Get past the flashing sign of the nude woman outside the Lusty Lady, in San Francisco’s touristy North Beach. Ignore the cashier changing men’s twenty-dollar bills into stacks of ones and fives in the shabby foyer. Don’t be distracted by the row of private booths, where you can slide a dollar into a machine, and the hatch-door raises to reveal a pair of naked ladies writhing in a mirrored chamber. This is actually a story about San Francisco real estate.
The Lusty Lady—not only the first strip club in the country to successfully unionize, but the first to function as a worker-run coöperative—announced this week that it will be closing down the peep show for good. Tora, the woman working the front desk, who, like several others quoted here, didn’t feel comfortable telling me her full name, explained the reason like this: “Our landlord is a dildo and didn’t want to negotiate.”
Some at the club see the demise of the Lusties—as the dancers call themselves—as evidence of how so much of what makes San Francisco progressive, and subversive, is getting pushed out in favor of the sleek and corporate. The nation’s only peep-show union shop, they’ll tell you, was smothered by a man behind what is considered the Walmart of San Francisco’s strip-club scene.
Talk to the landlord, Roger Forbes, and it’s about rent: the club didn’t make it in May, and had to go.
Since 1997, when unsavory work conditions prompted it to become what is believed to be the first strip club in the United States to successfully unionize, the Lusty Lady has been San Francisco’s answer to a mainstream strip-club industry that many Lusties dismiss as exploitative and paternalistic. The Lusties are some combination of Rosie the Riveter mixed with “Showgirls”—they tend to be feminist, queer, punk-rock types rather than the tanned, buxom blondes seen at many strip clubs. They belong to the Service Employees International Union, report to a purple-haired shop steward, earn hourly wages and overtime, and terminate workers only with “just cause.”
Facing an earlier closure of the club in 2003, the dancers bought the business from its owner for four hundred thousand dollars and formed a worker’s coöperative. For three hundred dollars apiece, dancers and support staff buy a stake in the business and a vote in all decisions affecting it. (As one exotic dancer told Tad Friend, who wrote a profile of the establishment for The New Yorker, “Things are so bad in other clubs that the Lusty Lady is a great ray of hope. It’s like, ‘you haven’t got all of us!’”)
Two years earlier, in 2001, Forbes bought the building that housed the Lusty Lady and more than doubled the club’s rent; it had been well under the market rate for adult establishments, he told me.
Forbes, a seventy-one-year-old Nevada-based strip-club and real-estate magnate, bought up San Francisco strip clubs in the nineties with various partners and now has a stake in nearly all of them in the city, including eight packed into a couple of neon-lit blocks in the North Beach neighborhood. He is also an investor in the company, BSC Management, that operates those clubs, and he owns some of the clubs’ buildings, too, he says. (These are the other type of strip club—decidedly non-union—where women are usually not employees, but independent contractors, paying stage fees each shift to dance.) Compared with the adult fantasyland of BSC Management’s clubs in the neighborhood, the Lusty Lady was always the “red-headed stepchild,” says the six-foot-four bouncer at one BSC-operated club, who goes only by “Fat Sam.”
In the last year, Forbes told me, the club was tardy on garbage bills and rent, and he could never find anyone in charge of paying. “I really got tired of that,” he said. “I was burned out having to deal with them.” After the Lusty Lady failed, in May, to make its rent of sixteen thousand five hundred dollars, Forbes filed an eviction lawsuit. The club eventually worked out an agreement in which Forbes would allow it to stay in the space until September 2nd without paying rent, as long as it vacated by then.
The Lusties and their allies see it differently. “You can say it was because you’re delinquent on rent … but the truth, is that there’s eighty thousand dollars that walks through this door every month that, once you close, is likely going to go to one of [Forbes’s] other establishments in the neighborhood,” said Scott “Big Red” Farrell, who became the Lusty Lady’s general manager last year.
Forbes countered that the Lady’s peep-show format doesn’t compete with his strip clubs. “If I was concerned about [the competition], I’ve had that building fifteen years now, I could have found a way not to extend their lease for the last ten,” he told me. Still, the landlord clearly is repelled by the Lusty Lady’s poor hygiene. “If you go in there, you’d be sickened by how they haven’t taken care of it. Every business needs to have money invested in it.”
Dancers say that part of the club’s rather tawdry atmosphere is due to both lack of funds for capital improvements and to the co-op structure itself; when you need people to agree on everything, it’s hard to make decisions at all, especially quick ones that are needed to save a tanking business. It’s “frustrating,” said the Lusties’ spokeswoman, who goes only by “Prince$$.” The workers even pondered scrapping the coöperative model altogether when they ran into financial trouble a year ago. “We kind of felt like the whole world was watching us,” said Andi, a man who was working the front desk in a stocking cap with cat ears, who wouldn’t give his full name. “We felt we had to make it.”
Instead they hired Farrell—an amiable porn model—who worked out a deal with the co-op in which he could make unilateral financial decisions. “I’ve kind of silenced them with the contract I have,” Farrell told me.
Farrell had lots of ideas, at first. He wanted to renovate the eyesore of a club from top to bottom. He wanted to broadcast peep shows on the Internet using Webcams. But when the coöperative informed him in May that they hadn’t made rent, his role became one of negotiator with Forbes. (Farrell had hoped to get the rent reduced to twelve thousand dollars in exchange for ceding some space to the neighboring property.) Forbes told me that he’s already found a tenant for the space, which he wouldn’t reveal other than to describe it as a “non-sex-related business,” in which he has no ownership stake.
Announcing the closure in an e-mail sent out to workers in the wee hours of Tuesday morning, Farrell beseeched them to “have our exit be dignified, lucrative, and fun.” On Wednesday afternoon, a woman who went by Roxanne Redmeat snapped on plastic gloves to collect the trash (dirty tissues, largely). A gaggle of blonde women celebrating a birthday rushed in and nervously asked how many of them could pile into one booth. A customer in a Giants sweatshirt walked around listlessly, burping. The dancers staged a tame show for a local news channel. Andi said that Rainbow Grocery, a local worker-owned store, had relayed its condolences, and said it was hiring.
Still, good wishes aren’t likely to keep the Lady open. “A lot of people are like, ‘It’s really sad to see you go! We really support you!’” Prince$$ told me in the club’s basement office, which was filled with Lusty Lady posters, business binders, and deflated blow-up beach props from a theme night. “It’s like, ‘Really? How much did you support us? Twenty? Two hundred? How much a day?’ I tell people, if there’s a local place they love, hollah with a dollah. You can’t pay the rent with Facebook likes.”
Photograph by Justin Sullivan/Getty.
