The Mitchell Brothers O'Farrell Theatre was a strip club at 895 O'Farrell Street near San Francisco's Tenderloin neighborhood. Having opened as an X-rated movie theater by Jim and Artie Mitchell on July 4, 1969, the O'Farrell was one of America's most notorious adult-entertainment establishments. By 1980, the nightspot had popularized close-contact lap dancing, which would become the norm in strip clubs nationwide. Journalist Hunter S. Thompson, a longtime friend of the Mitchells and frequent visitor at the club, went there frequently during the summer of 1985 as part of his research for a possible book on pornography. Thompson called the O'Farrell "the Carnegie Hall of public sex in America" and Playboy magazine praised it as "the place to go in San Francisco!"

A strip club is a venue where strippers provide adult entertainment, predominantly in the form of striptease or other erotic dances. Strip clubs typically adopt a nightclub or bar style, and can also adopt a theatre or cabaret-style. American-style strip clubs began to appear outside North America after World War II, arriving in Asia in the late 1980s and Europe in 1978, where they competed against the local English and French styles of striptease and erotic performances.