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In 20 years of being open 24 hours a day, no one has ever complained to the cops for any reason about Danny's Adam and Eve, a sex shop in downtown Philadelphia. A few months ago, the local police district threw a luncheon and gave shop owner Danny Liss an award for being an "asset to the community." Not for nothing, it would seem, do they call it the City of Brotherly Love. Yet on June 18, the city council dished up a hateful surprise to Philadelphia's erotic bookstores and their customers: a curfew requiring them to close between 10 pm and 8 am-- the hours when bookstores say they do half their business. So far the law is not being enforced. Adult businesses staying open, and their lawyers are lobbying with the city council to set, perhaps, a later closing hour. But Philadelphia has dangled a sword over its porn shops.

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The ordinance covers stores whose products emphasize various "specified sexual activities" and "specified anatomical areas." It is worded vaguely worded enough to apply to a bookstore filled only with classic literature. Yet the statute is a copy-cat of a Vineland, New Jersey, ordinance that was upheld last year by the US Third Circuit Court of Appeals. The court contended that the noise, traffic, and litter adult businesses supposedly generate in a residential neighborhood make them a legitimate subject for curfew.

The Philadelphia ordinance was introduced in March, while the city council was considering gay domestic partnership legislation. But the curfew law received no coverage in Philadelphia's usually politically tuned-in gay press until June.

"I think it's reasonable to suspect that there was kind of an implicit tradeoff here," says Larry Gross, co-chair of the Philadelphia Lesbian and Gay Task Force: "we'll support domestic partnership and you go along with a crackdown on the adult businesses." City councilors deny any connection.

Whether or not there was a tit for tat, it's clear business interests, not citizen complaints, pushed through the curfew. The law was first proposed by a lawyer for a hotel chain, and its most vocal advocate was the manager of a Holiday Inn near Adam and Eve and other adult businesses.

"My store has 15 full-time employees, and I'd have to lay half of them off because we'd be closed," Liss about the potential effects of the ordinance. "Ten o' clock at night-- that's when people start to go out."