Secret Stars!

Online presentation January 12, 2025 -- come hang out with me!

Image: This is the cover of a book project about feature dancers that I was working on when I moved to New York thirty years ago. I eventually stopped working on it because no one would agent it, and then I started working on The Burlesque Handbook. Now it’s history! The most interesting thing to me about feature dancers is that they’re still going strong, but almost no one outside of the feature dancer circuit even knows what a feature dancer is.

This video clip shows how I work on a book project. I create my own version while I’m writing the proposal. It’s a manifestation process that I love doing.

I just scheduled an online presentation about this project and my experiences as a feature dancer in the 1990s. It’s mostly about the process of becoming a centerfold and a feature dancer, but I’ve also got some stories! If you’re interested in burlesque history and adult entertainment history in general, this could be fun for you! It’s free. It will take place live on Zoom on January 12, 2025, at 5 pm EST. Send me an email at schoolofburlesque@gmail.com (if you’re subscribed to my email newsletter you should be able to simply hit reply) for the zoom link and password.

It’s an experimental presentation, and it’s unlike many of my illustrated lectures because I’m describing the feature circuit from my perspective rather than attempting to give a full historical overview. There was a somewhat different circuit in Canada, for instance, and the circuits everywhere were racially segrated to a significant degree. Still, my experiences will explain how the circuit I toured operated and how I and others got into adult magazines, which, as I say, is unfamiliar to almost everyone, even if they have strip joint or burlesque experience.

Feature dancers are the missing element in many of the stories that say, “Strip joints completely ended burlesque.” That assertion is misleading, though it’s true that burlesque houses virtually ceased to exist. However, the style of performance we call burlesque, which, for the purpose of discussing feature dancers, I’ll describe as “elaborately costumed and/or themed striptease,” continued to happen in — you guessed it — strip joints. There were gown and glove strips, pasties and g-strings, feather fan dances, half-and-half numbers, fetish numbers, fire eating, puppets, pop culture references, and all we associate with the neo-burlesque style. In my opinion, the neo-burlesque movement has more to do with the context in which the performances occur than the way the performances look. And all this fancy stripping was happening through the 1960s-1980s, while there were burlesque revival shows such as Sugar Babies, This Was Burlesque, and The Best of Burlesque.

For a time I had so internalized the idea that artistic striptease was killed by strip joints that I didn’t really think of what we feature dancers did as burlesque. However, as I’ve seen so many historians credit other kinds of performers of the 20th century as part of the development of neo-burlesque (circus, drag, showgirls, go-go dancers, etc., some of whom for all we know would not want to be associated with burlesque – or sex work), I’ve realized that perhaps feature dancers are yet another erased influence. Although feature dancers are still a thing, for this presentation I’m stick to limit the topic to what it was like for me and others on the feature circuit in the US in the 1980s-90s.

I hope you can join!