The Girlfriends: Spotlight, E18: Antonia Pickets the Lusty Lady

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Brought to you by Nitzer in the ad council. Hey, listener, this episode we're going back to 1990s San Francisco, and a peep show called The Lusty Lady.

It's a story of some incredible dancers who stuck it to the man, and along the way, there'll

be some bad language. [MUSIC] It's nighttime in San Francisco. An Antonia Crane is dancing in a fishbowl. Literally, it was just a visually like a circle with glass, and on the corners of the

fishbowl were the one way mirrors, or the one way glass, where customers could see us, but we couldn't see them. Antonia moves her body slowly to the music. On either side of her are other dancers, twisting and grinding in stilettos. They're silhouettes multiplying in the reflective glass.

I was hip to hip shoulder to shoulder with like seven people next to me. This is The Lusty Lady, a peep show, and a San Francisco institution. Plans come and pay a few quarters to sit behind the glass, and watch the new dancers inside the fishbowl. But today, something is wrong.

One of the other dancers, Star, gets Antonia's attention. She said to you that little red, red light blinking there, star points to one of the corner boots. Your butthole is being filmed right now. Move over.

Oh my god. Antonia moves downstairs, away from the little red light, and star strides over to the corner

She yells at the guy over the booming music and tells him to turn the camera off.

This isn't the only time someone has tried to film the dancers without their knowledge or consent, and they're sick of it. They would sneak it in under their jacket, and they would go into the booth, which was a private booth. Your naked body, like closer than you and I are right now into our screen.

“That's how close they were to your body, filming it.”

And it was just like, "Oh hell now." That moment, a little fire in Antonia, once she's carried with her ever since. She spent decades advocating for the rights of sex workers and strippers, and fighting for their stories to be heard. And it all started here at the Lusty Lady.

Antonia knew something needed to change, but she couldn't do it alone. She and the other Lustys, as they call themselves, banded together. They stood up for one another when the outside world didn't believe in them.

Together, this incredible group of women and firms transformed the Lusty Lady.

They won hard-fought victories that are still having an impact today. Plus, they did it in six-inch heels and a selection of incredible wigs. And I call that some truly iconic Girlfriend's Behavior. I'm Anison Fields, and from the teams at Novel and I Heart Podcasts, this is the Girlfriend's Spotlight, where we tell stories of women women.

Today, Antonia Pickets the Lusty Lady. Antonia Crane has so many different talents that it's hard to know. They're exactly how to describe her. So I'll let her do it. My favorite way to describe myself is basically a queer, homocidal, fierce fighter, activist,

writer, PhD, candidate at USC. I'm a lover, I'm a fighter, and I'm a queer sex worker and writer. I'm amazing.

“I mean for that to rhyme, but I mean, as a writer, it comes naturally, right?”

Antonia is very, very cool. Today she's wearing these big statement glasses and a tight red-knit sweater with tattoos poking out of her sleeves. She's just completely nailing that Riot Girl turned academic look and I am here for it.

Back in the early 90s, she was still that artsy punk kid, just 20 years old and living in California, would you be able to kind of paint a bit of a picture of what your life was like in San Francisco before you started at the Lusty Lady? It was a gritty time in San Francisco. There were protests in the streets every weekend, whether it was food, not bombs, or a protest

against domestic violence against women. I was really broke, a lot of my friends were really broke.

“Back in 1992, I was doing a lot of drugs, I was also at Mills College and I was studying”

what we called back then women's studies and to survive in San Francisco, I thought, "Hey, I'm just going to work in the lap-dancing clubs and take down the patriarchy one lap dance at a time." And a lot of my "Dike" friends were doing that and it was back then it was performance art and you would walk into the clubs and get hired on site and see these women doing

these incredible acts just together or separately and just it was definitely in the air feeling

that we could use our bodies in a way that was empowering and that our bodies were a site of revolution. In the lap-dancing clubs, Antonia made friends from all walks of life, but the working conditions left a lot to be desired. It was a very exploitative environment, we would go to work and be charged to work and they

would call it these fees and the fees and the fines would have different titles. These fees, the had no caps, I'd go to work and it would be $80 and then for four hours that I'd go to work in the next day and it would be $180 for four hours in the same place. Correct. Wow.

And if you wanted to work and get on this schedule, you had to pay these exorbitant fees. In 1995, Antonia took a break from dancing because she was recovering from addiction. And a lot of the clubs, people were taking drugs out in the open as she wanted to avoid the temptation.

But then a friend recommended she tried the lusty lady. It was less frantic. It's like working in a factory, you have a locker, kind of like a gym, you clock in in a time

and they have the audacity to give you a paycheck, which is unheard of, kind of in the sex industry.

“This could be the stability that Antonia needs to get back into the dancing scene.”

A friend drops her off at the club, Antonia strives past the glowing neon sign of a naked woman outside and into her audition.

Soon, she's clocking in for her first shift, behind the glass walls with a fish bowl.

And that glass, it's another thing that made the lusty lady different from the other clubs. There's a separation between you and the client. And so there was less of a high impact hustle. High impact hustle is just that it's your body and their body and you're negotiating

the space and it's really fast and furious. Whereas if it's behind glass, there's that separation, kind of like the difference between being a bartender and being a stripper. There's a wall between you and the other person. It reminds me of, I used to work for like nine years as a singer in clubs and stuff.

And I used to hate it when I turned up at a venue and the stage was just floor level.

Because it meant that all the punters could come right up to you and the amount of times

I had like, you know, guys being real sneezes and stuff with me and kind of breaking past my barrier of like, I'm here performing and you're not meant to touch me. It's because I was on floor level, but as soon as you put me on even a small stage, they knew the boundless there, you know, yeah, I felt way safer and more comfortable. And like I could just perform, you know, I didn't have to think about anything.

Absolutely. I mean that floor show and the space between you and another person, especially with sex work, it's a constant negotiation and it's an art form as well. That also meant, and this is the important part, also, of the barrier is that it made me closer to my coworkers.

When they dance side by side in the fishbowl, or get changed in the locker rooms, Antony and her colleagues get to know each other. We would talk about what was going on that day in our lives and, you know, what I was going on with the customers and what they were doing and how we felt about it.

“Was it just like lovely to have the camaraderie of the rest of the work is around you?”

It was absolutely lovely. You know, remember, I was newly sober before that I was hovering mountains of meth. And when I got sober, I put on 35 pounds in three months and was healthier than I had had ever been, maybe. And I was next to these phenomenal women who had savings accounts and skateboards and pets

and some of them had kids and some of them had partners and a lot of us were members of actor. That's the AIDS Coalition to Unleash Power. An activist group that was founded in the late '80s. It was just one of the causes Antonyah and her colleagues got involved with.

So it was this really incredible, combustible collection of people in San Francisco who were

kind of, I think, primed to be activists. I mean, it sounds like a really incredible collection of women. It was, was it all women at the Lusty Lady? Yes, it was all exclusively women or fems.

“In any kind of performance, you have to create an identity for your own stage persona.”

And it sounds like Antonyah and her friends at the Lusty Lady had a lot of fun with it. I think that sex work is really drag. And so we had like a tremendous amount of wigs and personalities at the Lusty Lady. And I was bald at the time and I wasn't the only person who was bald at the time. And so everyone was very funny about their drag and had like these wild different wigs

and different looks. And you could have a lot of different personalities so you could come with one wig and be one name and come with another wig and be octopusy or Sicilline or Velvita and have like a totally different look. That's marketing.

Yeah, very old. Yeah, it was it like Mondays, you got octopusy, Tuesdays, you got, yeah, exactly. I don't beat it. I love that. As she settles in at the Lusty Lady in 1995, Antonyah is finding her feet.

She's making money and she has a new set of kick-ass colleagues and friends, but it's not all plain sailing. Antonyah begins to notice something she doesn't like about how the club is run. If you were one minute late, you didn't get your raise that week, one minute, one minute. One minute.

Oh my god. When it comes to hiring and firing or allocating shifts, the problems run even deeper. There were some things that were happening that were really, that were not okay with us. There was something called private pleasures, which was separate from the fish ball, I'll say, it was down the hall and only certain people would have shifts in private pleasures.

They would not allow women of color and black women to have as many shifts in private pleasures.

So women of color didn't get the same opportunities to earn as the white dances.

“They also tokenized people according to race and would have only one or two or three black”

women on a shift.

Those women would have to always cover each other's shifts because you have the same

person. Exactly. That was organized in a really fucked up way and then also body type. If you were small-breasted, you would have to find another small-breasted person. If you were thicker, you'd have to find another thick person.

Of course, the skinny white women with boobs had the most shifts and they had the most ability to cover their shift if they were sick or needed surgery or needed to travel. There was definitely favoritism. There was definitely a hierarchy according to a beauty standard. It's racist, beauty standards, and ableless beauty standards and ages and things were

according to that hierarchy at the time. And we were having open conversations about that at the time.

The open Brooks, one of the other dancers, urged the bosses to change their racist policies.

“They made some noises about rotating black dancers through the schedule more, but then”

they held a staff meeting to ban political literature in the dressing rooms. Because the lusties were such a tight-knit community, they shared their complaints with each other when they were hip-to-hip dancing in the fishbowl or after work, getting dinner. The straw that broke the camel's back per se was the filming. Antonia is standing in the fishbowl.

Her friend's star has just pointed out the glowing red light of the camcorder. And she is pissed. We were just like, "What the hell?" No, absolutely not. I'm not going to be recorded and be put on some sort of DVD being sold somewhere in some

shady ass back garage basement without my knowledge or consent. And there's nothing wrong with doing porn. It's just that this is this job, in this place. This is what I'm being paid for here. Star was next to me.

She was 19 at the time.

“She stormed offstage and went and topped to the show director and said, "We don't like”

being filmed." And of course, the manager showed director said, "You can go work somewhere else." They always say that. "Yeah." "You don't like it here.

You can go work somewhere else."

And second, no, no, no, no. I work here. And so Star came back to stage and said, "I'm

going to change things around here." And I said, "Okay." Next to the break, the lusty's get organized. In the moment, it felt like it was going on forever. I didn't think I was going to live.

I was terrified. There was no anything inside those eyes. They turned black. They scared the hell out of me. That was your first murder case.

Yes, sure. Fear to say this was the biggest case here, career. Yes, sir. Right from the murder of a child who's 12-year-old child. Balsy gets.

I would think so. And the woman saw the murder, paid place by crevents and the people. Anthony DiPipo showed no signs of remorse, appearing unfazed after being sentenced to the maximum. I said, "I'm not guilty. I'll take it to the grave."

Listen to the devil's quarry on the Ihard radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. And to hear the devil's quarry add free with exclusive content, subscribe to Love of For Good Plus, on Apple Podcasts. I love the sounds, the buzzing from the stadium, the chanting from the fans, the announcers

calling the place, soccer, football, at home. Why do I wash the world cup? That's like asking me, why do I breed? I inherited that fandom from my mom. From Futuro Studios, I'm Fernando Chavari, and this is American Football.

I show about soccer culture in the U.S., and it's under dog roots. We go beyond the game to the people and the stories that make it great. A soccer game is a festival, it's not just a game, it's your culture. I took an elbow to my head, which cracked my skull. It is an American game, the Brazilians don't like hearing that though.

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slow answer, whose work with the unhoused community has made a huge impact online and in her community. Listen to We the in-house on the iHard Radio app, Apple Podcast or wherever you get your podcast. After the showdown in the fish ball, Antonia and her friends aren't about to let the customers

get away with violating their privacy anymore. So they take matters into their own hands. Star said I'm going to change things around here and then she started to talk to the other dancers and started to say well let's post up pictures let's make a Xerox copy of a sign that says no cameras like a camera with a line through it and post it on the one-way

booths. This doesn't seem to wall to me. I mean, if you're all it's just like the sort of poster that you get in any theater or cinema. And you think that the lusty lady's management would want to stop the filming as well.

But things don't go to plan.

“The show directors would tear those posters down.”

Why would they tear them down? Because of the irrational fear of workers having any power. I really think that's what it is. I mean what else is it? It's totally irrational.

For sure. They're used to stepping all over us. It's quite aggressive. It's aggressive. It's aggressive.

It is. It's aggressive. The message is clear. The bosses aren't going to step in to stop the filming. But tearing down the signs doesn't stop the lusty's for organizing.

It fires them up. So the dancers start meeting at a Chinese restaurant next door to the club to strategize. And they start talking to the other employees at the lusty too. We had a thing called support staff and they were artists and they were guys who worked at the front desk and they would buzz us downstairs and they were security and they would also

escort us from the dressing room to the private pleasures which was down the hall. Now that's a really good opportunity to talk about working conditions. They were also frustrated by the clientele bringing in cameras and making a mess and acting out and they were also frustrated with management. And so we actually were able to get them on board with our movement.

The dancers hold a meeting with the support staff to hash out plan.

We said, well here are our grievances and here's what's going on and everyone had

a lot of ideas about the things that they were frustrated with in the workplace. And after discussing it, we realized that if we brought these grievances to management, we were just all going to get fired. They need protections to stop the bosses from being able to retaliate against them. We decided that we had a unionized.

I can't imagine how nerve-wracking that decision must have been.

and properly address the issues at the last day of the day. But if this went wrong, they could all lose their jobs. If they went public, they also risked outing themselves as strippers and sex workers at a time when that was extremely stigmatized.

There had never been an official recognized union of strip club workers in the USA before.

But as Antonia points out, sex workers have always fought for their rights. We just didn't often hear about it. It's not common knowledge because there's a lack of a scholarship around it and there's a lack of sharing that scholarship. I've always kind of bought into the idea that sex workers are this marginalized labor group

that are on the margins of society and kicked to the shadows and that is true in a sense. But also, if you look at history, we have always been here. We have always been at the beating heart of society and labor and at the forefront of feminism. We are the oldest profession and we've always organized with each other and built coalitions.

“And I think the scholarship just needs to catch up.”

In that meeting, the work is at the last day lady decided to take a risk. They were determined to stand up for what was right. A lot of people are like, "Well, we'll get fired. If we see anything, we'll get fired, we'll get fired." "Well, guess what?

You're going to get fired." "You're going to get fired anyway. If you have no protections, you're going to get fired." So the contract will get you protections and when you're organizing, you have protections. They knew they had a fight on their hands.

So the last day's decided to look for support. We joined with SCIU, which is a giant union here? SCIU stands for the Service Employees International Union.

Today, it represents almost 2 million workers in all sorts of jobs from healthcare to window

washers and janitors.

“The last days wanted in, but it wasn't going to be easy.”

The head of the SCIU said now, "Why was that?" Because stigma, respectability politics, they didn't want strippers to be part of SCIU. And just really, you know, we were laughed at. The dancers had to jump through a series of hoops just to prove that they were even eligible to unionize.

A lot of strippers are hired as independent contractors rather than employees, which makes it a lot harder to legally unionize. The last day, lady, was different. The dancers were officially employees. They got a paycheck and everything.

But to begin with, it was still hard to get the bigger unions to back them. So the dancers teamed up with an advocacy group called the Exotic Dancers Alliance and got to work convincing their local SCIU chapter 790 to let them in. Local 790 said yes.

“They would have been stupid to not accept us, and we would have made a huge stink about”

it. And so we were like, "No, no, no, no, no, you're our union, you're our local." So we became SCIU Local 790, the Exotic Dancers Alliance. We had our list of demands, and we met with management, and they started calling mandatory meetings.

They cried, and they said, "Please don't do this." It was just emotional blackmail. It was literally just emotional blackmail. They pissed against each other. They made the union sound like this terrible entity that was out to get us and rip us off.

They made it sound like having a union was going to turn management against us and make our jobs harder, that unions are racist, that unions are exploitative, that you're going to be writing this big check to the union. It is really divisive, and it's using the language of social justice in order to divide and conquer the workforce and to pit people against each other.

But what happened with us is that we were such a close-knit group that once they started doing that, it just made us angrier and stronger. As we just knew it was bullshit, in the summer of 1996, the lusty's line-off at the club to vote in their union representatives, and officially launched the Exotic Dancers Union. We had members of SIAU, sitting at the table, and it was just like a traditional ballot

box where you fill out a card, and you put it in the envelope. Each ballot cast is a landmark step for workers' rights in the sex industry. We were the first strippers to unionize in the United States.

It was a powerful moment.

Then newly elected shopsters are announced. These are the people who represent the workers to management. Those people were Sorsha, Velvet, Tori, Poly, Star, and Decorance. And Jean also, they just wanted to say their names. And now the fight really begins.

The dancers need to negotiate a contract if they actually want to change things around

We wanted anti-discrimination policies that had teeth. We wanted no cameras.

“We wanted more freedom and fluidity about changing our shifts with anybody we wanted to.”

We wanted more people of color. We wanted more regular raises.

We wanted just basically having anti-discrimination policy that was current and modern and

aligned with our culture. Now they have the formal protection of a union. They can ratchet up the pressure on their bosses. So your Ben Brooks falls a racial discrimination claim against the club. And the dancers take direct action to protest about their working conditions.

One thing that we did is no pink day. And so like if you're working in a pencil factory in your finding against your bus, one thing that you want to do is you want to slow down production. Like pump the brakes on production. Right?

So what we did is we had no pink day. And so what that means is we covered our bodies. And we covered our neither regions. No. With skirts.

Yeah. While you were dancing, yeah, we covered our junk. And so that was no pink day. So we refused to show our junk.

“And I think that's just really creative.”

Yeah. And like genuinely sort of outrageous from what people were expecting, right? Yeah. Yeah. Of live new dancers to cover their junk wall dancing.

And we wrote on our hands, you know, on a fairly repractices is showed it in the mirror through the glass. Cool. That's punk. The lusties are letting the world know that they're not happy.

And it causes a star. I have the San Francisco Chronicle clip in front of me. It says north beach strippers unite and this is from August 14th, 1997.

Dancers could be the first in the country to unionize.

It goes without saying that the bosses did not appreciate this.

“And it wasn't long until they struck back.”

And to me, it says they started firing people just for being late. They started being trigger-happy with firing people, you're supposedly allegedly have protections if you're unionizing. So it's retaliatory, but they'll use, oh, you were two minutes late. And then one woman named Summer, who was a single mother, was fired.

So we walked out together. And to me, and the lusties were not about to let this shit fly. They strode out of the club, and management locked the doors of the lusty lady behind them. Coming up, the fight for rights gets dirty.

In the moment, it felt like it was going on forever. I didn't think I was going to live. I was terrified. There was no anything inside those eyes. They turned black.

It scared the hell out of me.

That was your first murder case.

Yes, sure. Fear to say this was the biggest case of your career. Yes, sir. Right, the murder of a chunk of 12-year-old child. Bows it, guys.

I would think so. People wake up and the woman saw the murder, paid place by crevents in the pitiful. Anthony DePippo showed no signs of remorse. Appearing unfazed after being sentenced to the maximum. I said I'm not guilty, I'll take it to the grief.

Listen to the devil's quarry on the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. And to hear the devil's quarry add free with exclusive content, subscribe to Love of a good plus on Apple Podcasts. I love the sounds, the buzzing from the stadium, the chanting from the fans, the announcers

calling the place soccer, football, at home. Why do I wish to walk up? That's like asking me, why do I breed? I inherited that fandom from my mom, from Fooduro Studios, I'm Fernanda Chavari and this is American Football.

I show about soccer culture in the U.S., and it's under dog roots. We go beyond the game, to the people and the stories that make it great. A soccer game is a festival, it's not just a game, it's your culture. I took an elbow to my head which cracked my skull, it is an American game, the Brazilians

Are they the only ones I don't like?

Actually, nobody likes that. As we get ready for the men's world cup this summer, listen to American Football as part of the Michael Thuda Podcast Network, available on the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Hey, I'm HodaKatby, host of the podcast, Joy 101 with HodaKatby, together.

We're going to have meaningful conversations with the world's most fascinating people, like when actress Olivia Munn shared how she overcame fierce health challenges. I've gone through breast cancer and then helped my mother through breast cancer, and that was more difficult. There's a lot of people who understand post-parnaid question.

I was not prepared for post-parnaid anxiety. Listen to Joy 101 with HodaKatby on the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. If you're seeking to try to understand the forensic science behind these cases that we hear

“about in the news, body bags is where you need to turn.”

There's no fluff.

We do a deep dive into the forensics.

Listen to body bags with Joys of Scott Morgan on America's number one podcast network. IHeart, open your free iHeart app and search body bags with Joys of Scott Morgan and start listening. Here's something that should not be as complicated as it is, getting a racist tattoo removed. And here's something that should be a whole lot easier than it is.

Getting a new one, put up in its place. As long as there's a politics of race in America, there's going to be a politics of remembering the civil war. To get to school, I had to go down Robby Lee Boulevard, get to the grocery store I had to go down Jefferson Davis Parkway.

If you're in a store in, and you leave out half of what the history is, you're not turning a job. I'm a Keela Hughes, in Rebels' spirit season two goes deep on both of those things. The fights, the politics, the people who won, and my personal campaign to add something to the Kentucky State House that's actually worth the wall space.

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How do you represent that? They are just fueling a fire that is really catching. You'll see what I mean. This is in the Rebels' spirit season two, on the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.

Antonia and the other dancers are locked out of the lusty lady, but they're not about to give up their fight just to get back in. Luckily, Antonia's friend Star has a plan to get them another source of income.

“I think she's like 5-10, and she attracted more submissives, right?”

So she had this client of hers who wanted what did he actually want? I mean, that's maybe a topic for an essay, but I was going to say a whole new podcast for that. I mean, a whole new podcast. But anyway, so she was like, "Hey, I have this client come and meet me.

We're going to go meet in this place. He's going to meet us in a jeep and take us out to his construction site, and he wants us to pose in mud." And he paid us several hundred dollars a piece to go meet us in San Rafael, which is like 20 minutes outside of town.

We all piled in his jeep. Okay. Now, what I do that today, no, I would not. But this is 1996, '97, and we just were unafraid. I don't know.

There was just something about the '90s where I was just like, "Sure, I'll get in the car with you and drive in the middle of nowhere." I have eight badass women with me. What is he going to do? Like, he's outnumbered.

I mean, to be fair. He is outnumbered. To be fair. He was outnumbered. I mean, we could have all taken him.

We were all tough ass bitches, right? And so, we're in the middle of nowhere. In this construction site, it's all mud. And we're all rolling around and posing. He wanted us to pose in mud and take photos of us.

“And I think that is our portrait, our family portrait, of us completely covered in mud with”

our arms around each other, and stacked on top of each other in a pyramid. That's our LSD lady family portrait. Oh, I love that. Yeah. And then I remember spending the next two days washing mud out of my ears.

While she's locked out of the LSD lady, Antonia picks up shifts at the other lap dancing clubs in the city. The other strippers would just roll their eyes and shred their shoulders and kind of laugh at us. But they really.

They didn't, other strippers. Yeah. Yes. They did not get it. Antonia isn't bothered by the skeptics.

Their movement is gathering momentum. They rally the local community and other local unions and stage a two-day picker outside the club. We handed out condoms, we handed out contraceptives, we were just to the nines on the picket line.

And when colourful thing about our group was our willingness to have fun and just turn

on fair to labor and bad girls like good contracts.

They also had some really incredible chance, like two, four, six, eight.

Don't go into Master Bay. Stunning."

“And how did like the normies in the street respond to all of this?”

When they were alone, they would hop, when they were with their girlfriends or wives, they wouldn't. Yes. Surprise. Surprise.

Yeah. But generally walking by, people were really supportive. This is also file a lawsuit under the unfair labor practices act, which was supposed to bar employees from firing and suspending workers without legitimate reason. And it works.

We got some of her job back. Oh wow. And so you just went in and you demanded somebody to get her job back. That was our demand, is that we needed to get her job back and we did that. And we just literally were very fierce with our, if anyone got fired, we walked out.

It's clear talking to Anthony Ed just had to turn in she and the other dancers were. And the more the bosses cracked down on them, the more resolved they became. We had a vow of, we didn't engage with the emotional blackmailing. It made us angry and more solid as a group. The contract negotiations were fierce.

And they dragged on for months.

“I remember hearing about it from decadents.”

Our shop stores about how they would stay up all night negotiating. And I remember we would go and have sit-ins where they were negotiating and just sit and wait and hear about what they accomplished that day. I remember it being exciting more than anything. I was just like, wow, this is really intense.

This is cool. And just feeling really proud. It's just feeling proud of my co-workers and proud of their ferocity.

In April 1997, the exotic dancers union finally came to an agreement with the Lusty Lady's

management. The new contract won them a pay rise, sick leave, an end to one way glass, a ban on video cameras in the club, and the ability to switch shifts with any of the dancers. Not just the ones that looked like them. It actually got us a lot.

It served as a blueprint for other workers, it got us a seat at the table in labor, it has created many thinkers and ferocious labor rights individuals in the sex industry. Back then, there was a lot of stigma and we were really behind and we were really like not open about our sex work as much. But I think that changed it.

I feel like that was the turning point where I was like, oh, guess what? All workers are honorable. Sex work is honorable. We deserve rights, we deserve an anti-discrimination policy. We deserve the right to organize and talk back to the boss.

To celebrate that victory, the work is through a very Lusty Lady party. It's what we call play day where we open up the rooms and the dancers kind of walk around the area and we give lap dances kind of out of the open and we celebrate and we're all in costume and we have food and I remember just being like this really fun.

“We got our contract celebration so I do remember that moment just being like a really celebratory”

moment. After a few years at the club, Antonia danced her lost shift at the Lusty Lady. Now that she was secure in her sobriety, she was making more money at some of the other lap dancing clubs. I felt that I had left the Lusty Lady in really good hands and I definitely had because

they decided to become a union collective and that was the first stripper union collective

also in the United States. When the owners of the Lusty Lady threatened to close the club in 2003, the dancers clubed together and bought it off them. It became the first worker owned strip club or peep show in America. And Antonia went on to become a writer, she's currently doing a PhD at the University

of Southern California and she's not the only Lusty Lady alum to go into academia. A lot of Lusty ladies have written books about this experience. It was like such a professor incubator. When I sent these work for an all but a lot of people I was not kidding around. Yeah, yeah.

I liked the idea of that as some sort of like academic accelerator experience. Just go dance at Lusty Lady and then write a book about it and then become a PhD. There's three of us literally out of like 12 of us that have pieces. So you should open your own school. We should open our own school.

Yeah. The Lusty Lady incubator school of sex work organizers. Perfect. In the three decades since the Lusty Lady first unionized, Antonia has seen conditions get

The fact that the corporations and the owners of ship clubs have been allowed to continue

to get away with retaliating, shutting down, breaking labor laws. It's just been open season for corporations to just run a muck and wreck organizing efforts. And the fact that they've just been continuing to get away with that is just criminal. Even the Lusty Lady couldn't last forever. In 2013, the club was forced to close.

“It was really a historically important union collective of strippers and the only one in”

the country. And so the priceless out of our rent and we lost the building and we lost our lease. On the night at closed, the dancers held a funeral procession for the club. They carried a pink bajooled coffin through the streets to mark the end of an era. But Antonia has carried on the fight that began at the Lusty.

In 2018, she founded Soldiers of Paul, which later became Strip as United. It's a labor organization that helps dancers unionize. Antonia also runs another group called the Striper Worker Center. We continue the fight. Every day is a battle.

I really think we need to mobilize. The working class needs to mobilize more and just have faith that, you know, if we get

“everyone together, that's how you change things.”

Some of the other dancers have also gone into labor organizing full-time. I mean, decadence, who was my friend also became a labor lawyer and still is a union labor lawyer. That's great. When we started to organize, she was talking to the lawyers and she just thought, you

know, I'm smarter than these people and went to law school and became a labor lawyer and she's proved it and she's proved it because sex workers are really smart. Using the pandemic, Antonia helped run some events at Star Garden, a Strip club in North Hollywood, to inform dancers about their labor rights. In 2022, the dancers there went on strike.

And after a 15-month battle with their bosses, they unanimously voted to unionize. Another really successful thing that the Striper Garden dancers did is their relationship with the media was so incredibly positive and I just cried watching it happen, like watching them get interviewed over and over again on media outlets. Seeing how media was talking about Stripers and talking about their labor war and talking

about working conditions, like, they weren't considered a joke. I mean, please to see that you think it's better. I mean, allowing sex workers to tell our own stories is it's such a pleasure and an honor and it's such a fun experience and I hope that more sex workers are brought to the table and feel able to freely openly speak about their honest experiences and feel safe doing so.

You know, it's people being sensitive and really listening and it's really just about humanity. It's just about our shared humanity and when we can come together and be like, you know what? Let's just share our humanity. Thanks so much to Antonia Crone.

If you'd like to know more about her incredible life, you can check out her memoirs spent.

“Antonia also kindly recommended a couple of other books if you want to learn more about some”

of the themes that we've talked about today. There's the ethical Striper by Stacey Claire and unequal desires, race and erotic capital in the stripping industry. That one is actually by another lusty lady alum and someone you heard about in this episode, Professor Sjoban Brooks. [MUSIC]

If you've enjoyed this conversation, you can find loads more incredible women on our feed. Do check them out. And please do spread the word and tell your friends about us. We want as many people as possible to be part of the girlfriend's gang. [MUSIC] Next time on the girlfriend's spotlight, Layla becomes visible.

[MUSIC] My mom hugged my biological mom, my dad hugged my biological mom, and they went up to her and gave her a hug. And then we started crying. [MUSIC] This season, the girlfriend's spotlight is supporting the charity Women Kind Worldwide.

They do amazing work to help women's rights organizations and movements to strengthen and grow.

If you'd like to find out more or donate to help them secure equal rights for women and girls

[MUSIC]

“The girlfriend's spotlight is produced by novel for eye-harp podcasts.”

For more from novel, visit novel.org.

The show is hosted by me and a sim field. This episode was written and produced by Caroline Thornham. Our assistant producer is Lucy Carr. Our researcher is Sayana Yusuf. The editor is Hannah Marshall, Max O'Brien, and Craig Stracken are our executive producers.

Production management from Joe Savage, Shree Houston, and Charlotte Wolf. Sound design, mixing, and scoring by Nicholas Alexander, Daniel Kempson, and Dan King. Music supervision by Jacob Tiveich, Nicholas Alexander, and Anna Simfield. Original music composed by Louise Agustine,

and Gemma Friedman. The series artwork was designed by Christina Lemcool.

Willard Foxstone is creative director of development, and special thanks to Katrina Norville,

“Carrie Lieberman, and Will Pearson at eye-harp podcasts, as well as Carly Frankel,”

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But now, there's a new and exciting way to start your journey toward a more joyful existence. Joy 101. It's a new podcast hosted by me, How to Copy. If you're craving inspiration to maximize your joy, tune into these candid, uplifting, and moving on-air chats.

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I actually dropped better one of my eye. It heightens my senses, comes with down. If anything, I'm more careful. Honestly, it just helps me focus.