As part of our anniversary celebrations, we take a detour into the Rio’s saucy 1970’s years as the Dalston Tatler, one of London’s highest grossing porn cinema clubs with an uncensored grindhouse programme and a full burlesque striptease extravaganza stage show. 

We delve into the lurid stories and legends of this era with a fully illustrated talk packed with scandalous details, and an overview of the Rio’s connections to the Soho porn industry in an age of permissive society, civil rights, female liberation and relaxed attitudes to censorship. The talk and presentation will be led by our own Pink Palace curator Andrew Woodyatt and will have special guests (TBC). 

Then we take a deep dive into the day to day life of working in a porn cinema with a screening of Bette Gordon’s feminist cult classic VARIETY (1983). Christine an aspiring author takes a job selling tickets in a New York porn cinema, where she gradually becomes increasingly interested in the films, and then starts a relationship with a rich mysterious patron of the Variety and is drawn into a dangerous world of stalking and voyeurism.

“Variety comes out of the fact that the whole sexuality question is very big in New York at the moment. Women who have worked together politically for a long time are finding themselves split around issues of what you can show, what you can want sexually, what you can even think. Variety fits right into that split. It is a dividing film, with the project of forcing people to confront things. Some women come up to me afterwards and say thank you for dealing with those issues, while others won’t even talk about it. Even among my friends, there are those who rush up and those who hide. It is as though the film touches something deeply repressed… Variety is a curiosity piece. It is there to raise a lot of eyebrows.” Bette Gordon, interviewed by Sight & Sound (1984)