Who Will Start America’s Second Unionized Strip Club?

Will it be you? Or perhaps me? There’s been some good writing recently on the closing of the Lusty Lady in San Francisco, our nation’s first and only unionized strip club. At the Atlantic, Lily Burana remembers her time working there:

I stopped in to see the show upon the recommendation of a friend — a Central American labor activist who had worked there before decamping to Nicaragua. When the opaque window slid up, I was oddly charmed — four nude girls behind the glass were twirling in this tiny mirrored room, like some pervert’s idea of a music box. Some of them had tattoos, one of them had piercings, none of them were tan. It seemed, as these things go, almost demure — as if Riot Grrls had infiltrated Madonna’s “Open Your Heart” video. Fairly confident I wasn’t destined to run for public office, and therefore fairly insulated from future scandal, I decided to give it a whirl. As I waited to audition in the manager’s office, I inspected the schedule, noting that the dancers’ stage names fell well outside the “Brandy/Candy” norm. You could call yourself Jinxxx or Quasar or Cruella or Petite Fromage or Amnesia or Lil’ Chaos or Theremin Blue Thunder — no one would mind. For my audition, which was five minutes with the girls on stage dancing in nothing but dirty white high-top Nikes, I spontaneously picked the stage name “Tawdry.” After I was hired, I bought a terrifying wig of long synthetic auburn curls that made me look as if I were electrocuted on the set of an 80s hair metal video. I found an old white button down and plaid schoolgirl skirt at a Mission thrift shop, and the persona was complete.

The Lusty Lady has been in operation for almost 40 years, and in 2003, the dancers bought their business for $400,000 and started a workers’ collective (a moment covered wonderfully by Tad Friend in this subscriber-only New Yorker piece). But this year, after failing to make their rent, the Ladies were evicted by their landlord Roger Forbes, a real estate magnate from Nevada who has a stake in “nearly all” of the other, “decidedly non-union” strip clubs in the city. The New Yorker has a short account of the establishment’s last hours (“A customer in a Giants sweatshirt walked around listlessly, burping”) up here.