On a cold January evening, Aurora lugged a box containing a chrome pole and wooden base into the Empty Bottle. Her eyelids were painted with silver glitter and she wore a white hoodie with a bedazzled script that read “Money makes me cum.”
The original complaint also alleges that dancers paid “house fees” to work and were required to share their tips with “managers and with non-service employees or agents of the club,” like the DJ, in-house makeup artist, and “house mom,” who provided food and sometimes toiletries in the locker room. This is illegal to require of employees, but many strip clubs commonly enact these rules because dancers are listed as independent contractors on paper. Management at Rick’s Cabaret (formerly VIP’s and now under new ownership) said they were “advised not to comment” on the lawsuit.
Outsiders to the adult entertainment industry may consider a dancer’s work to be purely physical. But dancers often describe their work as sales, a business built on physical and emotional labor. Each night at VIP’s, dancers would evaluate the crowd and engage with the most promising customers to sell undivided attention. They would observe, they would charm, they would perform in skyscraping platform heels, sometimes in ten-hour shifts. The payoff could be sweet: on a busy night, or when a dancer met just the right customer, she could bring home hundreds of dollars and on rare occasions break a thousand. On a bad night, though, she might leave with nothing.
Aurora first got into stripping after winning $1,000 in an amateur night Rack of the Month Contest at Jimmy’s Restaurant in Chicago Heights. Soon, she was hired. She lived with her parents and kept dancing to help pay their mortgage and make enough money to travel. (Aurora took her first flight at age 26.) Since then Aurora has worked at venues across the country, and has even pole danced onstage for Snoop Dogg’s tour. A few years ago, Aurora began teaching in-person pole dance lessons from her apartment, both for sex workers and those outside of the industry. She also runs the Tip Rail, where through social media and a blog she offers advice to dancers, a “source for leveling up your stripper career.”
Now it’s illegal for club managers and owners to accept tips from dancers; workers’ rights and customer conduct rules are posted in clubs; employees are given copies of their contracts; clubs must develop a written plan for how security camera footage is preserved; no one can be employed as a manager or security staff who has a domestic violence–related conviction within five years; and no retaliation is allowed against workers for reporting violations. “Time is up on the social problem or nuisance approach to how to address adult entertainment,” said Jayne Swift, lecturer at the University of Minnesota and organizer of SWOP Minneapolis. “It’s time to move towards a labor and human rights approach that recognizes that sex workers are members of whatever community they’re in.”
The interviews for this story took place before the novel coronavirus pandemic. The night at the Empty Bottle now reads like a social-distancing nightmare and the future of clubs—as things reopen, or after another outbreak, and really, until there is a vaccine—is uncertain.
