D’vine, Alani, Bijoux and Coco Presley: are these the names of strippers, or Beanie Babies? This piece makes a couple mild digs at strippers, but they’re just as mean to Beanie Baby collectors, so we forgive them.
Like lots of small businesses these days, San Francisco’s unionized, worker-owned peepshow has hit some seriously tough financial times. But they’re still fighting to stay open! You can support their efforts here.
Some background: The Lusties unionized in 1997 and became a co-op in 2003 and, in addition to being the only unionized peepshow co-op in the world, they also remain one of San Francisco’s only independent clubs. Instead of paying stage fees and hustling for private dances, they receive hourly wages and each own a share of the business. Which sounds great in theory, but seems to not have been working so well in recent years.
Just days after celebrating their 15th anniversary of unionization, rumors hit the web that the club could be shutting down soon, due to worker disagreements, competition from internet porn, their idealistic-but-possibly-impractical business model (it can’t be easy getting a strip club to function as a co-op, when dancers tend to be transient side), and the general state of the economy.
Quite a few of the co-op members have left (Jolene Parton and Sandy Bottoms tell their stories here), but some are still working hard to stay open, according to this article from the SF Chronicle which, I’ll warn you, is pretty judgy and offensive. How come in such a famously sex-positive city, the biggest newspaper can’t find someone to write about the Lusty Lady’s current situation without throwing in a little anti-stripper moralization?
I’ll resist the urge to dissect the Chronicle piece and all the ways it fails (it’s pretty obvious if you read it) and encourage everyone one more time to support the Lusty Lady.
Picture the scene. You’re sitting in a strange room with your friend, waiting for the near-stranger to come and give you instructions, and, you hope, some money. You look around at the expensive furnishings, and your friend, who is wearing just a bed sheet. “So…are you wearing any underwear?” you ask. “No,” they shoot back at you, and you both crack up. And then your client comes back in the room, and you eye them with a mix of ingratiation and just enough jut of the chin to let them know who’s in charge.
The mix of camaraderie, defiance, curiosity and sitting around naked in unfamiliar places is familiar to any sex worker. But the two characters onscreen are Sherlock Holmes and John Watson, who have been summoned to Buckingham Palace to work on a confidential case involving some compromising photos of a young royal. The photos in question are held by one Irene Adler, a dominatrix, who we also see in tantalisingly brief shots intercut with Holmes and Watson. While they look at tastefully posed photos from her website, she thumbs through real-time snapshots of them on a swanky phone. A game of wits is thus begun between Holmes and Adler, in which they bluff, drug, evade and outfox each other by turns for ninety convoluted minutes. [READ MORE]
I’ve never been to Pumps myself, but I can visualize a strip club with the lights on and the music off, the bartender counting out the till, the bouncer placing stools on the bar, and the dancers getting dressed. On a busy Friday night, this might be the first time they’ve all been in the same place at the same time. They can finally ask each other “what was up with those really drunk bitches?” and “did you see when they got kicked out and one of them screamed that she left her scarf and that we’re mean? It was amazing.” And then someone will note that maybe the supermoon brought out such bad behavior from a pair of women who didn’t look like they would be jerks. Some of them would give the two the benefit of the doubt and agree that they are probably nicer people when they’re not doing shots underneath a 14% bigger, 30% brighter moon. [READ MORE]
Like lots of small businesses these days, San Francisco’s unionized, worker-owned peepshow has hit some 
