Romantix Pairs Theatre

On the one hand, this is a perfectly serviceable adult entertainment center, thoughtfully offering everything from BBWs to ominously-​endowed twinks who must truly get dizzy when compelled to achieve full tumescence. There’s a helpful rainbow sticker over the private arcade door, and even rather cute little wastebaskets outside each solo quarter-​slot booth. Peachy.
That said, it’s also a little dull, in that modern, sanitized way. Or maybe I just don’t find places like this satisfying unless they have VHS tapes from before Carter left office. In any case, nothing here especially distinguishes the Paris from a place you’d stop off at along an interstate–
–*except* its physical structure. As the helpful clerk informed me, it opened as a grand movie theater in 1940, went out of business when film hit the skids in the classic TV era, reopened as a bowling alley, and ultimately returned to celluloid when porn theaters proliferated across the nation in the early 1970s. So no pre-​fab box or strip-​mall hole in the way here, this is a true smut palace – though the tangible sense of history is really best felt outside, where the proud marquee, vintage posters, and overhead lightbulbs all retain the different modality of sleaze that marked the era.