Originally published in The New Yorker. Compilation copyright (c) 2004 The Conde Nast Publications, Inc. All Rights Reserved.)
San Francisco has led the sexual revolution since 1964, the year a teen-age dancer named Carol Doda caused a sensation by appearing onstage at the Condor night club in a Rudi Gernreich swimsuit that lacked a top. In subsequent months, the sensation grew, as Doda pioneered the silicone-injection craze and ballooned to a size 44-DD. Before long, a sailor in North Beach could buy a cone at a topless ice-cream stand, eat it while getting a topless shoe shine, then take in a show starring "a topless mother of eight."
Feminism came to San Francisco early, too. In the Nixon era, women of evolved consciousness picketed the Condor, claiming that Doda was being exploited. "They said, 'Burn your bra!' " Doda recalls. "I said, 'I'm not even wearing a bra!' "
Today, Carol Doda is marketing lingerie and the Condor is a sports bar, but a new sexual experiment is in progress at the Lusty Lady Theatre, around the corner from the Condor. Last year, the Lusty, as it is known, became the first employee-owned strip club in the country. It has been the thinking woman's strip club since it was founded, in 1984; its dancers, rather than taking the usual stage names of Barbie or Angel, called themselves Virginia Dentata or Attila the Honey. (At their request, the dancers mentioned in this story are identified only by their stage names.) Lili Marlene is currently using her experience with customers to refine her thinking on the socialization of male sexuality; Donna Delinqua is writing a doctoral thesis, "Narrative and the Production of Lesbian Identity," between shifts. The dancers respect one another's sensitivities by avoiding "scented or perfumed grooming products," and Cayenne, who has a master's degree in social work and a shaved head, says that part of her work is "to model self-respecting behavior for the customers." In other words, she explains, "I won't put up with shit."
In 1997, the dancers took their polemics outside, picketing for the right to have a union. Chants such as "Two, four, six, eight, don't go here to masturbate!" and "No contract, no pussy!" made their point, and the Lusty became the only one of the country's twenty-five hundred strip clubs to unionize. "Those dancers are our most functional chapter," Lawanna Preston, the staff director of Local 790 of the Service Employees International Union, says. "They alone negotiated the majority of their last contract"--in January, 2003, resulting in a three-dollar-an-hour raise for some employees.
A month later, the club's manager, Darrell Davis, announced that the owners had asked him to close down the Lusty. In May, however, the dancers bought the business for four hundred thousand dollars--all borrowed from the old owners--and reorganized it as a cooperative: dancers, janitors, and cashiers pay a three-hundred-dollar fee to become co-owners and share in the profits. They sought business advice from the Rainbow Grocery and Good Vibrations, two local cooperatives that market organic produce and sex toys, respectively. A dancer named Havana incorporated the club as the Looking Glass Cooperative, after consulting the "Co-Op Incorporation Sourcebook," and another dancer, Miss Muffy, a high-school graduate, drew up the co-op's buy-sell agreement, promissory note, and membership paperwork with the help of sample forms downloaded from the Internet.
Traditionally, stripping is capitalism at its most explicit: men sell women's bodies to other men. The idea behind the new Lusty Lady was that capitalism would give way to the utopian glories of self-ownership. Rather than capital (the owner) renting labor and forcing it to do dull and repetitive tasks, labor would rent capital (borrow money) and be free to reinvent not only the notion of tasks but also the master-slave dynamic inherent in sex work. "We extinguish the concept of hierarchy," the club's new mission statement declared; everyone would take turns hiring and firing, debating corporate strategy, and maintaining client relations (an executive function previously viewed as mere entry-level wiggling around in the nude).
Morale at the club improved after the takeover, and a wave of new customers--a more respectful, less drunk sort of customer--came in to support employee ownership. But some observers remained dubious. A manager at Roaring 20's, a club up the street, who identified himself only as Anthony, snickered when he was asked about the Lusty Lady's prospects. "I've been working here for three years and I don't know how to run a club, so how could they?" he said.
"Workers always believe management is full of shit," Darrell Davis told me. A soft-spoken man, Davis had spent the past twenty years in the sex business, and was relieved to be getting out of it. He hopes to become a teacher. "That antagonism was much more powerful at the Lusty, because the women were nude, and vulnerable, and from San Francisco," he continued. "During the first union negotiations, the dancers told me I was 'raping' new dancers by paying them less than more senior dancers. I offered to start everyone at the highest wage and cut their salary by a dollar every few months, but they didn't want that, either. The real problem was that some of the dancers felt that any profit the company made was immoral." He added, "But they are now what they never wanted to be: corporate owners."
The facade of the Lusty Lady Theatre testifies to the sex industry's peculiar faith in alliteration: the "Lovely Lusty Ladies" inside are billed as not only "Hot Hard Horny" but also "Naked Naughty Nasty." Should these traditional enticements fail, an "Under New Management!" banner flaps from the building's marquee, and a sandwich board proclaims that the club is "Worker Owned." Inside the club, however, the Barbary Coast-style decor remains unrefreshed. Shabby velvet curtains droop from the entrance, blocking out any ambient light. Rules are posted by the cashier's desk: "No loitering! One guy per booth! Don't tap booth glass! Clean up after yourself!" At a conventional strip club, a dancer gyrates on a stage ornamented with a pole and a disco ball and, often, dry-ice vapor, while other strippers work the room looking for lap-dance customers; the Lusty Lady, by contrast, is a peep show. After navigating a dim hallway, customers enter one of twelve small booths that surround a stage covered in red carpet. Inside, when they drop a quarter into a slot, a shutter rises, and for seventeen seconds they can gaze through a glass window at three women, naked except for high heels, who strut and grind.
On the other side of the hallway are private video booths, and around the corner is the Private Pleasures booth, where, for ten or twenty dollars, a solitary dancer behind glass will take requests; for a customer, it's the equivalent, one dancer says, of "having your car valet-parked."
Downstairs, behind a locked door, is the dancers' lounge and changing room, and off the lounge there is a windowless office that contains three battered metal desks and a vintage poster of Rosie the Riveter that declares, "We Can Do It!" The Lusty Lady has seven board members, who meet here every Monday afternoon. Although an atmosphere of good humor prevails, the business's problems have proved to be as incessant as the solutions are makeshift. The cooperative's work-in-progress bylaws, for instance, explain that share ownership is "pursuant to subsection (b) of Bylaw Section 8.03 (of the Rainbow Grocery Cooperative Bylaws, which we have yet to fully understand)."
A board meeting in mid-November began when Pepper, a thirty-three-year-old blonde with two piercings curling up from her lower lip, said, "O.K., I'm going to do my usual bullish facilitation, because, remember, in high school I was on student council."
"I was in the bathroom with vodka and cocaine," Miss Muffy, a baby-faced brunette, said.
The board listened to a status report on the club's negotiations with its landlord, Roger Forbes, who, in the past three years, had more than doubled the rent, to $13,442 a month. The dancers had requested a new lease at a lower rate, but Forbes had initially demanded a sixty-thousand-dollar security deposit.
"I want to send Roger Forbes a turd box," Ruby, a dancer, said.
"It would just fester alongside the fifty turd boxes people already sent him," Pepper said, looking up from a pink scarf she was crocheting. "Somebody probably already signed him up for Turd-Box-of-the-Month Club."
Forbes finally gave the cooperative a new lease at the same rate--with no security deposit required. "It would behoove them, after they get the lease set, to spend some money sprucing up their facility," he told me. "As far as I can tell, no one's spent a dime on that place in twenty years."
Forbes has an ownership stake in several of the properties owned by Deja Vu, Inc., the country's largest strip-club chain. Deja Vu has taken over seven clubs in the Lusty Lady's neighborhood, including Roaring 20's and the Hungry i, where Lenny Bruce developed his act in the nineteen-fifties. At Deja Vu clubs (and at most clubs in San Francisco), dancers have to pay the management "stage fees," as high as two hundred and forty dollars a night, for the privilege of working a shift as an "independent contractor." On a good night, a dancer at a conventional strip club can make far more money than a dancer at the Lusty Lady--as much as a thousand dollars. But because they begin each shift in debt, and know that they can be fined for chewing gum or for clapping out of time onstage, strippers at other clubs often feel pressure to use the private lap-dancing booths to engage in "dirty dancing" or "extras."
Sex work is as subject to the iron laws of economics as any other form of labor. The advent of the Internet has given strip-club patrons the opportunity to post reviews of individual dancers, often in the raunchiest language imaginable, on Web sites; this dissemination of information has, as the Chicago School of economists would have predicted, led to increased competition and falling prices. A "bareback blow job"--that is, oral sex performed without a condom--which local call girls charged three hundred dollars for in the mid-nineties, can now routinely be had at a strip club for twenty dollars, or no more than a lap dance. "Things are so bad in other clubs that the Lusty Lady is a great ray of hope," says Daisy Anarchy, a stripper who has worked at numerous clubs and is attempting to unionize the city's erotic dancers and legalize prostitution. "It's, like, 'You haven't got all of us!' "
The Lusty Lady's board went on to discuss plans for a fund-raiser that would feature a spanking booth and an auction of the dancers' underwear. Havana, a slim strawberry blonde, said, "We'll make more money if a dancer takes off her underwear for the winner right there."
"I wish we could get through one of these meetings without talking about vaginas," Aesop, a soulful-looking male cashier, said.
Pepper steered the meeting back to the agenda: the Lusty Lady was broke. When the employees bought the club, they knew that revenues from the live shows, buffeted by the rise in Internet porn and the soft local economy, had fallen forty per cent since 1996, when the club grossed nearly three million dollars. But they suspected that Darrell Davis had underplayed the club's profitability all along, and hoped that incentives and new ideas would invigorate the business.
The new management tried ladies' nights, but it turns out that women aren't as eager as men are to look at naked women. A plan to blanket the city with ads was scotched when the dancers discovered that they didn't have the money to do it, even though Davis had given them twelve thousand dollars in cash to get started, and had suspended their debt payments for five months. The co-op's most profitable innovation had turned out to be the installation of a Pepsi machine.
The situation was such, Pepper reminded everyone, that they would have to close if they didn't cut costs by two thousand dollars a week. "We need to think outside the box," she said.
"Again with vaginas," Aesop said.
The board had polled the workers to learn which of fifteen possible cuts had the greatest support. Health insurance and pay for the dancers' prep time were being eliminated, late shifts would be curtailed, and the workers also strongly favored reducing the top dancers' wage, from twenty-six dollars an hour to twenty-three.
Donna Delinqua, speaking to a hand mirror as she applied lipstick for her upcoming shift, suggested that, instead, the board recommend cutting the top dancers' pay by two dollars an hour, and other dancers' by a dollar. Pepper agreed, saying, "We need to spread the cuts around, because I need to eat something other than brown rice."
"Do we still believe in additional money for seniority?" Havana asked, returning to the radical issue that had so vexed Davis.
"I do," Pepper said. End of subject. "But we also have to make sure it all seems super-super-democratic and everyone feels super-super-heard," she continued. Pepper and Donna are union shop stewards, positions that--until a few dancers volunteered to serve as temporary union reps--would have required them to negotiate salary cuts with themselves.
"We have to have the illusion of two different parties with different ideas," Pepper continued, "although, ultimately, I'm going to make the whole fucking thing happen in half an hour by just"--she made a sound of chewing through flesh.
"That's so Darrell," Tony, another support staffer, said.
"You've learned," Aesop said. "You've learned from the best."
A few weeks later, the dancers voted to cut their pay by between one and three dollars an hour, with the highest paid among them taking a larger hit. "In our last contract discussions with Darrell," Pepper told me, "he couldn't negotiate us to the position that we have to accept from ourselves now. Nobody could be more shocked and unhappy about that fact than me."
A dancer named Una Puna stretched her legs on the cashier's counter, loosening up before her morning shift. "Political correctness goes into everything we do," she said. "Since we took over, we've even asked, 'Why can't the guys here dance onstage, too?' "
Criptid, a bald cashier who is a member of the co-op--and who is one of the few employees to have worked at the club long enough to qualify for the health benefits that the co-op just eliminated--glanced up from his newspaper. "I'm a pretty good dancer," he said.
"You should dance!" Una Puna said.



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