Gentlemen's clubs: the adult rooms and the courts

1976 — the record of the courts

Written in court records: The gentlemen's clubs are the one corner of Fort Wayne nightlife whose history is documented less by advertisements than by litigation, and this entry follows the record that exists: directories for the rooms, and court opinions for the fights. The earliest date in that record belongs to a building, not a name: the property at 1407 South Calhoun Street was used as a sexually oriented business from approximately 1976 until October 2016, as the federal court's statement of facts puts it — forty years of adult use on a downtown-edge street. The opposition is documented from the same era: the News-Sentinel's history of the 1980s records that in 1982 the Citizens for Decency through Law group began picketing adult theaters in Fort Wayne. The standing clubs of the modern record, as the directories list them, are ShowGirl I at 2910 Goshen Road, ShowGirl III at 930 East Coliseum Boulevard, and Brandy's Lounge at 3011 West Coliseum Boulevard at Goshen — the three rooms that, between them, would take the city to court.

The place fight, 2019: Fort Wayne's zoning ordinance barred sexually oriented businesses from the Downtown Core district while permitting them in Intensive Commercial districts, and it let an existing nonconforming use lapse after twelve months' vacancy. When the 1407 South Calhoun use ended in October 2016 and the property sat empty past the year, the use died with the vacancy: the Zoning Administrator denied a Certificate of Use for a new adult nightclub there, the Board of Zoning Appeals upheld the denial, and on January 25, 2019, the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of Indiana denied the would-be operator's injunction and granted the city partial summary judgment, holding the place rules a content-neutral regulation aimed at secondary effects — a time, place, and manner restriction, not a ban.

The conduct fight, 2019–2020: Months later the city moved from where the clubs could be to how they could operate. On August 13, 2019, the City Council adopted Ordinance No. G-19-19, regulating sexually oriented businesses: no nudity, and semi-nude employees only on a stage at least eighteen inches high, in a room of at least six hundred square feet, kept at least six feet from patrons, with no touching between semi-nude employees and customers. The three cabarets — B&S of Fort Wayne, Inc., doing business as Showgirl I; Showgirl III, Inc.; and JCF, Inc., doing business as Brandy's Lounge — sued that September, arguing the ordinance unlawfully regulated the operation of their state liquor permits and infringed their speech. The Allen Superior Court denied the clubs' injunction and granted the city's; on October 29, 2020, the Indiana Court of Appeals affirmed, holding that the ordinance regulated conduct rather than the sale of alcohol, that it was not preempted by the state's liquor laws, and that it survived the First Amendment's secondary-effects doctrine. The clubs continued under the rules the courts left standing. That litigation — two federal and state cases, an ordinance number, and a forty-year-old Calhoun Street address — is, on the record reached, the fullest history Fort Wayne's gentlemen's clubs have, and it is printed here at exactly its documented size.

Sources:

1. 1407, LLC v. City of Fort Wayne, U.S. District Court, Northern District of Indiana, decided January 25, 2019 — the 1407 South Calhoun Street property's use as a sexually oriented business from approximately 1976 to October 2016, the twelve-month lapse of the nonconforming use, the denied Certificate of Use, the Board of Zoning Appeals, and the court's content-neutral, secondary-effects holding.
2. B&S of Fort Wayne, Inc., et al. v. City of Fort Wayne, Indiana Court of Appeals, Case No. 20A-MI-466, filed October 29, 2020 — the plaintiff clubs (Showgirl I, Showgirl III, Brandy's Lounge), Ordinance No. G-19-19 adopted August 13, 2019, its six-foot, eighteen-inch, and six-hundred-square-foot provisions, and the affirmance on the liquor-permit, preemption, and First Amendment issues.
3. ACGSI, 1980–1989 Timeline of Allen County — the Citizens for Decency through Law pickets of adult theaters beginning in 1982, copied from the News-Sentinel's decade history.
4. Directory listings (Yellow Pages; DexKnows; the clubs' own sites) — ShowGirl I, 2910 Goshen Road; ShowGirl III, 930 East Coliseum Boulevard; Brandy's, 3011 West Coliseum Boulevard.