It’s a warm summer’s day, and my boyfriend and I are standing outside the Empire Cinema Club in Huddersfield. As it’s a porn cinema, the entrance is purposefully easy to miss: a slim opening between a Citizens Advice Bureau and a taxi office, with an unassuming sign overhead and open, unguarded doorway. We hover for a moment before climbing the stairs, nervous anticipation hanging in the hot air. The staircase is steep and carpeted in grey, and the walls are painted a deep crimson that glows under two small bulbs at the top, bathing everything in a lurid, theatrical red.
At the top of the stairs is a cut-out window where we’re greeted by a friendly, thickset man in his 40s. He explains that my boyfriend will have to become a member for us to get in — a one-off payment of £10 — and that his entry fee will be £8. I can go in for free, but never alone: women are only permitted entry if accompanied by a man.
After we’ve paid, my boyfriend is handed a membership card, a piece of white plastic with a QR code that leads nowhere, and the man offers to show us around. He gestures behind him to a changing room we can use if needed, and then towards two plastic wall-mounted tubs: one full of condoms and the other, sachets of lube. Both are free. “And through there,” he says, “is the main screening room and also the private rooms. Let me know if you need anything at all, and have fun!”
Empire Picture House, as it was formerly known, opened as a standard cinema in 1915, becoming a dedicated sex cinema in the 70s, when porn cinemas were commonplace. Back then, the sight of the so-called raincoat brigade slipping in and out of darkened auditoriums was unremarkable. London alone had dozens: Soho’s Windmill, the New Compton, the Eros. In smaller towns like Huddersfield they were often converted Odeons or independents, their marquees repainted; interiors partitioned into smaller screens or booths. At the height of their popularity, these cinemas offered something you couldn’t get at home — at least not easily. Hardcore pornography was illegal to sell or screen in the UK until 2000, but loopholes allowed ‘membership clubs’ to operate on a private basis. For men without their own space, or who wanted to feel less alone in their desire, porn cinemas provided a kind of charged anonymity.
Their decline was just as rapid. The arrival of home video in the 1980s made watching porn privately far easier, and cheaper. By the 2000s, DVDs and the internet rendered the idea of paying to sit in a sticky chair with strangers faintly absurd. In the wake of tightening obscenity laws and declining footfall, most cinemas quietly shut down. But not the Empire.
While there are a handful of other venues across the UK that show pornography in screening rooms, Empire Cinema Club is the last of the golden era still operating in a dedicated cinema building. I wanted to see what still draws people here when they can have porn in their pocket at all times. I wanted to know what kind of people still need to come to a space like this — and what it would feel like to enter into that desire with them. My boyfriend and I decided to make a weekend of it: travel from London, stay in an upmarket hotel nearby, and head to Yorkshire Sculpture Park the day after — a fairly absurd weekend for a couple in the infancy of their relationship.
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Leaving the comfort and safety of the reception area, we find ourselves in a half-dark corridor lined with doors. Immediately the overpowering chemical smell of industrial cleaning products hits the back of my throat.
“At least it’ll be clean,” I joke quietly.
We explore tentatively, unsure and perhaps a little scared of what we’ll find behind each of the doors. There’s one dedicated ‘couples’ room — a tiny cubicle with a filthy red, pleather-covered piece of foam, cracks in its shiny exterior revealing soft yellow innards. At the far end, a door labelled ‘SCREENING ROOM’ beckons to us.
The main room is a shallow, low-ceilinged space with a few rows of worn velvet cinema seats sloping towards the screen at the front. There’s a sense of thwarted purpose about the space — empty seats, a lonesome stripper pole at the front; the entire place seems eerily quiet. I feel a pang of disappointment. In our pre-trip fantasies, my boyfriend and I had talked about the appeal of being watched by older men while we had sex, gleaning pleasure from their surreptitious gaze.
It’s worth noting that even in a space like Empire Cinema Club, the Sexual Offences Act 2003 still applies, meaning it’s technically illegal to engage in any sexual act in a space where you could be visible to others, and the club doesn’t encourage you to have sex in the public areas. Technically, the only spaces where anything sexual should happen are the private rooms — but for us, that was part of the appeal (and everything we did went unseen by the staff).
We shuffle into two of the seats in the middle, their tired hinges creaking as we fold them down. For a moment, we sit still, silently observing the film. On screen, a group of youthful, slim, tanned people are having fun at a pool party when their attention is drawn to a couple making out. They watch, curious, as the man kneels in front of the woman, pulling her underwear to the side, and she throws her head back in a gesture of pleasure. After a few minutes, when she reaches her climax, a group of topless women jump up and down in slow motion to celebrate.
“It’s a bit Terrence Malick,” my boyfriend whispers to me, and I laugh — but it’s true. The film, like Malick’s oeuvre, has a dreamlike, grainy quality that makes it hard to place in terms of decade or era. It’s not the type of porn I’d pick if I were at home, but it’s enough.
We start kissing and soon I open my legs to accommodate my boyfriend’s hand, making enough noise to signal to anyone nearby exactly what we’re doing. As we take turns pleasuring each other, doors start to creak open, alerting us to the presence of others. I crane my head to get a better look at the crowd encroaching on us, noting, without surprise, that it’s all older men. There are no other couples, presumably because these men are not open with their partners — if they have them — about what they’re doing in town on this Saturday afternoon. Where have they been hiding? They seem to appear from nowhere, as if they live like woodworms in the walls, emerging to witness a young couple’s pleasure.
At this point, the dynamic between my boyfriend and me becomes clear, and I understand better why women aren’t allowed in alone. He’s the buffer between me and the men, many of whom are now masturbating behind me, next to me, and in front of me. As I enjoy my boyfriend’s touch (and the gaze of the men), I can feel that his attention is half on me, half on them, monitoring how close they’re getting. At one point, I feel a man’s knee next to mine as my boyfriend says, “Just watching, please,” to our eager friend. Feeling his distraction, I whisper that we should take a breather, and we head to one of the private rooms, locking the door behind us. After a brief check-in — we both conclude the screening room experience was overwhelming but ultimately fun — we continue in one of the private rooms, actually in private, until my boyfriend leans across and unlocks the door while I’m on top of him.
I’m facing towards the wall, so I can’t see how many men have been waiting for this moment, but their footsteps sound numerous as they shuffle quietly into the doorway. Not stopping to glance around, I continue, determined to give them the show they came for. Part of my own fantasy prior to coming had been the virility of these men — I had imagined the grunts and groans they’d emit as they watched us, touching themselves. But their presence feels more diminished than that. They’re quiet, timid, and tentative, other than one man who mutters, “Lucky bastard,” under his breath. They’re also incredibly respectful: at no point does anyone try to come too close or get involved in what we’re doing. It’s as if we’re inhabiting different worlds with an uncrossable boundary between us: they’re outsiders, relegated to the role of spectators of romantic and sexual love, while we’re free to take part in it.
After we finish, I expect them to disperse quickly — the fun is over, after all — and my boyfriend and I are now sharing an intimate moment together. To my surprise, the group of men watch our tender post-coital exchanges with the same quiet reverence as they did our sex. After we separate, most of the men shuffle away, thanking us sincerely, but one man approaches us, shaking my boyfriend’s hand with wet eyes. “I just wanted to tell you that I’ve never seen anyone so in love before,” he says. “Thank you.”
Afterwards, we regroup in the relaxation area: a long corridor lined with black and chrome chairs, a bookshelf inexplicably full of Dickens, and a small wall-mounted TV playing the Olympics. We sit with our tea, fully clothed, among men who had been masturbating over us mere minutes ago. Here, in the summer afternoon light, away from the persistent red glow, the Empire Cinema Club and the men within it take on a new context. They talk openly and warmly, telling us excitedly how rarely couples came through. One man says he’s been coming for years and has only seen one other couple; another expresses regret when we tell him we’re just visiting and won’t be back tomorrow.
I had started off thinking of the cinema – and its patrons – as seedy, full of shame. But as I relax into my seat and listen to their idle chatter about the Olympics, I don’t get the sense that anyone feels any shame at all. Perhaps to men who grew up without the internet, it feels more shameful to masturbate alone at home, or in a room sequestered away from their wives. Seeing the men chatting, laughing, and joking afterwards, I get the impression that the space provides a social function as much as a sexual one. In a country where male loneliness has become a quiet crisis, with millions of men reporting they have no close friends, the camaraderie here feels strangely striking.
As we leave the Empire and step back into the bright Yorkshire afternoon, I feel unexpectedly moved. The experience has been stranger, sweeter, and sadder than I’d imagined: what began as a voyeuristic thrill-seeking trip had become something more tender. It’s easy to dismiss places like Empire as anachronistic, even sordid, in the age of free online porn, but coming away, I wonder if they offer something desperately needed in working-class towns like Huddersfield: presence and community.
This feels especially important now, as governments from the UK to the US are trying to tighten online porn restrictions in the name of ‘safety’, with mixed views on whether this is really the motivation, or just one that’s easier to argue than curtailing our sexual freedoms. There is indeed much to debate on the topic of porn consumption, voyeurism, misogyny, and healthy sexual encounters, with opinions on all sides that will be coloured by each of our own desires, experiences, and personal politics. But in such a climate, to defend spaces like the Empire is to defend not just sexual expression, but also the right to gather; to be human in our longing.
Jessica Key is a London-based writer exploring relationships, desire, and modern intimacy. Blending first-person reporting with cultural criticism, she examines how technology, sex, and shifting social norms are reshaping the way we love. She is currently working on her debut novel, Computer Love, a coming-of-age story about growing up online and learning how to love offline.
