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2007 —
The negative:Joseph County: no opening reported, no premises zoned, no raid, no prosecution, no council debate, no lawsuit. A private scene that never collided with a landlord, a prosecutor, or a zoning board is exactly the kind that leaves no record, and this section does not pretend the silence proves more than silence. But the silence here is total in a city whose adult trade otherwise generated forty years of reported litigation, and it is printed as the finding it is.
The state's one case, at boundary size: Indiana's only reported decision testing a members-only sex club against a city ordinance is Indianapolis's. Reel One, a private club begun in 1992 whose members paid to view or participate in live sex acts, was sued by Indianapolis under an ordinance declaring such a business a public nuisance in itself. In Broadhacker v. City of Indianapolis (Indiana Court of Appeals, April 17, 2007), the court reversed a summary judgment against the club's operators: whether Reel One was genuinely a private club — members only, under a written membership agreement, closed to the general public — was a real question of fact, and on that question turned whether the ordinance reached it at all. The case stands for the distinction this whole section runs on: Indiana law has always had to ask whether a club is a business open to a segment of the public or a genuinely private association, and it has asked that question, on the reported record, only in Indianapolis. South Bend's courts were never asked it, because no club here ever came before them.
Sources:
- Broadhacker v. City of Indianapolis (Ind. Ct. App., April 17, 2007) — Reel One's 1992 founding and members-only structure, Indianapolis Revised Code § 391-601, and the reversal on the private-club question; printed as the state case it is, not as a South Bend event.
- Joseph County swingers, couples', or members-only sex club, returned no documented instance.