The
council members all but scratch their heads and call for a break. A
more anarchistic meeting forms outside as the smokers light up and the
snow feathers down. I find Rich. “You’re pretty up front about bribing
the council,” I say, and he’s speaking even faster than usual, as if
the battle has his tongue going in Morse Code. “Hell, yeah, I’ll pay,”
he says. “Target goes into a town and offers a bunch of jobs in
exchange for a break on their taxes. It’s the same goddamn thing they
do all the time. They disguise it as employment, and the city disguises
it in tax breaks. Well, I bring employment to a goddamn community and
they try to get rid of me.”
Laura, of Kountry Kettle, jumps in.
“The bottom line is that we can’t stop them. Nudity is here to stay.
Whether it’s Bock or Bemidji, there’s money to be made from girls
taking off their clothes.”
A man in a suede fringe jacket leans
in. “Listening to them, it seems like we need to walk the streets of
Bock with a whole-body condom suit on so we’re not a threat to the
community.” A lady with a long thin cigarette ignores him. “I think
there’s a very mixed feeling in town. Our main concern was that we
didn’t want signs of naked women on the buildings. It’s a very
conservative town here. But it’s a broke town that’s going to go more
broke if they fight this. I may not like it, but I also have a sign out
front of my door that says ‘Proud to be an American.’ It’s only our
freedom that separates us from our enemies. Here, you pray for it, you
don’t outlaw it.”
A crew of men, hands stuffed in their pockets,
mills around. “If they don’t give them their license, it is going to be
a big, expensive battle, because Rich here will go all the way,” says
one. “Bock don’t have that much money. We could put a parking lot in
with that money he offered,” adds another. The suede jacket wants back
in. “Someone in one of the last meetings said they thought stripping
was degrading to women,” he smiles. “I think it’s a beautification to
women. The female body is extravagant to me.”
Laura ignores
him. “In the last meeting, some people brought up the religious part.
That really got my goat afterwards because I was brought up in the
Church and I still go to church. You don’t walk into a place and call
people scum, thieves, rats, but before that you say, ‘I’m a born-again
Christian.’ I’m sorry, in the Bible it says those that judge will be
judged.”
Rich is smoking his second cigarette. “At the last
meeting, this lady wished me off the face of the Earth,” he says,
checking in the window for the meeting to start up again. “I turned
around and said to the minister behind me, ‘Well, that’s a real nice
Christian you have there.’” But Rich switches between prey and
predator. “It’s their choice, but I’m getting the kids in here
tomorrow. When this happened in Coates, I had every car flyered in
Dakota County Vo-Tech, every car at Inver Hills Community College.
Tomorrow there’ll be flyers at the high schools around here.”
I
know Rich well enough now that if I ask him about any concerns of
corrupting the youth, he’ll respond with a characteristic explanation
that they see it all in anatomy class. “Whoop-de-ding,” he adds, seeing
my expression. Inside, the mayor is calling everyone back. Rich looks
uncharacteristically stressed, off-guard, jolted off his Larry Flynt
soapbox for a brief moment, as if this battle is so consuming it can
even burn out the igniter. “The mayor has been in three times,” he says
slowly and slightly out of pitch. “And I heard she said that she
thought it was tastefully done.”
Inside, a mother in a
high-buttoned shirt with her hands tightly clasped is standing while
her teenaged daughter sits staring at the floor with wide, embarrassed
eyes. “I’m not saying I condone what’s going on in the back room,” the
woman says, “but I don’t want this town overrun by a bunch of
18-year-olds. We have enough trouble with the minors.” A man on the
other side agrees. “I don’t think we want our seniors going to school
on Monday morning and talking about what they saw in Fat Jack’s. I have
four daughters.” A man in the back bellows, “Here’s the question we’re
up against right now: Do we want nudity with 18-year-olds or do we want
nudity with 21-year-olds. That’s it. There’s nothing more here to talk
about.” A guy in camouflage sitting on a back table with the two
sheriffs speaks real slow when he comments. “We live in the country,”
he says, as if it’s a particular nation. “We see dogs and chickens and
horses getting it on all the time, so what’s the big deal?” The mother
ignores him, waving for the mayor’s attention, voice pinched with
concern. “If we don’t have the liquor license there, then what control
do we have?”
The mayor sighs audibly and slaps both hands out on
the table. It’s been a long meeting, over three hours of her being
seated between a rock and a hard place, and she appears tired of this
discomfort only two months into what could drag out to 11 years. “We
don’t have control whether their liquor license is there or not there,”
she says. “All we have is the moratorium.” Someone sitting in the front
row by Rich graciously puts the nail in the coffin. “Last page of the
liquor license application, ma’am, ‘state’ is spelled wrong.” The mayor
looks to the clerk, deadpan. “Just make sure ‘thong’ is spelled right.”
After
the meeting, there is a veritable convoy of locals to the nearest bar,
where Brad McBride, the buoyant manager of Fat Jack’s, immediately buys
the entire bar a round. “They’re not going to win it,” he says. “They
can’t even handle the first round. We don’t want to bankrupt them. Most
people here have been absolutely wonderful, very vocal and supportive.”
Brad raises his glass to locals who this time raise their glasses back.
“This is home,” he clinks. “We’re glad you have us.”
When
Randall Tigue looks at the 11 years he spent defending Rich in Coates,
he sees little victory in his career crusade to protect the unpopular
views our forefathers made as the first thing to guard in their list of
Amendments. “I do think the First Amendment in this state has lost so
far in this battle. But I also think the notion that cities can use
their zoning to run people out of business will eventually be as
unsuccessful as the obscenity prosecutions. In ’73, after a successful
obscenity trial in California, Charles Keating held a press conference
saying all porn would be wiped off the face of the U.S. within a year.
Thirty years later, there is more sexually explicit material available
than ever dreamed of in ‘73 and it’s Keating that has served jail time.
In the long run, these heavy-handed attempts to suppress free speech
will always fail.”
Historical reality check: Ballet was once
considered obscene. In 1827, citizens reviled a ballet dancer for the
“public expose of a naked female” when the prima wore loose pants
covered by a long skirt. Seventy years later, when a leg was still
covered entirely for bathing or swimming, the forerunner of exotic
dance was first performed in public at the Chicago World’s Colombian
Exposition. It was known as the cooch dance or danse du ventre or
hootchy-kootchy (belly dance).
Flash forward a hundred years,
explains Randall, and even in the last bastion of Reagan-ethics, the
cooch dance had massive public support, however private. “In the
largest political landslide in history, when 51 million people voted
for Ronald Reagan, 55 million adult video tapes were rented that year.
We’re just not the same Puritans we were. During the Clinton
Administration, there was a virtual suspension of obscenity
prosecutions. After two-plus years of John Ashcroft under Bush, there
hasn’t been a resumption of them, even though he is every bit as much
of a moral censor as Ed Meese ever was. Reason one: Osama bin Laden is
giving Ashcroft something to crusade against. Reason two: You have to
prove that a given piece of work exceeds community standards, and those
are being set by what’s on the Internet, what’s available at the public
library, what’s on cable, what’s playing in every hotel/motel. Even the
Ashcrofts have to contend with what are our community standards now.”
I
caught up with the History Channel filming at Rick’s Cabaret in
Minneapolis, where producer Scott Miller came to shoot for an hour-long
show on gentleman’s clubs to air this summer. When TV’s equivalent of a
Mensa meeting takes an interest in T&A, you know how G-rated the
skin drama has become nationally.
Miller didn’t come first to
Minnesota by chance. “I had been in touch with Rick’s in Houston, their
home base, and they said we had to go to Minnesota. For me, the draw
was… this is Minnesota,” he says, emphasizing it in an over-rounded New
York accent as if we’re a particular nation. “It’s just not somewhere
you’d think a gentleman’s club would be. You think L.A., you think New
York, you think Vegas. You don’t think the wholesome, Midwest thing.
Sex in the heartland, you know.”
I think back to the ruined
bachelor party, me rubbing my forehead trying to figure out Minnesota’s
conflicted conventions. “I just don’t get why you asked me to call
strippers,” I had said to the guys as they packed up to go home. “And
you didn’t tell me that your wives were so opposed.”
Eyebrows
had raised, shoulders hunched. “Well,” offered one, “we thought you
knew.” So far, the bare truth I’ve learned about Minnesota’s skin war
is this: Strip back to the economic truth, and we’re still naked
capitalists. Sex is a growing $56 billion industry, and like it or not,
it seems to have the ultimate moral authority behind it—the American
Constitution. A buck is still a buck, whether it’s tossed onto a
country stage or into the till at Sex World. And in the land of supply
and demand, it doesn’t ultimately matter what you feel about whether
the fig leaf should be worn or not. The blue sky will still claim
innocence. Big business will still dance in pricey clouds overhead. It
depends wholly on what pollution we choose, collectively, not to
breathe.