 Sorry about that, let's see. All right, Jenny, I'm gonna mute you. What for now? So you'll mute me. Okay. Yes, okay. And we're about to go live. And the room is open. All right, we'll get started. Hello, friends. We'll get started in just a moment. As we let the meeting room fill in, I see it's getting darker. Little welcome, everyone. Welcome, welcome, welcome. Give it just a few more minutes to get folks in. Hello. It's so nice to see people's face. I know like some folks don't like to turn on their camera, but it really is nice to see some humans at events, some end-dogs, humans, end-dogs. It is seven o'clock. And you are at San Francisco Public Library's virtual library. Yay. And we're celebrating summer stride. It is summer and it's not just for kids. So sign up for your summer stride. Do your reading, 20 hours of reading gets you our iconic tote bag. And it's very cute artwork by San Francisco's own Kehlani Juanita, who draws this beautiful work and has a children's book out now with chronicle books called Ta-Da. And you could also do your summer tracker if you feel like coloring, which also is not just for you kids. So lots of things you can read neon girls and be done with your 20 hours or maybe two more books and be done with your 20 hours and get your tote bag. So check in, you can do it online, you can download, you can go pick up your tracker at any of our libraries that are open. So as I mentioned, we are here for Jenny Warley and her book, Neon Girls, Strippers Education in Protest and Power. I am excited about this. It was on my radar for several months now. So I'm so happy that Jenny agreed to be with us during summer. And as I mentioned, we'll be having author talks every Tuesday night, June, July and August, and a couple more throughout that aren't on Tuesday. We wanna welcome you to the unceded land of the Ohlone Tribal people and acknowledge the many wrong mutish Ohlone Tribal groups as the rightful stewards of the lands in which we live and work here in our Bay Area. The library is committed to uplifting the names of these community members from these nations with whom we live together and encourage you to learn more about first person culture and land rights. And we have a lot of hosted many programs. I have a reading list and as soon as we get going, I'll put that in the chat box. And the document that I link will also have links to Jenny's book and any books or anything that comes up tonight that I can link back, I will do that. And priority is me linking it back to our library. So that's my first choice. But it will have lots of other info about the library and upcoming events. All right, now I'm gonna breeze through some library events just quickly. We have, like I said, almost every, I mean, for sure every Tuesday night, but also June 19th, the amazing Haban Germa. June 21st, I wanna say is Marlon Peterson along with Kesey Limone, amazing. So just come through, we have so much happening over summer, including another, our second round of Total SF Book Club with Heather Knight and Peter Hartlove of Total SF, SF Chronicle, should be super fun. And we are celebrating Pride. So we have a lot of events through June, including the amazing Sarah Schulman with her very thick book. This would definitely get you past your 20 hours if you pick this one up. And historic, Lots of San Francisco history, which we love. And of course, our own Tom Almiano with his book, Kiss My Gas. We will be, we are celebrating Brontès Pernell who was in the library, virtual library, June 1st, he kicked us off and he definitely kicked us off. And you can catch that event on our YouTube, but we'll be talking about his book, 100 Boyfriends, June 28th. Asian Art Museum tomorrow, telling us about all the amazing data sets. And Saturday, I really, really, really am pushing folks to come to this one because photographer Danny Lyon will be in the audience or will be a panelist and talk with photographer Louis Watts, who's also pretty San Francisco Bay Area famous. But if you are familiar with Danny Lyon's name, you are familiar with his photos. He is iconic, many of them. And so his new film, SNCC is out, will be screening and having a chat afterwards. So please come through. As I mentioned, June 21st, Marlon Peterson, Kisi Lamone, moderated by her own poet laureate, Tango Isen-Martin. I cannot say enough about these writers, they are just powerful. All right, tonight's event, we have Jenny Warley and talking about her book, Neon Girls, A Stripper's Education in Protest and Power. Jenny is a former San Francisco lusty lady dancer and her book gives an account of how she led her fellow co-workers to create the first stripper's union in the world and take control of the operation of their club. And if you're San Francisco Oakland Bay Area, you know the lusty lady. If you've been around for any amount of time, definitely some great San Francisco history. Jenny Warley 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 sex industry and worker activism and has played at film festivals and universities worldwide. Her writing has appeared in bitch, captive genders, invisible suburbs, the queerists and PRI outright radio. And with that, I will stop sharing and we're gonna have a reading and lots of time for Q&A. So get those Q&As ready. Tell me I was sharing. I hope I was sharing. I think I was. All right, Jenny, welcome to the virtual library and let's unmute you. Yes. I'm asking you to unmute, but this is not doing. I didn't realize it was a hello. Hi, thank you. Thank you so much, Anissa. That was so, that was lovely. And, oh, just I need to make some corrections to my bio or I need to make corrections to the bio that I send out. So I'm no law, I'm a former president. So I'm, I finished my term as president of the faculty union at city college. And then the other element that I always like to just say a little bit about is that, you know, whenever you have a union organizing effort, it's never one person of course is never just Norma Ray, right? There's always a, it's a collective effort. So I like to say I was part of the organizing team at the Lusty Lady back in the 90s, as opposed to that I led it or that I created it. But thank you so much everyone for coming tonight. My book, Neon Girls is about my time as a dancer at the Lusty Lady Theater, which if you're from the Bay Area, you're familiar with. And it focuses on both my experience as a dancer in the sex industry and my experience as part of the union organizing team. And then ultimately the cooperative worker takeover of the Lusty Lady as a worker owned co-op in the early 2000s. And it combines memoir, first person narrative memoir style with meditations and reflections and a lot of historical geeking out that I love to do. So I thought I would read tonight a bit from the chapter about my audition at the Lusty Lady and then a little bit about my first shift and if time allows a little about the union, our first union action that we did as dancers. So let me start with my, well, let me start with my first shift. I arrived an hour early for my first shift because I knew it would take some time to transform from sedate clothed woman to live nude girl. Josephine and she's the boss had instructed me that if a dancer's hair was shorter than chin length as mine was at the time, she was to wear a wig. So I'd purchased one of long unruly ash blonde curls. I'd been going for, I wonder if the camera, this is a picture, I wish I had a better screen share of this, but that's me in the crazy 90s curls. I'd been going for a sexy beach babe vibe when I picked it. But in the dressing room of the Lusty, I saw that the celebrity at most evoked was not Pamela Anderson, but Johann Sebastian Bach. This was not a marketable look for a stripper, but wigs are not returnable and I was too broke to buy another. So I bravely tucked my hair up inside Johann Sebastian and attempted to apply the false eyelashes I bought at the drugstore, which made me look like a small tarantula was nesting on my eyelid. I gave up and just applied some mascara. Made up the wig and jacked up on three atch heels, which were high for me and modest for the girl I would become. I put my clothes into the locker Josephine had assigned me and waited nervously for the clock to strike 6.59 when I was to go on stage. At a quarter to seven, a tall athletic woman strode into the dressing room on legs that seemed to extend from the floor all the way up to her neck and whose hair fell down her back in dozens of small braids. She dropped to the floor, opened a locker in the lower row and began pulling off her boots, jacket, jeans, shirt and underwear until she was completely nude except for a pair of tube socks. She replaced the motorcycle boots with silver knee high platform boots that zipped up over the socks. She pulled a paper towel from the dispenser next to the mirror, placed it on one of the swivel chairs in front of the dressing room table and plunked her bare ass down. You knew she asked directing her gaze at my reflection in the mirror instead of turning around. Startled to realize she was talking to me and met her eyes in the mirror and replied to her reflection. Yes, it's my first shift. Brushing shimmery powder on her collar bones, she said, cinnamon. I thought she was talking about the powder and wondered momentarily why she would brush herself with cinnamon. Then I realized that she was introducing herself. Oh, I replied, I'm Jenny. She raised an eyebrow and I realized that she had used her stage name and probably expected me to do the same. I mean Polly, my stage name is Polly. So it went in this house of illusion and mimesis. We stood together each day completely exposed but we spoke to each other's reflections and called each other by made up names. We hid and revealed, masked and unmasked and covered and stripped. Moved easily between barest truth and most fantastic fiction. When the digital clock on the dressing room table blinked 6.59, cinnamon closed her makeup box, stuffed it into her locker and told me it was time to go on stage. I got up and followed her down the first hallway towards the pre-stage mirror. She breezed right past but I snuck a glance at my new nude self. Not bad. I felt a little puff of confidence, proud of what I'd pulled off. Polly wasn't polished and powerful like cinnamon but her red lipstick, dark mascara, long, blonde curls and high heel shoes, at least she looked like a reasonable facsimile of a stripper. Emboldened, I smiled at the mirror and headed up the stairs to the stage. At the top of the stairs, cinnamon pulled a timecard from a rack and shoved it into a time clock which made the punching sound familiar to me from fast food and bookstore jobs. I searched the cards, organized alphabetically by last name, found my own and punched in before following cinnamon down the dark narrow hallway to the stage. Our arrival triggered a quiet choreography. A dancer with dark curly hair waved sweetly at the open windows and purred perm as she slid past me to the exit. Hearing her, a slim pale blonde in pink shoes floated silently off stage in her wake. Remaining in the little mirrored room with me and cinnamon were a busty blonde with a beauty mark and sleepy-lidded Marilyn Monroe eyes and an ordinary looking white girl in low pumps and understated jewelry. But for her nudity, she looked like she might be working in an insurance office. Cinnamon approached one of the full-length windows at the corner booth and lay down on her back and front of it. I danced, but the windows on my side of the stage closed one by one and the faces from those windows appeared near cinnamon, craning to get a better view. Soon, she was surrounded by five open windows as she slowly slid her legs open and closed then turned over and knelt on hands and knees. Suddenly, there was a knocking sound and in the mirror, I saw three faces in one window and six pointing, waving hands, beckoning cinnamon. She ignored them, but the insurance office lady snapped to attention. Uh-uh, nope, one to a booth naked office lady announced sternly, shaking her finger at the offenders. The three 19-year-old boys in the booth stared dumbly, then smirked at her. You and you, snapped naked office lady, pointing at two of them, out. They stayed, laughing and looking unconcerned. So she stalked over to them, turned around and slid down the glass, her back and shoulders pressed against the window, completely blocking their view of the nude women. I could hear them object noisily until one of them yelled frantically at the others, get the fuck out, man. A door creaked, then two more and the windows on either side of the first opened to reveal the stricken faces of the two delinquents, no longer laughing. Mean naked office lady moved away from the windows she'd been blocking and nodded calmly. That's better. I watched in awe as she danced sternly in front of the three boys who no longer made a sound, but just stared chastised. This was a brave new world where nude women could so efficiently disrupt a homosocial brofest and install in a gang of unruly boy men a state of near total obedience. This wouldn't work with cat collars on the street, but the lusty stage I realized was actually designed so that women could control and channel access to visual pleasure. This woman was using a very simple but very powerful carrot and stick technique to exercise power. Our naked bodies were the carrot and her back was the stick. Observing this choreography of withholding and allowing I ceased fretting over my possible loss of feminist consciousness, wondering instead how I might learn to exercise the power I saw naked office lady wield. She noticed me watching her. Haven't worked with you before. She said to me without taking her eyes off the troublemakers, what's your name? Polly, I replied. Hey Polly, I'm Grenadine. She said, finally smiling and looking my way. We call her Grenade, said the Marilyn Monroe look-alike eyes on the windows before her. I'm Shishi, she said, placing both feet on the windowsill and then bending her knees, hands gripping the lusite bars vertically on either side of the window. Shishi, I asked the blonde like French for fancy? No, Shishi like English for lesbo, she replied. Let's see. I think I'll move now to a slightly later passage about, so that's my first shift. And then I talk later about moving past that kind of idealized realization of, wow, this is an incredible place to looking at some of the problems that we encountered in our workplace and contending with some of those problems. So I'll read a little bit about those. Because the lusty had so many rules, opportunities to mess up abounded. The pay scale was like a game of shoots and ladders. Weekly dollar an hour raises took us up, up, up. But a single infraction, like missing a staff meeting or arriving to stage two minutes late, would send us sliding back down to the bottom. From the iron fist of the dressing room digital clock to the costume and grooming deadlines, too much black, mesh not sheer enough, hair too short, to the meticulous rules about dancer confidentiality, to the harsh consequences for tardiness or sick calls. The 1950s boarding school dorm like regulations haunted us. I would show up 30 minutes early for my shift to avoid the possibility that a flat tire, a flat bike tire or a muni delay would send my paycheck spiraling downward. The dread of clocking in late soon provoked a recurring anxiety dream of racing across town and through the lusty lady lobby to the dressing room and then scrambling to get my clothes off, heels on, and Johann Sebastian Bach affixed to my head before the minute hand on the clock hit the dreaded nine. Relieved to admit it just barely in time for my shift in the dream, I would stride across the stage toward a window and start swaying my hips and smiling around at the other dancers in their glamorous nudity. But when I look down at my own body, I would see with horror that I was still wearing my army surplus pants, t-shirt and boots in a comic reversal of the standard anxiety a dream about showing up to school naked. I found my dream self at work fully clothed. So that was just, that was a little bit about how strict it was at the lusty. And as a result of that, we formed of that and other issues like being videotaped without our consent or without permission and often without our knowledge as well as pretty blatant racial discrimination specifically anti-black discrimination against black dancers who weren't allowed to work in the more profitable private booths at the lusty. And in response to some of those issues, we formed a labor union in 1996. And we won our union recognition and in our first contract negotiation, we found that the management just really weren't negotiating with us at all. They were just coming to the table and asking about stupid things. And they were basically trying to run down the clock in order to get rid of our union. So this is about how we dealt with that, how we pressured them to actually come to the table and negotiate in good faith. When our bargaining team, Velvet, Jane, Naomi, Isis, Decadence and support staff Scott, there were a handful of men who worked there at the front desk doing support staff work and cashiers and so forth. When our bargaining team arrived at the bargaining table to negotiate, management simply rejected all of our proposals out of hand or quibbled over petty issues. After a few months of this, and it was now early 1997, we realized that they were trying to run down the clock. If the year passed and we hadn't agreed upon a contract, management could claim a stalemate and petition for union decertification. Not only would we not have a contract but we would lose our union and management would almost certainly fire all of us organizers and get us blacklisted around town. We needed to pressure them to come to the table for real but how? The answer as so often was the case at the lusty lady was between our legs. In assembly line jobs, workers sometimes use work to rule actions to pressure management to make changes. This involves all workers agreeing to do the bare minimum required by their contract or job description which results in a slowdown of production. This hurts profits but doesn't endanger anyone's job because technically everyone's doing what they're obligated to do. Simply dancing more slowly would not accomplish this in our case, obviously. So we devised a strategy that would. Normally our stage performances were quite explicit. We'd bend over in front of the windows or face them with one foot up on the windowsill. Sometimes we'd even put both feet on the windowsill and hold ourselves up with the three foot loosite bars bolted vertically to the mirrored wall on either side of the window. While the performance of explicit shows was the unspoken norm at the lusty, the performer's standards that we'd all been handed when we were hired did not state that we were required to perform this explicitly. They only said that we needed to be one nude and two paying attention to the open windows. And three make eye contact with the customers. So we decided that our slowdown would entail collectively working to this rule. We would be naked, pay attention and make eye contact but nothing else. We would eschew the explicitness of our usual performances in order to frustrate the customers, slow down business and pressure management to negotiate. We publicized the upcoming slowdown openly to dancers not only to make sure everyone participated but also to let management know that we were united, willing and able to hurt their bottom line if they wouldn't negotiate with us. When the day of the action came, the show directors were watching from their private observation booth behind their very own one-way glass. We were prepared for this surveillance and had cautioned dancers not to talk on stage, to adhere meticulously to costume standards, to cover their tattoos, remove their body piercings, wear nothing but shoes to avoid being accused of overcovering, to move around the stage, to smile and make eye contact. During our pinkout, we maintained near complete discipline around these standards so as not to give management any excuse to fire or punish anyone. In fact, when we were motivated by solidarity and commitment to achieving our collective aim, we were far more attentive to our work standards than we were when management was enforcing them with carrot stick measures. Things seemed to be going well during my first pinkout shift. No one broke ranks and the stage was silent except for the music and occasional murmur of perm to indicate the end of someone's shift. But when I walked into the dressing room for my break, I found Summer, a 20-year-old dancer with a young son at home talking quietly with Jane and looking somber. Hey, what's up? I asked, concerned. Colette said I have to have a disciplinary meeting before I can work again. Shit, did she say why? No. I went back to, she's allowed to have a union rep in the meeting at a Jane. I'm going with her. I went back to stage and quietly told the other dancers what was going on downstairs. At 2.15, I heard someone running fast and loud down the hall, leaving to the stage. Jane appeared at the stage door and yelled. They just fired Summer. I heard others running and yelling the news backstage and out in the customer area where support staff worked. Let's walk out, I said excitedly. The other dancers moved towards the door, ready to throw down. No, Jane hissed urgently. They can definitely fire you for that. Stay here, keep dancing. She took off back down the hall. When my shift was over, I dressed quickly and ran outside. A group of dancers and support staff were at the theater entrance making picket signs that read, read higher Summer and unfair to labor, negotiate, don't retaliate. I took a marker and one of the poster boards and someone had brought and made a sign. Honk for stripper's rights. Throughout the afternoon and into the evening, more dancers showed up for the picket. Because this wasn't an actual strike, we told those scheduled to work to do their shifts as usual and join us afterwards since they could be fired for not showing up. The next morning at 9.15, about 15 people we didn't know, mostly 40-ish African-American and Latina women, older and more professionally dressed than our scraggly little group, came walking up Telegraph Hill towards us. One of them was carrying a bullhorn. Uh-oh, I thought, grown-ups. Were they cops? Or when they reached the theater entrance, I saw that they were carrying bunches of professionally printed picket signs, stapled to sticks, reading unfair to labor, SCIU. Without a word, they each took a sign and fell into line with us, walking in a long, thin oval in front of the theater. The woman with the bullhorn listened to our chant. Two, four, six, eight, don't go here to masturbate. And without a hint of hesitation, began shouting it through the bullhorn for others to repeat. When that chant grew stale, she switched to the con response format to teach us some picket line standbys, which we collectively improvised, so that workers' rights are under attack. What do we do? Stand up, fight back, became strippers' rights are under attack. What do we do? Get dressed, fight back. And no justice, no peace became no contract, no pussy. As we walked the line, I asked the woman in front of me, are you from the SCIU office? Oh no, I work at City Hall in the Assessor's office. SCIU just put out the call last night that some sisters needed backup on a picket line and I wasn't working, so I came to support you. Most of these strangers were members of different workplaces that had affiliated with SCIU, but some were members of totally different unions who had gotten the call from the San Francisco Labor Council that we needed support and they came up to provide it. The next day, sorry, we stayed out front all night, chanting, laughing, carrying signs into the street, posing for photographs with tourists and giving interviews. Some customers hung out and chatted and two city supervisors stopped by to give fiery speeches encouraging us to stay strong. Fire engines drove slowly past, horns honking and lights flashing, firefighters hanging out the windows and cheering us on. It felt like all of San Francisco was there with us and I was overwhelmed with gratitude that all these people rather than looking down at us because of what we did for a living were instead willing to celebrate us, not as performers or sex objects on the stage, but as fellow workers whose struggle was their struggle. The very presence of these comrades seemed to lift us up in defiance of a world that would shame us to take that shame and throw it back in the faces of those who dare disrespect us. So I'll stop there. I think that's a lot. Thanks, Kevin. So maybe we'll have, we could do questions now about the process or what became of the Lusty Lady or anything like that. Let me just go to, go to gallery view. So, oh, hey, Nico. So my students are here. It's so great. So any questions about the Lusty Lady? Oh, it looks like Kevin has a question. Let me find him. Go ahead, Kevin. Thank you. Awesome. Can I have two questions and answer or don't answer either way? Were you thinking about writing a book as this was happening? Because I don't know how you could remember in such great detail all of these things that happened years ago. First question. And the second question in the book, it felt to me like you were really ambiguous about stripping, like part of it was, it's my body, I'm gonna do what I want to do. And then part of it, it felt like you felt a little bit exploited. And I was wondering looking at it from where you are now, how you feel about that. Yeah, yeah, so that's, I was, I don't think I was specifically thinking of writing a memoir, writing this all down. I knew at the time, like we were the first, we weren't exactly the first strippers to organize and I talk about that in the book, but we were touted as the first strippers or exotic dancers to organize a union. I'll say more about that in a second, but so I knew it was historic as it was happening. I was in graduate school, I was studying to be an English professor, which I am now. And so I didn't quite know what I was, what I wanted to do to sort of commemorate this, but I did keep journals at the time. And I also wrote some other shorter pieces that I, that incorporated a lot of this, that was, I either wrote it at the time or just shortly thereafter. So, I wrote a radio piece about it and a performance piece about it, but I kept some journals from the time, but also a lot of it is, some of the characters are composites of, like I don't remember exactly who said X, Y, Z. Like I do, in this scene that I read, like I absolutely remember that it was Jane who came running down the hall and the summer who got fired. Like those things I do remember, but there's other little things like, can't exact, was it cinnamon that was in the dressing room on my first shift? Can't exactly remember. But, so some of the less important things, I do kind of composite the characters. And, but I also have a weirdly specific memory for anecdotes and I can recall very specific things that people said that struck me or that I thought was really funny, things like that. So, so yeah, so it's a mix of having recorded a lot, written down a lot at the time, done some writing and performance and other radio stuff at the time. And then also just like a strange memory for things, specific things that strike me, struck me. And then in response to the second question, I'm really glad that you brought that up, Kevin. So my ambivalence about working in the industry about stripping and yeah, I've always had an ambivalence about it. And that's a pretty central theme in the book is, you know, I was a feminine, like I read the like feminist group on my college campus and I was really active in kind of the late end of second wave, the 80s or 90s, I guess, yeah, early 90s end of second wave feminism. And so I was ambivalent about dancing and it was a real choice for me to make. It was something I struggled with. And it's a struggle that really never went away, I think that I, that persisted. And you can see that in the book and in the account of some challenging, some challenges that I had with customers and their treatment of me in that industry. So, and I didn't really want to use the book to answer that question, but more to pose those questions and to explore, you know, how I negotiated that ambivalence at the time. So let's see, there's a way you can raise your hand, but I see questions, okay. So there's questions in the chat. Let's see, naked office lady, how long did I work at the Lestu lady? On and off, I worked there for over 10 years. So from the mid 90s or like 94 to about 2003, maybe 93. So on and off over 10 years, I went away, actually, I kind of skip over this passage of my life, but I went away to the East coast for my PhD program. And was, you know, I was working there, or I was on the East coast for a few years, but then I came back and while I wrote my dissertation, I worked at the Lestu again. So on and off over the course of 10 years for my probably like my mid early 20s to my early 30s. And then I wanted to know why hair length seemed strictly enforced. That was just, that's a good question. It was just a convention of femininity. They wanted us to look feminine in a very specific way. Having short hair was just sort of too butch, even if it was like you're also in a feather bow and high heels that there were just conventions of femininity that were enforced. Did I attend the funeral procession for the Lestu? Yeah, there's an account of that at the very end of the book of the Lestu that he closed in 2013. And it ran as a co-op for 10 years. So after we unionized and got our contract, we operated as a union shop for about five years. And then the boss, in one of our contract negotiations, one day the boss came in and there were two Lestes. There was one in Seattle and one in San Francisco. He came in from Seattle, came to our contract negotiation and said, I agree to all of your proposals. And he handed us the contract and was like everything. Yeah, so everything you said, yes, I agree to it. And we were like, oh, that's weird. And he wouldn't explain it. He's like, I have to catch a plane and he got on a plane and left. And we were like, yay, we got our contract, but still we were like, what was that? And then it turned out a couple of days later, we all got pink-slipped and an announcement that they were gonna close the theater. So he had just, he conceded everything in the negotiation and then basically fired everybody and said they were gonna close. At that point, we all, and I see that I don't wanna name names, but some of the people who were involved in that are present here. I know Miss Muffy is here, but Miss Muffy and Pepper and a whole bunch of other dancers and I said, like, look, they're doing such a shitty job of managing this place. Let's just take it over and run it ourselves. Let's do it. And so we had a meeting and we proposed this to the other dancers and they said, yeah, let's do it. Let's start a collective. So we started, we filed for corporate status as a California corporation and we were a co-operative corporation. And technically I was the CEO of the corporation for a bunch of years. I think I was still the CEO well after I was teaching at City College and no longer dancing, but somehow I just stayed on the paperwork. But so we started a co-op and we ran it ourselves, which had its own issues as one of our brilliant, brilliant early co-op organizers, Miss Muffy will attest. I think she doesn't wanna make herself seen, I guess. So that's the story. But then it closed in 2013 that business just gradually dried up and it had to do with, I think it had a lot to do with the, a lot of the sex industry going online. It just wasn't marketable anymore. So it closed in 2013 and there was a big celebration with a funeral procession through North Beach of all the dancers in black, so that was exciting. Did the unionization effort become quite mean on the owner's part? I helped unionize the Claremont Spa and management created a very hostile competitive environment. Oh no, it was really hard. So that's Shree, it looks like. Yeah, it was really, you guys can unmute yourselves and ask your questions too, but it was quite brutal. They, that was what that action was about. They wouldn't even negotiate really with us at first. They tried to run down the clock so that we would, they could decertify our union. They put up all these stupid posters like about how bad it would be when we had a union and how all these guys, our phone numbers would go to the guys at the union and they would harass us and all kinds of bullshit they pulled. But we just stayed really on top of it. We had a really amazing writer, Jane, who's, she's now a fiction writer. She was in that section that I just read, but she would write these amazing screeds against management in response to all of their efforts. And they, we would immediately put up posters. They would do reports from the bargaining table. This was before email. So they would put up posters with a discreet, with basically summary of everything that happened in bargaining each week. And the lead attorney for the management was named Mr. Byrne. And they would always put a picture of Mr. Byrnes from the Simpsons to represent the mean millionaire guy. So, yeah, they were really brutal, but we fought back. They really tried to fight it back. Okay. So when the lusty transition to a co-op were the rules of appearance more lax. I could have sworn that the lusty stood out for having dancers that looked differently than the standard norm. Yeah, I think that we did relax the rules somewhat. You know, we were still bound by those norms of our culture and femininity and all of that stuff. So it was kind of a push pull. Like, do we want, you know, do we wanna just look how we look or do we wanna make money? Like there was always a tension between those things. But what was better about having a co-op is that we could really negotiate those things kind of collectively and talk about what was worth it and kind of negotiate those issues a little bit more freely. So yeah, but things relaxed a lot more in terms of everyone didn't have to cover their tattoos or take out all their piercings or have a wig if you had short hair, things like that. Would you ever consider as an owner doing that yourself? Make a business form another? I think like, I think Linda means, do you mean as a co-op? I think maybe she means- Would you ever wanna be a business? Like, what would you think of that? Like, would you ever consider doing something like running a business, running being the owner of a business? I probably wouldn't myself, but it's just not something that's ever, I've ever been drawn to. Growing up, my dad was self-employed and it was just like, oh, it just means you're working all the time. And I don't think, I think that our Ms. Muffy is not here, but Ms. Muffy is one of the women that I organized with and who really helped us organize the co-op. And she has her own business now. She does finance stuff and she's amazing. So a lot of people do. Cinnamon, who I read about, who I included in that excerpt that I just read, she owns her own business now. Josephine, who was the boss who hired me in that account, is, she's the director of a nationally known nonprofit now. I don't wanna give too much information about people, but yeah, they're all pretty badass women. Anything that you didn't mention in the book that you now would? Is there anything you did? Let's see. I guess, I don't think so. I guess just that I wish that the organizing within the sex industry had taken off more and that that was more, that there had been more of a domino effect around the sex industry because workers are really still getting the short end of the stick, not just in stripping, but in porn and all of that stuff. And now in what's in the only fans? Is it called only fans? Yeah, only fans, the only fans. Now that stuff, the people who are doing that online sex work are getting really poorly treated by those platforms and facing a lot of just a whole new wave of mistreatment, it just takes a different form, I guess. So I wish, I guess that's one thing I really wish that, I wish A that we had been successful in turning our energies outward and really organizing the rest of the industry. And then maybe also I wish that we had really kept the lusty lady up to speed with the industry and enabled ourselves to really continue longer. And what I mean by that is that, because we were all kind of doing other things, like I was a PhD, I was writing my dissertation and everyone was doing something, people had a kid or very few of us, like this was our main focus, but we took the time and created this collective, but it really would have been an investment or like an investment of energy that I didn't at that point wanna have, but Miss Muffy had this great idea, as I said, she's an amazing business woman. She had this idea, she was like, look, we should just, we need to have a new business model, like we need to be the punk rock hooters, and which is brilliant, right? Like, or like go to webcamming or go more to the internet or whatever, adapt. But because we all had these other lives and really stripping was a way of just making the rent, it was hard to make the choice to really invest the energy in doing something like that. All right, any more questions? You can use the hand raising or the thumbs up or you can just wave at me or you can just unmute yourself or you can unmute yourself. All of those things. No, any of those things. Niko, so sweet. Also on YouTube, YouTube friends, if you wanna send us some questions, we can get those in the chat. Okay, so a Laurel Sharp, hi Laurel. I saw you, I see you're just a picture, 55 plus years now, working class. Just last year, I was encouraged to consider sex work as a viable option in a heavily gentrified San Francisco Bay area where I have aged into economic refuse. The push out is notorious among my age group, yeah. By and large, although out my life, sex work has been the most common suggestion for escaping the working class, it stuns me. Yeah, I mean, I think that is, it really struck me Laurel, even when we were quite young, we were in our 20s and one thing that really struck me working at the lessee was, like it made me mad actually at the time when even when we were very young girls or young women that, oh, all these smart, amazing, cool women and still the thing that we're most valued for is our sexuality or still the thing where we make the most money is by getting naked. That's the tension I think that Kevin was addressing, like, yeah, it was really cool how we ran the stage and we took it over and we started a union, but it still made me really mad that selling ass was what we were most valued for even when we were young like that. Did this club have any open stage dancing? No, it was completely, so that's from Roger. It was completely closed. It was a, now I really wish that I had brought more photos, but it was a completely enclosed area. It was about the size of like your living room probably. And it had, on three sides, it had mirrors everywhere on the ceiling and all the walls. And then on three of the walls, there were windows that went up and down. So it was a peep show. And there was glass in the, there was a glass between the stage and the customers. And the customers were in these little booths, like room closets. And so it was completely enclosed. There was no contact with the customers. There was a private booth, but also that was, there was also a glass barrier always. So no prescenum stage dancing at the Lusty. What can we do now to change the industry? I mean, I think that there does need to be another round of organizing. It's hard work. It's hard work. It's psychologically and emotionally difficult, but there is an effort now among dancers in California to organize. It's been kind of sidelined by the COVID epidemic, which closed all the clubs. But there's been an organizing effort and there's a group, they're called Soldiers of the Pole. And they are organizing in various clubs. I don't wanna say too much about the area, just because I don't want their management to crack down on them before they have a chance, but they're amazing. And they also are, one thing is they're spearheaded by a former Lusty lady organizer who, she was in our organization, so she's my age. And that girl is still dancing, she's still fine. And she is leading this effort to start, to continue the organizing of unions in the industry. Comment on how it's affected my view of sex. And well, I talk about that also in the book a lot. It gave me, I tell an anecdote, in the book I tell an anecdote about a girl I knew in college who was just incredibly beautiful and incredibly promiscuous, kind of like very much on her own terms and very cool. And she was upset about an interaction with a man one day, she was crying about it. She'd been, someone had broken up with her. And I said, well, do you think you maybe hurt his feelings by sleeping with all these other guys? And she said, she cried. And she said, oh, Jenny, that's just stupid. Men don't have feelings. And so, and I realized that that became, I began to feel a lot that way, very guarded of men. I saw a side of men that isn't normally available. And isn't pretty. And so it definitely made me, it really took the, it just made me skeptical of men. I'll just, I guess I'll leave it at that. Yeah. So can anyone attempt to start a, yes, any workers can, so any workers can start a union. It's much more difficult if you're an independent contractor to start a union. And that was one of the biggest problems that we, that was with stripping was that almost all strippers, at the time when I was organizing and when I was dancing, almost all the other clubs, the dancers were independent contractors. They're classified it as independent contractors. It was totally illegal classification because they had all these rules at work. They didn't make their own schedule, any of that stuff. It was a bullshit thing, but the clubs did it to save on, they didn't then have to pay all kinds of payroll taxes. Yeah, it made them more money, exactly. So, and they were sued repeatedly over and over by dancers and the dancers always won. So, but now because of, if any of my union people are here and you can remember the law that got rid of that independent contractor status, now they're considered employees, right? And so now dancers are much better positioned to AB5. Thank you, Laurel. So now strippers are much better positioned to unionize. So I'm hoping thanks to AB5 that this will start up again. But yes, any workers who are employees can form a union. I know that it is still possible. It's just more difficult with independent contractors. But yes, any workers can do that. Okay. How did the oldest profession turn into a gig economy? Yeah. Yeah, that happened largely, well, just because of the management of sexism. I'm sorry, I'm looking at the chat folks. So any other questions or thoughts? The book actually talks, oh, sorry, go ahead. No, no, you. The book actually talks a lot about this history, the arc of the history of the sex industry. So as I said earlier, I am also a history geek, especially like a local San Francisco history geek. So I talk a lot about the history of the sex industry in San Francisco and how it came to be the way it was when I was dancing. And I go all the way back to the, even the gold rush and talk about the history way back then as Anissa said in my bio, I actually did a film and I sometimes still do a bicycle tour of the sex industry in San Francisco that talks about the whole history of sex work in the city since the 1840s. It's really interesting. The film is called Sex on Wheels and it's up on Vimeo and I can, if anyone's interested in watching it, I can let me know and I can send you the link. I have unmuted everybody. So I'll give you a big round of applause and I will actually find that Sex on Wheels and put it in the shared document which I have put in the chat box again and that leads, links to the library, links to Jenny's book and yeah, how about another presentation on the history of sex in San Francisco? That sounds awesome. I have an open invitation anytime, Jenny. Thank you. Library community, you are unmuted. So give it up for Jenny Warley, everybody. Thank you so much for coming in and it was great. Oh, so good to see everyone and thank you. I've put my email in the chat if anyone wants the code to watch Sex on Wheels online, there's a password. Thank you so much for coming. I so appreciate it. This has been great. I look forward to seeing you all in person soon. One day. Great to see you. Including y'all. All right, people, hello. All right, friends, thank you for coming. Come see me tomorrow or next Tuesday and have a wonderful evening. Bye, Lisa.