WINTER 2026
ISSUE 05

₁ Anora (2024) is an award-winning film written and directed by Sean Baker. It premiered at the 2024 Cannes Film Festival, where it won the Palme d’Or. Charm plays a supporting role in the feature.

In early 2023, the workers at the Star Garden Topless Dive Bar in Los Angeles became the only dancers at a strip club in the United States to have a union. But their struggle began much earlier. Some of the dancers we spoke to have been involved in informal workplace organizing at Star Garden, Jumbo’s, and other clubs in the area since as early as 2018. Like in so many industries, these worker-organizers move between workplaces – clubs and other entertainment venues – talking to each other about both their frustrations and their hopes for the future, swapping ideas and strategies for fighting the boss. When Star Garden changed hands in 2021, a crew of stripper-organizers who had previously worked for the club returned. Finding conditions to be deteriorating rapidly as the new management sought to extend their control over every aspect of dancers’ work and wages, they started to push back. Things escalated when several dancers were fired in quick succession in early 2022. Workers responded with a comprehensive safety petition that included a demand for the reinstatement of their fired coworkers. Quickly thereafter, workers walked out, were locked out, and had their union election challenged by the boss, who subsequently filed for bankruptcy.

Between March and December of 2022, the dancers picketed the club – an action they consider a strike. Nearly a year later, they finally won their election and negotiated for the club to drop the bankruptcy petition and reopen. As bargaining began and work resumed, however, management fought the newly unionized dancers tooth and nail, especially by subverting their demands for safety and dignity with new rules that made it nearly impossible for dancers to make their money, let alone in a safe working environment.

While the sequence of the struggle at Star Garden is deservedly well known, we have rarely heard from the workers themselves about what their work is like, what they love and hate about the club, or about their positive vision for the future. Here, four of the workers engaged in the organizing describe what they were fighting for, what their work means to them, and what they have grappled with over the years. Their comments reveal the similarities between this job and any other, where control over your body, time, and money are always at the core of the struggle between workers and bosses. In their struggle, the Star Garden strippers have held steady, and they continue to fight for a better life for sex workers and for the working class as a whole.

There are basically two kinds of strip clubs: stage clubs and lap dance clubs. At a stage club, customers sit at the tip rail and throw a lot of money on stage. Lap dance clubs have a stage, but most of the money is made in private rooms or “VIP rooms.” Even minimal touching is technically prostitution under LA law, but this usually isn’t enforced. The club provides a relatively safe space for sex workers, but owners take advantage of that to exploit us. 

In both types of clubs, the dynamic between the dancers and management is the same. It’s like this classic pimp dynamic where the club wants to make sure they’re getting a cut of all of your activities. Like at Deja Vu, where I’ve been working recently, the club owners are so paranoid about the dancers getting tipped for VIP dances that they have these “customer notice” signs posted all over the club that say something like, “This is the price of the lap dance. If you pay more than this, tell the manager.”

In LA, it’s a pretty bad club scene. The 50/50 cut for dances has become pretty standard, where the club takes half of whatever the dancer makes. Anyway, Star Garden was a stage club, and we decided to organize it after one of our coworkers, Reagan, was fired in February 2022 for complaining about unsafe working conditions. Reagan had this customer who was acting possessively. Like, he’d get jealous if she’d talk to other customers. He’d gotten tattoos of her face on his body. She raised this as a concern with staff, and they mocked her about it. They fired her for making a scene. The next month, another coworker, Selena, got fired for trying to diffuse a situation where a customer was filming a dancer without her consent.

Around this time, the owner, Steve, made a rule that we couldn’t go to security directly with our concerns – we needed to go to management first. Even if management wasn’t in the building, we would have to call them, and they would, like, review the security footage and make a determination. Steve’s new “security” protocol created real feelings of precarity and, like, a lack of safety, actually. I had contact with a lawyer through Strippers United who advised us to do a safety petition. She told us that if we put our names on it, we’d be protected from retaliation, which didn’t actually protect us in the moment but did get us our jobs back eventually. We had like 17 out of 25 dancers sign it. The non-signers weren’t opposed; they were just worried about losing their jobs.

Steve wasn’t always the owner of Star Garden. Before him, it was this burly German guy, Hans – a very stereotypical club boss. The first summer I worked there, in 2017, the air conditioner broke, and he blamed it on the dancers, like, “Whoever was closing down the bar didn’t turn off the AC and it melted down.” He refused to replace it, and the club was miserable – so fucking hot. I remember talking to the other dancers in the dressing room about doing a sit-in or something to demand that the air conditioner be replaced. This was when the gears in my head really started turning.

I started complaining about late fees, which they charged us and I hated because I’m always late. Strippers are always running late. I started to do some research and learned about employment law, because it felt weird to me that they weren’t paying us at all and, on top of that, they were charging us these fees. One day, I went up to the bartender and I was like, “Hey, I’m kind of aware that this is not an above-board situation, so maybe y’all should stop charging us late fees and pissing us off so that you don’t get sued.” And she said, “If you don’t like the rules, you can leave.” After that, I was fired.

Being fired was devastating. I was new to LA, and I had made all of these friends at work. Star Garden was like this entire community I had lost. A year later, in 2019, I ended up going to a show that Strippers United put on with Reagan performing and they were tabling. And yeah, I didn’t really even know what a union was, but I got involved. I learned about unions and tried to organize Jumbo’s, where I was working at the time. We got 50 percent cards signed and were preparing to file for an election when the pandemic shut everything down.

In 2021, Hans sold Star Garden to Steve. Reagan went to work there, and she thought that it was a good prospect for unionizing because all of the girls there were pretty close-knit. At this point, Steve was already trying to turn the club into a lap dance club, which was totally inappropriate to the venue. I mean, you might do some lap dances, but Star Garden was not a club with private rooms. Steve just wanted to shift to lap dances because he could guarantee a cut for himself. He would actually shut down the stage and stop performances if dancers weren’t selling enough lap dances. It was really shitty. When I heard about all of that stuff going on I was like, “I don’t know if I want to trouble myself with this.” But I decided to go back, which was possible because of the new ownership, and basically salt it.

When I went back, I didn’t want to, like, impose this idea of the union. That wouldn’t have worked anyway. I first proposed the union idea after Reagan was fired because all the dancers in the group chat were like, “This is so wrong. Reagan brought in so many good customers. How could they dispose of her like this?”

We delivered the safety petition in March of 2022. It demanded Reagan’s reinstatement and the reinstatement of two other dancers who had been fired.

This led to a lockout and eventually to a return to work. But when we got back, things had changed for the worse. Steve had manipulated our demands from the safety petition by imposing these new rules that made our jobs unnecessarily difficult. We were given only 15 minutes in the dressing room for hair and makeup. On stage, we couldn’t dance more than a few feet away from the pole – he marked this out with black tape on the stage – and we were barred from having physical contact of any kind with customers.

Steve also increased the price of drinks, and security guards started aggressively screening patrons for alcohol consumption prior to entering the club. Many of our customers reported being turned away for failing a sobriety check. Some said that they were turned away because the club was closed for a private event when there wasn’t one. It required extraordinary mental fortitude to make it through four- to six-hour shifts in an empty club. Sometimes, I’d spend my time practicing twerking. Just the bartender, security guard, and me, twerking at full throttle in the corner, in full view of each other in the small club. Other times, I’d stretch out on the cushioned bench behind the pool table and read or crochet.

Something that we’ve struggled with internally within our group is a sense of failure, I guess because the club is closed. But this sense of failure is something that I really campaign against because our fight is a fight that will continue – beyond our lifetimes, even. I mean, we’re in the beginning stages of it. The fight continues. But that feeling of failure, it does kind of cast a shadow over Star Garden and has sort of inhibited other organizing in some ways. For a lot of dancers in LA who have heard of Star Garden, it’s kind of like, “Oh, that didn’t work.” We’re working on ways to change that perception. We did inspire a group in Portland to unionize, but that’s been a challenge as well.

When the club reopened in 2023, the owners imposed new “safety” policies. They changed the way that I was allowed to be a stripper. They would get really weird about even just sitting at tables with patrons sometimes. Touching, even hugging, holding hands, putting a hand on a thigh – all things that are part of what we do in order to provide a fantasy experience – were just completely cut off.

A lot of the people who would come to see me at Star Garden had come to see me there for years. There were some regulars that I had brought from the burlesque community or from the after-hours or kink communities.

There were loads of people that I’ve been close with for years in this client–stripper type relationship who suddenly I couldn’t interact with in the way that I was used to. We weren’t even allowed to give high fives. So even the people who would come in just to be like, “Hey, I wanna tell you about my week and throw you some dollars and get a lap dance,” they couldn’t come in and celebrate their accomplishments from the week with me. We were being watched in this way that completely took away my choices. All of this discredited me as a performer and as somebody who provides personal interactions.

Before, when I was on the floor walking around and interacting with customers and sitting at the tables with them, it felt like a very controlled night out with my friends. After, it felt like I was being watched at lunch in prison. Like, eating is kind of a vulnerable thing for me. So when I catch people watching me eat, I get weirded out. And I feel like that’s the best analogy for this, because after the reopening it just felt like there was security around just watching me stuff my face. And it was bad food. It felt like I was trying to be on my best behavior for the prison guards so that they would hook me up with a pack of smokes later for not starting a food fight.

I used to be able to have an interaction with a customer in the lap dance area, and it would be a negotiation between me and the client and the overall club rules. After the strike in 2022, I felt the eyeballs. Just the way that I felt management’s eyeballs on me through the security cameras while I was trying to have this interaction with a client that was so controlled by the rules. It made me not want to sell dances. It made my clientele not wanna come back. It felt more like a pimp situation than it felt like providing an experience.

I play billiards in a league and have for years. Matter of fact, I started playing pool regularly because I was playing pool so often at both Star Garden and Club Burlesque. My pool league coach, who I have been playing under for over five years, was a client at both of these places and that’s how I met him. He’s still one of my best friends.

So, the pool table used to be a real source of happiness for me. Even if clientele were coming in and they didn’t want a lap dance or they didn’t want to chat, I could almost always break down their barriers through playing a game of pool. Because sometimes they just don’t know how to speak to women, and that’s part of why they’re there. Being able to kind of give them something else to be focused on helped me do my job in a way that was really fulfilling.

But then, instead of it being $2 per pool game, Steve made it $30 for a half hour. It was like a dollar a minute, or something like that.

When Steve took away the pool table from me, I was so angry. That felt so much more like my pool table than his. He hid the damn pool balls behind the bar! I don’t know why I am still so raw from that. Like, “Not the pool table!”

So, I was losing the customers that I had already determined were safe for me because the club was making them feel unwelcome. We couldn’t bring in our own safe clientele who we wanted to come back because we knew that they spent money. We knew they liked to drink and have fun. We knew they were local. We knew their backgrounds. And because those clients didn’t wanna return, we were forced to start taking in whatever walked through the door. We’re always meeting new people, but having to screen for ourselves that way was really hard when it was all at once.

To not be able to welcome my safe people – the people who support and love me and appreciate my art – to my workplace . . . it was just a real bummer.

I really think that this comes down to Steve not wanting to lose the battle to a bunch of strippers. He wanted to take advantage of a system that is already looking to take advantage of us. Star Garden management was set up to exploit the dancers after the strike because of the way that California and federal law has already exploited dancers. I think he wanted to use our bodies and would not accept that he was going to lose to us.

It’s the same way that a lot of the labor force is exploited by their corporate overlords. The working class is exploitable in a capitalistic society, and whether society wants to recognize it or not, we are working class.

We are a part of the workforce, just like any other job. We are secretaries, we are teachers, we are bartenders. Many of us have several job titles just like these in addition to being an “after-hours therapist.” Most of us are not just the sex worker or stripper title. We are on the same team here. We are very normal people. We’re not running around trying to corrupt everyone on the planet, and we’re not trying to steal husbands or ruin families. We’re just trying to provide some sense of acceptance for the people who don’t receive it often. I swear that when I’m stripping, I spend more time teaching and listening than I do actually performing any acts of sex work. Our job is just as important as any other.

I feel like I have two unattainable dreams kind of warring with each other at all times. The first would be that we just get a call letting us know that everything is going to revert back to the way that it was. We’re going to be given protections and be allowed to make decisions on our own. But since I feel like that is wildly unattainable, the other dream I have, which certainly feels almost as lofty but that I still have more hope for, is that we are empowered and able to create a new space for ourselves. And we really carve out a space for not just strippers, but maybe all types of sex workers. In our little bubble to start with, but then maybe make some ripples, and hopefully be able to change the narrative for the whole country.

I knew it was going to be considered insubordinate to show up to the virtual meeting in full clown face. And while I realized that the third-party HR person, a comely young woman who lived in Colorado, probably didn’t deserve my ire, the situation at Star Garden had become so toxic and ridiculous, I felt compelled to act out as a form of resistance. I relished my bad behavior, which was a salve for every injustice we suffered while management was doing everything they could think of to make our lives hell.

Fifteen months after the delivery of the safety petition, in June 2023, we sat down with the boss and his shrewd new lawyer for our first in-person bargaining session. The session was in our territory – the Actors’ Equity Association meeting room – and we felt unstoppable, backed up by our established union and its badass women in leadership. The club boss and his lawyer were dwarfed by our group in more ways than one: we dominated the negotiations with our strong proposals, and we laughed when they handed us materials that appeared to stipulate new rules that the club would enforce. We rejected the new “House Rules,” which included significant changes that our lawyer assured us would violate the settlement agreement on the basis that a business that is unionized cannot legally change things that are considered integral to the workplace.

We were dismayed when the boss blatantly ignored the law that allegedly prevents employers from doing this and when the “House Rules” that we never agreed upon became the new enforceable rules of the club, turning the place we had loved upside down and backwards.

When I went back to work and experienced these new rules in action, I learned my first lesson in “malicious compliance.” Management’s undermining of our requests was impressive in its efficacy. The club systematically took all of the things we had asked of them in our safety petition and perverted them.

Now here I was, on the Zoom call with HR, having slathered on some white face paint and drawn exaggerated diamond shapes over my eyes and a bizarrely misshapen mouth.

“It was reported that you dressed up in a costume with a sword and were stabbing chairs and also pretending to stab the dancer Charm. Do you have anything to say about that?” HR asked. Her voice was corporate sounding and emotionless, her pixelated face impenetrable and distant. 

“Oh no, you thought that was real?” My voice was saccharine. I couldn’t help myself. I wanted to make her job difficult. She worked for the same boss as me, except she was remote and got paid a salary and wasn’t in the position of having to fight for her dignity and her livelihood in heels with her tits out. I don’t know if she actually harbored anti-sex-worker sentiments in her heart, but having her chastise me for my costume and performance choices in a club that I had once loved, but which had become intolerable, made me feel the need to sound condescending. It made me feel better, if even for a moment.

“I swear, I didn’t hurt that poor chair! The sword was plastic – I even bent it in half in front of the cameras so you would know it was fake. And don’t worry, Charm is alive!”

There were no customers in the club when I misbehaved. Being silly with costumes, props, and shenanigans was my refuge, and it boosted my morale and the morale of the other dancers, and that was really what was being challenged in this stupid disciplinary meeting with HR. I wished I didn’t have to attend these meetings, but the union said that complying with the process would paint us in a favorable light in the eyes of the National Labor Relations Board.

So, fine. I would comply – maliciously.

“It was reported that you dressed up in a Handmaid’s Tale costume and danced to inappropriate songs on stage. Can you tell me about that?” she droned on.

“Oh, yes! All the dancers participated. I’m sure you’ve spoken with some of them already. We were all feeling inspired by the new rules, such as ‘No touching our own bodies,’ ‘No touching the pole in a sexually suggestive way,’ ‘No touching another dancer’s body,’ ‘No overtly sexual dance moves,’ ‘No hugging other dancers or customers,’ and we thought it would be fun to just go all out and dress the part!” I watched the image of myself in the corner of my phone screen, distracted and amused by my choice of Zoom background. It was the image of a circus, and I was on the circus stage.

“And the songs?”

“Oh yeah, the songs!” I chirped cheerfully. “I believe I danced to a couple of my favorite spirituals to set the mood! One of them was ‘Down to the River to Pray’ – the version from the O Brother, Where Art Thou? soundtrack – love that one! The other song was ‘I Say a Little Prayer’ by an artist you may know of. Her name is Aretha Franklin? You may have heard of her. I think her biggest hit was a song called ‘R-E-S-P-E-C-T,’ does that ring a bell?”

I felt smug. The feeling wouldn’t last, and it was a poor substitute for success. But winning the fight for a first contract felt like a faraway dream at that moment. Negotiations had stalled, and any acceptable compromise seemed impossible with how far bargaining had backslid. The faith we had poured into the bureaucratic system that purported to protect workers like us was starting to feel misplaced.

Did I really want to put my precious energy towards rankling this woman who was basically a stranger hired by my boss to reign in my misbehavior? No. What I really wanted was a safe and sane workplace. What I really wanted was for our union to be a beacon in the darkness of stigma, marginalization, and criminalization that otherwise plagues our industry. What I really wanted was a contract that could be referenced and built upon by future dancers who wanted to improve their own working conditions.

But I was feeling provoked and also desperate to stay inspired to keep showing up to a bitterly antagonistic workplace. I knew that at that moment my coping mechanism was this absurd clown persona. Clowns are the best truthtellers, after all. They do it slyly, and they get to criticize and satirize those higher up in the social order under the guise of entertainment.

The meeting finally ended after we “discussed” the rule violations I had allegedly committed. Afterwards, I sat silent for a long time, looking at my image, alone in the virtual Zoom meeting room. It wasn’t a real victory. But at least it was something. It would sustain me for another day in the fight.

Before the strike, the stage felt so alive and electric. After, we were forced into this tiny triangle that they drew on the stage so that we were always six feet away from the customers. I felt very stifled by the fact that I have to fit my tall-ass giant body inside this slim crevasse. And I’m not allowed to touch my body or do sexual motions. Something that used to be so freeing to me, with no rules, got turned into second-guessing at every step. And I no longer had the autonomy to choose whether or not to dance for someone or to stop a dance, because I wasn’t given the opportunity to dance for anyone. It was important that I was neither forced to dance nor punished for capitalizing on my sexuality. This paternalistic approach to safety is antithetical to what makes being a stripper work for us. It was just so ridiculous, seeing myself in a screenshot touching the top of my chest . . . I felt like I was on a ridiculous, depressing game show that no one would want to watch because it sucks so bad. 

In the past, things were fucked up, but if I wanted to get the fuck away from somebody and say, “I don’t wanna talk to you,” I could just do that. If I wanted to have a great time with somebody, I could do that. The idea of the safety petition wasn’t to reinvent the wheel. It was just, “Hey, if somebody fucking reaches up and grabs my pussy while I’m trying to dance, maybe you would do something about that?” I just feel that we weren’t asking for that much. The response was so egregiously angry, like, “How dare you come to me and ask for help?” I don’t know how else we could have proceeded from there. It was an insanely weird and psychotic feeling, like, “I’m only here because you decided to have a strip club where people dance on stage and take their titties out,” and then all of a sudden, it’s, like, flipped on its head. We were in that position to capitalize on our sexuality, and then we were still being harassed and creeped on, but we weren’t making any money. 

The people who own these clubs and have never done sex work themselves have no idea how to relate to it. It causes them such anxiety, it’s overwhelming. But we know how to handle it because we do the work, and it’s not sensational to us. It’s just everyday work. I think that the owners and managers are jealous of us. They don’t like that we’re beautiful and that people love us and come to see us. They don’t like that we could make more money than they do. They don’t like that we could make money that they don’t know about.

No matter what I did, Steve was staring at me. And then when I looked back at him, he’d look away. If I had a serious concern to bring up to him, he would act like he didn’t know what I was talking about and then leave the room or go outside. There was no way to talk to him. He shows his ass, but he doesn’t really show his ass; you never see him getting emotional, but every move he makes is so baby-diaper. 

It’s just typical of a man – I hate to say it, but he’s one of those guys who, if it’s not his idea, he’s not doing it. Even if it’s a good idea that might work for him and his family and his career. I think he’s very afraid of women.

So, in true Star Garden stripper-protest form, I came up with a few new acts. They were a way for me to blow off steam and make my friends laugh, since there were generally zero or maybe one customer in the club at any given moment anyway. My favorite of them, which I repeated a few times, was a dance to “I Wanna Be Your Dog” by Iggy Pop. I put a spiked dog collar on my neck with a chain leash that I attached to the pole so it was like I was a dog tied to a post. It was a way to take ownership of the situation and make it sexy. And to really freak out the management and to say “Fuck you” without having to really say it. The other one that I did was a mime act with the lines on the floor. I was dressed as a clown, and I kept trying to get out of the triangle, but I would just bump into the invisible wall. I think they got the message.

If I could speak to Steve now, I’d like to say, “Suck my ass. Look at me and look at you. What do you think it means that I’ve been able to turn this experience into more success than I’ve ever seen in my life? What do you think it means that people know that I stood up to you? I’m proud of it. I hope that everybody in your fucking life is like, ‘Did you see Anora?’” It would just kill me if he decided to watch it on Hulu and there’s me and my tits again.¹ He can’t escape me. 

We need to get a club and make it the most fun and diverse space that people have ever experienced, where all the workers are receiving equal pay and fair treatment and have benefits and all the things they tell us we can’t have, because we know that we can. Other owners and dancers would see our example and know that they can let go of the reins, because I think that once they see it, they’ll see that it’s the only thing that makes sense. I believe that this will happen no matter how long it takes. It’s the future. This gonna sound so head-ass, but the most important thing is making the attempt to better your life and the lives of the people around you. I don’t think I’ve ever had such a complex, intimate connection with so many people as I did during the strike. My relationships with my coworkers and our customers and our supporters on the picket line just opened up my heart so much. It changed me forever. I miss it. It was like a real community in a way that I had never experienced before. I wish people would fucking do it instead of just having an opinion about it. I wish people understood how their lives would change if they made the effort to connect to the people around them. 

But I fear that our experience shows other dancers that if they try to stick up for themselves or for each other, their club will be turned into a fucking gulag. I’ve already heard some girls say stuff like, “True hustlers know to keep their head down and put up with some shit and you’re gonna be fine.” I don’t accept that. The world does not have to be either getting molested in the club or no club. Those are not the only two options. The boss is not our fucking pimp. We sign employee contracts. That does not mean that you can play with my body like I’m a Barbie.