DALLAS, Tex.—With the Dallas City Council scheduled to vote on Wednesday on a resolution that would order the manager of the Kay Bailey Hutchison Convention Center not to enter into a contract with Three Expo Events, LLC, the company that puts on the various Exxxotica Lifestyle Conventions around the country, Three Expo has decided to get ahead of the game by announcing dates for the convention in three other cities.
"The Exxxotica Expo has once again been in the national spotlight as the City of Dallas has decided to put the event's return to the Dallas Convention Center to a vote from the Dallas City Council, which is scheduled for Wednesday, February 10," the company stated. "In the interim, the nation’s largest events dedicated to love and sex, is pleased to announce its remaining 2016 event schedule and locations, as well as unveiling its all-new ad campaign for the year, which clearly sends the message that the sexual revolution is here."
Exxxotica will be returning to both Chicago (July 8-10), and New Jersey (November 4-6), as well as making its debut in Columbus, Ohio, August 26-28, at the Greater Columbus Convention Center, thanks to sponsor MyFreeCams.
“Columbus is a pretty amazing geographical location,” J. Handy, Director of Exxxotica, said about the choice of the show’s debut in the Buckeye State. “First off, it’s one of the 15 largest cities in the country. Second, it’s within driving distance of Detroit, Pittsburgh, Indianapolis, Cleveland, Cincinnati and Louisville, all who have a combined population of over 2.5 million people.” Columbus was also recently named one of the most “sex-happy” cities in the country, ranking third in the nation, in a recent Men’s Health article.
Dates and general information for all four shows is now available with the launch of the updated official website, ExxxoticaExpo.com. Location specific sub-sites will launch soon and will be the place where fans and exhibitors can find out all the information they need about all things Exxxotica, including stars appearing, exhibitor and sponsorship opportunities, educational seminar schedule, travel info, official after parties, special events, announcements, and much more.
Exxxotica’s 2016 ad campaign carries the timely message of “Sex Isn’t A Four Letter Word” and features empowered images of adult stars and Exxxotica favorites including Allie Haze, Anikka Albrite, Asa Akira, Charlie Grace, Jillian Janson, Kelly Shibari, Kendra Sunderland, Mick Blue, Misty Stone, Nina Hartley, Ms. Exxxotica New Jersey Roxy Nelson, Skin Diamond and Stoya, among others.
Meanwhile, back in Dallas, it's beginning to look as if Mayor Mike Rawlings, who had no problem with Exxxotica's presence at the convention center last August, has succumbed to the pressure from moralistic oil billionaire Ray Lee Hunt and his wife Nancy Ann, chair of the equally moralistic New Friends New Life, which claims to "restore[] and empower[] formerly trafficked girls and sexually exploited women and their children," both of which claim that besides allegedly exploiting women, the show would be in violation of the city's adult use code.
There's just one problem with that: "Last year when this convention was here, the mayor persuaded the chief of police to send undercover vice officers into the convention to look for arrest-worthy offenses," noted Jim Schutze of the Dallas Observer. "In a subsequent closed-door 'executive' session of the City Council, city lawyers told council members that the undercover agents had been unable to spot a single criminal activity, a single event or act or circumstance that was in violation of the law."
But there are already stirrings within the Council that Rawlings' resolution may already be in trouble. For example, council member Jennifer Gates has already proposed an alternate resolution which reads, in part, "Elements of the adult entertainment industry [have] a detrimental effect on the community [and] promote and encourage the objectification of women," and as such, the council "believes this event contributes to the degradation and victimization of women" and therefore "does not condone or support the adult entertainment industry."
Rawlings has already indicated that he doesn't support Gates' version of the resolution, though he might vote for it if his own fails—which it certainly should, for a number of reasons, number one among them being that the resolution is an unconstitutional abridgement of free speech.
"He is making a pretty serious legal mistake, and I'm pretty disappointed that he couldn't be talked out of it," council member Philip Kingston said. "If you have a public accommodation, you can't rent it and then discriminate on the basis of content. This specific kind of event is the subject of very explicit Supreme Court opinions. You can't decide which conventions you're going to have once you've got a public convention center. That's just the rule, you know, and there aren't any exceptions."
Kingston added that Rawlings' resolution is "just like the city's ban on protests near highways and its ban on feeding the homeless without a permit. The city got sued over both of those and ended up settling both cases after U.S. District Judge Jorge Solis took issue with both ordinances: it settled the highway protest case for $270,000 and the feeding case for $250,000."
But perhaps the biggest testament to Exxotica's popularity in Dallas is the fact that the most conservative member of the Dallas Morning News' editorial staff, Mike Hashimoto, penned an op-ed yesterday taking the mayor and council to task for even considering banning Exxxotica from the convention center.
"If you’re Pamela Geller, you have the free-speech right to put on a Muhammad cartoon contest, even if it upsets some Muslims," Hashimoto wrote. "If you’re Westboro Baptist Church, you have the free-speech right to say truly horrible things up the road from a military funeral. If you want to burn an American flag, fire it up; generally, it’s protected speech.
"The rest of us don’t have to like it, much less agree," he continued. "I have better things to do than spend disposable income on a porn convention, for instance, but as long as the organizers and exhibitors stay within the confines of the law—and, by all accounts, that’s what happened last year—how about if we move along with our lives and let others do the same? You, Dallas taxpayer, could soon find yourself on the hook for a loser of a lawsuit, if Exxxotica’s promoters were so inclined after banishment. Our city officials aren’t good at everything, but they know how to pick loser lawsuits."
The battle lines are drawn, and we'll have to see what happens at tomorrow's council meeting before we find out what kind of trouble the billionaire moralists will cause—and how much moolah Dallas citizens will "be on the hook" for.
