a saleswoman and a grocery store manager.
Cinema 16 would endure after the tragedy — it was sold off and revamped shortly after Casto’s murder — but that wasn’t the case for Ottumwa’s Cinema X, the site of another brutal killing 15 years later.
On March 13, 2012, owner Kenny McDaniel was found dead by the rear entrance of the adult theater he’d owned in downtown Ottumwa since 1980. Likely Iowa’s second-to-last adult cinema, Cinema X was still showing 16mm feature-length movies and loops, resisting the more internet-friendly gonzo scenes that make up most of the adult film industry today.
The 70-year-old McDaniel had been living at the theater, sleeping on a cot under the projector. He was killed with a crowbar. Bruce Darnell Pollard Jr. was convicted of murdering McDaniel before robbing the place.
Even if someone wanted to keep the show going after McDaniel’s death, they couldn’t — Cinema X had been operating as a “legal, non-conforming use” business for years. Since it was located within 1,000 feet of Ottumwa High School, any new occupant would have to comply with local zoning code.
“It could operate as any retail or service business, anything traditionally thought of as commercial — but not an adult business,” Planning and Development Director Nick Klimek told the Ottumwa Courier.
CEC Theatres, a Midwest chain, currently runs Ottumwa 8 out of the former Cinema X space, 1215 Theatre Dr. It’s a decidedly traditional movie theater.
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The last owner of the Mini Cinema 16 bought it shortly after Casto’s murder in the late ’90s.
Earl Baugh moved from Ottumwa to Waterloo with not a penny to his name in the 1960s. He lived in his car for three weeks before he could save enough money to get a place of his own.
His dad told him he needed to get a trade, so Baugh got a job at a dry cleaners making $40 a week. He worked his way up to management, and by 1968 the owner offered to sell him the place for $22,000. In three weeks, he got the money to buy it. Baugh would own and run the business until 2023, opening numerous dry cleaning locations around Waterloo and Cedar Falls.
One Sunday night back in the early 1990s, Baugh caught a 60 Minutes episode on hotels selling porn to guests. Intrigued, he traveled around the country scouting out different XXX entertainment purveyors before he decided to open one of his own.
“I always did what worked for me,” Baugh told me. “I asked my parents what they thought about me getting into the porn business. My mom said, ‘Go do it, but don’t tell the whole world.’ My dad said it was probably less competitive than the dry cleaning business.”
He first looked into building an adult cinema just off of Highway 20, but the lot turned out to be too close to a bike trail, and local zoning required he be at least 600 feet from parks, churches or playgrounds. Baugh had a good rapport with the city, however, and officials tipped him off to another prospect: Cinema 16.
“They said, ‘Well, that store, if you can get it bought, we won’t take it over.’”
Baugh reached a deal with owner Dick Marble, who had previously bought the Mini Cinema from its founder (and another Dick), Richard Davis. Unlike his predecessors, Baugh faced little opposition for operating a den of vice — though he did recall that when the store reopened, a group of women in black dresses came out and prayed in front of the building.
He stocked six months’ worth of merchandise ahead of time, storing the stacks of dirty magazines and tapes in his family’s home. Baugh realized it would cost him nearly $30,000 to update to a new film projector — 16mm and 35mm projection were passé in porno theaters, and video projection was in. Baugh’s niece suggested he go down to Crossroads Mall and pick one out that could play VHS and eventually DVDs. They also replaced the old theater seats with loveseats.
Baugh’s loved ones didn’t balk at the nature of the new business. “You know, my family always worked together,” he said. “My wife and daughters worked at the dry cleaners. We belonged to a church in town. We always worked hard, and to be honest, I never mixed business with politics.”
One of the first things Baugh noticed about his new customers was their discomfort upon entry, hats down and coat collars raised. So with the help of his brother Larry, Baugh flipped the layout and moved the main entrance to the back. The neighboring businesses liked the idea, offering up their back parking spots after they closed around 4 p.m.
“A lot of people would come in and say hello to me. I loved talking with people. They came in and talked with me on their way to work,” Baugh said.
“The place was a safe place for those in the swinger community, the gay community and those who were lonely.”
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Adult cinemas may not have been centers of high culture, but they did give average joes a local place to gather outside of work and, incidentally, test the fringes of their First Amendment rights. In 2026, dozens of state and local governments have worked to make attending a drag or burlesque performance, checking out an erotic book from the library, or simply being transgender in public more legally dubious and socially taboo than getting caught with your pants down in a dirty theater. None of these behaviors, of course, pose any real danger to children, no matter what their proponents claim.
As threats to kids’ safety go, no amount of movies can match profit-driven social media algorithms; cuts to childcare, SNAP and education resources; and exploitation by billionaire tech oligarchs, like white replacement theory advocate Elon Musk. Musk’s GrokAI has allowed users to generate nude images from real photos of adults and children posted to X, formerly Twitter. Despite this apparent violation of existing laws against CSAM and nonconsensual deepfakes, Musk and his company have faced few legal consequences in the U.S.; in fact, Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth announced on Jan. 13 that Grok will be incorporated into the Pentagon’s IT systems on a $200 million contract.
While the Trump administration continues to cover for Jeffrey Epstein’s criminal cohorts, rightwing legislators are waging a war on porn to rival their war on porn theaters. Age verification laws pushed by Republican state legislatures made the world’s most popular porn site, Pornhub, inaccessible in almost all Southern states last year. Fervent anti-trans crusader Sen. Mike Lee of Utah has partnered with Illinois Rep. Mary Miller (famous for intentionally misgendering her trans colleague on the House floor and praising the end of Roe v. Wade as a “historic victory for white life”) to introduce legislation that would redefine “obscenity” in U.S. law to include any sexual content, part of a rightwing effort to conflate LGBTQ identity with pornography and effectively censor both.
The ACLU has compared modern anti-porn legislation, including the bipartisan Kids Online Safety Act, to anti-jazz laws in the 1950s spurred by reactionary and racist conservatives. The future internet may well require uploaded ID photos or bank information to access adult websites, nationwide. Perhaps you’ll need to feed your biometrics into an AI “digital identity system,” such as billionaire Sam Altman’s iris-scanning Tools for Humanity. Tech CEOs and government officials would assume broad authority to determine what’s “appropriate” for people to see.
This “risks censoring everything from jokes and hyperbole to useful information about sex ed and suicide prevention,” according to Jenna Leventoff, senior policy counsel at the ACLU. “Safety doesn’t need to come at the cost of free speech.”
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After 50 years in Waterloo and two decades with Earl Baugh at the helm, Cinema 16 ceased to be a cinema shortly after my visit. Baugh sold it on contract in 2022, and the new owners closed the theater side, rebranding as an adult gift shop called Romeo and Juliet. It was short-lived, and Baugh officially sold the property off in 2024. As of October 2025, it was boarded up.
Content in retirement, Baugh looks back fondly on the enterprise. “It made me money and I went out with a bang.”
“Porn will always make money and the world needs it,” he added. “Everyone needs love.”
Kristian Day is a filmmaker, writer and host of the long-running radio show and podcast, Iowa Basement Tapes. Keep up with him on Instagram (@kristianday) or at kristianday.com. This article was originally published in Little Village’s February 2026 issue.
