Jennifer Worley - Neon Girls: A Strippers Education in Protest and Power

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bookstore, or pushing shopping carts through Washington Square, but Allen Ginsbergs angel-headed hipsters had mostly been replaced by tourists in brand-new sweatshirts, purchased that morning at Fishermans Wharf when the damp, chilly fog crushed their dreams of a sunny California vacation.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 Michelangelos, 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 hourswork 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 masters degree in English literature at San Francisco State, I found myself struggling to pay my $325 rent, so the Lusty Ladys 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 Id gone straight from high school to William and Mary, graduating in four years flat, and was now in my first year of a masters 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, shed spent time at San Francisco State and UC Santa Cruz before finally enrolling in art school, where she painted huge, abstract canvases. Wed met a year earlier at Nolo Press in Berkeley, where we both still worked. She was my first girlfriend, and I hers, though Id previously dated only boys, while shed been out since age sixteen. Shed 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 RJs 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 prettylong dark hair, olive skin, petite buildbut not particularly glamorous or va-va-voom. Before meeting her, I hadnt 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 Chilecitoas the hillside had come to be knownand 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 Als. A cancan girl kicked her garter-belted neon leg above the entrance to the Hungry I (possibly the worlds most semiotically sophisticated strip club name).

From the southwest corner of Broadway and Kearny, RJ pointed downhill: Thats 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 theaters 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 Ladys 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 musica nave, romantic vision drawn from movies and novels. Despite my fascination, I hesitated, not yet brave or broke enough to cross the Lusty Ladys threshold.

The next day, RJ and I biked to the BART train together, and then to the publishing house where we both worked. Wed met on the job a year before but didnt 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 hadnt heard of them, but asked RJ if I could go with her. She shrugged and said okay. Though I wasnt gay (yet), I was drawn magnetically to the exciting all-girl world of San Franciscos 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 worlda 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.