Showgirl Video is gone, but the store’s iconic marquee will be preserved
Showgirl Video, an adult video and bookstore that’s believed to have operated the last remaining peep show in the Las Vegas area closed last month, and the sticky-floored structure is to be torn down to make way for a marijuana dispensary.
End of an era
Showgirl Video opened on Las Vegas Boulevard in 1983, During its years of operation, dancers performed for tips behind a window, which patrons could open by putting $1 into a machine.
Arrow Video owner Ray Pistol partnered in the business with Treasure Brown, herself a onetime dancer at Showgirl Video who calls peep show dancers “coin operated girls.” Sexually oriented businesses along Las Vegas Boulevard, where Showgirl Video sat, were banned via ordinance in 1992, but the store was grandfathered in under an older city code.
Now, however, all such businesses “have been supplanted by the internet,” Pistol, who sold Showgirl Video in 2016, tells the Las Vegas Sun. “You can get anything you want at any time. It’s a 24/7 smorgasbord from all around the world.”
The customers at Showgirl Video came from all walks of life, Pistol said. The performers he hired had little experience in the adult entertainment industry.
Disneyfication
Victoria Hartmann, director of the Erotic Heritage Museum in Las Vegas, said efforts in recent years have tried make the city more “family friendly.”
A similar move happened in New York City, with an effort in the mid-90s to increase security in Times Square and close its pornographic theatres and peep shows.
“In the peep show, the interaction isn’t as intimate, it’s also not creating as much of an experience,” Hartmann said. “With someone you’re watching through a window, they’re kind of doing their own thing, there’s minimal interaction. Whereas with gentlemen’s clubs, especially with the clubs that have existed within the last 10 or 20 years, their whole mantra is creating an emotional experience for their guests.”
