Thinking about this photo
Vignettes
She looks so powerful to me. She’s elevated, spotlit, confident, and she knows what happens next, unlike many members of the audience, sitting with their ties on and their hands in their laps. She’s doing something and they are merely spectating. The eyes are all on her and the cameras are too. She’s fully nude in front of a roomful of clothed men, which suggests her social status to be lower than theirs because historically the nude person in the room is the least in control (which raises questions about my nude clients in my dominatrix sessions, which I discuss in another post), but she doesn’t seem vulnerable at all. I don’t know who she is or who took the picture or even what year it is, though based on what I know about the history of hairstyles and exotic dancewear and what the men are wearing I’m going to place it between 1969 and 1982. That’s a wide range, I realize, but even that could be off. It could be anachronistic, it could be a recreation from a movie, it could be a place that was ahead of its time.
I can’t find the original provenance of this photo, so if you’re good at looking up such things and have the time, I’d love some help! **EDITED TO ADD Victoria Rose found this link with the caption “Part of a group with a cover sheet identifying Valerie Craft, Miss Nude America who defied authorities and danced naked on a Chicago stage” **
It shows an aspect of total nudity that I always loved, that last pop of the hook on my breakaway g-string that set my girl totally free in the wind. Their collective gaze on me like a touch or a tongue, a tactile sense as much as an intellectual sense of being seen.
When I very first started in the early 80s it amused me to say that I was dancing for the heads of baptists, because they were just heads to me from the perspective of the table dance, and for the heads of dead presidents, who were on the dollar bills they spent. It was a very fluid power dynamic that shifted constantly throughout a single shift. Sometimes I had all the pussy and half the money, and sometimes they had all the power to choose me or not. Not being chosen was scary, because this was my living, and insulting, because my desirability was on display; but being chosen could be the thrill of a lifetime.
One night in the mid 1990s I was dancing nightshift at the Cheetah III. I was at my peak dance ability and hottie hotness. I was famous for all the tricks I did with a long rope of pearls. I was so well-known for it that a customer who was a jeweler (and who later took me on my first trip to NYC, where he made the mistake of telling me that from now on it would just be him, and no other men or women) had a strand of cultured pearls made for me. I was wearing a stretchy white dress I’d made that I could manipulate around my body without ever taking it off, and my breakaway g-string was in my sequined garter. I was wearing apair of expensive italian silver shoes that I’ve saved even though they’re falling apart because they remind me of this era of my life — not the best era, but a good one. The Dj was Jeff, who was a master at getting the room jumping. I was dancing on a six-top for a group of conventioneers. When they asked my name, I said JoJo, and they started chanting “Jo-Jo! Jo-Jo!” I had been at this club for nearly a decade and a lot of the other dancers and I had great relationships. Some of them heard the guys and started chanting along, yelling “Jo-Jo! Jo-Jo!” The whole room, and even the DJ, picked up the chant. The room felt like it was bouncing around me. The music was great, I was loved by my friends and co-workers, my pearls were whirling and my hair was flying and my garter was packed with big bills, and it was the absolute pinnacle of my stripping career. As I was stepping down from the table I told a friend sitting at the next table, “I should quit after that, huh?” The idea of going out on a high note at my peak in my mid-30s was pretty appealing. Shortly after, I sold all my costumes and my car. My friend Steve Trimboli, owner of the infamous Scrap Bar, drove me to New York City to live with my friend Judith, a philosophy professor who taught me to write academic papers to debate anti-pornography theory, and the next great phase of my life began.
That’s just one of the experiences this photo reminds me of.
Photos of strippers that include their audiences are always fascinating to me. I have a lot of disjointed and sometimes contradictory thoughts when I look at them, which are related to the varied experiences I’ve had while working as well as to the fantasies I had about working in them before I ever started, and my reactions to the critiques I’ve heard of them by both workers and observers.
A few more photos of strippers and their audiences:
Caption at source: “Gypsy Rose Lee was already the world's most famous stripper when she joined the Royal American Carnival Shows in 1949. Born to an ambitious 'stage mother from hell', Gypsy spent her entire youth on the road performing in vaudeville as a child actor. She made her debut on the burlesque stage when she was 15-years-old at the behest of her mother. Above, Lee performs her traveling striptease act to a captivated audience on the opening day of the Memphis Cotton Carnival in May 1949”
Caption at source: “Burlesque Female Impersonator Stripper Dee Light Dancing to a Large Audience of Men and Women”
Caption at source: “A stripper at a striptease show is taken past the audience on a moving conveyor belt in Tokyo, Japan in 1957.”
This image is from the website of the stripjoint in the picture. The original page is gone. It’s The Cheetah III in Atlanta, as it looked when I worked there in the 1990s.
Caption at source: "Photographer Lauren Greenfield captures the dancers, artists, workers, and hustlers behind the most important club in hip-hop history."
What do you think when you look at the images? How much, if at all, do the captions affect your reactions?
Note: lately my brain has been generating vignettes, so I’ve been letting these thoughts roll instead of editing them into essays. I’m doing more structured work while editing my book chapters behind the scenes, and I’m hoping to read them aloud here on Substack, but for now I hope you enjoy these meandering thoughts.
Love, love, love this so much! That first photo is one of my favourites of all time. She is power.
Fascinating!