Away from prying eyes? The urban geographies of 'adult entertainment'

Most towns and cities in the UK and US possess a number of venues offering sexually-oriented entertainment in the form of exotic dance, striptease or lap dancing. Traditionally subject to moral and legal censure, the majority of these sex-related businesses have tended to be situated in marginal urban spaces. As such, their increasing visibility in more mainstream spaces of urban nightlife raises important questions about the sexual and gender geographies that characterise the contemporary city. In this paper we accordingly locate the phenomena of adult entertainment at the convergence of geographic debates concerning the evening economy, urban gentrification and the gendered consumption of urban space. We conclude that these sites are worthy of investigation not only in and of themselves, but because their shifting location reveals much about the forms of heterosexuality and homosociality normalised in the contemporary city.