Hearing on privacy
issue puts peep-show
ordinance on hold

By Debra Barayuga
Star-Bulletin

Off with the doors if you want to run a peep show, the city says.

If not, violators face up to one year in prison and a $1,000 fine for each violation under an ordinance that the city was supposed to start enforcing tomorrow.

An attorney for an adult video store says the ordinance is unconstitutional and is seeking a court order to block the city from enforcing it.

Gerry Silva, city information officer, said the City Council passed and the mayor signed the ordinance because of community concerns over illicit activity in peep shows.

Silva said late yesterday that the city will delay enforcing the ordinance until after the court rules. A hearing has been set for Tuesday. The ordinance, which took effect Jan. 1, 1998, requires that individuals may operate peep shows if they have a license and if they comply with certain requirements.

The city has received 12 applications but they still are being processed and none have been issued, Silva said.

Janra Enterprises, doing business as Suzie's Adult Superstore, had applied for a license but was denied because it hadn't met all the requirements.

The booths at Suzie's violate a section of the ordinance that bans doors, curtains or walls from obscuring the booths.

In its request for a temporary restraining order filed in Circuit Court yesterday, Suzie's is fighting to protect its patrons' rights to view sexually explicit films or videos in private as they would in the privacy of their own home.

Suzie's will not be issued a license until it removes the booths' doors.

Dan Foley, attorney for Suzie's, says the ordinance violates Suzie's and its customers' freedom of speech and privacy.

The ordinance is not "content neutral" and only applies to adult video arcades that show adult films or videos, he said.

In overturning the city's ordinance banning commercial handbill hawkers in Waikiki, the Supreme Court in 1981 ruled that for an ordinance to be constitutional and a reasonable "time, place and manner" restriction of speech, it must be content neutral and apply to all forms of speech, Foley argued.

The peep show ordinance violates the public's right to privacy, which includes the right for citizens to view sexual videotapes at home or purchase pornographic magazines to read in the privacy of their own home, he said.

That right, he said, also should extend to viewing films and videos in a peep-show booth.

Some customers preview films in the booths before they purchase it.

"Without having the opportunity to preview a film or videotape," Suzie's "cannot fully exercise his right to privacy," Foley argued.