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It took 11 years of litigation to determine that the city of Houston has the right to require a quarter-mile between sexually oriented businesses and neighborhoods, schools and churches. With that principle established, the operators of adult bookstores and topless bars have come up with a fallback defense: They’re not sex shops.

The tactic has changed the nature of the cat and mouse game between the city and the SOBs. Instead of arguing that the cat has no right to pursue the mouse, the mouse’s lawyers are claiming it’s not really a rodent. Thus strip joints are expanding dancers’ costumes to cover more skin and styling themselves as bikini bars, while porn sellers are claiming to be legitimate bookstores whose primary products are not purchased for sexual gratification.

As a Houston Police Department vice officer told the Chronicle, “I’m not sure what a bikini bar is, but our officers are finding that all the topless clubs, they’re operating the same.”

Houston City Attorney Arturo Michel predicts that the new strategies by the SOBs will result in drawn-out court cases to prove the establishments haven’t changed their character. To close an establishment the city must file a civil suit to secure a court order.

“There will be claims that they are not really a topless bar, that they have certain anatomical parts covered, that they are really in the business of selling booze, and so you have to have a certain level of undercover work to be able to show that,” Michel said.

Asked when Houstonians could expect to see a sexually oriented business closed down by the city, Michel predicted that suits against several arcades for operating without a permit could bring results in two months or so. “The low-hanging fruit are those that are unpermitted,” the city attorney said. “The first thing to do is to just show that. And then we’ll probably add in those that we think are violating the distance requirement. But it’s really the issue of getting our evidence together and making sure we can have enough evidence to address the arguments that we think they are going to raise in response.”

As Michel observes, the fight for compliance is likely to be as difficult as the effort to defend the ordinance’s constitutionality. “We want to do it carefully because these are well-funded operations and they will hire good lawyers. They’ll … find ways to combat every piece of evidence we have.”

Three mayors and a succession of city councils have repeatedly voted to protect sensitive areas of the community from pornographic bookstores, bars and clubs that deal primarily in sex, attract criminal elements and degrade women. It’s unfortunate that even after the U.S. Supreme Court refused to hear a challenge to the Houston ordinance, the SOBs refuse to accept reasonable distance requirements.

That leaves the city no choice but to continue the legal fight by taking these businesses to court and exposing the true nature of their operations.

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