Lowell Lundstrom is the founder and pastor of Celebration Church in Lakeville. It’s a congregation of one thousand, and they’ve just built a $5 million hall. When I ask Lundstrom about strip clubs, he gives a long and relaxed laugh. “If you gather a lot of men at a nightclub and someone walks out with a T-bone steak,” he says, “everyone will hoot and throw money. You have, then, an unhealthy desire for meat. When a woman takes off her clothes and men hoot and put money in her garter belt, it’s an unhealthy desire for sex.”
He’s clear about how cities should deal with strip clubs. “Adam and Eve had to put on fig leaves after they sinned and people have been trying to take them off ever since. Anyone who believes in Christian ethics has to come down solidly against strip clubs. It leads to lust and committing adultery and fornication in your heart.” Lowell invites me out to lunch with him and his wife, tells me he’ll treat and that if I come on Sunday, it’ll be like I’ll get a free concert but with a Billy Graham message. And then he adds in a warm and drawing voice, “The last thing that Ted Bundy said before he was put to death was that pornography destroyed his mind and that was what led him to rape and kill those women. This is a heavy one you’re writing about. Come on Sunday. It will help.”
Instead, I head on Sunday to what fundamentalists call “petting zoos,” “sexual assault parlors,” “rape cubicles,” and “glory holes.” There’s one strip club in Cannon Falls, a town that has signs on both sides of Highway 52 inviting travelers to “Pray to End Abortion.” Our club, “Class Act,” is famous legally. Here, Minnesota courts found that a city ordinance claiming that nude dancing does not hold artistic merit was found to be unconstitutional under the First Amendment. The city of Cannon Falls lost, Benton County soon after, and ever since then, obscenity charges against strip clubs have largely been abandoned in favor of zoning and licensing battles. (The First Amendment Lawyer’s Association frequently says that instead of being experts in T&A, they must now be experts in P&Z—planning and zoning.)
The travelers off Highway 52 and the local working-class patrons are largely unaware that Class Act was able to settle their victory by allowing an upstairs bar, a strip club below, with separate entrances both allowing re-entry. Alcohol and total nudity coexist in only one strip club in Minnesota—at the King of Diamonds in Inver Grove Heights. Two places in St. Paul, the Lamplighter and Casey’s, allow patrons to watch a nude stripper through a glass wall, so that her room is technically next door to the liquor-licensed property. Thanks to the 21st Amendment, which repealed prohibition and consequently gave state governments extra authority to regulate liquor, drinking in the presence of nudity is still considered a dangerous cocktail that Americans can’t handle.
Inside Class Act, 26 men—and four women sitting close to their dates— watch a woman in a Goldilocks wig stream down the runway on white platforms the height of cruise ships. Front row, most men are chewing gum, some have their caps turned backwards to decrease the distance between themselves and “Paradise,” who’s announced by the D.J. in a barker voice reminiscent of Star Search. Paradise waves the air in a slow move that rolls like an invisible hula-hoop is circling down her hands to her shoulders to her hips. She teases one negligee strap down, gathers the chiffon up her thigh, eyes sweltering at half-mast. Patrons reach for money, and she chooses one who tries to suppress a childish grin that he’s been singled out first. She spirals to the floor, scissor-kicks her legs open and shut like she’s taking his picture, the whole time laughing and plucking at a nipple. Dollars feather down on the stage. When she toys with her G-string, flashing, the man looks both baffled and amazed (the Shock and Awe tactic for easy surrender). His eyebrows raise and his chin sinks back as if his face is stunned on the top and grateful on the bottom. Legs up on his shoulders, her fingers trace pricey folds. He’s in a vortex of reverie, lost to the crowd, wholly transported. You can see him mechanically snap back to Earth, bowing slightly as he lays money at her feet. But as soon as he’s made the customary obeisance, it’s Paradise lost; she’s up, cruising on her heels, spiraling the pole like she’s winged, eyeing the next shoulders where she’ll dock her stalwart seduction.
For me, it all changes when she sheds the last bit of clothing. Our highest court has decided that full nudity doesn’t extend the non-verbal message of exotic dance. In essence, they’ve said the vagina has no artistry. Watching Paradise dance naked, I actually start to feel something different than the detached analysis I’m here for, something different than the queasy feeling I have watching a stranger gape like an amateur gynecologist into a dancer’s privates. I take this tremendous deep breath. I feel less self-conscious.
She seems to be literally dancing out of some kinds of bonds, not going for seduction as much as for joy—conjuring for me the image of Snoopy vibrating in parenthesis of happy movement off the page. This “yippee” in the face of prudes and prigs—not suffocating behind masks, but bare, whole. The difference between the fragmented naked and the restored nude. The prelapsarian welcome. I’ve left the Guthrie less transported.
Afterward, I meet Paradise in the dressing room. It’s a four-foot-by-15-foot sealed off corridor where 20 dancers squeeze in to prepare themselves before they exit through a mirrored door directly onto the stage. The air is thick with smoke and perfume, littered with makeup and costumes. There is a small curtained-off toilet with a dispenser on the wall offering tampons, Advil, breath freshener, and condoms. Two women are huddled counting out bills and talking about savings plans, another is checking her crotch in the mirror, and Paradise is crimping her wig for her next act.
“Any place outside of Las Vegas, stripper equals prostitute,” she says, her voice surprisingly crisp. “They think you’re sleazy, unintelligent, unemployable, do drugs, can’t be trusted, and have some type of Jerry Springer background. You’re kinda like a leper to most—can’t be trusted with women’s boyfriends or around children. It’s really out of ignorance.”
Paradise can strip assumptions too: She works a full-time job in human resources for the corporate office of a home security firm in Minneapolis. She is in charge of hiring the people that protect your homes, valued, I think, for her judgment in identifying reliable people, while she is routinely judged as unreliable. Neither her employer nor her family knows that she dances here for extra cash. She has stripped for five years, and while she has saved enough to buy a home and a nest-egg for a future business, she says she could be a millionaire if she knew then what she knows now. “The biggest problem with the industry is that strippers are not trained how to invest their money, which is why we all got into it,” she says, her pupils narrowing, intent. “If even half of us understood that, we could stimulate the economy rather than just a handful of guys. Imagine: Strippers making sometimes a thousand a night. My ass could get more than just a few men out of this recession.”
Paradise laughs when I ask her if she feels exploited—as if she’s heard this question too many times before. “I’m the one walking away with the money, which in my mind is no different than the feeling I imagine any model gets,” she says. “Except there’s also the buzz you get from performing, which I got from theater too. Stripping is artistic and athletic. You should see the Poleympics in Vegas if you doubt the skill.”
Mid-question, she interrupts me, placing her hand on mine in apology. “I’m sorry, I can’t talk to you anymore… I’m getting out of my bubble. I do what you’re asking nine-to-five: Think, answer, analyze. Here it’s a role, a fantasy I play.”
Her expression is already transforming as she speaks. The question I had started to ask—how exotic dance constitutes art—is answered by just watching Paradise, as she preens in the mirror, eyes finding again their bedroom gaze. She is becoming the persona that makes her audience feel desired. She is an actor preparing backstage. She will build the drama by playing with her chiffon, marking her stage placement as she eddies around the pole, plucking her erect nipples, playacting a climax, and the viewer will leave like everyone leaves a theater—confused, relieved, unchanged, maybe transported. Some may leave with a loosened breath in their chests, others will find their way back to their lives as frustrated as they came. Still, no matter how private one’s reaction is to stripping, none will escape the social drama: Whether it’s a nudie sign by the road you struggle to explain to the children, a venue you lament being closed, or how the shrinking budget of your town chooses to dish up its fiscal pie, everyone in Minnesota is paying for a seat in the exotic show.