Chapter 4

Exotic Dancers Union

A pro-union flyer I made during our organizing campaign.

Courtesy of the author

Because the Lusty had so many rules, opportunities to mess up abounded. The pay scale was like a game of Chutes and Ladders—weekly dollar-an-hour raises took us up, up, up, but a single infraction—missing a staff meeting, arriving to stage two minutes late—sent us sliding back down to the bottom. From the iron fist of the dressing room digital clock, always almost “on the nine” (or so it seemed), to the costume and grooming guidelines—Too much black! Mesh not sheer enough! Hair too short!—to the meticulous rules about dancer confidentiality—destroy your schedule and phone roster at the end of each week, use discretion when calling any dancer with an asterisk by her name on the roster—to the harsh consequences for tardiness or sick calls, the 1950s-boarding-school-dormlike regulations haunted us. I would show up thirty minutes early for my shifts to avoid the possibility that a flat bike tire or MUNI delay would send my paycheck spiraling downward.

The dread of clocking in late soon provoked a recurring anxiety dream of racing through the Lusty lobby to the dressing room, then scrambling to get my clothes off, heels on, and Johann Sebastian Bach affixed to my head before the minute hand on the time clock hit the dreaded 9. Relieved to have made it just barely in time for my shift, in this dream I would stride across the stage toward a window and start swaying my hips and smiling around at the other dancers in their glamorous nudity. But when I looked down at my own body, I would see, with horror, that I was still wearing my army surplus pants, T-shirt, and boots! In a comic reversal of the standard anxiety dream about showing up to school naked, I found my dream-self at work fully clothed.

I started to see even more of the problems at the Lusty when I wanted to go to a concert on a Friday night that I was scheduled to work, and I tried to trade my shift. I worked my way down the roster of dancers’ names and phone numbers printed on the reverse of each week’s shift schedule, trying to find someone willing to trade me. The roster listed dancers alphabetically by stage name and also included a plethora of other information, much of it conveyed in a code of fonts, symbols, and abbreviations. Next to each stage name was the dancer’s “ask for” name (her real name). Asterisks around a dancer’s “ask for” name indicated her request for discretion from callers. Not everyone’s roommates knew about their work, some had young children, and a few still lived with their parents. The letters “PP” next to a stage name meant that the dancer was available to cover Private Pleasures shifts, and an underlined name indicated that a dancer was categorized as “busty” by management. I wondered why breast size was noted on the phone roster. I found out when She-She agreed to trade her Thursday night shift for mine on Friday night.

“We need to get a show director’s approval, so call them and let me know what they say. They might not go for it.”

“Why not?”

“Titties.”

“What?”

“Just call and see.”

I called Josephine and asked about the trade. “Hmm,” she said, as she scanned the schedule on the other end of the line. “No, I’m afraid that won’t work.”

“But why not?”

Josephine sighed, impatient with my naiveté. “She-She can take your shift on Friday, but since she’s the only busty scheduled on Thursday night, she’d need to get another busty to replace her.”

I hung up, perplexed, and called She-She back.

“Yeah.” She sighed. “I figured they wouldn’t go for it.”

“But in the hiring packet Josephine gave me, it says they want diversity onstage. I’ve got it right here! It says: ‘This industry is based on a combination of appearance and customer interaction and we know that not all customers have the same ideal of beauty. The management creating the performer schedule attempts to create a show that has the most variety possible. Variety includes but is not limited to: performance style and customer interaction, hair color and length, body type including bust size and height, and costuming styles.’”

“Yeah, that’s code for ‘Blond hair and big titties trump everything,’” explained She-She. “You’ve got small boobs, so they won’t let you take my shift, because mine are big.”

The formal language in the club’s hiring packet used neutral terms, suggesting that variety itself was the objective, but “variety” actually signified a set of unwritten rules that ranked various features, creating an unspoken hierarchy. As with “busties,” blond dancers could replace nonblondes as well as other blondes, but we had to find another blonde to cover for us if we were too sick to work. Oh, unless the nonblonde was busty, in which case she might do. That week, I gave up my Friday night shift to She-She without taking hers, which shrunk my paycheck by a third.

Even more troubling were the similar, unspoken rules about race. Skin color was not indicated on the roster, and the show directors never explicitly invoked it to disapprove a shift trade, probably for legal reasons. We all noticed, though, that only one brown-skinned dancer (management’s term was “exotic”) was scheduled at a time, so a brown-skinned performer could cover a shift for a white girl only if no other brown girl was scheduled at that time. Extensive tattoos worked the same way dark skin did, but as a parallel category. Tattooed dancers and brown-skinned dancers could replace themselves with anyone but could fill in only for other tattooed or brown-skinned performers. Unless they were busty. Or blond, of course. Got that?

Management pretended that these categories were equal, that it was all about maintaining diversity, and to some extent, that was true. But I learned that show directors secretly categorized us all as either “stars” or “filler.” With my shitty wig and flat chest, I figured I was filler, but I felt no envy toward those busty, beautiful girls. Being in the preferred category meant it was harder to get your shifts covered if you were sick, and calling in sick without covering a shift could push a dancer down the pay scale or even get her fired. Even so, and even though I knew these categories were stupid, sexist, and racist, seeing them laid bare and feeling myself placed within their confines felt humiliating. I wondered how much more so it must feel for Cinnamon, Bay Area born and raised, to be classified “exotic” because of her dark skin, while white-skinned, European Kitty was called a “girl next door.” I understood now why Cinnamon held herself aloof from me: my blond hair and blue eyes allowed me to pick up unwanted shifts whenever I needed the money, while she was limited to those shifts cast off by fellow “exotics,” despite her electric onstage smile, extraordinary dance skills, and long, athletic legs. Such contradictions abounded at the Lusty—onstage, we watched each other’s backs, built each other up, and, when necessary, closed ranks against those customers who went too far. But we also suffered small and large inequities like these that loosed or even cut the ties binding us together.

One night in 1996, I trudged down to the dressing room for my break before my Private Pleasures shift, flopped down on the futon, picked up a piece of paper lying on the floor near my head, and read it lazily. It was titled “EDA Newsletter,” with a logo reading “Exotic Dancers Alliance” under that. Beneath the heading were a series of short articles: “New Class-Action Suit Forming Against Bijou Group,” and “Court Finds Dancers Are Employees, Not Independent Contractors.” I’d been dancing now for a little over a year, and I’d heard Honeysuckle, Star, and others talk about working at the other clubs in town, where dancers had to pay ever-rising stage fees of $100, $150, even $200 per shift. At least I didn’t have to pay to go to work, like at those other clubs, I thought as I skimmed a few of the articles. Still, the Lusty had its own problems. The issues in the newsletter seemed like much larger violations of employment laws, but even if our problems didn’t warrant a class-action lawsuit, maybe this Exotic Dancers Alliance could help us do something about the way Lusties were getting their hourly wage lowered for minor infractions, or being written off the following week’s schedule if they called in sick. Maybe we could stand up against this, the way Tori and Velvette and Mike on the PA had stuck up for Justine when she needed it. I sighed and put this thought away, though. I wasn’t here to fix the problems in this messed-up, sexist industry. Even though I’d been dancing for a year, I still told myself that I didn’t plan to be here long enough for that.

Naomi, a tall, slender dancer with long legs, light brown skin, and fashionable, chin-length dreadlocks, was at the makeup table getting ready for her shift. She’d been hired not long after I had started. “You done?” she asked, looking at me in the mirror. She’d named herself after the supermodel. Photos of the then-ubiquitous Campbell adorned her locker.

“No, I’m going into booth,” I answered. Naomi looked confused.

“Have you always done booth?”

“No, I just started a few months ago.”

“How long did you have to wait?”

“Wait for what?” I asked.

“Before they put you in booth?”

“Well, I didn’t do it for the first few months I worked here because I was too nervous, but then Josephine said I’d get more shifts if I was available for booth, so I decided to try it.”

“No, but after you asked to work booth, how long before they let you?”

“Oh, they put me on the next schedule, right after I asked. Why?”

“I asked to work Private Pleasures a few months ago, but they never gave me any shifts.”

“That’s weird.”

“Do you make more money in there?”

“Oh, yeah. I average like $50, $60 an hour in there. Plus, I get a lot more shifts now. I was getting only one or two shifts a week before, but when I said I’d work booth, I started getting three or four.”

Cinnamon came out of the bathroom and into the dressing room. “Do you ever work in Private Pleasures?” Naomi asked her.

“They don’t schedule us in booth,” Cinnamon answered, bluntly, flopping down on the futon next to me. “Scooch over, Polly.” (Now that I had lasted through Cinnamon’s unspoken probationary period, she deigned to address me directly.)

“What do you mean?” asked Naomi.

“Management says Black women don’t make any money in there, so they just don’t schedule us in booth.”

“Still, we should have the option,” Naomi argued. “They could promote our shows to a different customer base. Or make it an exotic thing, like they do with Asian women.”

Naomi and I were both newish at the theater compared to dancers like Cinnamon and She-She, who had been around for years, and for a long time, we took our cues from their tough, world-weary attitudes. After all, they had seen scores of dancers come and go, and they seemed to know how things worked, and would always work, at the Lusty. Old-school dancers also knew that in spite of the ways in which racism and sexism played out at the Lusty, we were treated better than dancers at other clubs. Sexual harassment from coworkers and abuse from customers were not tolerated, we were physically safe at work, and we got paid above the table without having to hustle for tips.

But Naomi was braver and more proactive than the rest of us, and she was not prepared to accept the way things were when it came to outright racial discrimination. When I arrived for my next shift, there was a petition on the dressing room door asking management to schedule Black performers for Private Pleasures shifts. But even before I returned from stage on my first break, the petition was gone. Naomi was nowhere to be seen; the light in the show directors’ office showed under the door, but the door was closed. I knew this meant Naomi had been called in for a meeting with the boss. On my next break, the light in the office was off. I looked at the schedule posted on the dressing room wall by the phone. No names were highlighted, so I breathed a sigh of relief. When they fired someone, her name was highlighted on the schedule, letting the rest of us know that her shifts were up for grabs. Naomi hadn’t been fired. At least not yet.

The swift shutdown of her petition and the reprimand that I was sure she’d been issued warned against rocking the boat, but the injustice of it angered me. Naomi had done nothing wrong. In fact, she had spoken up about an injustice that the rest of us were more comfortable ignoring, and in return, she was being treated like a pariah. While this treatment gave me pause, it also fueled my growing anger at our management, pushing me one step further down the road toward resistance.

Although stripping while Black meant fewer stage shifts and no booth work at all at the Lusty, Asian dancers enjoyed a special status among the so-called exotics. Indeed, clubs all over town used images of Asian women to advertise their shows, but only very, very light-skinned Black women were hired at self-styled “upscale” clubs like Mitchell Brothers. With the notable exception of Asian men, who often preferred blond, blue-eyed white girls like me, Asian performers were adored and fetishized by customers of all races. This meant more money and more work, but it also created pressure to play to stereotypes about docility, childlike innocence, even subservience, and most of the Asian women working at the Lusty scoffed at these expectations.

Magdalene was one such dancer. Even her choice to name herself for a castigated biblical prostitute indicated her rejection of sexist, Orientalist stereotypes. Her go-to costume played to the popular Japanese schoolgirl fetish—a sawed-off plaid skirt with a hemline that fell mid-ass, high-heeled patent leather Mary Janes, and lace-trimmed ankle socks—but her stage persona was sarcastic and goofy. She enjoyed tripping the rest of us up while we were performing, pushing us out of character with her various comic shenanigans, then acting the innocent once we’d lost our composure. One night, she was in the seventh hour of an eight-hour double shift and growing increasingly slap-happy when I started my own evening onstage. I’d just completed my “seductive” maneuver—a long, slow stride to a window, holding eye contact the whole time, moving down the window like a snake slithering down a tree. As I slid back up to a standing position, I caught a glimpse of Magdalene in the mirror. She had pulled her schoolgirl skirt up to her armpits, hunched her shoulders, and was shuffling toward a window. Despite the tiny skirt, heels, ankle socks, and glossy black ponytail, before my very eyes this pert, twenty-four-year-old Asian American woman had transformed into a seventy-eight-year-old Jewish man, pants belted around his rib cage, shuffling on a just-replaced hip down the concrete walkway of his retirement community. Magdalene shuffled across the stage, complaining about the volume of the music: “Oy-vey! This juke joint is just too laut! It’s making me mishugas!” I collapsed into uncontrollable giggles, ruining my own charade of cool sensuality and engagement with the customers. I pointed at Magdalene by way of explanation. But when I turned to her again, she’d transformed back into a demure Japanese schoolgirl, smiling shyly at my customers and fluttering her fingers.

When another dancer returned from her break and replaced Magdalene, she got up and headed to the dressing room. Ten minutes later, I was bending over in front of another window when a loud, crotchety-old-man voice came from the hallway behind the stage, speaking in Magdalene’s made-up Yiddish lexicon: “Feh! My own tuckus I can’t see, so dark it is in this verkrepliche platz!” The house lights went on—harsh, bright lights that were used only during after-hours cleaning. We all looked around, blinking in the garish lighting. My makeup suddenly looked clownish. The zits on my ass glowed brightly in the mirrors. The stains on our costumes showed. The customers looked on from their windows, stunned at the sudden evaporation of the stage’s sultry red glow and the sudden appearance of Magdalene shuffling in through the stage door, skirt to pits again, shoulders hunched. “Ach! That’s better! Isn’t dat better?”

Trying not to burst out laughing at Magdalene’s antics, I looked away, focusing on my own reflection in the one-way windows for which I’d been dancing. The one-ways allowed spectators to see us, but all we saw was a mirror image of ourselves. When Magdalene turned the lights back off, I noticed a red light behind my reflection. I felt a dull drop in my stomach as I recognized the “power on” indicator light of a video camera. While I’d been trying to conceal my laughter at Magdalene’s act, someone had been making an explicit video of me with neither my knowledge nor my permission. Quietly, I stood up and turned my butt to the window. “Gordon’s in booth two,” I murmured in a low voice to Magdalene, who was now dancing next to me. We used the code word Gordon (in earlier days, Flash Gordon) to indicate that a customer had a camera but avoid alerting the customer that he was about to be confronted by support staff, who would demand that he turn over the film or videotape (back in the days of those things). Without a word, Magdalene walked offstage and coolly picked up the white phone just outside the stage door. She returned just as quietly, giving me a tiny nod of reassurance as she walked up to me. I continued to dance with my butt in the window while Magdalene swayed next to me, her hand on my back in a gesture of silent solidarity and support disguised as just another suggestive tease. Suddenly, we heard the door to booth number 2 bang open, and Scott’s voice loudly order the amateur pornographer out into the hallway.

I dashed offstage, grabbed a threadbare robe hanging outside the stage door, and ran in my high heels to the lobby, where I spotted a man holding a compact videotape and arguing with Scott at the front desk. I grabbed the tape, broke it in half, threw it to the floor, and stomped it to shards beneath my stiletto heel. Then I walked back to the stage door (which buzzed open obediently as I approached), took off the robe, and went back to work, still seething.

I knew that it was just a fluke that I’d noticed the video camera’s glowing light. If I’d been on autopilot, dancing without trying consciously to ignore Magdalene’s antics, I would have missed it. How many cameras had I missed in the year and a half I’d been laying my body bare before these one-way mirrors? This was surely not the first time I’d been recorded against my will onstage; it was just the first time I’d noticed. How many minutes or hours of footage had strangers shot without my knowledge? I felt violated, impotent, and angry. I hated the idea that men I didn’t know or trust now had records of the work I did, that they could carry Polly, naked and unawares, from the safe refuge that had birthed and nurtured her, into that other world where I had to live my life. Would others meet her out there? My professors, students, college friends, people back home? Polly was mine, and she belonged in here, not out there. Sure, I borrowed her boas and hose now and then, but I decided—not these men—when and how much of her to loose upon the outer world. Back onstage, I became wary of the windows, on guard all the time.

The following week, management called a performers’ meeting for Sunday morning at 10 A.M. Like in any workplace, we had staff meetings, but at the Lusty, if a dancer missed a meeting, her hourly wage would plummet by several dollars, or she would find herself omitted from the following week’s schedule. So forty dancers packed into our tiny, underground dressing room, piling onto the futon and spilling out over the floor in our street clothes. Glamorous blond bombshells had reverted to shaven-headed dykes; lithe, petite pole dancers to bespectacled geeks; Japanese schoolgirls to heavy-booted anarchists.

Usually our meetings covered the same old territory: don’t wear so much black onstage, don’t waste the Styrofoam cups provided in the dressing room, put valuables in your locker to prevent theft, no excessive chatting while performing. As Josephine was wrapping up the “don’t waste cups” talk, I noticed Tori pointing at the paper towel dispenser and whispering to Jasmine. Jasmine’s hand shot up. “Also, you know how we put down a paper towel where we’re gonna sit down?” Jasmine preached, piously. “Everybody should put their name on them ass covers too, so we don’t waste ’em!” Tori and Velvette ducked their heads, shaking and snorting conspiratorially, and I bit my lower lip, imagining myself flipping through a card catalog drawer of initialed ass-papers, carefully alphabetized and filed so as not to be wasted.

“Um, thanks for that idea, Jasmine,” Josephine replied. “And finally, I would like to review the camera-call procedure, as we have had some incidents lately.” She reminded us of the code word and how to use it, assuring us that support staff would do all they could to seize any film or video. I was fuming. I knew they must have heard about my camera incident, knew they were aware that customers were using the one-way windows to film us surreptitiously. The only reason I’d caught one of them was that he hadn’t thought to put a piece of duct tape or chewing gum over the red indicator light on his camera.

When they opened up the discussion, I raised my hand.

“It seems like the real problem is the one-way windows. Guys know we can’t see what they’re doing in there, and now that video cameras have gotten so small, some of them are taking advantage to film us. They could even be selling the footage. The other day, I was probably taped for twenty minutes before I realized it was happening. If you’re serious about dealing with cameras, then I think you have to remove the one-ways.”

Josephine seemed unfazed. “This issue has come up in the past, and we’ve discussed it with June.” June was the general manager of the San Francisco Lusty Lady and our sister club in Seattle. “She has said that she will not remove the one-way windows. We will do our best to prevent photography, but we cannot guarantee that it won’t happen.”

“So you’re saying we just have to accept it?”

“I’m saying that performers do face some risk of being photographed or taped,” Josephine answered. Then she looked directly at me. “And if you are not willing to accept that risk, then you should reconsider whether you want to work here.” Her pointed shift to the word you wasn’t so much a threat as it was a way to single me out, to make this about me and my inability to handle the risks that came with the job, risks that, presumably, the rest of the performers in the room had no problem with. It was a way of separating me from the group, making me—not the cameras or the one-way glass—the problem. For a long hour, I believed her, because no one else spoke up or took my part.

I rode my bike home, angry, afraid, disappointed. My words of protest echoed against the drywall of the dressing room, a call-and-response gone unanswered. When none of the other dancers had backed me up, I’d felt alone, and now I wondered if Josephine was right. Was I the only one getting upset about the cameras? Maybe I didn’t belong among these gutsy, beautiful girls after all. Maybe I’d been wrong to feel like I was one of them. I suddenly remembered Naomi and the petition I’d been too afraid to sign. She hadn’t been fired, but she had been reprimanded and shamed for taking up a petition rather than addressing her grievance to management directly. This is what she must have felt like—a target—because she dared to speak out. And I hadn’t backed her up.

When I got home, I checked my voicemail.

“Hey, Jennifer,” said the first message, using my “ask for” name. “This is Kristen, from the theater. I just wanted to thank you for speaking up in the meeting today. That took a lot of courage, and I wish I’d had the guts to back you up.” Hearing these first words, I felt like a cloud had just passed off the sun. Someone else felt the same way. Kristen’s message went on for another five minutes about how disrespected she had felt as she listened to Josephine’s response, how she’d grown angrier and angrier on her way home from the meeting. I replayed her message three more times, bathing in the feelings of relief that I wasn’t alone.

Later that week, I was dancing with Velvette, Star, and a new girl named Sweet-thang. Star was interacting with a customer in the corner when he asked her, “Have you been dancing a long time?”

“A couple years, why do you ask?”

I heard him say something but couldn’t quite make it out. Star responded, “How old do you think I am?”

This time I heard his answer: “Well, your tits have some jiggle to them, so I figure you’ve gotta be . . . forty?”

Star was twenty.

“Where you from, honey?” she asked.

“Vegas.”

“Ah. You go to a lot of strip clubs in Vegas?”

“Sure do.”

“All the titties there stand straight up, I bet. Don’t jiggle around like these old jugs?”

“Well, I don’t mind an older gal,” the customer responded magnanimously. “But yup, all the girls there are young, eighteen, nineteen. You can tell, cuz the tits are all perky!”

“Yup, stand straight out, even when they’re lying down,” Star agreed. “Oh, I remember those days,” she continued nostalgically. “My tits haven’t been that perky in a long time, not since I had my kids. Velvette here’s my daughter, you know!” Velvette rolled her eyes at Star’s absurd tale. She was three years older than Star, but they were wearing identical platform stilettos and identical curly blond extensions, styled in identical high ponytails. Star continued: “I’ve tried to keep young, but it’s a lot of work. I’ve had hair extensions, leg extensions, neck extensions, breast implants, butt implants, pussy implants, tooth implants. But it’s sure an uphill battle, when you’re my age.” Even more than in other mindless jobs, we needed moments of fun like these. They were a way to pass the time, of course, but also a survival skill by which we called our own and one another’s attention to the outrageousness of the roles we played, day in and day out, and of the breadth of the schism between those roles and who we really were. In these moments our real selves—Jessicas, Megs, Jennies—made surreptitious little appearances onstage, to warn our stripper selves not to believe our own hype, to remind Star and Velvette and Polly who was boss.

We were all smiling at Star’s long con when she suddenly looked into one of the one-way windows, then got up and stalked to the stage-side phone, called the front desk, and then stomped backstage. I heard the door to the one-way booth open, made out the shadows of two support staffers in the doorway, then watched, helpless behind the glass, as the silhouette of the customer holding the video camera bolted. The door slammed closed, and the booth went dark again, but I heard the sound of running in the exterior hallway as the support staffer took off after the would-be pornographer.

When I took my break a few minutes later, I put on a robe and went to the front desk. “Did you get the camera?” I asked Keith, the cashier.

“No,” he reported glumly. “Bastard got away.”

I went backstage, where I heard Star yelling in the show directors’ office. “We did not sign up for this! Sweet-thang makes $10/hour, and now someone’s going to put her in porn videos against her will, and you’re not doing anything to stop it from happening again!”

It felt gratifying to hear Star hollering out the words I wanted to say myself. She was right: I no longer felt safe, anonymous, and free behind the Lusty’s protective glass. My every move was now fraught with fear that the one-way windows might at any time conceal a camera. This left me self-conscious and fearful when one of them was open, which was almost all the time. The power I’d seen women exercise on my first shift at the Lusty—She-She throwing men’s demeaning words back at them, Star chiding them into following her orders, Grenadine enforcing her steely rule—seemed all for naught in the face of this new, insidious threat.

In some cultures, a photographer is thought to steal the soul of the photographed subject. This was very much the feeling that the lurking, hidden cameras in the one-way booths evoked in me. In the act of taking my picture, of taking what wasn’t theirs when I’d willingly given them so much, these surreptitious videographers stole something like my soul. No longer could I dance like I was free, pretend with abandon to be this other, wilder girl, then leave her carelessly behind when I returned to daily life. Now, these soul-stealing camera wielders threatened to capture that wild girl and tie her forcefully to me, to my ordinary daily self, to any future self I hoped to have. I knew something had to change, and I was starting to wonder if I would have to tell the Lusty goodbye.

A week later, ten of us gathered at Tori and Velvette’s Tenderloin apartment, a huge converted storefront with a big, open rehearsal space for their band in front and living quarters in back. The Tenderloin always felt to me like the most urban of San Francisco’s neighborhoods, the only one with large, old, multi-unit tenements rather than the divvied-up Victorians, or single-family houses in the rest of town. It was a neighborhood of immigrant families packed into tiny apartments, sleeping in shifts, of addicts and alcoholics passed out or panhandling. Several Lusties lived in the TL: it was cheap, just a short bus ride to the theater, and home to other strip clubs like the Mitchell Brothers O’Farrell Theatre, the New Century, Market Street Cinema, Crazy Horse, and Chez Paree. It had been San Francisco’s gay neighborhood in the 1960s, and even though many gay men had moved to the Castro in the 1970s, the gay and trans sex trades had remained there, alongside the girlie shows and lap-dance clubs where my Lusty comrades worked.

As the hustlers and dealers did trade outside, we watched a videotape that Cinnamon’s boyfriend, Scott, a kindhearted support staffer, and a firm ally to us dancers, had confiscated from a customer and brought to the meeting. It showed explicit, close-up footage of Honeysuckle, Mamacita, Velvette, and Tori, their faces fully identifiable, their bodies exposed completely.

“Damn,” a wincing Mamacita said when she saw the footage. “My family is really old school, traditional Mexican. What if somebody they know sees this and tells my family? They would disown me.”

I knew how she felt. I’d started a teaching assistantship that semester, and, as I watched the video, I imagined how mortified I would be if video got out. Since my own camera experience a few weeks back, I’d grown self-conscious onstage, hiding my face behind my now-grown-out hair, afraid to approach the one-way windows. Doing so wouldn’t keep me safe, I knew, noticing that in the video we watched, even the dancers on the far side of the stage were visible and fully identifiable.

On the video screen, Honeysuckle, in a blond wig, full makeup, butterfly wings, and glitter-covered platform sandals—approached the camera, clearly oblivious to its presence. She winked seductively, placed a foot on the windowsill, and exposed herself to the camera behind the one-way glass. It was infuriating to watch her make herself so vulnerable, and to know as I watched that her vulnerability was being exploited in that very moment. I felt both guilty and powerless. Watching the footage, I felt as if I were the voyeur filming her without consent; but knowing that I had performed the very same dance moves as Honeysuckle was doing on-screen, in the very same place, a thousand times, I also felt like the object of the camera’s violating gaze.

“Jesus,” shouted the real Honeysuckle, wearing cutoff shorts over ripped fuchsia tights, and her trademark googly third eye. “I’ve done porn shoots that show less pussy!”

“And I bet you made a lot more than twenty-two dollars an hour,” Tori added.

“That’s what makes me so mad,” Honeysuckle responded. “I make eight hundred dollars a scene when I do porn, and these guys are putting—what, five bucks?—in the machine and leaving with footage they can sell for hundreds of dollars. And there we are”—she gestured toward her glamorous alter ego on the screen, and the others in the background—“making fifteen bucks an hour!”

“They just downgraded me to twelve dollars for being late to the last meeting,” said Jane.

“And that’s another thing,” Velvette chimed in. “It’s unfair, the way they’ll pull some people all the way down the pay scale but do nothing to others for the exact same infraction.”

“Yep,” agreed Star. “I see them calling girls into the office for this and that all the time. But I’ve got big boobs, so nobody messes with me. That’s fucked up.”

“And what about not scheduling Black dancers in booth?” Naomi asked. “That’s just flat-out discrimination, but when I took up that petition, I got reprimanded. They said I should have talked to them about it first.”

“But you know if you’d have gone in there on your own and said something, you’d have just disappeared from the next week’s schedule,” added Velvette.

“Exactly,” said Naomi. “So what do we do?”

“We could write a petition asking them to take out the one-way windows,” I suggested.

“Should we talk to a lawyer?” asked Velvette.

“I know some of the girls who’ve sued the other clubs from my job at Market Street,” offered Decadence. She and Star and some of the others worked at different clubs pretty regularly. “They started that group, Exotic Dancers Alliance.”

I remembered the EDA newsletter I’d found in the dressing room, with articles about the various class-action lawsuits EDA members had brought to challenge the unfair and illegal conditions at other clubs.

We decided to contact ED to see if they’d meet with us and help.

As we said goodbye, there was a feeling of cautious hope that, having shared our mutual worry, shame, and anger at being violated, we might somehow effect a change. Our goal was modest—to swap out the mirror glass in three 18 x 24ʺ windows—but our fears were large and varied. We feared what we could lose if a video got out: other jobs, future careers, custody of children, respect of friends, physical safety, even love. And we also feared what we could lose if our effort failed: income, home, education, time.

I felt buoyed by the fact that the other dancers actually shared my fears and my anger, and that they had all seemed ready to move forward, had not tried to talk me down. In place of the impotent rage I’d felt upon spotting the video camera’s red light, I felt a tentative sense of strength, a strength that wanted testing, and which I fully expected to fail, but a strength nonetheless.

A week later, on a windy spring day in 1996, Velvette, Tori, Amnesia, Decadence, Naomi, and I went to Fox Plaza on Market Street on a Tuesday night at 6:00 P.M. We rode an elevator up to the mostly empty offices of Service Employees International Union 790, and nervously entered the reception area. Accustomed to a reception desk staffed by gutter-punk boy-men in black T-shirts and combat boots, with Maglites the size and shape of billy clubs clipped to their belts, we were impressed and a bit intimidated by the welcoming smile of the well-coiffed receptionist, who read us immediately as attendees of the Exotic Dancers Alliance meeting. This was not hard, given our platform motorcycle boots and shirts made out of our old fishnet hose. The receptionist led us to a small conference room where SEIU seemed to store its own collection of plainclothes strippers: a petite, thirtyish woman with dark hair and skin; a pale, gothy-punk platinum blonde; and a tall white woman with long, silken, light brown tresses.

“Hi, I’m Dawn,” said the tiny one, in a slight accent. “Are you all from the Lusty?”

“We are,” I answered. We took seats around the table and introduced ourselves. The goth chick and the silky-haired woman introduced themselves as Daisy and Johanna, and the three of them told us about the work they had been doing over the past few years. Primarily, they’d been organizing dancers to file and join class-action lawsuits for back wages and the return of the illegal “stage fees” that clubs charged dancers in order to work. Daisy said she’d even been blacklisted at all of the clubs in town because of her organizing work.

Dawn explained that the problems they were fighting had begun in the 1980s, before any of them had even started dancing. Before the ’80s, strip clubs provided no-contact sexual entertainment for the most part. Then, the cops shut down all the city’s massage parlors and “encounter studios” (1970s-era brothels). After that, the strip clubs tried to fill the vacuum by pressuring dancers to provide full or partial contact sexual services. Club owners started by dropping dancers’ pay down to minimum wage so they would have to hustle for tips to make money. In 1980, the Mitchell Brothers O’Farrell Theatre introduced lap dancing, in which dancers would gyrate on high-tipping customers’ laps. Some Mitchell Brothers dancers began making hundreds of dollars each night.

In 1988, Mitchell Brothers changed the status of its strippers from employees to independent contractors so that management didn’t have to pay them a wage; the logic was that the dancers were selling services directly to the customers, with the club acting merely as a venue in which they operated their various “independent businesses.” Soon after, the club began charging dancers a booking fee or stage fee of ten dollars for each shift. In the early 1990s, other theaters began following suit.

The negative impact of this move for dancers reached far beyond the minor expense of the booking fee. Because clubs were no longer paying dancers for their time, management began scheduling as many dancers as possible, even on nights when business was too slow to support that many workers.

Daisy explained that when she’d first worked at Market Street Cinemas, there would be maybe ten dancers on a shift. So say on a given day, if customers spent a total of $3,000 in tips, dancers would average $300 for the shift. Yeah, some would make $600 and some would make $200, but everyone could walk out with enough to pay their rent. But after the clubs started charging a booking fee, management had an incentive to book as many dancers as they could. Sometimes there would be thirty or more dancers per shift, but the number of customers remained constant. That meant all thirty dancers had to compete for that same $3,000, so the average amount per dancer went down to $100 per shift, and plenty of girls left with nothing. Others started offering hand jobs or more in order to compete. But management didn’t care, because they were making their money off the dancers, not off the customers.

So in 1993, Dawn, Johanna, and Daisy got together and formed Exotic Dancers Alliance. They filed a complaint with the Labor Commission against the Market Street Cinema, and won. But after the decision, the club owners doubled the stage fee and tried to turn the remaining dancers against EDA by blaming the lawsuit for the increase, saying EDA forced management to spend huge sums on legal fees.

Johanna explained that when she was dancing at Mitchell Brothers, management just kept raising the dancers’ booking fee higher and higher, so five hundred current and former dancers had organized to file a class-action lawsuit to recoup past booking fees and unpaid wages (since the club didn’t even pay the dancers minimum wage). That suit was still underway.

I was impressed by the courage of these women, and the fact that they had stood up and said, Enough is enough. We’re not going to put up with your shit anymore. I looked at the other Lusties, and they looked hopeful too. If anyone could help us, these gals could.

Dawn asked us what was going on at the Lusty, and I explained about the cameras and the one-way windows. Naomi explained that Black women were never scheduled to work in the private booth, and about the arbitrary discipline system.

Daisy, Johanna, and Dawn looked at one another like they had thought this through and were ready to pitch us their plan. Then Johanna spoke up, explaining that EDA had mostly approached issues through litigation—suing the clubs to recover wages or fees that dancers never should have paid. And they’d been pretty successful. The problem with that strategy, she admitted, was that even when EDA won, the clubs would just pass on the cost of any settlement to the current dancers by raising their stage fees and telling them it was the fault of the “troublemakers.” EDA had been working on other tactics to fight the clubs, tactics like organizing a dancers’ union to allow dancers to negotiate for better, fairer working conditions and pay. Because we weren’t dealing with lost wages or illegal fees that would warrant a lawsuit, and because the Lusty classified us as employees, not independent contractors, the Lusty might be just the place to put this plan into action.

Daisy told us that SEIU 790 had been supportive of EDA, providing meeting space and advice on labor law. She offered to talk to their leadership to see if they would help us.

We agreed. I felt relieved at the prospect of any sort of help, pleased that someone outside our scrappy little group might care. At the same time, I was anxious, a bit scared that I was getting in too deep. Start a labor union? In high school, I’d read about the bloody battles between coal miners and company thugs, between migrant farmworkers and local cops. What was I getting into? Maybe I ought to just keep my head down and do the job until I graduated. I didn’t know how to start a union, or if it would even be possible.

Daisy left the room and fetched a representative from SEIU, a guy in his forties named Jim. Our body language shifted immediately: arms folded, eyebrows raised, faces turned a bit away, eyes shifted to look at one another. A man? Dancing had taught us to be careful with men, and Jim’s appearance tripped the wires of our collective caution now. He asked us about our workplace issues, and, guardedly, we told him of the one-way windows, the racial discrimination, the arbitrary treatment, and what had happened to Naomi when she tried to speak up. We mentioned that we were thinking of writing a petition to management demanding the removal of the one-way windows.

We were surprised when Jim cautioned us against taking the petition to management, explaining that at the moment, we were all “at will” employees, meaning that we could be legally fired for writing, signing, or even just reading the petition. In fact, he told us, without a collective bargaining agreement, we could be fired for any reason, or for no reason at all. On the other hand, Jim explained, if we openly declared our intention to form a labor union and sent management a notice naming ourselves as members of the union organizing committee, then we would be protected. Even though it would be perfectly legal to fire an “at will” employee for almost any reason, it was illegal to fire one for attempting to organize a union. Still cautious, I told Jim that we weren’t sure if we were really ready to form a union.

“You already have,” he answered. I must have looked puzzled, because he explained that just by getting together and discussing our working conditions and agreeing to ask for what we wanted collectively (rather than individually), we had formed a union. “That’s all a union is,” he explained. “A group of workers”—he gestured around the room at us—“acting together for their common interest.” What we needed to figure out was whether we wanted to proceed on our own or affiliate with a larger union like SEIU.

Not yet convinced that joining SEIU would do anything except replace the old boss with a new boss, we were skeptical. Amnesia, always a straight shooter, addressed Jim point-blank: “No offense, but I don’t know you. Why should I trust you?”

Jim responded openly: “Fair question.” He explained that any changes we would fight for at work would be totally up to us. SEIU could provide resources—lawyers, experienced organizers, office staff, and the solidarity of thousands of members citywide. But what we fought for, and how hard we fought—that would all be up to us and our coworkers. Jim told us he couldn’t promise we would get what we wanted, but he did promise that we wouldn’t have to fight management on our own.

Less wary now, I asked what we would need to do if we decided to join SEIU. I was still hesitant enough to emphasize the “if.”

Jim laid out the process: we’d need to get 50 percent of our coworkers to sign union cards asking SEIU to represent us. The National Labor Relations Board (NLRB) required only 30 percent to call an election, he explained, but he would want to see at least 50 percent to show SEIU that our campaign—which would demand substantial resources on SEIU’s part—had a solid shot of succeeding.

Amnesia, Velvette, Decadence, Naomi, and I looked around at one another. “We’re going to need to talk to the rest of the dancers about this,” Amnesia said.

I stood outside the entrance to the Lusty the next night, smoking a rare cigarette. Naomi arrived for a shift in her street clothes, breezing through the old-timey bordello decor of the theater’s lobby, past the cashier behind the ornately carved, dark mahogany front desk. I watched her on the closed-circuit monitor by the front desk as she passed down the unmistakably male-scented hallway whose patterned carpet concealed the stains of lust. As she approached the door to the backstage area, the cashier pressed the buzzer that unlocked the stage door without even waiting for Naomi to push the doorbell. On the monitor, I saw a customer try to trace Naomi’s steps so that he too might be buzzed magically into naked-lady land. He approached the door several times, but of course was not buzzed in. The cashier, Mark, watched him as well, and just as the disappointed fellow gave up and turned away from the door, Mark pressed the door release so that it buzzed gaily at the poor chump’s back. The man whipped around, hope restored, but Mark released the buzzer again and the sucker looked crestfallen.

I smiled, stubbed out my cigarette, and made my own way down to the dressing room. I heard the voices of dancers in the dressing room talking animatedly, but they stopped as soon as my footsteps became audible in the hallway. When I came around the corner, Decadence said, “It’s just Polly,” and the dancers laughed at my puzzled expression.

“We thought you might be a show director,” explained Octopussy, lowering her voice. “We were talking about unionizing. I was saying that I hate the one-way windows, and I wish they’d get rid of them, but at the same time, the Lusty management is also really cool compared to a lot of other clubs.”

Decadence nodded and told us that the owner of Market Street Cinema paid off the vice cops, so when a dancer got assaulted by a customer and called the cops, they didn’t even show up. Management didn’t want any messy, boner-shrinking criminal investigations during business hours.

Octo juxtaposed this to an incident at the Lusty several years back, when a dancer, Jello, came to work with her face bruised so badly that makeup and dim lighting couldn’t disguise the swelling. She was terrified to go home to the boyfriend who’d beat her, but also afraid he might show up at the theater looking for her. While she was on stage, the show directors called the Seattle Lusty Lady, and on Jello’s second break, they handed her a plane ticket, $300, a dance schedule for the Seattle Lusty with her name written in for several shifts, and a key to a studio apartment the Lusty owned near the Seattle theater.

Tara, another Lusty old-timer, nodded and added that stuff like that might make some people hesitate to “betray” the Lusty managers by forming a union. Other dancers, who’d worked at clubs like Market Street or the Century, might not want to rock the boat at the Lusty either.

“Still,” I said. “They aren’t listening about the cameras or the discrimination. What choice to we have?”

Star suggested that we could form our own, independent union, rather than affilliating with SEIU or a larger local, but I thought about what Jim at SEIU had said: that we’d already done that part. Getting together to make a collective demand was forming a union. But they hadn’t budged. We needed to do something that would push them to hear us.

Decadence suggested calling another meeting at Tori and Velvette’s place and inviting as many trustworthy dancers as possible. If we couldn’t get more people involved, unionizing wouldn’t even be possible, but if we could, then we could make a decision about our next steps together.

At Tori and Velvette’s a few days later, a large group of dancers along with both Mikes, both Scotts, and Chuck from support staff had gathered. We discussed how to move forward.

Some wanted to organize under the legendary Industrial Workers of the World. IWW had been founded in 1905 and eschewed contracts and collective bargaining in favor of more militant tactics, such as work sabotage, strikes, and direct action in the workplace. The Lusty’s IWW contingent included mostly support staff members—especially those who had come of age in the ’80s East Bay punk scene and still harbored a deep commitment to its anarchist principles—and some dancers like Star, who had cut her activist teeth on the direct-action tactics of ACT-UP in the early ’90s. I remembered learning in high school about the Wobblies’ proud, storied history of militant direct action stretching back to the early twentieth century, and I thought their uncompromising stance would mesh well with our motley crew of artists, activists, and radical queers. But I’d never heard of the IWW representing any workers in the present day. In 1996, IWW seemed more legend than a real union that could help us organize.

“Do the Wobblies even still exist?” I asked skeptically. Star said she knew some, but they were activists, not workers who’d organized under IWW. This made me more skeptical. We didn’t need a bunch more grungy punks with righteous ideas and anger but no sense of how to proceed. We needed Xerox machines and lawyers.

Velvette was ahead of me. She pointed out that SEIU 790 had been supportive of the Exotic Dancers Alliance’s legal efforts. They’d given them a space to meet, resources to publish their newsletter, and legal support for their lawsuits. She described how Jim had met with us and seemed to have a whole strategy for how to organize and get what we wanted from management. After an hour of discussion, we took a straw poll on how to move forward. Star and a few support staffers still leaned toward IWW, and a few others wanted an independent union, but Velvette and the rest of the dancers, along with a number of support staffers, wanted to go with SEIU. Fortunately, we were all uncertain enough about the right path that no one was totally wedded to his or her own position. That meant that those who’d preferred to go Wobbly or independent agreed to stick with the group, because the most important thing was that we organize, no matter how we did it.

I had brought the stack of union cards that Jim had given us, and that week’s work schedule. We were an organizing team of thirteen dancers: Cinnamon, Star, Magdalene, Sorcia, Jane, Velvette, Kristen, Lolita, Tori, Tara, Amnesia, Naomi, and me. With around sixty dancers on the roster, we only needed to talk to three or four other dancers each. We ran through the schedule, circled names, passed off our enemies and exes to others, divided up the union cards, and went to work.

While the Lusty was starting to organize, I was still living two lives: in addition to finishing my master’s degree and applying to PhD programs, I had also begun teaching that year at San Francisco State University. At twenty-six, I was just a few years older than my students, and anxious to establish my authority in the classroom, so on the first day of my first class, I wore a silk suit from Ann Taylor—the most expensive item of clothing I’d owned to date—and shoes that made the click-click sound of power. I had written a detailed outline of all I wanted to cover that day, run off copies of my syllabus, and checked Kinko’s to ensure that the reading packet I’d assembled was ready for my students. I took a breath before entering the classroom, and then did not breathe again until well into my introductory lecture, when I began seeing stars. All eyes were on me, but I forgot my next point, and the page swam as I looked down at my lecture notes.

Then I recalled a recent occasion I’d also felt this way: my audition the previous year at the Lusty Lady. Polly, I thought. Polly would know how to handle this. Buck naked, Polly had commanded and controlled hundreds of rowdy, leering, demanding men. I paused, imagined myself in Polly’s high Lucite heel shoes and glamorous pink boa, filled my lungs like I’d just come up from under water, and picked up my lecture where I’d left off in a newly authoritative voice. The dizziness disappeared, and the students laughed at my jokes, took notes, and raised their hands with questions. Polly to the rescue, I thought.

The teaching assistantship wasn’t enough to pay the rent, so I kept dancing nights and weekends. But while my peep-show experience helped me in the classroom, the inverse was not true. As a teacher of young men who might very well end up some Friday or Saturday night at the Lusty, I became anxious, reticent onstage, especially before the one-way windows. Before my encounter with the video camera, the anonymity of the venue had seemed to provide safety, allowing me to be open, engaged, and vulnerable onstage, almost without limit. But now, I hung back, turned away, tried in vain to hide my face with my hair—a difficult endeavor in a panopticon of windows and mirrors. For all the confidence and authority I was gaining in the classroom, onstage I began to feel desiccated, sucked dry of my brazen, former vitality, as if my teacher persona was vampirizing Polly, stripping her for emotional parts.

A week after our meeting with EDA and SEIU, I waited in the dressing room after my shift until the show director’s office door was closed and no light emanated from beneath it, indicating that Josephine had either gone home or was in a one-way window booth, quietly monitoring the dancers for the performance evaluations that would determine whether we got raises or reprimands in our paychecks the next week. Sizzlean sat at the mirror, fixing her hair and applying her stage makeup. I took a deep breath, nervous about being overheard, and awkward because I didn’t know how Sizzlean would respond to what I was going to ask.

“Hey, Sizz,” I murmured discreetly. “Remember when I had that video camera behind the one-way a few months ago?” I reminded her of what we already knew—that mine was no isolated incident, that more and more customers seemed to be using the one-way booths as cover for videotaping now that cameras had gotten so compact and light. Sizz told me that she’d caught someone filming recently as well, and that she’d heard about Star’s confrontation with management. We shared our frustration and anger over management’s coldhearted response. Less nervous now that I knew she was upset about the cameras too, I took a deep breath and made my pitch, still speaking in low tones.

“So a bunch of us went to an Exotic Dancers Alliance meeting last week, and we met with someone from the union where they’ve been meeting. We decided that our best option is to form our own union and affiliate with SEIU. But we need everyone to sign union cards saying they want to join. Will you sign one?”

I looked at Sizzlean in the mirror, trying to see in her face if my request had deepened or dampened the fragile connection we’d just made. I hoped she wouldn’t shut down and hurry off to the stage now that I’d asked her to take action. She didn’t shut down or run off, but she hesitated, wondering aloud if maybe we could just band together and insist that management take out the one-ways.

I told her about what had happened to Naomi when she petitioned management, and about Jim’s warning over “at will” employees, and the legal protections for workers organizing a union.

She thought a minute more, and then blurted out, “Yeah, what the hell. I’ll sign. I’m sick of these guys with their cameras up my cooch!” Sizzlean filled out her card on the dressing table, signed it, and handed it back to me. I breathed a sigh of relief. Only forty more dancers to go!

Not all the dancers signed cards. Later in my shift, I approached Justine.

“I just don’t want to get involved,” she answered stiffly.

“Don’t you worry about the videotaping?”

“No, I just don’t think about it.”

“But doesn’t it upset you that other girls are getting taped without their consent?” I pushed.

“I just don’t want to.” She went back to the stage, even though the clock was only on the seven and she had two more precious minutes left on her break. I wondered at Justine’s refusal. I’d witnessed Tori and Velvette standing up for her months before, terrorizing and publicly humiliating her childhood abuser, driving him from the theater forever so she could be safe. Why wouldn’t she want to join forces with these women who’d shown her so much solidarity and care? Then I remembered that she was dating Mark, the rigid, unsmiling, square-jawed support staff manager. Justine signing a union card would likely cost him his job; managers were not afforded the protections of employees against union-busting retaliation. Justine had weighed her loyalties and chosen her man over her fellow dancers.

A few others declined to sign, but by the end of the week when we took the union cards back to SEIU, 80 percent of our coworkers had signed them.

Jim was impressed. “That might be the highest percentage of a shop I’ve ever seen sign cards off the bat.”

He outlined our next steps: He would contact our manager, June, and ask her to recognize our union, based on the number of cards we’d signed. She would tell him to fuck off and call her lawyer. He would call the National Labor Relations Board to petition for a secret election for union recognition. The NLRB would call an election, and if enough workers voted yes, management would be forced to recognize our union and negotiate a contract with us.

“At that point,” Jim explained, “things will get very dirty, very fast, so you’ll need to be ready for that.”

We smiled at one another. We were strippers. We could do dirty.

As the organizing work at the Lusty got more serious, the relationship between my scholarship and my work in the sex industry began to shift. Instead of serving as a means of getting through my graduate work without debt, the sex industry became instead a focus of that graduate work. It felt like a vast, unexplored terrain in scholarship, especially when approached from a labor perspective.

As I began researching the history of the sex-workers’ rights movement, I learned that in the 1930s, it was common for strippers to be involved in performers’ unions that included burlesque comics, musicians, nightclub singers, and “respectable” stage actors. The most famous among these stripper-organizers was Gypsy Rose Lee, an extremely active member of the labor movement: she spoke frequently at union meetings in support of workers’ struggles, attended meetings of the Communist United Front, and was blacklisted in Hollywood during the Red Scare perpetrated by Joseph McCarthy’s House Un-American Activities Committee. Her novel The G-String Murders actually includes a character who is both a stripper and the shop steward for the union representing performers at the famed Minsky’s Burlesque in Times Square in the late 1930s and early 1940s.

In the library at SF State, I discovered a fascinating master’s thesis filed in 1966 by Ann-Terry D’Andre, who played piano at local nightclubs and had interviewed the strippers who worked there. Her thesis The Strip-Dancer: The Sociology of a Deviant Occupation explained that by the early 1960s burlesque theaters had largely disappeared, and striptease had moved from theater venues to nightclubs. As alcohol sales replaced ticket sales as the venues’ key source of revenue, dancers began making their money by hustling drinks: customers would buy dancers drinks in exchange for their company at the bar or a table, and clubs began paying each dancer a kickback on the amount her admirers spent while in her company. Unbeknownst to the customers, who paid full price for the ladies’ cocktails, bartenders often omitted the alcohol from the dancers’ drinks, both to make the whole hustle more profitable for the bar, and to allow the dancer to stay sober for a night’s work, during which admirers might buy her dozens of drinks.

Just as stage fees and independent contractor status were ruining stripping for many dancers in the 1990s, the drink hustling of the 1960s replaced the flat-rate salaries, work rules, transparent pay scales, and other practices previously achieved by union contracts. Moreover, the shift of the worksite from the stage to the barstool erased stripping itself as a form of labor, since workers made their real money hustling drinks, not performing. Finally, rather than encouraging performers to fight collectively for better working conditions and wages (as they had during the burlesque period), the commission system pitted dancers against each other. Strippers competed for the attention of big-spending customers by showing more and more skin, eventually flashing their nipples and pubic areas in order to sell more drinks after their show.

The effort to one-up other performers with a sexier act, more outrageous staging, or more elaborate costumes gave way to an outright race to the figurative and literal bottom in the 1950s, as the clubs and dancers competed to show more and more skin. As nudity began to trump creativity, and burlesque theaters fell out of fashion in favor of nightclubs, the status of strippers changed. No longer viewed as skilled performers like musicians or comedians, in the ’50s strippers were gradually excluded from performing artists’ unions. Around the same time, general union membership began its precipitous drop from over 30 percent of the American workforce in the early 1950s to today’s 11 percent. All these factors—the demise of burlesque, the rise of drink-hustling as striptease moved to nightclubs, and the overall drop in union membership among the American workforce—led to the total disappearance of unionized strippers by the early 1960s. By the time the Lusty Ladies began our organizing campaign, even the memory that strippers had ever previously unionized had been all but erased, so that we were often hailed as the first unionized strippers.

Still, during the 1960s and 1970s, other sex workers continued to organize. One of the earliest acts of collective protest by sex workers occurred in San Francisco in August 1966, when a group of transgender sex workers, fed up with continual harassment from police and security guards, rioted at Compton’s Cafeteria in the Tenderloin District, then the city’s main gay neighborhood. A month after those riots, a group of mostly gay male youth called Vanguard, many of them hustlers, demonstrated against police sweeps targeting sex workers and other people involved in the underground economy of the street. Similarly, the New York City group Street Transvestite Action Revolutionaries sought to empower transgender sex workers. While generally associated with the rise of the gay liberation movement, these groups might also be seen as some of the earliest organizations in the nascent sex-workers’ rights movement.

In the early 1970s, the women working at the American Massage Parlor in Ann Arbor, Michigan, went on strike, protesting their treatment by the parlor’s owner, who had reconfigured their working hours without their consent. According to Lyndall MacCowan’s interview with one of the organizers, Denise Turner, the women picketed in front of the massage parlor during the strike, hired a lawyer, and filed a complaint with the National Labor Relations Board, which held a hearing over their wage and hour complaints. They ultimately won a settlement from the massage parlor and went on to organize a local decriminalization drive, in the service of which they created PEP (Prostitution Education Project) to educate other lesbian-feminists about sex-workers’ issues.

Similar activism was happening overseas. On June 2, 1975, one hundred sex workers occupied St. Nizier Church in Lyon, France, to protest the prison sentences that ten of them had received, as well as the failure of police to investigate the recent grisly murders of three local sex workers. This occupation triggered solidarity occupations around the world, including in Paris (where Simone de Beauvoir visited the occupiers), and San Francisco, where a solidarity strike was called by an emergent sex-workers’ rights group named COYOTE (Call Off Your Old Tired Ethics). Founded in 1973 by ex-beatnik Margo St. James and sociologist Priscilla Alexander, COYOTE sought to end the stigmatization of prostitutes and pushed for the inclusion of prostitutes’ voices in the burgeoning women’s movement. In the 1970s, COYOTE succeeded in abolishing mandatory STD testing, and the practice of jailing women arrested on prostitution charges under the guise of quarantining them to prevent the spread of STDs, and even temporarily halted the prosecution of those arrested for prostitution. Members of COYOTE had mentored and helped organize the young dancers who formed EDA in the early 1990s, the same dancers who had, in turn, helped us begin our own organizing effort.

Learning that our union campaign was directly related to a tradition of resistance among sex workers gave me a sense of connection to a larger struggle, a longer history, a bigger picture. This wasn’t just about some one-way windows, or even racial discrimination at one dumpy little peep show. It was about confronting the systems that commodified women’s sexuality for the benefits of everyone else involved—the customers enjoying the anonymity of the one-way booths, the videotapers exploiting those booths for pleasure and profit, and our management, who made a profit off the one-ways but passed their cost on to us—a cost we paid with our privacy, our safety, the trampling of our right to consent. Just like those Tenderloin hustlers, Michigan “massage” workers, and French hookers, I realized, we were standing up and refusing to be “the other” who made the system work for everyone else. This feeling of connection to something beyond the seemingly trite minutia of our day-to-day gripes and grievances sustained me and saw me through the election campaign and well beyond.

Before Jim even contacted the Lusty’s general manager, a dancer accidentally left a union card out in the dressing room. Josephine found it, and management went on high alert, with June flying down from Seattle to nip the unrest in the bud. A few days later, the one-way windows on stage were replaced with ordinary glass. Was management finally responding to our concerns? The answer came in a note from June attached to my paycheck that week:

To Lusty Lady Performers and Support Staff:

The Lusty Lady is conducting experiments with the one-way booths in response to Dancer and Support Staff concerns about cameras.

In an attempt to alleviate tensions and to create a more peaceful and communicative workplace, we have removed two of the three one-way windows on a trial basis. This experiment is for an indefinite period of time but will probably become permanent . . .

It was a bait and switch. Management had refused to concede any ground to us for months while would-be pornographers videotaped us without permission from the one-way windows. They had shamed me for speaking up about it in a meeting and told Star to find another job when she’d complained. But now that the unionization cat was out of the bag, management was suddenly attempting to appease us by redressing our grievance. I felt annoyed at this too little, too late gesture. Why couldn’t they have just listened to us and removed the one-ways when we asked? But I also felt gratified, because I knew the answer: our show of unity and power had scared them. Our plan was working.

Next, Jim contacted June to inform her directly that her employees were organizing. He asked for a meeting. As expected, she refused. Instead, she set up a series of mandatory, interrogation-like meetings between the show directors and various small groups of performers. We couldn’t refuse to attend, so to ensure that no one would get into an argument and give management a chance to fire her for insubordination, we spread the word that everyone should remain silent during the meetings, effectively denying management a platform from which to make their case against our union.

When it was time for my meeting, I found that I’d been grouped with Jane, Velvette, and Naomi, all union organizers. Management was trying to contain us and prevent us from infecting the less involved, more persuadable dancers. They didn’t realize that the very announcement of these meetings had inspired enough anxiety and anger in these “persuadables” that many had come to us for advice and support. We’d become de facto leaders. Again, I felt both annoyed and gratified: annoyed that management was attempting to contain us so as to more effectively manipulate the other dancers, gratified that management was again responding to our show of power. Both feelings galvanized me for the meeting and cemented my growing sense of power and duty to see this effort through.

Our meeting was with Collette, who had been promoted to show director recently when Josephine, expecting her first child, was fired (reputedly because upper management didn’t want to deal with maternity leave and childcare conflicts). Collette, so recently one of us, started the meeting nervously, clearly reciting from a memorized script: “Okay, so we just wanted to have these meetings to talk about some issues that might come up around the union. Does anyone know what a strike is?” All of us remained completely silent, looking Collette straight in the eyes. She waited expectantly. And waited. Her face turned a deep red, and she looked down. I sat before her like a tin soldier, refusing her aid or comfort, trying not to think of Collette with her head on my shoulder, in my lap onstage not long ago, welcoming nervous, newcomer me to the Lusty sisterhood. She shifted in her chair. “Okay . . . uh . . . well . . . Does anyone know that the union will have access to your home addresses and phone numbers?” Confidentiality was a big deal to strippers; she was trying to make us afraid of the union we were creating by implying that it was something outside of ourselves. We all stared back at her, repeating our stubborn chorus of silence. Velvette folded her arms. Collette had covered shifts for me, had shared drinks and cabs after late nights, and I sat like a marble rook, stoically waiting for her to move herself into check. “Fine. I-I-I . . .” she stammered, cheeks hot, tears pooling in her averted eyes. “You can . . . you can go.” We got up in a single motion, like troops on the march. We left the office without a word and she closed the door behind us in a hurry.

Star had a theory about why our sense of solidarity was so strong. She said that working naked together every day made us vulnerable to each other, and it made us trust each other. “Well, that’s Octopussy,” she said, mimicking her own thought process by way of explanation. “I’ve seen her naked ass, and she’s seen mine. So yeah, I’m gonna stand with her.” She was right, but the catch was that this sense of solidarity also kicked in as I watched Collette struggle under the weight of our collective and deliberate silence, banished from our naked sisterhood. She’d been one of us not a month before, and now I was letting her twist in the wind. Worse—with my silence, I was actively condemning her. I might as well have spit on her. But I also knew that Collette was choosing to be on their side against us. She was choosing to help them undermine our union, and if we wanted to win, we couldn’t allow ourselves to pity her for her own choices. In fact, if we wanted to win, we had to make it uncomfortable—even painful—for Collette to participate in management’s counterattack. So even though it felt awful, I did it anyway.

Onstage one night after the show directors were gone, we were brainstorming names for our union while we shook our asses at the windows. A window to one of the larger, wheelchair-accessible corner booths slid open. Inside the booth, I spotted a young, bearded man seated in a wheelchair. As I danced toward him, I noticed that his chair was tricked out with a keyboard facing the user, and an LED screen facing forward, glowing in the dark of the booth. I knelt down to get a better look and the customer jerked his hands around the keyboard. His muscle control wasn’t great, but he was smiling and obviously able to type; the LED screen suddenly lit up with the word “Hi!” I laughed and clapped with surprise and delight. Guys tried to talk to us all the time, but the glass and the loud music on our little stage made it impossible for us to really hear them most of the time. Unlike those comments and questions yelled through the glass and over the din of the jukebox, the words on the LED screen were plain as day. The dollar he’d inserted ran out, the window shade slid closed and I beckoned the other girls over as I heard the sound of coins dropping into the slot inside the booth. We all crowded around the window as the shade rose. The guy smiled again, looked Tara in the eyes, and batted with jerky motions at the keyboard: “What’s your name?” appeared on the screen and all the dancers clapped and smiled at the cleverness of this getup, and its suitability to our peep-show setting where communication was impeded by loud music and thick glass. The men in other windows craned their necks to see what was going on. How was the guy in the corner getting all the girls at once? The other dancers drifted back to the neglected windows, but I stayed at the corner near Tara, continuing our surreptitious conversation about a union name.

“I was thinking ‘Live Nude Girls United,’” I murmured.

Tara nodded thoughtfully. Corner guy typed busily and his LED screen lit up: “International Sisterhood of Ecdysiasts?” I laughed out loud, both at the clever, over-erudite title, and at the fact that he’d overheard our conversation, as the customers sometimes did when we weren’t careful to keep our voices down.

Tara glanced into the booth and smiled, but countered: “How about just ‘Exotic Dancers Union?”

She was right. It was descriptive, serious, and a nod to Daisy, Dawn, and Johanna’s Exotic Dancers Alliance, which had inspired us and helped us get our start.