Are we on the cusp of a porn theatre renaissance?

The UK only has one remaining porn cinema. But we're still finding ways to come together.

Porn is, for the average person, a secretive pursuit. The drill is quick, surreptitious and always the same.

You make sure you’re alone. Then, you search some NSFW words on your phone, click onto a tube site, peruse some clips, and touch yourself until you’re done – gasping and panting and spluttering to a halt in tandem with the figures on screen.

Besides the tiny cartoon detective, complete with binoculars and hat, who stewards you into an incognito tab, there’s nobody around to witness (or, let’s be real, judge) whatever you’re watching.*

This way of consuming porn – mostly secretly, mostly on the cheap, mostly in the privacy of a bedroom or a bathroom – is a relatively recent phenomenon. Porn used to be enjoyed in a room full of strangers, some of whom might want to get off with you, others of whom would just want to get off alongside you.

Before the invention of the VCR and the internet – both which essentially privatised our desires, allowing us to view erotic material in a kind of self-imposed, erotic solitary confinement – the only place where we could see hardcore porn was in a cinema, whether one solely dedicated to NSFW movies or a mixture of mainstream and adult films.

Admittedly, the golden age of porn cinemas is behind us. There is only one porn theatre left in the UK (a spot in Huddersfield which is definitely on my to-visit list) and a smattering of gay saunas with their own movie rooms. However, it seems that there are now other, alternative spaces facilitating communal porn consumption.

An example: Back in 2023, Augustus Muller (of the darkwave band Boy Harsher) collaborated with Vex Ashley, of the creative porn project Four Chambers, on Cellulosed Bodies, a score designed to accompany Four Chambers films released that year. While these sorts of porn-music collabs aren’t super common, in and of itself, the link-up also gave rise to both an erotic installation and in-person signing at Boy Harsher’s gig that year in Leeds.

When we see porn seep into other creative spaces like this, it should be a cause for celebration. Desire, carnality and embodiment are all fundamental parts of the human experience, ones that are often under-explored in mainstream media.

Similarly, Four Chambers has screened a retrospective, and worked across various events, at London gallery and cinema the ICA – a space which has also welcomed late-night fetish clip screenings curated by the duo Content Warning. As part of these screenings, the curators Harlan and Helena Whittingham (the latter of whom happens to represent Vex Ashley via Lover Management), have been working with the UK Fetish Archive to collate VHS tapes of different sexual subcultures and kinks from the recent, but pre internet-porn, past.

Yes, the premise of bringing VHS tapes, designed for at-home viewing, into a cinema, is somewhat oxymoronic. “We sit in this contradictory space because we are showing VHS tapes in a cinema but the rise of VHS tapes was really the reason why porn cinemas started to die off,” Helena explains.

But by encouraging folks interested in the worlds of fetish, film and art to come together in one room, the duo have been able to showcase the conversations and critical thinking which porn screenings can help facilitate. “Porn cinemas were obviously there for masturbatory purposes but a lot of the time you would leave a screening and it would spark conversation around what you liked, your favourite scene, or things that you might have found offensive.”

In the pursuit of porn-viewed-as-art, as well as conversations about porn with strangers, I hopped on a Ryanair flight to Barcelona last week to visit The House of ERIKALUST – my very first #gifted press trip in eight years of journalism – an experience which I am writing about, in an official capacity, elsewhere.

Queueing up in the rain in a nondescript street of Sant Martí on a Thursday night, a door opened, some prosecco and masks were proffered, and a gaggle of attendees were beckoned into a space of curtains, screens and XConfessions.

There are three rooms. Projected onto the wall of the first, a conveyor belt of erotic fantasies plays out as we stand around, swilling our drinks in silence. Then, there’s a dash to enter a second chamber and VR headsets are dutifully positioned on our heads. For what I’m guessing is half an hour (I lost track of time) we shuffle through a virtual, feminist porn version of the Playboy Mansion. Finally, there’s a cavernous, white-walled room where we sit like tiny, horny ants as a sequence of porn clips are projected, full-scale, across multiple walls at once, enveloping us in sounds and light.

Was it sexy? Sometimes. Did it make me appreciate the actors, home in on the angles, and think more about the way these films are shot and produced? Definitely. Placing porn in this kind of exhibition format reminds us of all the energy poured into making these films – emphasising that porn, and the people who make it, aren’t disposable.

While meandering through the exhibition, I was also reminded that watching erotic content in a group completely changes how you react and engage with what you see and hear.

The experience isn’t tailored to your own desires, or the very specific erotic niches you tend to frequent. Instead, you remain open to a whole new range of scenarios and feelings – and you look around, seeing how others are reacting and enjoying the content on show.

In Times Square Red, Times Square Blue, Samuel Delaney discusses the gentrification of Times Square, a process which turned a seedy labyrinth of porn theatres and peep shows into the overpriced tourist trap we may recognise today. Some of the book’s best passages discuss Delaney’s own experiences in porn theatres: the guys he would jerk off, the social connections he would form.

To him, the rituals of these erotic spaces were a chance to bring together gay, bi and queer guys who didn’t have anything in common besides their sexuality – erasing the distinctions of class and the difference of their outside lives as they all sought out the expressions of identity, and horny sexual opportunism, which couldn’t really be found elsewhere.

For me, though, it goes even further than that.

When we watch erotic content with one another, in our communities, we’re able to converse and discuss and come together (in more ways than one). Rather than encouraging a culture of shame or singularity, we begin to see sexuality in a different light: as a normal part of who we are, rather than as a secret part of ourselves which can only exist in private.

* There are, naturally, some variations to the rule. You might not watch porn completely solo, maybe a sexual partner is peering into the same screen, getting off alongside you. Or perhaps you pay for your porn or subscribe to content on OnlyFans – in which case, gold star for you!