(some names and dates have been changed)
From Sin City to Hustlers to Zola, more than a few of my favorite neo-noirs feature strip clubs as part of their narrative. My interest in these naughty places began when I was a kid growing-up in New York City. Whenever mom took me through raunchy Times Square back in the ‘70s, I was always curious of what was happening beyond the blacked-out windows of the bars that advertised “Live Nude Review” or “XXX Acts.” However, it wasn’t until relocating to Baltimore when I was a teenager that I experienced the inside of a strip club for the first time, when a summer job buddy took me to “The Block,” the city’s red-light district.
Back in those days when the drinking age was 18, no one ever asked for ID and we were allowed to hang-out in the 2 O’ Clock Club (made famous by pioneering stripper Blaze Starr), Circus Bar and Gayety Show Bar. There was also Bottoms Up on Howard Street, where I once got into a long conversation with a dancer about chameleons. Most of those places were dark and smoky, but for me it was lust at first sight.
Once I became less nervous about getting caught-up in a raid as though every spot was Minsky’s, I began journeying to the area alone and even, much like the T-Pain tune decades later, fell in luv with a stripper. That affair didn’t last long, and ended with me having a broken heart and an empty wallet. After moving back to New York City for college in 1981, I visited a few strip clubs (Billy’s Topless, the Baby Doll), but I wasn’t a regular at either of them.
However, in the olden days of the ‘70s and ‘80s, being a stripper wasn’t a glamour profession or the sort of career young women aspired to acquire as soon as they graduated from high school. Even the men that were patrons didn’t brag about going to those places. It wasn’t until a decade later that stripper life began spilling over into the day-to-day world of pop culture through films, television, MTV videos, metal bands and, eventually, rap.
How stripper world and hip-hop began to overlap I have no idea, but gradually rap verses became more sexually charged as lewdness became lyrical and the player/stripper lifestyle socially accepted. Beginning with Uncle Luke down in Florida, the bawdy aesthetic soon became the norm.
It wasn’t until the beginning of the 1990s that I began frequenting them again. However, while the strip clubs I visited in Baltimore years before were integrated by both race and body sizes, many of the spaces in the ‘90s and beyond only wanted certain types of dancers. Some of the newer clubs considered themselves more “upscale,” refusing to hire women who were plumper, darker or, in their opinion, less sophisticated. It was during that era that the sort of Black clubs we’ve seen in The Players Club (1998) and P-Valley (2020) began to open.
“For some girls, the urban clubs were the only places they could work,” says Sparkle, a former dancer. From 1994 to 1997, she worked at a variety of clubs in New Jersey (Cinderella’s, Bookers), New York City (The Gentlemen’s Club) and Atlanta (Magic City, Club Nikki). Back then, Sparkle was a twenty-one-year-old college student about to be evicted and needed to make quick money. “In the so-called upscale clubs, the white clubs, if you were a Black girl with a big behind, you couldn’t work there. You couldn’t look like a Black girl, they wanted you to be mixed with something and look exotic with fake breasts.”
Personally, the few times I’d been to an “upscale” gentlemen’s club, I was bored to death. During that time I was a scribe for various urban magazines including The Source, Vibe and RapPages, a few of my interviews (Jermaine Dupri, Ginuwine, Killer Mike) were done at clubs. Meanwhile rappers and producers began testing their latest recordings at those spots believing if the strippers could dance to the tracks then everybody could. As Mercedes, one of the dancers on P-Valley tells an aspiring rapper, ““My booty can’t bump to this, ain’t got no tremolo.”
In Sparkle’s three years as a dancer, she witnessed her world go from topless to bottomless to anything goes “locked door” parties where sex was more than a fantasy. “There used to be rules,” she says, “but the flashing of private parts set the tone for some of the clubs, because after the guys see it, then they want to touch it and then it got crazy.”
By New York City law, fully nude bars weren’t issued liquor licenses, but there were many illegal clubs where owners didn’t care what went down as long as they were paid. “Girls started giving nastier lap dances and having sex, the veterans, like me, weren’t used to that kind of stuff and some just stopping coming to work.”
In the spring of 1996, when I was a thirty-three and living in Chelsea, my homeboy Shawn schooled me on a wild Hell’s Kitchen club called Medallion’s. “It’s your kind of place, Mike, with thick, fine Black and Spanish women,” he said. “Real women, it’s not one of them plastic titty places.” Shawn was a record executive who worked at Boom Bap Entertainment. “Medallion’s is much smaller, more intimate, but it’s just as wild.”
I scribbled the address on a Vibe business card and realized that it was only fifteen blocks away from where I lived. After waiting a few days, I finally walked up 8th Avenue to the 37th Street address. Housed in a nondescript pre-war building, there was no sign in front. Opening the door, I climbed a few flights of stairs as music played above my head. On the third floor, after the stern face doorman/bouncer patted me down for weapons, he grunted, “That’ll be ten-dollars.”
Stepping into the small club as Total’s jam “Can’t You See” blared from the massive speakers, and the air smelled of baby powder, cheap perfume and spilled beer. Leaning against the bar, I ordered a Heineken while eyeballing the sexiness surrounding me. The place reminded me of a joint one might conjure in a teen-age wet dream. Most of the dancers were clad in provocatively tight dresses or their Victoria’s Secret best. Some wore colorful wigs while others strutted proudly with exquisite weaves. On the main stage a woman defied gravity as she did tricks on a floor to ceiling pole while others performed table dances for their grinning customers.
I was surprised of the boldness of Medallion’s, especially considering Mayor Rudy Giuliani’s overly Catholic crusade to rid the city of evil sex emporiums. He’d ordered the police and other civil servants to be hard on “quality of life” crimes, closing peep shows and strip clubs throughout the city. After taking a gulp of chilled beer, I sparked a Newport. Smoke swirled towards the colorfully jelled ceiling lights that gave the room a strange Hype Williams video effect as the women walked by, their skin sparkling from glitter.
The dancers ages ranged from early 20s to somewhere in their 40s. Across the room, the small stage was covered with dollar bills while two women danced and took turns bending over to show their bare bottoms. Lost in lustful thoughts, I was startled by a tall light-skinned woman wearing a skintight silver dress and matching heels, who was suddenly in front of me smiling.
“I’ll give you a lap dance for twenty dollars?” she said sweetly. Her lips were painted red and full breasts overflowed from the dress. With a sassy confidence, she made eye contact. From the top of her weave to her purple toenails, she was fine as blackberry wine. A long ash fell from my cigarette as I processed her offer. Twenty-dollars seemed like a small price to a few minutes of fun.
Most men that frequent strip clubs don’t think about the lives of those women beyond the bar, but as a fellow dancer Sparkle got to know them well. “Some girls were coming out of foster care, homelessness or had tragic home lives where they were being raped or worse,” Sparkle says. “My cousin started stripping, because she was in an abusive relationship and needed money to leave. Everybody doesn’t have the skills to get a good paying job and the system isn’t going to help you. My first night I made $200 and I went crazy.”
Standing at the bar, I gazed across the room to the dressing room where the women prepared. The door was open, and some were sipping drinks, chatting with others or putting on lipstick. “When girls start out, they don’t always have the best costumes or shoes,” Sparkle says. “Sometimes a woman would come through the dressing area selling costumes. In Atlanta, there would be house mothers, but in other clubs your peers were your mentors. Everybody had their own cliques.
“When I worked at the white clubs there was always a lot of cocaine, but at the urban clubs the girls was mostly drinking and smoking weed. I was a drinker, White Russians or tequila shots, because I just couldn’t go on that stage sober. Then there were girls who would do anything for a dollar. I would tell some of them, ‘Baby, you don’t have to do all that for a dollar.’ Some girls just didn’t know that they could just go on stage and make their money.”
Some dancers took their stage acts to the next level. “There used to be these girls that came down from Detroit that were just off the hook,” she laughs. ”They would be pulling pearls out of their coochies. I’d just be sitting at the bar drinking White Russians, because I wasn’t doing all of that. Dancers were making so much money in those places. Sometimes I made five, ten thousand dollars a week, but it wasn’t like anybody was talking to us about investments, so we blew it. The girls in Atlanta were different, because they were buying houses, but we were in Jersey buying nice cars and blowing the rest. I helped out my family and friends, but if I had stayed at Magic City (in Atlanta), I would be telling a different story.”
Medallion’s closed at four a.m.; outside, standing beneath the street lamp, some guys waited to talk to the strippers and trying to convince them to join them at the No-Tell Hotel around the corner while others planned some future rendezvous for private functions or bachelor parties. Although dancers could make loot at the private affairs, as Sparkle says, “All money ain’t good money. I worked a few private parties, but there were too many stories of girls getting robbed and raped at those events for me to continue.”
I soon became a regular at that sordid spot. There was looseness to the scene that made me comfortable. Medallion’s was funky, wild and for the next year I hung-out there. Like any true junkie, I might stop for awhile, maybe a few weeks, but after a while, I was feenin’ like Jodeci to get back to that sexual playpen.
However, after a brief winter hiatus, Shawn called. “You’re never going to believe this bullshit, but Medallion’s closed. I went there yesterday and the whole floor was shut down.” For a second, I cursed Giuliani and his anti-fun night riders. For a few days, I was in a blue funk, but deep in my heart I knew it was for the best. Over the next few years, I still visited various strip clubs, but it wasn’t long before became weary of the scene that was becoming too aggressive, too expensive and too much.
The last time I had fun in a strip club was in the winter of 2000 when rapper Trick Daddy, who I was writing a cover story about for The Source, took me to the infamous Club Rolexxx in Miami, Florida. After that, as with other things I cherished in the ‘90s, strip clubs soon became something that I used to do. However, that hasn’t stopped me from including strippers and their dance establishments in my neo-noir short stories including the Dixie in “Woman’s Work,” Glitter Girl in “Escape-ism” and Bottoms Up in “Haunt Me.”
In the late-‘90s, Sparkle quit stripping. “The clubs were becoming way too wild and I was old school,” she says. “The girls were getting younger all the time. Then, I became pregnant with my daughter and I just couldn’t do it anymore. Some girls made it out. My old roommate got her masters. The hardest part for me was giving up the money. When I started working a regular job, I was making three hundred dollars a week when I was used to making that in an hour and a half. For a lot of girls, stripping was a way out, but you just can’t stay in that life forever.”
