dance

Anti-sex-industry campaigning promotes the idea that society is sexually out of control and we are in imminent danger of being devoured by raging commercial sex. The introduction to Three Naked Ladies says different: For as a long as there’s been music, women have danced for the entertainment and titillation of men: Dancers Rachel Aimee, Lauri Shaw and Jodi Sh Doff discuss whether dancing is ‘going downhill,’ whether dancers have to offer more than before and how regulation works and doesn’t work inside dance venues in New York from the 1970s to today. Look for the Three Naked Ladies and a new topic every Wednesday on laurishaw.com, thedirtygirldiaries.com, and hoshookerscallgirlsandrentboys.com. Here it is revealed that dancers were once referred to as hot lunches.

Rachel Aimee: I think there’s this myth among dancers that the industry is “going downhill” and that dancers across the board are expected to do more than they used to do. I know women who have been working since the 90s and refer to that decade as the “golden age of stripping,” when dancers got paid tons of money just to dance on stage and didn’t even have to touch the customers, but it seems . . .  that dancers have been doing more than just dancing for a long time.

Lauri Shaw: Yes, and in the 90s there were girls who said the same thing about the 80s.  . .

Jodi Sh Doff: In the late 70s there was a lot less regulation. It was years before AIDS reared its ugly head. Tourists, particularly Japanese men, could come off the plane at Kennedy airport, hand a cabbie a slip of paper with just the word “Cookie” on it. Places like the Cookie Jar and Winks were standing room only, bottomless, with stages no higher than, well, than your dinner table. Girls were there for your dining and dancing pleasure, hot lunches they used to be called. The money was insane and there was no hustle. You couldn’t sit and drink with a customer — there was no room. . . By the early 80s the Alcoholic Beverage Control (ABC) code called the shots, and if a club served booze, the girls had to be a minimum of six feet away from the customers and they had to have g-strings. No pulling aside the g-string (although girls did), no touching yourself or them (of course we did that too). That’s when a lot of stages moved behind the actual bar. Diamond Lils was a renegade bar, hence the lack of register tape or financial records of any kind.

RA: Yes, you couldn’t get away with anything like that at clubs I’ve worked at, but I think it’s the norm for lapdances to be pretty heavy contact and sometimes include “extras” (hand jobs, etc.), especially in private rooms. Then of course there are plenty of dancers who just dance and don’t do anything illegal.

LS: All of that’s true, in fact last year Scores lost its liquor license after getting busted for prostitution in 2007. But in the 90s, blatant tricks didn’t happen out in the open like that, out on stage for everyone to see. The rule was generally “no touching the girls onstage.”

RA: I’ve also heard cops arresting dancers just for allegedly agreeing to perform an illegal act. In cases where dancers get busted, of course the clubs never take any responsibility, even if they knew perfectly well what was going on and may have been making money off it.

LS: I do remember one place where a scenario like at Diamond Lils might have flown — the Harmony Theatre. I was only there once. They kept it really dark and made no pretence of being “entertainers.” I don’t think they even bothered serving drinks. I do not remember there being a bar at all. Men sat in those theatre seats and haggled with the girls over the price of a lapdance, which was often a euphemism for a hand job or more.

JshD:The original Harmony was uptown, on 48th Street, right by the Gaiety Burlesque. The Gaiety was an all male dance house with live sex shows and a lot of action going on back stage between sets. Working girls used to hang out in the back rows just to get off their feet for a while. It was a blast, I had a few guy friends who worked the Gaiety. But the Harmony used to be specialty acts, old school star strippers and girls that could pick a dollar up off the table with their cooch. Very impressive if you ask me. I believe the name was changed to the Melody Burlesque and then the Harmony re-opened downtown and it was that free-for-all you’re talking about. All lap dancing, no pretense of being “entertainment” at all.

LS: Exactly, it was a free-for-all. Men could buy anything they wanted at the Harmony, and working girls could buy the freedom to give the men whatever they wanted. There wasn’t a bouncer in sight. The shift manager sat in the coat room, away from all the action.

RA: I’ve never worked at a place that was that free and easy, but I’ve definitely preferred working at clubs where management was more hands-off. At some of the big corporate “gentlemen’s clubs” that have taken over modern-day Manhattan, management are constantly micro-managing everything the dancers do, policing lapdances and pressuring dancers to take customers to private rooms (because they make a huge cut). I think most dancers prefer the freedom to decide for themselves what they’re comfortable with. But in general I find it’s very difficult to have open conversations about who does what in strip clubs because it’s so easy to offend people. There’s so much stigma attached to sex work that it’s easy to unintentionally make someone feel bad if you’re not willing to do something that they are willing to do. Everyone has different boundaries, so I think that tension is always going to exist in the industry.

– Laura Agustín, the Naked Anthropologist

Imagine a restaurant where a waiter has to pay to come to work and hand over a portion of his tips: So commented a lawyer in Boston, where a group of strippers claim they are treated like indentured servants. That anyone would pay to wait on tables sounds absurd, but it is the conventional employment arrangement for strippers, pole dancers, table dancers and lap dancers. In so many sex-related businesses, normal employment practices go out the window: Owners claim that those dancing or having conversations and sex with customers are not employees but independent contractors, and that the contracts occur between worker and customer, with owners providing only drinks and a location. Which allows owners to wash their hands of any responsibility, conveniently.

This is ridiculous for more than one reason, not least the much higher prices owners can charge for those same drinks when they are imbibed in the presence of dancers. Employers routinely make the argument, however, implying that they are clean and their businesses are not raunchy. In the case of puticlub owners (big brothel and entertainment venues in Spain), owners make the collateral argument that their venues are in every way superior to other sex-industry venues, so that they should be allowed to operate while street sex work and other sorts of sex businesses should be prohibited. Yes, another self-serving argument.

Judge upholds strippers’ pay suit   The Boston Globe

By Jonathan Saltzman, 11 August 2009

About 70 strippers who worked at a Chelsea club are each entitled to recover thousands of dollars in damages in a class-action lawsuit because their employer misclassified them as “independent contractors,’’ depriving them of wages and tips, a judge has ruled. The suit, which a lawyer for one of the strippers described as the first of its kind in Massachusetts, seeks to recover money they should have received at King Arthur’s Lounge in Chelsea since 2004.

King Arthur’s Lounge . . .  did not pay the strippers any salaries, required each to pony up $35 to perform each night, and kept $10 of every $30 that each made for “private dancing’’ in secluded booths, according to a state judge who granted a stripper’s motion for summary judgment on the issue of liability.

The club had argued that selling alcohol is its main business, not putting on strip shows, and that the performers were independent contractors who provided extra entertainment akin to televisions and pool tables at a sports bar.

Suffolk Superior Judge Frances A. McIntyre dismissed that argument. “A court would need to be blind to human instinct to decide that live nude entertainment was equivalent to the wallpaper of routinely-televised matches, games, tournaments, and sports talk in such a place,’’ she wrote. “The dancing is an integral part of King Arthur’s business.’’

McIntyre certified the suit brought by Lucienne Chaves, a 32-year-old former stripper at the club, as a class action on behalf of her and other dancers who were misclassified as independent contractors, said Shannon Liss-Riordan, a Boston lawyer for the strippers. About 70 other strippers who worked at the club are part of the class proceeding to trial on damages.

Liss-Riordan said the strippers at King Arthur’s were like indentured servants, given the $35 fee they had to pay management. “In this case, we have an employer who was charging its employees to work,’’ she said. “They weren’t making minimum wage. They weren’t making any wage. Imagine a restaurant where a waiter has to pay to come to work’’ and hand over a portion of his tips. She estimated that some of the strippers will be entitled to tens of thousands of dollars in damages.

Under the Massachusetts tips law, waiters, bartenders, skycaps, and other service employees must earn a minimum wage of $2.63 an hour. Employers are prohibited from taking a portion of their tips, although a number of restaurants, bars, hotels, and other businesses have violated that provision. The strippers at King Arthur’s were allowed to keep all the tips they received when they performed in an open area, but had to turn over a third of what they made in the private shows, Liss-Riordan said. Chaves, who worked at the club from 2005 to 2007, declined to comment through her lawyers.

Robert R. Berluti, a Boston lawyer for King Arthur’s, said that some of the strippers made hundreds of dollars a shift. That raises questions about whether they suffered financially, he said, although the judge rejected a similar argument in her July 30 ruling. Berluti said McIntyre’s ruling reflected the fact that Massachusetts has one of the strictest laws in the country concerning misclassification of workers as independent contractors. “This was a case where the judge was saddled with a Massachusetts law that makes it an outlier with respect to the rest of the country,’’ he said, adding that his client is considering appealing.

In arguing that the strippers were independent contractors, King Arthur’s said that Chaves got to pick her own music, costumes, partners, and routines. The club also said it never gave her written rules to follow or documentation that she was an employee.

McIntyre rejected that argument, pointing out that the club hired and fired strippers, determined what hours they worked, and “apparently hired its dancers based solely on whether they ‘look good’ rather than individual performance experience or talent.’’