Strippers on Strike

How a group of North Hollywood strippers are reckoning with workplace safety violations and racism in the sex work industry.

It was spring. I was standing beside the dish pit at the cafe I work at, chatting with a coworker. They mentioned to me that someone they knew was striking at their workplace. I also knew that this person they were talking about happened to work at a strip club in North Hollywood. I was intrigued. My coworker told me about the mistreatment of the dancers by the club managers, how most of the strippers walked out in protest of retaliatory firings and were starting to strike on the club’s busiest nights. The establishment is called Star Garden (lovingly nicknamed “Star Garbage” by some supporters of the workers’ cause). And it was just the beginning of a massive reckoning not just for Star Garden, but for the American labor movement and the sex work industry. *

*To be clear, when I say “the beginning” I’m referring to the beginning of the Star Garden movement specifically and what will hopefully become the second successful unionization of strippers in the country. As was pointed out by many BIPOC sex workers who have been working for labor rights in their industry, namely organizations such as Haymarket Pole Collective, and Stilettos Inc and others, Black women, sex workers of color, Transgender and Queer folks have been on the ground doing this work for years. And some of these groups were critical of the way that Stripper Strike NoHo chose to approach their strike. A main complaint was that the dancers of Star Garden were not involved in the activist movements led by BIPOC folks until some of their causes directly impacted them. And their privilege as white dancers carried them far, materially and socially, before they got involved in the work of unionizing and striking. 

It’s not my place as a white woman who is not a stripper to say if the Star Garden strippers adequately addressed the issues that were brought up by these groups. I am trying to situate myself appropriately in the movement while retaining my excitement for the cause. I do however think that this movement is important, inspiring and ultimately for the good of the industry and for labor rights as a whole.

This movement was, as all are, imperfect. And I don’t mean to use “imperfect” here as a way of making racism or erasure of the work of BIPOC activists seem inevitable or justified, but rather as an acknowledgement of the ways that our privilege binds us to our own limitations. Our humanness, our experience, our prejudices sometimes keeps us from the summit of our most ideal selves— or even from the single step up to our slightly better selves.

I have to admit, I worry that this entire piece may be an unwelcome insertion into this issue. But despite my best efforts, it may be impossible to extricate myself from my biases entirely. I also don’t want to live or write for a “fear of being canceled” because I think that’s an egotistical concern more than an altruistic one. Moreover, I don’t necessarily ideologically believe in canceling, nor do I think it often produces the intended results. That doesn’t mean that I think that people who demand accountability from individuals or groups who have done harm are obligated to tone police themselves. I am mindful of the ways in which my own identity and lapses in judgement might be impossible to disguise in this piece. And in fact, I don’t think they should be hidden, I think they should be pointed out and addressed whenever possible. 

You’ve just witnessed my own personal reckoning with my relationship to this story. Here’s a snippet of the Star Garden strippers examining their own, you can find the full post on their instagram:

So, as the spring, summer and fall months wore on, asking for updates about the strike became a part of my regular catch ups with my coworker: How was your weekend? Can you believe this astrology we’re having? How's the stripper strike going? 

Call it the idleness of white privilege, call it a fundamental underestimation of my own power to elicit change, call it “ being too busy”, for whatever reason (that I now find myself pretty embarrassed by), I only ever asked for updates via my coworker’s reports. I never really took the initiative to actually go out to one of their strike events. Oh the dissonance between my values and my actions! But as I began writing more frequently, as I began creating more digital content and enmeshing myself more deeply with my newfound Los Angeles community, it became obvious to me where I wanted to turn my attention as a writer and community member. 

I reached out to Velveeta, one of the strippers at Star Garden who knows my coworker and has been organizing the movement with her fellow strippers from the start. We talked on the phone one afternoon for a casual, conversational interview. I was in my sweats, pacing around my apartment and hunching over my laptop (yes, a girl can do it all ). From the sounds of it, it seemed like Velveeta was making herself lunch. 

Before our conversation, I familiarized myself with the particulars of the strike that I wasn’t able to ascertain from the dish-pit-side chats alone— probably because a customer needed me to speed walk a $10 chocolate croissant to their table with a blended air of subservience and feigned enthusiasm. (Now tell me that’s not a performance that sex workers have perfected).  

The strike and grievances of the dancers have been pretty well documented by both the Strippers Strike NoHo social media accounts and at this point by several mainstream media organizations including Vice, Buzzfeed, LA Times, and Teen Vogue. The main inciting incidents of the strike include a time when one dancer, Regan, was locked out of the club and fired for getting into a fight with a bartender who “joked” about a customer stalking and killing her. Another dancer, Sinder, was assaulted by a customer while dancing and was fired for bringing up the incident with management. Yet another dancer confronted a customer about breaking club policy by filming a dancer without her knowledge or permission and management fired her for “causing drama”. (Oh the feminist killjoy, forever the mascot of women, workers, and scapegoats everywhere). Another important piece of context about this story is that after over 7 months of picketing on the club’s busiest, most lucrative nights (Thurs, Fri, Sat), the dancers have been taken on by Actor’s Equity and are up for a vote by the National Labor Relations Board to be allowed a union election (a position they are set to win the majority of easily). So the picketing chapter is closing as the formal unionizing and negotiations chapter begins. 

*And by the way, when I say “fired”, what I’m referring to is a kind of seedy, “quiet firing” where management told them to “take some time off” or simply didn’t schedule them for more shifts or, as in the case that finally set the walk-out and subsequent strike into motion, locking the dancers out of the club when dancers arrived for a shift. 

Now back to the call with Velveeta. She told me that what started as a conversation with management then became a petition signed by several dancers, which then became a lock-out/walk-out, which then became a strike, which then became a unionizing effort which has finally culminated in one final strike night and a vote to join the Actor’s Equity Union. After the union vote negotiations will begin between Actor’s Equity and Star Garden. Velveeta and I spoke during the last week in October as plans for the final strike on Nov 5th were underway (two nights ago as of the publishing of this piece). 

I asked her about what she’d learned from this experience. Velveeta told me that she’d tried to unionize at her last club when similar safety concerns, issues of misogyny, racism and unjust treatment arose. She believes she was fired retaliatory from that job, and has used her experience there to help inform the action around Star Garden. 

“I learned to really seize the moment,” she said, “When there is a pressing issue that people are fired up about and angry about— you have to seize that energy to get people to act.” 

I think this wisdom is a transformative one. Many of us are instructed by parents, mentors, friends, the media to leave our emotions out of our decision making processes. It’s thought to be imprudent, reactionary, impulsive, and ultimately destructive to insist that our internal strife is indicative of the change that we must work to materialize in the real world. But here was a lesson in emotional intelligence—or perhaps rather, in the intelligence of emotions. It’s a recognition of the righteousness of feeling, the trust that the swell of anger that arises in unjust situations is not merely a tidal wave passing through us, but rather the body’s way of holding onto something true and important for long enough for us to catch a real glimpse of it, and allow it to inform our actions. Velveeta’s emphasis on “seizing the moment” is a recognition that the anger will slip away again if we always allow intellect to subsume the senses. But these strippers trusted the feelin’, baby!

The strippers organized and with the help of community allies. They gained a social media following and took to the streets every weekend to spread their message— and they did it in style. Their pickets often had a theme, which included pageant night where dancers dressed as beauty contestants, (among my favorites were “Miss Demeanor” “Miss Andry” and “Miss Behaved”) a pool party that involved a sidewalk slip-n-slide, and “Oompa Loompa night” which, I mean, is just perfect. Their efforts expanded the boundaries of what labor movements could be and who they could aim to protect, and I can only hope they set a new fashion precedent for future strikers! 

What surprised me as I did my research about the strike was just how novel it is for a strip club to unionize. The only other stripper’s union in the US was formed in 1996 by the dancers at Lusty Lady, a club in San Francisco that has since closed. Some members of this movement at the Lusty Lady have taken on a “Godmother” role to the Star Garden dancers, resulting in a sweet and powerful communion between sex workers across the generations. Sex work is oft referred to as one of the oldest businesses, which makes my amazement at this being only the second union of strippers in the country even more profound. This strippers of NoHo strike isn’t just a radical and important and powerful movement, it’s history. 

And in part due to the historic nature of the movement, the strike has gotten some mainstream media attention. The dancers have been interviewed for print, TV and web (am I 100 years old using a term like “web”). Velveeta characterized their relationship with the media as overall very positive. She said, “The media has been really great with us, everyone has taken for granted the seriousness of our struggle - one thing they haven’t been great about is highlighting the issues with racism in the clubs because our complaint that motivated us was safety”. This brings us to the other reason the Star Garden strippers strike has been so successful: most of the dancers are white.

Velveeta said that the dancers decided to really focus on safety concerns in their campaigning in part as a strategic move. It’s not new information that whitewashed movements gain the most traction, they gain more media attention because they present a sanitized, “unthreatening” image of struggle, they are taken seriously by lawmakers and by everyday citizens (especially white citizens with more social capital). And this deference to the validity of the struggle that a white person faces is in part what composes their privilege, privilege that must be redistributed in order to truly form an inclusive movement. The women’s suffrage movement is a hallmark example of white women taking center stage and excluding women of color from the spoils of victory, despite many of the efforts originating from the very marginalized groups from which material benefits were withheld. 

Essentially, any white suburban mom watching the news can get behind a catch phrase as cross-stich-onto-a-pillowable as “Safety First”. But something just as true and just as important as, say,  “This Is Racist”, is more offensive to the white-pseudo-christian-American sensibilities.

And an unfortunate reality of organizing any movement for social and political change is grappling with how exactly to approach the presence and power of such white sensibilities. And so in some ways the strippers at Star Garden were forced to cater to the weakest link — white defensiveness and denial. They also though are mostly white themselves and didn’t want to speak on behalf of a struggle they did not personally experience. If they did make racism in the industry and at the club central, they are criticized for being white saviors, for speaking on behalf of an experience they cannot understand, and for doing it simply to virtue-signal and provide the appearance of an intersectional approach without necessarily providing the substance of one. But if they didn’t make these racist issues central, they risked repeating the mistakes of many social movements of the past that have been co-opted by white members of the movement at the expense of non-white members.

In our conversation, Velveeta was open and swift about her estimations of management on this issue, “Steve and Jenny are horribly racist” she said. She raised issues of management kicking out black customers without cause, not allowing black dancers to audition, and saying flat out racist things as just a few examples from which she draws her justified conclusion. “But racism,” she said, “is unfortunately not the galvanizing force in our society that it should be— we bring it up all the time [to the media] and it isn’t covered. It’s frustrating for Black strippers and Black stripper activists that are following our campaign and feel left out— some have gotten negative coverage or have been called “ratchet” in the comments of our videos. Our privilege [as white dancers] has definitely played out in our coverage and that’s been the main thing that’s held our campaign back.” 

I want to dwell for a moment on the particular racism of the Star Garden Management. Of course, the blatant racist hypocrisy of removing black customers who have committed no offense or at least, no different offense than white customers is infuriating given that management refused to remove men who posed an actual threat to their dancers’ safety and wellbeing— the main reason the dancers started their campaign in the first place. 

We see here that the forces at play in the legal and social systems resolve in the same manner on the microlevel, a kind of trickle-down racism perhaps (or trickle-up, depending on which way you see it). But either way there are The Rules, and then there are The Rules for White People, and then there are The Rules for Black and Brown People. And as fundamentally, morally, spiritually, philosophically wrong as it is, it is perhaps in equal measure unsurprising that black guests were treated with less decency, less leniency, less dignity and more severe punishment than white ones. Why would this industry, this topless dive bar in North Hollywood, be the exception to what we know is always the rule?

Here too, there is a chilling kind of enforcement of what “kinds” of men can consume or derive sexual pleasure from a white and often female body. Black men have been purposely positioned by white culture as a sexual threat to white women over the course of history and even still to this day. This has had,  as I’m sure we all know, devastating, human-rights-violating consequences for the Black community. That coupled with the fact that we also come from a deep history of the simultaneous devaluation of Black women and the over sexualization of them. And so here we are, in 2022, and the club doesn’t want “too many” Black dancers. And even if they did hire them, they’d almost certainly be treated worse than white dancers. 

My hope in focusing on this point of racism and making reference to the history from which it all springs is not to preach or virtue signal or pile on or to over-explain dynamics which communities of color know well and need not be reminded of. It is in part to make up for some of the lack that the mainstream media left in their coverage of the dancer’s strike efforts. But also, I think most of my readers are people I grew up with or went to college with, and all of those places (Orinda CA, Oakland CA, Madison WI) are heavily segregated, often financially rich, and often desperately socially coddled communities. These are places where people like me have all the degrees and extracurricular accolades a mother could hope for, but yet we suffer from sometimes severe deficits in understanding the ways in which our communities enforce and protect racism and systemic violence.

As Velveeta said on our phone call, sometimes the Star Garden strippers feel “damned if we do, and damned if we don’t” on issues of highlighting the racism in their industry. But they’ve chosen to try and to take accountability when necessary which I think does count for something. 

That was the lesson I learned from all of this. I knew at the dish pit in March that this strike was happening. But I was afraid to show up imperfectly, I was afraid to sacrifice something as precious as time without the promise of success or social acceptance. But the sunk cost fallacy will not deliver us from evil. So even though I was honestly embarrassed to be there so late in the fight, I’m glad I did attend the final strike. I don’t know if I personally did any good, but I hope that seeing a crowd of supporters enlivened the spirits of those who have been working so hard for months on this strike. Plus, I got to wear my favorite shirt in the perfect setting.

The final strike was themed “Graduation” and the dancers were adorned in gowns, caps, and of course, lots of fun accessories and lingerie. Awards were given out to the Valedictorian stripper for graduating “Mangum Cum Loudly”, the Star Garden security guard was given the “Biggest Bootlicker” award. (He was the only recipient of an award last night who appeared to be rather ungrateful.) At the strike I made friends, felt safe, felt righteous anger coursing through me, and I enjoyed a hilarious, flamboyant night of good-ole-fashioned community organizing.

Tom Morello of Rage Against the Machine came and roused the crowd with a few pro-union acoustic numbers. He spoke into the megaphone before and after his performance and I’ll leave you with his words, “I truly believe that the future of the labor movement in this town and in this country will not be made in the courts, it will not be made in congress, it will not be made on fox news or on social media…it will be made on the sidewalks of North Hollywood tonight.”