First person: What I learned from joining the stripper strike

 By Nicole V. Bush

Christianna, President of Stripper's United, and Star Garden Dancers celebrate the announcement of their unionizing with Actor's Equity.

It was a balmy night in North Hollywood, California.

My friend Christianna, president of Strippers United, a sex worker labor organization, invited me to my first strike line in August 2022. I had heard about the Star Garden Stripper strike through other friends of mine and had just finished reading Porn Work by Dr. Heather Berg. I was beginning to understand how vulnerable this group of predominantly femme workers is in our patriarchal, capitalist society.

The strippers first went on strike on March 19, 2022, after the owners fired two dancers: one for intervening when a customer was filming her colleague on stage and another for expressing her concerns about a potentially dangerous customer. During the 8-month strike and 7-month legal battle, the Star Garden strippers picketed, advocating for safer working conditions. However, I watched afar, unsure how to ethically participate in this burgeoning labor movement as a middle-class USC doctoral student.

I use the term “sex work” to describe the consensual exchange of sexual services for money. “Sex work” is an umbrella term that includes many sexual services such as stripping, porn work, sensual massage, phone sex, full-service sex work, and more. Carol Leigh, sex worker and activist, originally coined this term in 1978 as an act of resistance against the anti-pornography movement and, by doing so, reframed sex work as a labor issue rather than a legal one. The term “prostitution” is broadly viewed by members of the sex worker community as a term imbued with criminal connotations that dehumanize and essentialize this group of laborers.

The elation that August night at the strike was palpable.

The dancers announced that Actor’s Equity would represent them in their unionization fight. Adorned with pins, union members happily flashed their union cards and asked how they could help. We danced and huddled together in an attempt to keep the sidewalk clear, but the dancers couldn’t stop the twerking or the joy. Cars sped down Ventura Avenue with horns blaring, signaling the driver’s support for the Star Garden dancers. I felt incredibly fortunate to have met Christianna, a Black, non-binary femme sex worker. I have been learning and writing about sex work labor since that night.

One of the many protest placards from the night was lovingly well-worn.

On Thursday, August 24th, 2023, Star Garden reopened as the first unionized Strip Club in the United States since the Lusty Lady unionized in 1997. However, I understand this movement is about more than this specific club or group of workers. The Star Garden dancers were a group of predominantly white strippers working at a strip club, which in and of itself is a privilege many Black and Latine dancers do not enjoy.

Many strip clubs, like Star Garden, do not hire Black dancers. According to Christianna, who is a Black non-binary femme, many clubs refuse even to allow Black dancers to audition or will limit the number of Black dancers per shift to one or two at a time. In 2019, Cat Hollis, founder of the Haymarket Pole Collective, launched the Portland Stripper Strike in 2020 to protest the discrimination endemic to the profession; however, despite receiving early media coverage, their movement has not received nearly as much mainstream media coverage as the Star Garden Stripper Strike.

An air of jubilance filled the air as sex worker labor rights activists took to the night.

Hollis has been openly critical of this discrepancy and the Star Garden dancer’s lack of diversity. Moreover, when the club re-opened, the club put into effect hostile policies to put pressure on the contract negotiations with the unionized strippers, including going cashless but charging a $40 cover fee, closing early, shutting off the air conditioning, proposing an “unacceptable” lap dance pay structure, as well as understaffing the club. These tactics, according to the Star Garden Union, “are intended to discourage patronage. One night this past weekend [we] saw no customers come into the club at all. These anti-customer policies are meant to drive away business as a tactic to starve us out [in our contract negotiations].”

Meanwhile, a more public fight for sex worker labor rights continues online. Currently, Christianna and I are co-authoring an article about sex workers’ digital labor. In this study, we explore how Black and Latine sex workers utilize social media platforms and the relationship between the online component of their sex work and their in-person labor. Through narrative and thick description, we illustrate how the co-author of this study, an Afro-Latine sex worker, experiences this phenomenon, the labor practices, and tactics they use to overcome digital erasure and provide for themselves in a visual media economy that devalues all forms of sex work. While previous studies have distinguished sex workers and pole-dancing fitness enthusiasts, we maintain that the two are mutually constitutive and cannot be understood apart from one another. I look forward to sharing an article excerpt in this zine next month.

You can follow the Star Garden Union Instagram here.