Neon Girls: A Stripper's Education in Protest and Power

By Jennifer Worley

NPR's Best Books of 2020

"Galvanizing and urgent....a slice of queer urban history and a necessary rethinking of sex work as a site of collective labor struggle."  –National Public Radio

A riveting true story of a young woman’s days stripping in grunge-era San Francisco where a radical group of dancers banded together to unionize and run the club on their own terms. 

When graduate student Jenny Worley needed a fast way to earn more money, she found herself at the door of the Lusty Lady Theater in San Francisco, auditioning on a stage surrounded by mirrors, in platform heels, and not much else. So began Jenny’s career as a stripper strutting the peepshow stage as her alter-ego “Polly” alongside women called Octopussy and Amnesia. But this wasn’t your run-of-the-mill strip club—it was a peepshow populated by free-thinking women who talked feminist theory and swapped radical zines like lipstick.

As management’s discriminatory practices and the rise of hidden cameras stir up tension among the dancers, Jenny rallies them to demand change. Together, they organize the first strippers’ union in the world and risk it all to take over the club and run it as a co-operative. Refusing to be treated as sex objects or disposable labor, they become instead the rulers of their kingdom. Jenny’s elation over the Lusty Lady’s revolution is tempered by her evolving understanding of the toll dancing has taken on her. When she finally hangs up her heels for good to finish her Ph.D., neither Jenny nor San Francisco are the same—but she and the cadre of wild, beautiful, brave women who run the Lusty Lady come out on top despite it all. 

A first-hand account as only an insider could tell it, Neon Girls paints a vivid picture of a bygone San Francisco and a fiercely feminist world within the sex industry, asking sharp questions about what keeps women from fighting for their rights, who benefits from capitalizing on desire, and how we can change entrenched systems of power.

 

• Language: English
• Publisher: Open Road Integrated Media
• Release date: Jun 9, 2020
• ISBN: 9780062971333

Jennifer Worley

Jennifer Worley is a professor of English at City College of San Francisco and President of the faculty union, AFT 2121. Her film Sex On Wheels, documents the history of San Francisco's sex industry and sex worker activism and has played at film festivals and universities worldwide. Her writing has appeared in Bitch, Captive Genders, Invisible Suburbs, The Queerist, and PRI's Outright Radio.

Book preview

Dedication

For Stephanie Kulick, our first, last,

and only Honeysuckle

Contents

Cover

Title Page

Dedication

1: How a Nice Girl Like Me

2: Polly

3: The Daily Bump and Grind

4: Exotic Dancers Union

5: Freelance

6: No Justice? No Piece!

7: Seizing the Means of Production

8: Under Nude Management

Epilogue: The Last Dance

Acknowledgments

About the Author

Copyright

About the Publisher

1

How a Nice Girl Like Me

Lusty Lady, San Francisco, by Noodle. B&W from original color photograph. Licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 2.0 Generic license (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/2.0/deed.en).

I waited for my girlfriend RJ at Caffe Trieste in North Beach, the San Francisco neighborhood that had been home to beatniks like Lawrence Ferlinghetti and Jack Kerouac forty years before. A few gray-bearded beats remained, hanging around City Lights bookstore, or pushing shopping carts through Washington Square, but Allen Ginsberg’s angel-headed hipsters had mostly been replaced by tourists in brand-new sweatshirts, purchased that morning at Fisherman’s Wharf when the damp, chilly fog crushed their dreams of a sunny California vacation.

Sitting at a table by the window in my army boots, hoodie, and thrift-store vintage dress with the sleeves cut off, watching nuclear families pass by on their way to dinner at the Stinking Rose and Michelangelo’s, I thumbed through the San Francisco Bay Guardian, scanning the Wild Side section of the personals. I loved reading the pervy ads: Seeking woman with hairy armpits to worship and serve. Generous compensation, and Lactating woman seeks generous adult-baby for afternoon or evening feedings. On the back page of the paper, I noticed an ad: The Lusty Lady Is Hiring! Women, 18+, earn up to $22/hr working part-time and having fun in a safe, clean, respectful environment. No hustle, no customer contact, no experience necessary. Full nudity required. Flexible hours—work days, nights, or weekends. Call 415-555-0191; ask for Josephine. My eyes were drawn again and again to $22/hr, a huge hourly wage for an entry-level job in 1995. By comparison, I was making $11 an hour in my current job as a junior book publicist. After scaling back my work hours recently to start taking classes toward my master’s degree in English literature at San Francisco State, I found myself struggling to pay my $325 rent, so the Lusty Lady’s promise to double my income certainly drew my attention.

When RJ showed up, I pointed out the ad. Is this where that girl from your photo class works? The one who did the naked self-portrait on top of the refrigerator? RJ went to the San Francisco Art Institute, perched atop nearby Russian Hill. We were both in our early twenties, both in school, but I’d gone straight from high school to William and Mary, graduating in four years flat, and was now in my first year of a master’s program in English. RJ, the child of hippies, raised in the communes of 1970s Northern California, had taken a more relaxed approach to higher education. After graduating from Berkeley High, she’d spent time at San Francisco State and UC Santa Cruz before finally enrolling in art school, where she painted huge, abstract canvases. We’d met a year earlier at Nolo Press in Berkeley, where we both still worked. She was my first girlfriend, and I hers, though I’d previously dated only boys, while she’d been out since age sixteen. She’d gone to her senior prom with a girl at a time when such an event warranted an article in the local paper, with a photo of RJ and the other seventeen-year-old girl in matching tuxedos.

RJ looked at the ad. Yeah, the Lusty Lady, she answered knowingly. A few of the women from my school work there, actually.

Does Delilah work there? I asked. Delilah was a friend of RJ’s who stripped at various clubs around the city.

No. She auditioned, but they said she had too many tattoos. But Faith, who you met, and this other woman, Mina, both work there. Faith was pretty—long dark hair, olive skin, petite build—but not particularly glamorous or va-va-voom. Before meeting her, I hadn’t realized that ordinary-looking women could be strippers. RJ said, The Lusty is right over on Kearny, near Broadway. I can show it to you if you want.

We walked down Grant, turned left on Columbus, then headed east on Broadway onto the south slope of Telegraph Hill, which has been a red-light district since 1848, when a small group of Chilean women settled there to seek their fortunes in the California Gold Rush. The women pitched tents on the hillside, taking in laundry by day, and hanging out red lanterns by night to sell sex to fortune seekers on their way to or from Sierra gold mines. When European, Chinese, and American women began arriving in Chilecito—as the hillside had come to be known—and hanging out red lights of their own, the Chilean women packed up and moved east to the mining towns of the Sierras. The newcomers took over Chilecito, some making their fortunes as madams of posh bordellos called parlor houses, while others worked cheap in open-air stalls and died of tuberculosis within months of their arrival.

By 1995, as RJ and I walked down Broadway, the block was lined with strip clubs, each watched over by a towering, garish patron deity: The neon-nippled likeness of topless dance pioneer Carol Doda beckoned acolytes to the Condor Club. A leering green snake with a glowing red apple in its mouth wrapped around a naked Eve above the entrance to the Garden of Eden. A mobster with a tommy gun called the faithful to worship at Big Al’s. A cancan girl kicked her garter-belted neon leg above the entrance to the Hungry I (possibly the world’s most semiotically sophisticated strip club name).

From the southwest corner of Broadway and Kearny, RJ pointed downhill: That’s it there. A big, old-timey-looking marquee hung above the doorway at a ninety-degree angle to the building, extending over the sidewalk. Smallish, cursive type read LUSTY LADY THEATRE, followed by large, ornamented all caps announcing LIVE NUDES & MOVIES. Disembodied hands pointed from either side to a sign-within-the-sign reading, in smaller caps, FREE ADMISSION. We walked down the hill and stood across the street from the theater, casing the joint like jewel thieves planning a heist. More signage adorned the face of the redbrick building, some providing factual information—PRIVATE BOOTHS, OPEN 24 HOURS—others editorializing hyperbolically—NAKED! NAUGHTY! NASTY! and HOT! HARD! HORNY! The most striking piece of hustle adorning the theater’s edifice was a larger-than-life neon nude. She moved relentlessly through the same three poses in an endless, naked three-step.

I stared at the dancing lady, hypnotized by her rhythmic motion: hip jutting left, then right, illuminated breasts and hair swinging first to one side, then to the other. I felt drawn to her pulsing neon waltz, like a sailor to a siren song, and I wondered what lay beyond the blinding signage, what mysterious magic drew the men who brushed past me on the sidewalk toward the Lusty Lady’s doorway, funneling in from up and down and across the street as if reporting for some sort of derelict duty. What kind of women were in there, and what were they doing to draw such an unrelenting stream of male humanity? I pictured a raucous speakeasy full of moonshine, bawdy laugher, jangling piano music—a naïve, romantic vision drawn from movies and novels. Despite my fascination, I hesitated, not yet brave or broke enough to cross the Lusty Lady’s threshold.

The next day, RJ and I biked to the BART train together, and then to the publishing house where we both worked. We’d met on the job a year before but didn’t start hanging out until we ran into each other one night on Sixteenth Street in the Mission District. RJ was on her way to Komotion to see Mudwimmin, one of the many all-female bands playing San Francisco in the ’90s. I hadn’t heard of them, but asked RJ if I could go with her. She shrugged and said okay. Though I wasn’t gay (yet), I was drawn magnetically to the exciting all-girl world of San Francisco’s ’90s dyke subculture, where girls shaved their heads, rode motorcycles, and danced at clubs where massive, butch bouncers in leather would throw voyeuristic men down the stairs and out the door. The Mudwimmin show was very much of this world—a dark, smoky basement club, a lead singer like a girl Mick Jagger, sinewy and boy-sexy in low-slung red leather pants. The music was heavy, the crowd tough, gutter-punk dykes.

After that night, RJ and I began reverse-commuting together from San Francisco, where we both lived, to our East Bay workplace. Sometimes I’d pick her up in my old Volkswagen, but often, we’d bike to the same BART station, ride the train together, and then bike to the office from the station at the other end. I admired her ability to turn the things we obsessed over, like makeshift shrines and popular culture, into actual art. For a recent project, she’d created a parody of a risqué, early ’90s Calvin Klein men’s underwear ad campaign, hand-sewing an entire collection of white cotton men’s jockey shorts, some tailored to a comical, nipple-high rise, others embellished with various decorative elements, still others fashioned into backpacks or purses. She’d photographed me, herself, and other women in the shorts, bare chested just like Mark Wahlberg in the original ads. She hung these photos at a gallery opening, built a runway, and held a fashion show at the opening, with fey boys and butch girls modeling the crazy undies, and me closing the show as a BVD bride, the crazy high-rise tighty-whities pulled up just under my exposed breasts. RJ’s masculine confidence in her technical skill and her artistic vision made it strangely safe for me to walk the runway bare breasted. Against this backdrop of fin de siècle irony, postmodern critical theory, and urban dyke subculture, I’d fallen slowly in love with this butchy, brainy barely-a-girl.

The morning after RJ and I scouted out the Lusty Lady, I settled into my desk at work to write a press release. I suddenly remembered that I had a paper due the next day in my Romantic Poetry seminar, which I hadn’t even started. Although I was taking only two classes at the time, both required hundreds of pages of dense, difficult reading per week, and thirty-page final papers, and my full-time job left barely any time to study. I was planning to apply to PhD programs once I’d completed my master’s. I knew I would need to make As in every class to be accepted into a good doctoral program, but I had only a vague sense of the profession to which I aspired. My own parents had not gone to college, so my only contact with professional academics had been as a college student. From my vantage point, the job looked to involve reading books, writing books, and talking about books. Perfect! I’d thought.

As I headed home from work, I counted the money in my wallet. $24. It was Tuesday and I wouldn’t get paid until Friday, so when I arrived at the BART train station, I slipped into the elevator and rode it directly to the train platform, avoiding the fare gate. On the train, I picked up a Guardian someone had left on the seat next to me and glimpsed another Lusty Lady ad on the back page, thinking to myself that if I made $22 an hour instead of $11, I could cut my work hours in half, still make rent, and finally have enough time to study. But . . . stripping? Could I do that? I grappled with the idea as the train bumped and screeched through a tunnel.

I felt uneasy about pursuing the idea, in spite of the promise of more money and free time that would allow me to pursue my academic interests and career. Yes, some of my discomfort was the detritus of my Catholic upbringing, and if the term slut-shame had been coined at this point, I might have fallen back on it as an easy, shorthand way to dismiss my unease. But my real hesitation was more complex. I felt disappointed in myself, saw it as a personal failing that I was not moving upward on the ladder of class mobility. I was the seventh of eight children of parents whose educations had topped out with high school diplomas, and while my parents had managed to move geographically out of their working-class Buffalo neighborhood of two-family flats to a modest suburban house, they never made more than $35,000 a year. Still, they’d managed to send me to an out-of-state liberal arts college, and as a result, I could always feel, at my back, upward mobility’s winged chariot hurrying near, a sense of responsibility to make good on the promise of a college education, a promise my parents had been denied. So the idea of needing to work a job that was not just unskilled but everywhere stigmatized felt like an unmistakable sign of my failure, a humiliation far more potent than any feeling slut-shaming could evoke.

A more conscious source of disquiet as I struggled with the decision was my nascent feminism, also awakened in higher education. I’d majored in women’s studies (ironically setting myself up for the fiscal crisis I now sought to resolve by making myself into a sex object) before the hegemony of sex-positivity and slut-walks, so the idea of stripping seemed anathema to my most deeply held convictions. I had read the work of feminist legal theorist Catharine MacKinnon, anti-pornography advocate Andrea Dworkin, and other feminist writers like Susan Griffin and Kathleen Barry, who saw pornography, prostitution, and other parts of the sex industry as institutions that reinforced and eroticized our culture’s misogyny and sexism. So I worried not that stripping would make me some sort of unmarriageable harlot, nor that I would be beaten down and ruined by an exploitative industry run by brutal pimps, but, rather, that participating in the sex industry would make me complicit in an institution that harmed other women.

Then again, grinding out press releases and booking author interviews for an entry-level paycheck that left me dodging the BART agent sure didn’t feel like liberation. Was my feminist anti-porn ethic just another ideological shackle keeping me on the edge of poverty, working for the man in a pink-collar sweatshop, barely getting by, like in that Dolly Parton song? Was working for near-poverty wages really a feminist cause worth defending? I thought about the $24 in my wallet, which would be reduced to $20 after tonight’s burrito. I ripped the back-page ad from the paper and stuffed it into my backpack.

If this were a movie about a girl getting a job at a strip club, I would go to the club, ask to see the manager, and be pointed to an indifferent, middle-aged male club owner wearing a gold chain, smoking a cigar, and counting money. He would tell me he’s not hiring, but then one of the strippers would throw a drink in a customer’s face, yell I quit, and stalk out, so he’d change his mind and tell me, All right, honey, you can start tonight.

This was not how things went for me at the Lusty Lady. When I finally got up my nerve to call the number in the ad, I was transferred to a sweet-voiced woman named Josephine who invited me to come in the next day to meet her and see the show.

As I stood quaking in the lobby of the club the following afternoon, I imagined the strip joints I’d seen in the movies: a woman dressed in a long, sparkly, form-fitting gown would dance on a proscenium stage to wah-wah trombone notes punctuated by the hi-hat. Coyly or brazenly or nonchalantly, she would strip off layers of clothing specially made for easy removal, ending up in panties and pasties just as the song ended. The dancer would slip offstage to wild applause and randy hoots from red-faced, gin-soaked men in suits, their ties and shirt collars loosened.

At the Lusty, I was about to see a very different type of show. In the lobby, I was met by the smiling, pert Josephine, a former dancer who looked far too young and fresh-faced to be a former anything. As she spoke, Josephine gave me a subtle once-over, inspecting me, I now know, for tattoos, track marks, facial piercings, and crow’s-feet. Apparently, nothing visible in my street clothes ruled me out, and she invited me in to view the show. She turned to the surly punk rocker at the front desk and spoke in what seemed to me some sort of strip club Esperanto: Clean up on eleven, and five ones for a see-show. He muttered into a mouthpiece, and I heard the words Clean up live show eleven over a PA system from farther inside the theater. He handed Josephine some bills, and she turned back to me, smiled, and led me through red velvet curtains into a dimly lit, carpeted foyer, past a wall of red doors numbered four through ten.

I heard the muffled sound of Jerry Lee Lewis singing Great Balls of Fire. Signs above the doors were illuminated with the words vacant (in green) or occupied (in red). Shady men moved like ghosts through the halls, appearing and disappearing through various doors, dropping tissues into trash cans, passing one another silently, like spirits on different astral planes. None of them approached or even looked at us. Even with her sweet, ponytailed, fresh-scrubbed look, Josephine’s crisp, step off carriage seemed to act as a reverse dog whistle that only men could hear. I was impressed by the respect she commanded.

Another punk rock guy pushed out of booth 11 with a wheeled mop-bucket, a spray bottle, and a roll of paper towels. He mumbled, All set, to Josephine, and she nodded. I noted with a secret thrill that I’d just watched a white man clean a room (albeit a very, very tiny room) on the orders of a Black woman—my first inkling of the many reversals of the outside social order I would encounter in this looking-glass world.

Josephine opened the door marked 11, and Great Balls of Fire got louder. She smiled again and gestured for me to enter. I stepped inside and she followed, closing and locking the door behind us. We sat on a built-in wooden bench, painted matte black like the walls and ceiling. The booth was completely dark, except for a small, illuminated coin slot and bill acceptor whose sign read 25ȼ, $1, $5, $10, $20. Josephine slipped some singles into the bill acceptor. I heard the robotic sound of the machine registering the bills’ values, then a low hum as a window shade slid up, revealing a moodily lit room filled with women, all nude but for scant wisps of fabric hinting at costumes. Hat, boots, holster—cowgirl! White shoes, white thigh-highs, little white cap—nurse! Cat-eye glasses, tiny cardigan draped on the shoulders and buttoned at the neck—librarian! Plaid