X-RATED: Adult Businesses, G-Rated Neighbors Clash on Zoning

STANTON — Kathleen Zielinski figured that the name of her beauty shop, Shear Ecstasy, would attract female customers as they drove along the busy commercial strip that lines Beach Boulevard.

But that was until the curtain went up next door at TJ’s Theater. Now, the promise of live, nude entertainment jams the parking lot with men intent on watching women exercise their 1st Amendment rights.

Zielinski says she’s losing female customers who say they are made uncomfortable by the roving eyes of TJ’s patrons, many of whom assume that any woman in the parking lot must be part of the all-nude review.

Although TJ’s tries to police the lot for rowdy patrons, Zielinski reports that dullards often blunder into Shear Ecstasy searching for rapturous delight.

“I tell them, ‘No, we have clothes on in this place,’ ” she says.

Zelinski’s tale is yet another scene in the long-running morality play that pits adult-oriented entertainment operators against mainstream business owners who typically harbor less-than-neighborly feelings for nude juice bars, X-rated bookstores and topless revues.

Videocassettes, CD-ROMs and images plucked from the Internet might be sounding the death knell for many adult cinemas and bookstores, but club operators say that technology hasn’t dulled the male appetite for venues where women bare their bodies.

Don Waitt, publisher of the Clearwater, Fla.-based Exotic Dancer Bulletin, a trade publication, is confident that all the new technology will never supplant live shows: “I think live clubs are excelling for the same reason that guys fill up stadiums for football games.”

An estimated 2,500 clubs in the U.S. and Canada with adult-oriented live entertainment will gross about

$4 billion this year. Clubs run the gamut from small neighborhood bars with two dancers to glitzy clubs such as Rick’s Cabaret in Houston, which recently raised $4.8 million in a public stock offering.

The number of adult clubs has remained fairly constant in recent years, but attorneys for club owners expect the number to gradually rise as more municipal leaders acknowledge that court rulings have solidified the right of adult-oriented clubs to operate.

Increasingly, municipal officials who are under pressure to keep the clubs off Main Street are turning to zoning ordinances that restrict future X-rated clubs to industrial and manufacturing parks.

But club operators counter that the new ordinances have a simple but hidden goal.

“I can understand that they want to keep this kind of business away from schools and churches,” said Renee Vicary, who has waged a long court fight with Long Beach city officials for the right to keep Angels, a topless bar in a prime location on Pacific Coast Highway, open. “But these new laws are being made just to keep us out.”

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The clash between mainstream business and X-rated ventures is especially obvious along Beach Boulevard in Buena Park, a busy commercial strip that’s home to a large McDonald’s restaurant with a huge play area, Movieland Wax Museum, Medieval Times and Knott’s Berry Farm.

Tucked away in this bastion of family values is a relatively discrete sign for Studio Theater, which has been screening X-rated films like “Pizza Sluts” for nearly 25 years.

In an ironic twist, the taped telephone message for Orange County’s last X-rated cinema uses its better known neighbors as landmarks.

That’s galling to Richard Chandler, a Korean War veteran and onetime minor league catcher for the Cleveland Indians, who’s forged strong opinions about X-rated businesses during two years behind the counter of a small retail shop near the cinema.

“I’ve lost customers--women, mainly--who tell me they won’t come here anymore because of that place,” Chandler said while hitching his head toward the theater two doors down. “I’ve got nothing against them trying to make a buck, but it doesn’t belong here.”

Shortly before noon on a recent Friday, Chandler watched the daily parade pass by the picture window of Harcourt California Awards that’s filled with trophies, plaques and gifts. One by one, cars driven by single men pulled into the parking lot in order to catch the first showing of the week’s featured attraction.

“Must be one heck of a plot because some of these guys come to see it day after day,” Chandler quipped.

The small gift shop was empty late on a recent morning, but not the nearby parking spots that Chandler has clearly marked for gift shop patrons. Chandler complains that he has to clean up litter left behind by late-night cinema patrons. He also complains that one moviegoer frightened a young sales clerk by exposing himself.

It’s that kind of culture clash that is leading municipalities throughout Southern California to use their zoning powers to restrict clubs to land that historically has housed manufacturing plants and warehouses.

“The question is, if we’ve got to give these businesses an area to operate, where’s the best place to put it,” said Camarillo City Manager Bill Little. “And, increasingly, most of us are coming down on the side that industrial areas are probably the best place.”

Washington University Law Professor Jules B. Gerard, who’s written a book about adult business regulations, believes that the new regulations are a response to angry residents who believe that some adult entertainment--particularly lap dancing, where male patrons tip scantily clad women to “dance” in their laps--has grown too explicit.

In the past, cities “tolerated a certain amount of nudity and . . . robust sexuality,” Gerard said. “Now . . . you get such things as lap dancing, which if it’s not prostitution is the next closest thing to it.”

The zoning use changes that open industrial parks to the bumps and grinds of strippers comes as a surprise to many park tenants.

“I wouldn’t want to wake up one morning and find a strip joint across the street,” said Richard Runge, who sells trade show display booths from a small storefront in Southpark, a quiet industrial park located in southern Fountain Valley. “That’s not really the image I want to project given the kind of customers I have.”

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But strip shows and naked juice bars are now an allowable use in Southpark, and in industrial parks from Camarillo to Corona.

City officials say that distant industrial land is better suited for the secondary effects of adult-oriented business--mainly prostitution and drugs--than residential neighborhoods or residential areas.

Southpark, for example, was “the place that provided as much of a buffer as was possible from residential areas,” said Andrew Perea, the city’s planning manager. “It’s not only in a manufacturing area, it’s also pretty isolated from the rest of the city.”

Much of the traffic flowing through the park is headed toward a busy commercial center next to the concrete-lined Santa Ana River that’s anchored by Price/Costco warehouse and a giant Sports Authority store.

“We get a lot of women and children coming in here on weekends,” said Tony Hargis, manager of a Leslie’s Swimming Pool Supplies store. “And I don’t think that’s the kind of neighbor we’d want. Give me the choice between vacant space and that kind of business and I’d rather see empty space.”

Zoning law changes also are making owners of industrial and business parks think twice about possible tenants.

X-rated businesses are now “one of a lot of different uses we’re zoned for,” said Don Sutro, Southpark’s manager. “We’re also zoned for a police and fire station, but that doesn’t mean we’ll ever have them here.”

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Some adult business owners actually prefer locations in relatively out-of-the-way business parks. That’s the case with Irvine resident Tom Moss, who opened the Pleasure Company boutique in 1981, before Irvine crafted its first adult business ordinance.

“We didn’t want to offend anyone by having kids walk by,” said Moss, who sells sexy clothing and a wide array of adult gifts. “Quite frankly, I think that many customers prefer this kind of location where they’re not likely to bump into mom as she brings the kids home from school.”

But Moss isn’t the norm. Most adult club operators ridicule the latest zoning ordinances as a deceitful use of authority by city officials who are misusing their considerable powers to keep adult entertainment at bay.

Vicary, who owns the club on Pacific Highway in Long Beach, said she was stunned earlier this year when she tried to open a second topless bar in Corona--only to find that the City Council had used its zoning powers to restrict adult-oriented entertainment to decidedly unattractive industrial land that’s far from Corona’s commercial center.

“It’s impossible to open up there,” complained Vicary, who has canvassed Corona’s manufacturing zones with a surveyor in tow in connection with a lawsuit she’s filed against the city and its zoning law. “And that’s, in my opinion, what the city is counting on.”

Simi Valley businessman Philip Young complains that city officials have used their zoning powers to make the San Fernando Valley off limits to the topless club he wants to open. He claims that Southern California cities are crafting ordinances that meet the letter of the law--but that restrict club owners to locations that don’t make economic sense.

Roger Diamond, a Santa Monica-based attorney who represents dozens of adult business operators--including Vicary, who’s sued Corona for the right to open in a more attractive location--in lawsuits against municipalities, maintains that some of the new ordinances will fail to pass court muster.

Zielinski, the hairdresser who’s ready to throw in the towel and move her business to a quieter location, is learning firsthand how difficult it is to craft ordinances that can safeguard the rights of X-rated ventures as well as respect the rights of other citizens.

Stanton officials initially told the beauty shop operator that her plan to open a new salon in another strip mall would be classified as an adult business because the business would incorporate mud baths and a shower facility.

“They adopted this rule to keep out the TJ’s of the world, and I found out yesterday that, under the law that’s here to protect me, I can’t open up my new business,” said Zielinski, who adds that Stanton officials are working with her to resolve the problem. “They think I’m trying to open up my own little adult business.”