All I recall is a wall-sized tangle of limbs, the presence of mustaches, the oh-oh-ohs that emanated from the sound system and the furtive stares I received from the men scattered around the room. The Cine Windsor, a faded 1940s movie house with frayed carpets and worn seats, screened a mix of pornography and anything considered too avant-garde in the nudity department.įilms at the Windsor (like many adult cinemas) screened back-to-back, so the previous film was still playing when we arrived to watch “The Tin Drum.” I can’t remember the name or the plot. This is why my first - and, until recently, my only - trip to a porn theater was to see “The Tin Drum.”īased on a novel by Günter Grass, the Oscar-winning film about a boy who refuses to grow played at a local cine erótico. It was the 1990s, in the Chilean city of Concepción, and prevailing Catholic propriety prevented certain art-house masterpieces from showing at “proper” theaters due to their racy sex scenes. At a recent party of 30- and 40-year-olds, someone asked how many people had been to a porn theater. In the age of the Internet, the idea of watching porn in an actual movie house might seem like a quaint act from another era - like pumping water or dialing up AOL.
