I picked up a book called Strip City in an airport bookstore. I was drawn in by the blue-lined eye on the cover and the summary on the back: "Join journalist and former stripper Lily Burana in the ultimate road trip across America." Strip City is more than just a diary of a road trip, though. It's an insightful look at an outlaw profession with very little written history. Lily was thrilled to do an interview for SuicideGirls, saying that not too long ago she would have been a perfect SuicideGirl. We caught up over the phone to talk about stripping, punk rock, and writing.
Sarah Jaffe: One of my favorite things that you said in Strip City was, "I'm not the one performing, so my sense of what's appropriate is not germane. I don't get to make that call." It's so common these days, not only with stripping, but with musicians, with artists, with writers, that everyone thinks they do get to make the call. Everyone wants to say that they know that you've sold out, that you're doing it for the money or some other thing. How do you feel about that as far as writing goes?
Lily Burana: It's interesting, people are always saying to me (and I mean always saying to me) that stripping is a lot like writing, but it really isn't. In terms of the actual habits, they're very different, and [stripping is] an entirely public job. It's all about exhibiting yourself for someone else's approval and it doesn't really matter how you feel about it. And of course it's a very extroverted profession. Lots of chatting and networking and keeping up with the Janeses as far as your body appearance and all that stuff. But writing is exactly the opposite. It's a very private job, lots of time by yourself, almost to your detriment because you go into that weird writer's zone and you almost lose touch with reality. As much as a part of you wants to become this huge success, in order to succeed you have to write as truthfully and as close to the bone as you can, and that to me is the diametric opposite of stripping. It's [writing is] so much about getting something pure. Because stripping is 100% fake, and that's what we love about it. That's why it's kind of a relief to do it, because you don't have to sustain authenticity, it's all about getting your big blonde wig on and in a way being as campy as you can. It's almost like advanced role-playing.
It really became very apparent to me when I was stripping to do this book and thinking about stripping analytically, that the one thing that writing and stripping have in common is that they're rife with projection. Both are a performance of sorts, and you become like the piece of fuzzy velcro, and everybody who comes in contact with you, whether they're in your audience as a stripper or reading your book is sort of the spiky velcro, and they get stuck to you somehow. You can't control what they think about what you do or why you do it, but they sure as hell are going to formulate their own opinions. It was very interesting to see myself do that about other people. "If I were in her position, would I be doing that? Is that too cheesy or too sleazy or not sleazy enough, is it kind of prissy." That is the common link for me between stripping and writing, that you become this scrim onto which people project their hopes and desires and it often has nothing to do with you and everything to do with their version of you.
SJ: I'm always arguing with people over the whole "sellout" label, and it's an interesting way to look at that when you're talking about stripping. Stripping is obviously all about the money, for the most part, although these days you see a lot of stuff like all these new burlesque troupes that are popping up everywhere where they're not doing it for the money and really are doing it for the enjoyment of it.
LB: Oh yeah, there's a definite line between one and the other and a lot of it has to do with why you're doing it. There's a huge difference between stripping to pay off a $25,000 car and trying to get your kid into private school and stripping because you want to feel good about your curvy body and not have someone tell you that you're going to be a sexless geek the rest of your life. And that's not to say that the twain can't meet--it can, but I don't think that the former can be called a sellout.
It's funny. When I was writing the book I was much more protective of my life because I was much more scared then, so I didn't really say in the book that the fanzine editor I was dating was Tim Yohannan of Maximum Rock'n'Roll, who was like the most politically correct guy on God's green earth, and it was a huge point of contention between the two of us that I had worked as a stripper. We remained friends after we broke up, until he died, and it was so interesting because as the '90's wore on so many of the punk-o rock-o peace-punk girls became strippers and went to work at the Lusty Lady and he really had to stand down a little bit. That was a good thing, I think. There's a certain point where your politics can work against you and you start alienating a lot of your friends. Purity is great, but it can lead a particular strain of isolation that maybe is not particularly good for one's mental health. So that's been interesting to watch, that party line of political purity really soften, because there's more to it than the sort of cut-and-dry, "This is sexual objectification, therefore it's bad," kind of old-school victim, which now seems almost silly to me to bring up because it's changed that much. I just wonder who gets to make the call that somebody's a sellout. There were times when I felt like the most radical girl on the planet as a stripper, and there were times when I did feel like I was quite the sellout, and the person I was selling out more than anybody else was me. So I think your sense of political righteousness can vary from day to day, shift to shift and club to club. That's something you kind of let go of. It's very easy to be politically pure when you live in your parents' house.
SJ: When you've got money and you don't have to pay the bills, it's very easy.
LB: When I was sixteen and a half I was a paragon of peace-punk virtue. When I was nineteen and working in a peep show, and had an $800 a month apartment, with my equally punk rock girlfriend living there, I was humbled a little bit, shall we say. I just think that behind every self-righteous snot is somebody whose dad is a dentist, you know? He's out there in the salt mines filling molars and you're out there with the Che Guevara beret on.
SJ: A lot of people don't know what it's like to work.
LB: I think that's where a lot of stripper attitude comes from, this realization that regardless of what you think politically of what I'm doing, there's a bottom line to be met here, and I'm not asking anybody else to pay my way through life, and regardless of even how I feel about it on a day to day basis, the fact is that it's bringing in money, and you don't always use the money for the right thing. . . My point being, I think that for every sort of meddlesome political objection that people can levy against stripping, which is not to say that they're not legit, which a lot of them are, there is a retort which is, "Yes, but it's paying my bills," and it needs to be done. I just don't have to smell like french fry grease at the end of the night.
I do have one thing to say about that, though, which is that a lot of strippers tend to get lulled into the thought that it's either ass, or McDonald's, and it isn't. And you see women get trapped in the business,and this happened to me. You get so used to making that big money, or what seems like big money to you, and you skip over the salad days, you do your bullshit high-school job, whether it's cleaning homes or working at Pizza Hut or whatever and then you have this job where you are making as much as a white-collar executive--well, a middle-management executive--and you sort of think, "Oh, well, I've cut out the middle step, the ramen years, and so I can't ever go back to that and build a real career." Particularly women who are artists, photographers, painters and writers, who are like "I don't want to go back to the starving thing again, it would feel like a demotion." I went through that, because when I quit stripping I was in my mid-twenties and I had to go back to making no money. I really felt like I'd failed. Now that I'm away from that, I'm more established, I realize that it was time and poverty well spent, but I definitely see women get trapped in, "My success is predicated upon how much money I make. It's either this or McDonald's," and there this middle area where you are doing what you want and making good money, but it takes some time to get there. Stripping warps your time horizon because you get this drilled into your head, like "Younger faster now, younger faster now, younger faster now," that you get so afraid when you're twenty-five that you start thinking you're going to run out of time for everything, when in fact you're just running out of time to be attractive to the pervert in the back row. You don't really care about him anyway, but for some reason you think that he's a truth-teller. And he's not. Time, more than anything else, gets completely perverted when you strip.
SJ: I know girls who try to get out of stripping in their early twenties and they decide they want to settle down and get married.
LB: I think a lot of women, when we burn out, we think, "I'm going to go legit," and what's more legit than getting married? It's like "I'm going to go from the whore to the Madonna," or the whore to June Cleaver, and cut out the middle ground of having to figure out what you want. And invariably those women quit and come back. They quit their marriage and come back to stripping, because they realize that the guy is not the missing link. The missing link is, "What do I need to fulfill myself?" And that sounds totally Oprah and New Age, but. . .
SJ: It's so true.
LB: You've got to figure that out before you bring a man into the picture. Another person is only going to complicate things. And I see that with women who purposefully try to get pregnant to get out of the business. It's one thing to strip to support a kid you already have, or you have an oopsie and then you have the kid and that's not part of your exit strategy, that's one thing. But when the kid is your exit strategy, that's scary. Often you're not financially prepared.
SJ: That poor kid.
LB: This is really frank stuff. This is stuff that I didn't even have the brainpower to get to with the book because I was still reeling from stripper damage when I wrote it. There are so many life strategies of strippers--you think it's a good idea, and then you get out, and it's like, Whoa. I don't want to sound totally anti-marriage; I'm not, I am married. But I didn't get married until I was in my thirties, and had been out of stripping for a while. Marriage isn't the big fix-it.
SJ: A lot of the girls that I know that are stripping seemed to get into it because they didn't know what else they could do aside from getting married. Stripping falls into one of those female roles.
LB: I kind of realize now, looking back on it, that you need those years of complete desperation because it's only in that desperation, that darkness, that the beacon becomes what you really want to do with your life. If you're making fifteen to twenty-five hundred dollars a week, you're not hungry. I don't regret what I've done stripping, mostly because I can't imagine who I'd have been since I started stripping so young, like what would I have done with 18 to 25 if I wasn't stripping. But I think I would have started writing more seriously and written more honestly if I had--if I didn't have this giant sugar daddy of the strip club. That's not to bag on other strippers who do finance their art through stripping, women have done some pretty cool shit, I'm sure it probably did more good than harm as far as a logistical component of my life, but there is something to be said for the hard press of not knowing what you want to do and not having the luxury to coast while you figure it out. You just work that much harder I guess.
SJ: Yeah, although it's kind of hard to write anything brilliant when you're working two jobs trying to pay the bills!
LB: It's a tough thing to do. I also should retroactively preface this by saying that I'm speaking as someone who started stripping at 18. For somebody who went to college first, it's totally different. She'll probably read this and think, "What is this blithering idiot talking about?" but for me, I just know that it takes a lot of energy out of you working as a dancer that you don't even realize. Sexual energy and creative energy are very close to each other, and when you're spending all that energy you realize that you gave at the office, I'd come home and be staring at the computer thinking "Duh, I need a pedicure." All my creative energy would get drained out because I was so busy at work using all my creative energy making up stories about my age and where I was from and what I was doing in the club to some shoe salesman from Royal Oaks. Like, that was my big story that I wrote today, was that I was a twenty-four year old wandering babysitter from Tallahassee or whatever.
SJ: You talked about stripping having very little written history, and after I did a search on Amazon.com, just to see what I would pull up, as far as books about stripping, and you get books about stripping paint. And stripper brings up your book and a couple of others that were written by men. I think there was one other, like "Ivy League Stripper" or something like that.
LB: There are a few more now.
SJ: It's obviously getting to be more acceptable. It still freaks out people's families, but do you think it'll become even more common? Do you think we'll get a lot more people coming out and telling their stories?
LB: I think that there will always be fewer than people expect. It's much more visible now, but I think people tend to confuse visibility with acceptability. No, nobody's shocked if you have met or are friends with a stripper anymore in the way that they would have been ten or twenty years ago, and it's not like being a stripper is seen as some kind of sexual alien the way that she was in generations past. But it's one thing to be aware of categorically that strippers are out there. It's another thing to come out and put your own butt on the line and say "Yeah, I did this."
I think part of the reason why you're seeing more now certainly is that the social climate has changed so much. Maybe someone did try to sell the great american stripper tell-all that was politically astute and written like a dream twenty years ago but all the book editors just freaked out. It's not just who's willing to write but who's willing to publish. And it has gotten much less conservative. But even when I went to sell this book in 1998, the original publisher who bought the book, and later killed it (but we can talk about that later), but at the original publisher, there were five guys and one woman in this meeting, the woman was probably in her fifties, and she was like "We really like the articles that you've written about stripping," kind of trying to compliment and condemn me at the same time, so she ended up saying something like "but for the grace of God, I never had to do that!" Gimme a break. A woman our age, twenties or thirties or whatever, would never say that now. I could imagine that some woman probably did try to come forward and just got shot down.
I think we'll continue to see more, certainly, there were four, five books on stripping that came out in the past year that were written by strippers, and I think that's great. There are safety in numbers, I think more women are going to be like, well, these women came out, my story's a little edgier, maybe doesn't have quite so seamless an ending, so I'm going to come forward with that, and some other girl's going to go, "Well, I don't happen to be a middle-class white girl, which all these others are, so I'm going to come forward with that." I think we're going to see women become increasingly emboldened. I do realize that when I came out with the book. People would project all this weird stuff onto me because it wasn't their stripping life. A stripping story is not the stripping story, and people would be like "that's not what my life was like, so fuck you, you prude!" or "Fuck you, you whore!" There's all these subtle gradations about what women will or won't do, or think is or isn't cool. But that'll go away over time, because there'll be twenty stripper books out there, because there are twenty, thirty, fifty different stripper experiences. But that's a luxury problem. I really don't worry about it at all because I still get these emails from these women that are not just nice, but they become personally attatched to the book in a way that I never would've dreamed, and it's awesome. It's like the best feeling there is.
SJ: Ever since I first read the book, when I've talked about it to people, they've had great things to say. One girl said she took it to work and passed it around the dressing room, another said she had given it to a women's studies professor who plans to teach it.
LB: Now, literally, my big dream when I was writing this was that I wanted it to be in the dressing room, because that's the heart of the strip club. Everybody's like "What about the guys?" but we don't even think about that, we think about the money and the dressing room. So for me to think that there's a woman out there with it in the dressing room, I'm like "I'm alive!" I know I sound like the total post-punk Pollyanna, but I am!
SJ: I was sitting in the bar the other night with your book and my notebook, just scribbling down questions that I wanted to ask, and this guy sitting next to me asks, "What are you doing?" and I pass him over the book and ask him, "What would you want to ask her?" and he immediately said, "Who screwed you up to make you become a stripper?" And that answer is so. . .
LB: Guys like you! There's your answer.
SJ: He automatically assumed that there had to be something wrong, and didn't think that maybe some people just get into it because it seems like a good way to make money, and don't realize how hard it really is.
LB: Yeah, and also to go back to what we were saying about people's reaction to the book, I didn't try to curry any kind of critical favor with the elite, pampered book-reviewing masses, because I knew I was just going to get thrashed on every angle. Either too uptight, too manipulative, or too slutty. I was even surprised when it got good reviews at all because I knew the real critics of this book were going to be people that either loved somebody that did the work, or did the work themselves. So you get this reaction critically like that guy in the bar that are so far removed from it, all they know is what they think about it. People have their ideas from a distance, but when you know somebody who does it or do it yourself, you realize that the concerns are so different from what people expect. The concerns are, Am I going to get out of it? Am I going to meet my goal? Am I going to be able to keep my body image in check? Because you do turn your body into a commodity, your body and whatever portion of your personality you choose to present. And then when you get out, even if you're kooky alterna-girl with twenty-five piercings like me, with your purple hair under your wig, it's almost like your alternativeness becomes commodified too, like "Ooh, you're kooky alterna-stripper! Hi, kooky alterna-stripper! Why don't you come over here and say something about William Burroughs?" You realize that you are your brand, and that's such a modern, Gen-X nightmare existential thing to realize, but the strip club drives that home so hard, then you have some clown on a bar somewhere going "Did Uncle Pete touch you?" And it's like well, yeah, maybe Uncle Pete did touch me, but right now that's not what I'm trying to fix.
SJ: And you think that guys like that, with that attitude, are the ones who come in and give you money. The ones who are sitting there thinking, "What's wrong with this girl?"
LB: That was always one of the hardest things to deal with. It comes out of that scrim--like I said before, about being a scrim for people's sexual projection--of the confused guy. You get worshipful puppydog guy and you feel kind of bad for him, and sometimes you get plain dickhead guy, and he's just like "Well, you're too fat for me," or "I already tipped you two dollars," but at least his hostility is clean and you can get away. But then you get the guy who's like "Well, I am sexually titillated by you, but I also hate you and hate myself, so I'm going to be drooling and judging at the same time." And you walk away from there going, "I'm not sure if that twenty dollars I made was worth it." People's sexual neuroses are contagious, and it's not like that attitude goes flying into the lapel of your business suit and that acts like a shield. No, you're standing there in your fucking thong, and that attitude goes right into your skin, and into some receptacle in your soul.
That's something that people don't even think about, the stripper brain scramble. I think about it to this day. People are like "You didn't end up killed and dumped in a dumpster, it didn't seem to hurt you in the least!" Just because there's no physical bruises, doesn't mean you don't get that bruised-melon feeling in your heart. You can get ego boosts stripping, but you get ego bruises too. There's no "every man's dream." That's total rubbish. That's one thing that stripping is good for, because it does toughen you up a bit, you realize that that kind of girly need to please everyone is impossible so you just kind of let it go. Especially if you're an alterna-chick, because you know damn well that a lot of clubs won't even hire you. That's part of the reason that I did get all Barbie-d out when I did Strip City, because that's one look that does tend to fit in better everywhere you go, but you know, I'd be at a go-go bar in New Jersey with mostly Portuguese and Russian girls and I was dead air. You can't please everybody.
SJ: I think you do a really great job in there of showing that it's not always bad and that it's not always about the guys or the money, but that you can get off on it.
LB: Oh, absolutely. When we miss stripping, what we miss is like Friday night, everybody's making money, so you kind of kick over into "don't give a fuck" mode, and you start dancing to entertain each other, and Tiffany's making the most money, so she sits at the rail and tips everybody, and Mary Beth's like "I've made enough money, I'm going to go put on my catholic schoolgirl uniform and dance around to Ministry," and it becomes like this advanced carnal playground, and I don't think you can get that anywhere else. It's this total half-naked talent show feeling. I think strippers honestly miss that when they leave the business. There is this element of this carefree romping quality, and when you get it, it's like the most precious thing ever. We're not a particularly sexually playful society, so there is that element of exhibitionism combined with a play ethic that is a lot of fun.
One of the marks of professionalism as a stripper is being able to appreciate when another girl does a great show. I feel really privileged to have seen some incredible dancers. And these are not women who necessarily even wanted to be dancers, it's like, "I just finished following Phish around," and they strip down, take off their granny glasses and their Uggs and do this routine that just drops you on your ass. Regardless of the politics of stripping, there's a beauty to the performance that you can't really argue against. I do think we see more appreciation for that now that pop culture in general has become so bump-and-grindy.
SJ: Your use of music is so great that I feel like you should just release a soundtrack with the book.
LB: That's my dream, girl!
SJ: It's so well described that even if you don't recognize the song, you can still almost hear it.
LB: That's like the mark of a gazillion-dollar successful author is when they do issue a soundtrack. They've only done it like twice in the history of publishing. But I keep thinking I've got to rip a CD with all of these songs on it because it would be so funny to go from "Cherry Pie" by Warrant or "I Love Little Girls" by Oingo Boingo or whatever, to hear them side by side and and try to imagine them in one strip club.
SJ: What are the last five CD's you bought?
LB: I don't really buy CD's anymore, but let's see. . . I've become a huge Top Forty country fan so I am the ultimate cheeseball now. Why don't I just tell you what's in heavy rotation right now?
SJ: That works too.
LB: I've been listening to lots of Johnny Cash because he just died and we're all sad. It's that voice, that "Hello, I'm Johnny Cash," that's like, "Hi honey, Daddy's home." What am I going to do? I'm not going to hear that anymore. I've become obsessed with George Strait, the Strait out of the Box boxed set. I think it's because the book I'm working on now is a novel about a rodeo cowboy. I'm using George Strait as a role model. I think "If I could just make this guy a little more conservative," and then I put on some George and I know I can do it, I can make him an even gooder good-ol-boy.
Of course, "Cowboy Take Me Away" from the Dixie Chicks, because what I'm writing is very much a western romance, for people like us, anyway. Not like a Harliquin romance, I think a Harliquin editor would burst into flames if she read this book, she'd be like "What is that thing doing in there!" And Allison Moorer, whom I love. Allison Moorer wrote this song called "The Alabama Song," girl, if that song does not get your zipper down, either your zipper is broken or you are. It's this beautiful deep butterscotch maple syrup voice. This song is so slow and so southern, and I'm not southern at all, so it's just like, the whole southern gothic thing. It's a good thing this song is only four minutes long, because I'd just be melted into a puddle of girly goo if it was one minute longer. Also have been listening to--I'm so embarassed, my taste in music is so lame!--but I absolutely had to, because we're discussing stripping, dig out the Dracula soundtrack with Annie Lennox singing "Love Song for a Vampire." Which makes me sob uncontrollably. You never let go of that part of yourself that started kissing girls because of Susan Sarandon and Catherine Deneuve in The Hunger. It's like this incredible swoop of crimson velvet, it's big and it's romantic and it's showy and it's just achingly sad. And that part of you doesn't go away, even if you're married to an army officer sitting at your army post somewhere in your sweatshirt and jeans. There's still this little part of you that's like "Come over here so I can pierce you." That song is the link to that part of my soul.
SJ: In the book you say that punk is a "Fuck You" with a philosophy, and I think a lot of your book is a search for a philosophy to go with the "fuck you" of stripping.
LB: Somewhere in the urge to strip, regardless if it's to pay the bills or whatever, is a woman's quest for self-discovery. In a way for a lot of women, stripping is like the sexual equivalent of Junior Year Abroad. Some people might disparage it, and I know that it does easily become a cliche, but that speaks for how far we've come, that we've gone from this inconceivable entity to a cliche. But I think it's real. Women who are out there, shakin' their ass who are of a slightly countercultural bent are looking for something. Sometimes we don't even know what it is, often it's not about what you end up discovering, but there really is something about--two little strippers in yonder wood, and one is being a good girl and keeping her clothes on, and another one is going "well, I'm going to take everything that everyone has told me about this job and put it in the back of my head and go find out for myself." And that doesn't mean that that person is going to come out being a radicalized person, but maybe a more knowing person, and that isn't worthless. I don't even care if you go on to renounce stripping later on in your life, because some women do and they're entitled to that. I might, but I doubt it. But it opens the gates for the confident, questing part of yourself. I know that this is a controversial point, that someone's going to say, "Oh, she's just a pretentious blatherer," but I am a pretentious blatherer! But it isn't just about the money. It's also about the discovery. Sometimes you just have to wander into the dark.
SJ: Another quote from your book that I love is when you talk about the guy following you around the club offering to give you a new Corvette in exchange for having sex with his wife and girlfriend, and you say, "Please, like I'd be caught dead in a new Corvette anyhow." Which I just think is great because it's not what anybody expects you to say. Not that we actually think you'd have taken him up on it, but it's funny to read that. If someone was to tempt you with that kind of offer, though, what kind of car would it be?
LB: It would either be a classic Camaro or a Stingray, like '60's or '70's--the Corvette would be okay if it wasn't new--or it would be the total pimped-out Toby Keith half ton diesel pickup truck. Black with grey interior, tinted windows, because as a truck drivin' woman, I can attest, there's nothing like pulling up at a stop light and being the chick in the truck. It's kind of like peace through superior firepower, but oh well. The new Corvette, I was just so offended, I was like, "What kind of whore do you think I am? I would never be seen in that silly car!"
SJ: Tell me some more about this book you're writing about cowboys.
LB: It's not really a western story that hasn't been told before. It's about a young ranching girl who moves to the big city and has to come home to sell the ranch, and all her life all she's ever heard is "Don't ever date a rodeo cowboy," so she meets the rodeo cowboy, and let's just say it's a very educational experience.
SJ: Sounds like fun. Can't wait to read it.
LB: Well, I don't know if it's going to go any further than the top drawer of my file cabinet, but it sure has been interesting.
SJ: What else are you up to now besides that?
LB: Doing a lot of book criticism, which is sort of just keeping an oar in the water, because when you become a novelist, which I'm only now learning because I never thought I would write a novel in my life, you really do go into this complete parallel universe. I always thought that people who talked about what their characters would eat for breakfast were like crazy freaks, but it's true. You find yourself completely absorbed by minute details, thinking, "Wow, I wonder if he would ever eat Spam?" So it keeps me rooted to terra firma, because I don't really want to get any further out of my body than I already am on this novel. I do a lot of gender books and a lot of sex books--I don't know why [laughs], but that's pretty much it. Once I finish this novel, regardless of its fate, I'll sort of be ready to attack life again. My big goal for the upcoming year is to finally make it to the Playboy mansion. Aim high, right?
SJ: Even though you don't really say "I'm this tall, this size," you do a really good job of bringing your physical presence to the book. I wish I got to meet you in person because I have such a good mental picture that I want to see if I'm right. Without too many details, you're very physically present in the book. There's so much tendency to shrink away physically among women, so I think that was great.
LB: Well, I could have given my physical stats, which are not particularly unusual, but part of it just like, tall, blonde hair, big rack, and that seems kind of dorky, like why would you say that? Also, there's something about it--it doesn't matter what I look like. Of course when you strip it matters what you look like on every level, but in terms of telling the story of stripping, all you need to know is that I'm not perfect. And I know that. And I have my own mixed relationship with not being perfect. But that's what stripping is all about anyway, walking that fine line between "I kind of have to be perfect but I can make really good money not being perfect," and that paradox, you try to live within that. There are a lot of books where the women are like "I never thought I could be a stripper because I'm flat-chested," or because I'm whatever, it's kind of like, well, I did it, it doesn't matter if you're a golden goddess, there's still going to be all that self-doubt in there anyway. It has nothing to do with packaging, god knows we all know that. I think that the only thing I felt was important to say was that I was blonde, because I was aggressively fakely blonde, and that I had big shoulders and big thighs.
SJ: But you come across as physically strong, that no one is going to push you around.
LB: Which is kind of funny, because aside from the big shoulders, I don't even have the upper body strength to open a pickle jar on my own. I try to make up for that in mental fortitude. I think part of that does come from stripping and part of it comes from punk rock. If you come from the peace-punk background, you come into it and see the girls on the side of the mosh pit holding their boyfriends' leather jackets, but as soon as you see that you think "I don't want to be that." And that does give me that edge, makes it a little harder to translate into mainstream society, but I don't care. That's what I needed to see so much in other women, that it would just feel like such a compromise to let go now. It did cost me a dollar and fifty cents as a stripper that I wasn't this submissive, feathery-voiced little miss. But how much of yourself are you going to give up to make money? That's the eternal question.
SJ: People always want to save the stripper, take her away from all of that, but no one ever wants to save me from waitressing. I never hear guys saying, "Oh, my girlfriend works in a sleazy bar but I want her not to have to do that anymore." No one treats that as anything other than what you have to go through to be where you want to be. But just about every guy that I know that dates a stripper wants to save her from it.
LB: It's like Pygmalion with a go-go pole. It's a tough one, because I think that what makes guys want to save strippers as opposed to saving waitresses is it would give them a sense of contributing to a woman's moral uplift, and that's not to say that that part might not even be real--it is real. I certainly know that the guy that I'm married to now, who is not the guy in the book, we would not be together if I was stripping, he's made that very clear. It's been very interesting for me to be with someone who is not only like no, but fuck no, it's cool that you did it, but I don't want to deal with what you go through. I won't watch you do it. It's not that he's a prude, it's more that he sees what stripping takes out of women and doesn't want that for me.
It's been very interesting to be with somebody that I wouldn't have been with ten years ago. I would've been like "If you can't handle it, then. . ." Now I'm having to see it from the point of view of the guy. What it's like to watch your woman come home, and it's this woman that you think is beautiful and wonderful and all she can do is talk shit about herself because she had a bad night at the club. It is hard to share your woman with 200 guys in a week, especially if she's a lap-dancer or maybe you just don't want all these guys looking at her boobs. It's a tough thing to look at it from the guy's point of view because I'm one of those people that always sides with the chick. Now I'm like, "Wow, maybe these guys have something to say about it." And it's not that they want to be the white knight or they think you're some whore that they have to pull out of the gutter, it's like "I look at you in the strip club and all I can think of is pearls before swine, why are you wasting yourself on these ingrate losers?" That's not a moral judgment, that's a guy thinking that you're selling yourself short by doing this job and it has nothing to do with your sexuality, it has everything to do with taking something that he sees as valuable and putting it in front of guys who might as well be snoring. That was a real wake-up call for me.
But as far as the guy trying to save the girl, I can guarantee you one thing. If a girl quits the business because of a guy, she'll go right back in. Strippers cannot be saved, they have to save themselves. I don't care if it takes two years, ten years, or twenty years, she has to do it on her own. She's probably going to quit and go back, quit and go back, but she's got to hang up her stilettos on her own. Because external pressure to a stripper, let me tell you what the response to that is. A certain finger held aloft. I think there's a difference between a guy who thinks you're selling yourself short and a guy who thinks he needs to swoop down from a white horse and carry you away to a life of piety. I get a lot of email from guys who say "that guy in the book was really amazing, I couldn't handle it when my girlfriend stripped." Because most people don't even have to think about sharing their partner sexually, it's just a given. I do think a well-intentioned, egalitarian, earnest stripper boyfriend probably deserves his own medal. Which he's never going to get. It's also hard for female lovers of strippers--plenty of lesbian relationships break up over one girl stripping.
SJ: If you don't mind me asking, what did happen to the guy in the book?
LB: Oh, I don't mind at all. It had nothing to do with stripping, he would've been cool with stripping. I wasn't cool with it anymore. It was really just a matter of I wanted to be here, and it sort of started as a happy country love song and ended as a sad country love song.
That's something I've noticed with strippers, too. You become such a cartoon girl that sometimes you end up attracted to the cartoon guy. Because there is an element of camp to any gender role, so if you're a little exaggerated as a stripper than you look for a guy who's a little exaggerated too. Sometimes that can work out really well, and sometimes it's a little sad, but I certainly was grateful that somebody trusted me enough to allow me to include them in the book. I think that's something that people wonder about, how does it affect your relationship? It is intense, but you just go on and life goes through all these changes. . . I never thought I'd be where I am now, but then again I could never see myself being any older than 27, because that's the rock'n'roll age when everybody cool dies, and then on your 28th birthday you're like "Oh my god, better do some quick thinking!"
SJ: Tell me some more about how you started writing while you were dancing.
LB: Zines and punk-rock fanzines and stuff sort of sustained me through high school. I felt really alienated, I was not in a particularly punk-enriched environment, and I'd read Maximum Rock'n'roll or Flipside or Punk Planet and it was almost religious zeal, they became bibles to me. Then as a teenager I became attached to certain books, like The Bell Jar because of course Sylvia Plath was like the poster child for the self-styled artiste girl. I started writing for fanzines a little bit here and there, and it wasn't until I had started a zine called Taste of Latex which was sort of like a punk porn zine, maybe a precursor, a primordial shadow of SuicideGirls, because there wasn't really anything that combined sex and punk rock, and it had a short life. Making a zine was very demanding and it probably would have been easier as a webzine, but you know, we didn't have the World Wide Web back in the day! I'm one of those people where that's the campfire for me, those are the kinds of things around which my tribe clusters, certain books and certain zines.
When I was speaking at an OutRight conference--OutRight was cool because it was about the queer literati and writing as a non-heterosexually-identified person, which I was at the time. The only straight guys I knew were the ones that were paying me to talk to them. Doug Brantley, who has since moved to New Orleans and is actually connected with the Tennessee Williams Literary festival (funny how it comes full circle), was the editor at The Advocate at the time and he asked me if I wanted to start writing for money. I was like "I can't believe this whole writing plus money! That can actually happen in the same equation?" It wasn't like I'd planned to become a professional writer, I certainly had not, I spent my late teens and the earliest part of my twenties going around thinking "I like to do lots of things, which of these things is going to pay," and I just sort of gravitated towards writing, and learned the structure of journalism because of The Advocate, in terms of how to set up a story structurally and how not to be scared when you're on the phone (which I still have not gotten over), various things like that.
From there it was literally like swinging from vine to vine, never like I sat down and drafted out a master plan, which as I'm reading about the lives of writers I'm finding is actually more what happens. You don't really think you're going to be a writer, you just find one little peg and pull yourself up by it, and find another one, and by the time I was ready to quit stripping I had gotten some relatively decent clips, you know, I had published something in Mademoiselle and a lot of stuff in The Advocate and LA Weekly, and I decided to move to New York and quit stripping and starve. And I did that very well. My talent for starving is boundless. I wrote something for New York Magazine about stripping, and one of the things about stripping that's kind of cool is that it is of perpetual fascination to straight people, so I would pitch a story about it somewhere which is very helpful if you are a struggling writer. And I really did not make a lot of money for a very long time, and then all of a sudden it exploded, and I choked. I got all these really incredible assignments that I was too petrified to do, so I had this period where I kind of sucked. It was very embarassing and I'm still trying to recover mentally from that, but there's something to be said for rising slowly, rather than moving to New York and then within a year somebody's offering you ten grand to write a story for Esquire, and you're like "That can't be me," and I fucking blew it, completely.
Strip City came from a GQ story that I did, which was a fascinating experience and made me even more hungry to write more about stripping in a way that didn't feel like pressure to be the crazy empowered bad girl or the snivelling tearstained wretch. And I sold the book originally to a sympathetic publisher, kind of mainstream publisher, and they were very enthusiastic about it, and then when I turned it in, the fact that there was even the most cursory mention of prostitution made the editor kill it. He said "You can take out all the references to prostitution or you can deal with the fact that I'm going to kill the book." And I was like, "Please. A stripper trying to pass herself off as honest that doesn't at least mention prostitution is like somebody trying to write about disco and not mention coke. It's a very real pitfall of this business and I cannot possibly take this out." It was so ridiculous that he would even think to ask me to do it and I had to watch this book deal, this book that I had spent so much money to write and chewed up an advance and traveled all over and exhausted myself just completely go into the shitter. I was crushed, but somewhere inside of me was this little voice saying "Someone will get it," and we took it back out and within a month had sold it to Miramax.
It was such a good feeling to have somebody have the exact opposite opinion of, "It has to be in there, it's real, it's as real as what you go through to get your costumes on, or what you go through to try to do a dignified gas-station piss when your quads are aching from being in high heels all day." I was very happy with how it was handled there, because in the interim period where I didn't think this book was going to see the light of day I was really crushed. And it made it very hard to try to write another book because in my mind I had this picture of this big censorian editorial finger from the heavens going, "Bad girl, you can't go there." I don't react particularly well to the "Don't ask, don't tell," editorial policy, and I'll pay the price for it, but I ended up with a book that I don't feel too bad about. So that's the kind of thumbnail of my writing career. For the most part I've supported myself as a journalist and I like to sort of poke around in a dilettante-ish way and examine a facet of culture and then move on to the next thing. It's been a real exercise in discipline to be working on the same thing for a year and not be able to put on stiletto heels and a big hairpiece and shake off all my doldrums. I can't do that anymore, so it's really a very much "time to make the donuts" feeling.
SJ: I loved the way you ended Strip City, with passing on your costumes to the young stripper. Emma Forrest talks about emotional networking between women, and how her career started because of older women helping her, and she believes in doing that for younger girls. But I think that goes tenfold more with stripping because it is basically a woman's business. You get help from older women or you don't really have a chance.
LB: It's the ultimate apprenticeship. Until I went to that stripper school, which I still think is the only existing formal stripper school, I didn't realize that there was any other way to learn but from other women. You have someone who tells you the rules, but you don't really learn the rules rules until you talk to the other women. It's a business where within a year you attain veteran status, and I don't know any other business where you're considered a veteran within twelve months. You learn what you need to know and you turn around to the new girl and tell her, "You'll probably do better if you wear a different kind of bra," and that sounds like piddling shit, but it isn't. Your aesthetic is your bread and butter so to have some woman tell you about a different pickup line.
People who are outside of the business tend to see it as one perpetual catfight, but first of all, who has the energy for that? Our feet hurt, and we just want to count our money and go home. Second of all, when you're part of an outlaw class, there is this sort of instant solidarity. It doesn't matter how many spandex asses you see on MTV, it's still an outlaw business. So there's the unity that comes about from being widely misunderstood. Are all strippers friends? Absolutely not. There are clubs that are downright nasty, and you have to work very hard to ingratiate yourself with the other dancers, but I've found that typically it's more sympathetic than not. It doesn't really affect your money to help someone else out, and I think women grasp that very quickly.
These little dressing room niceties help keep you sane. Because there is so much hostility in the outside world, and there is such a dizzying emotional maelstrom when you're on the floor in the club, that it's nice to have this place that you can retreat to that's chick space. You don't need it as much when you leave, but it's nice to have had it. Even as a writer, if it weren't for somebody like Susie Bright, who is probably like 45 right now, she did On Our Backs and the Best American Erotica series and really was a pioneer, I met her when I was 21, and if she had not been very encouraging of me and my fanzine who knows if I'd have written at all? It helps when it comes from another chick because there's not that perceived sexual opportunism that there can be from a guy. "Is this guy just helping me because he's trying to get some off me?" which as a stripper you're very sensitive to anyway. You can realize that it's just an honest-to-god encouragement, and that can be the difference between becoming who you want to be and not, and that in essence means everything.
SJ: You talk about the nude clubs and the difference between dancing nude and dancing topless, and one thing that always pissed me off about nude clubs is that they don't serve alcohol. The idea that a man after a few drinks is going to be so overcome by the sight of a woman's vagina that he can't control himself. It really makes me mad.
LB: Vulva equals war!
SJ: It's kind of flattering, but it's stupid.
LB: Maybe that's based on experience, that a nude club does tend to get wilder, and it's OK if that's true, but I worked at a nude club in Alaska that had alcohol, so it's less a matter of how much pink you're seeing and more a matter of how good your security is. So I see it as a sort of antiquated thing, maybe it's less about the actual behavior in the club and what they're seeing and more as a sort of intimidation, like "If you really want to get nasty, we're going to take away your booze." It might be more about trying to regulate what they perceive to be decency from a legislative point of view, that it might be more about thinking they can keep the full-nudie gross people out of they don't let 'em have alcohol. But I worked totally nude in Alaska with lots of alcohol flowing and it was safer than a lot of other clubs I've been in. It seems just as weird to me.
SJ: In the book, when you ask Randy why he thinks guys go to strip clubs, he replies that he thinks guys get fixated on a certain girl and think that if they keep going back they may have a chance with her. And then you say that you had never really thought about hope as part of the strip club economy. I don't know if that's a nice way to look at it or not.
LB: It was something I hadn't thought much about. As a stripper, you have so much else to think about that you're not really thinking very deeply about why the guys are there or not. Is he a nice guy or is he not, that's all I need to know. I don't think that's why most guys go there at all, I think most guys go there as a form of escapism. They may fantasize in a way, maybe the way they fantasize that they'd take the Lamborghini out of the showroom, but they don't actually think that they're actually going to do it. I think it's more like mental playtime then actually fantasizing about taking the stripper out--"Gee, I wonder what that would be like? I bet she's really freaky, hee hee," and less about actually strategically trying to get the girl out of the club. But it was interesting to hear that because it really brought home for me that I haven't thought about that very deeply. It was more about what are my goals here, am I feeling OK today, do I need time off right now, thinking about it from a financial point of view or a psychic health point of view. I didn't think about the guys that much at all.
When you do think about the guys it actually becomes harder to do the job, so I don't know if women who are actively stripping should actually think "What's his motivation?" because that takes a lot of time and a lot of energy. I think there are a million different reasons why guys go to a strip club, and most of them aren't as chivalrous as "I want to date the stripper." Truthfully I do think of it for most guys as a form of escapism. As much as it is stepping into a parallel world for the dancers, it's even more so for the guys. It's this complete other world that you're not going to get from ESPN or whatever, and you can just sink right into it. That can be as harmless as doing it once in a while with your buds or as dangerous as a full-on addiction, but if somebody were to ask me what's the most compelling reason for a guy to go, I would say it's escapism. It's also an escape from the gender roles--most of the time they have to pursue, but they can go there and have these girls coming up and saying "Would you like a dance? Would you like me to sit with you?" and it's a buyer's market. I think most guys are out there having to campaign, and here instead they have the girls coming up to them and they're like "Mercy! I don't even know what to do with this embarassment of riches!" and of course the answer to that is, "Tip more!" As far as guys coming in there trying to court a woman out of the strip club, it's simultaneously touching and deluded. I can count on one finger the amount of girls I know out of all my years in strip clubs who married a customer.
I think that's why a lot of girls, including myself, preferred lap dancing when we really just wanted to make bucks. It's like, "Do you want a dance?" "Yes," "OK," grind, grind, grind, OK, song's over, "Do you want a dance?" "Yes," "OK," grind, grind, grind, "Do you want a dance?" "No," "OK, next!" It's mechanical, systematic, you don't have to seduce the money out of the guy's wallet, he's got the twenty in his hand, and you can take it, do your thing for two minutes, then move on. It's not the sort of agonizing, extended mating dance. I really had to learn when I was doing Strip City how to do it the other way because I wasn't doing lap dances. But sometimes you just don't want to seduce for your supper. It's like "Dude, give me your money, you know why you're here, I know why you're here," I know it's cold, but. . .
SJ: It's cold, but that's how it is. Even waiting tables, I get guys who leave me their phone number or ask for my phone number and I'm like, "It's my job to make you feel good, make you laugh, make your experience more enjoyable. I'm not doing it because I like you." It's this equation that some people just don't get.
LB: It's the blessing and the curse of stripping. If every man really internalized the extent of the artificiality of stripping, all the clubs would close tomorrow. It's this suspension of disbelief that guys do shockingly well, and it's shocking to women because women for whatever reason don't buy into that kind of thing. It can be shocking particularly when you start stripping how easy it is to seduce money out of someone. Two seconds of Scarlett O'Hara eyelash-batting and you've got four hundred bucks. There's a whole bunch of guys who are like "No way, I can't be turned on my ear that easily," but it can go to your head, and it can also depress you too, like "Wow, men are that easily manipulated around sex. I don't know if I like the world as much as I thought I did." It's kind of weird how much you can get for how little flattery.
SJ: Okay. To wrap this up, what's the last book that you read?
LB: The last book that I read was Skin Deep, by Karol Griffin, the subtitle is something like "Of tattoos, the disappearing west, very bad men, and my deep love for them all." It's kind of a rollicking tattoo-chick memoir. I could definitely see myself becoming best friends with her very easily. She's a Wyoming tattoo artist, and that combines two of my loves right there. Plus she's a chick, what's not to love?
You can pick up a copy of Strip City at your local bookstore.
Sarah Jaffe: One of my favorite things that you said in Strip City was, "I'm not the one performing, so my sense of what's appropriate is not germane. I don't get to make that call." It's so common these days, not only with stripping, but with musicians, with artists, with writers, that everyone thinks they do get to make the call. Everyone wants to say that they know that you've sold out, that you're doing it for the money or some other thing. How do you feel about that as far as writing goes?
Lily Burana: It's interesting, people are always saying to me (and I mean always saying to me) that stripping is a lot like writing, but it really isn't. In terms of the actual habits, they're very different, and [stripping is] an entirely public job. It's all about exhibiting yourself for someone else's approval and it doesn't really matter how you feel about it. And of course it's a very extroverted profession. Lots of chatting and networking and keeping up with the Janeses as far as your body appearance and all that stuff. But writing is exactly the opposite. It's a very private job, lots of time by yourself, almost to your detriment because you go into that weird writer's zone and you almost lose touch with reality. As much as a part of you wants to become this huge success, in order to succeed you have to write as truthfully and as close to the bone as you can, and that to me is the diametric opposite of stripping. It's [writing is] so much about getting something pure. Because stripping is 100% fake, and that's what we love about it. That's why it's kind of a relief to do it, because you don't have to sustain authenticity, it's all about getting your big blonde wig on and in a way being as campy as you can. It's almost like advanced role-playing.
It really became very apparent to me when I was stripping to do this book and thinking about stripping analytically, that the one thing that writing and stripping have in common is that they're rife with projection. Both are a performance of sorts, and you become like the piece of fuzzy velcro, and everybody who comes in contact with you, whether they're in your audience as a stripper or reading your book is sort of the spiky velcro, and they get stuck to you somehow. You can't control what they think about what you do or why you do it, but they sure as hell are going to formulate their own opinions. It was very interesting to see myself do that about other people. "If I were in her position, would I be doing that? Is that too cheesy or too sleazy or not sleazy enough, is it kind of prissy." That is the common link for me between stripping and writing, that you become this scrim onto which people project their hopes and desires and it often has nothing to do with you and everything to do with their version of you.
SJ: I'm always arguing with people over the whole "sellout" label, and it's an interesting way to look at that when you're talking about stripping. Stripping is obviously all about the money, for the most part, although these days you see a lot of stuff like all these new burlesque troupes that are popping up everywhere where they're not doing it for the money and really are doing it for the enjoyment of it.
LB: Oh yeah, there's a definite line between one and the other and a lot of it has to do with why you're doing it. There's a huge difference between stripping to pay off a $25,000 car and trying to get your kid into private school and stripping because you want to feel good about your curvy body and not have someone tell you that you're going to be a sexless geek the rest of your life. And that's not to say that the twain can't meet--it can, but I don't think that the former can be called a sellout.
It's funny. When I was writing the book I was much more protective of my life because I was much more scared then, so I didn't really say in the book that the fanzine editor I was dating was Tim Yohannan of Maximum Rock'n'Roll, who was like the most politically correct guy on God's green earth, and it was a huge point of contention between the two of us that I had worked as a stripper. We remained friends after we broke up, until he died, and it was so interesting because as the '90's wore on so many of the punk-o rock-o peace-punk girls became strippers and went to work at the Lusty Lady and he really had to stand down a little bit. That was a good thing, I think. There's a certain point where your politics can work against you and you start alienating a lot of your friends. Purity is great, but it can lead a particular strain of isolation that maybe is not particularly good for one's mental health. So that's been interesting to watch, that party line of political purity really soften, because there's more to it than the sort of cut-and-dry, "This is sexual objectification, therefore it's bad," kind of old-school victim, which now seems almost silly to me to bring up because it's changed that much. I just wonder who gets to make the call that somebody's a sellout. There were times when I felt like the most radical girl on the planet as a stripper, and there were times when I did feel like I was quite the sellout, and the person I was selling out more than anybody else was me. So I think your sense of political righteousness can vary from day to day, shift to shift and club to club. That's something you kind of let go of. It's very easy to be politically pure when you live in your parents' house.
SJ: When you've got money and you don't have to pay the bills, it's very easy.
LB: When I was sixteen and a half I was a paragon of peace-punk virtue. When I was nineteen and working in a peep show, and had an $800 a month apartment, with my equally punk rock girlfriend living there, I was humbled a little bit, shall we say. I just think that behind every self-righteous snot is somebody whose dad is a dentist, you know? He's out there in the salt mines filling molars and you're out there with the Che Guevara beret on.
SJ: A lot of people don't know what it's like to work.
LB: I think that's where a lot of stripper attitude comes from, this realization that regardless of what you think politically of what I'm doing, there's a bottom line to be met here, and I'm not asking anybody else to pay my way through life, and regardless of even how I feel about it on a day to day basis, the fact is that it's bringing in money, and you don't always use the money for the right thing. . . My point being, I think that for every sort of meddlesome political objection that people can levy against stripping, which is not to say that they're not legit, which a lot of them are, there is a retort which is, "Yes, but it's paying my bills," and it needs to be done. I just don't have to smell like french fry grease at the end of the night.
I do have one thing to say about that, though, which is that a lot of strippers tend to get lulled into the thought that it's either ass, or McDonald's, and it isn't. And you see women get trapped in the business,and this happened to me. You get so used to making that big money, or what seems like big money to you, and you skip over the salad days, you do your bullshit high-school job, whether it's cleaning homes or working at Pizza Hut or whatever and then you have this job where you are making as much as a white-collar executive--well, a middle-management executive--and you sort of think, "Oh, well, I've cut out the middle step, the ramen years, and so I can't ever go back to that and build a real career." Particularly women who are artists, photographers, painters and writers, who are like "I don't want to go back to the starving thing again, it would feel like a demotion." I went through that, because when I quit stripping I was in my mid-twenties and I had to go back to making no money. I really felt like I'd failed. Now that I'm away from that, I'm more established, I realize that it was time and poverty well spent, but I definitely see women get trapped in, "My success is predicated upon how much money I make. It's either this or McDonald's," and there this middle area where you are doing what you want and making good money, but it takes some time to get there. Stripping warps your time horizon because you get this drilled into your head, like "Younger faster now, younger faster now, younger faster now," that you get so afraid when you're twenty-five that you start thinking you're going to run out of time for everything, when in fact you're just running out of time to be attractive to the pervert in the back row. You don't really care about him anyway, but for some reason you think that he's a truth-teller. And he's not. Time, more than anything else, gets completely perverted when you strip.
SJ: I know girls who try to get out of stripping in their early twenties and they decide they want to settle down and get married.
LB: I think a lot of women, when we burn out, we think, "I'm going to go legit," and what's more legit than getting married? It's like "I'm going to go from the whore to the Madonna," or the whore to June Cleaver, and cut out the middle ground of having to figure out what you want. And invariably those women quit and come back. They quit their marriage and come back to stripping, because they realize that the guy is not the missing link. The missing link is, "What do I need to fulfill myself?" And that sounds totally Oprah and New Age, but. . .
SJ: It's so true.
LB: You've got to figure that out before you bring a man into the picture. Another person is only going to complicate things. And I see that with women who purposefully try to get pregnant to get out of the business. It's one thing to strip to support a kid you already have, or you have an oopsie and then you have the kid and that's not part of your exit strategy, that's one thing. But when the kid is your exit strategy, that's scary. Often you're not financially prepared.
SJ: That poor kid.
LB: This is really frank stuff. This is stuff that I didn't even have the brainpower to get to with the book because I was still reeling from stripper damage when I wrote it. There are so many life strategies of strippers--you think it's a good idea, and then you get out, and it's like, Whoa. I don't want to sound totally anti-marriage; I'm not, I am married. But I didn't get married until I was in my thirties, and had been out of stripping for a while. Marriage isn't the big fix-it.
SJ: A lot of the girls that I know that are stripping seemed to get into it because they didn't know what else they could do aside from getting married. Stripping falls into one of those female roles.
LB: I kind of realize now, looking back on it, that you need those years of complete desperation because it's only in that desperation, that darkness, that the beacon becomes what you really want to do with your life. If you're making fifteen to twenty-five hundred dollars a week, you're not hungry. I don't regret what I've done stripping, mostly because I can't imagine who I'd have been since I started stripping so young, like what would I have done with 18 to 25 if I wasn't stripping. But I think I would have started writing more seriously and written more honestly if I had--if I didn't have this giant sugar daddy of the strip club. That's not to bag on other strippers who do finance their art through stripping, women have done some pretty cool shit, I'm sure it probably did more good than harm as far as a logistical component of my life, but there is something to be said for the hard press of not knowing what you want to do and not having the luxury to coast while you figure it out. You just work that much harder I guess.
SJ: Yeah, although it's kind of hard to write anything brilliant when you're working two jobs trying to pay the bills!
LB: It's a tough thing to do. I also should retroactively preface this by saying that I'm speaking as someone who started stripping at 18. For somebody who went to college first, it's totally different. She'll probably read this and think, "What is this blithering idiot talking about?" but for me, I just know that it takes a lot of energy out of you working as a dancer that you don't even realize. Sexual energy and creative energy are very close to each other, and when you're spending all that energy you realize that you gave at the office, I'd come home and be staring at the computer thinking "Duh, I need a pedicure." All my creative energy would get drained out because I was so busy at work using all my creative energy making up stories about my age and where I was from and what I was doing in the club to some shoe salesman from Royal Oaks. Like, that was my big story that I wrote today, was that I was a twenty-four year old wandering babysitter from Tallahassee or whatever.
SJ: You talked about stripping having very little written history, and after I did a search on Amazon.com, just to see what I would pull up, as far as books about stripping, and you get books about stripping paint. And stripper brings up your book and a couple of others that were written by men. I think there was one other, like "Ivy League Stripper" or something like that.
LB: There are a few more now.
SJ: It's obviously getting to be more acceptable. It still freaks out people's families, but do you think it'll become even more common? Do you think we'll get a lot more people coming out and telling their stories?
LB: I think that there will always be fewer than people expect. It's much more visible now, but I think people tend to confuse visibility with acceptability. No, nobody's shocked if you have met or are friends with a stripper anymore in the way that they would have been ten or twenty years ago, and it's not like being a stripper is seen as some kind of sexual alien the way that she was in generations past. But it's one thing to be aware of categorically that strippers are out there. It's another thing to come out and put your own butt on the line and say "Yeah, I did this."
I think part of the reason why you're seeing more now certainly is that the social climate has changed so much. Maybe someone did try to sell the great american stripper tell-all that was politically astute and written like a dream twenty years ago but all the book editors just freaked out. It's not just who's willing to write but who's willing to publish. And it has gotten much less conservative. But even when I went to sell this book in 1998, the original publisher who bought the book, and later killed it (but we can talk about that later), but at the original publisher, there were five guys and one woman in this meeting, the woman was probably in her fifties, and she was like "We really like the articles that you've written about stripping," kind of trying to compliment and condemn me at the same time, so she ended up saying something like "but for the grace of God, I never had to do that!" Gimme a break. A woman our age, twenties or thirties or whatever, would never say that now. I could imagine that some woman probably did try to come forward and just got shot down.
I think we'll continue to see more, certainly, there were four, five books on stripping that came out in the past year that were written by strippers, and I think that's great. There are safety in numbers, I think more women are going to be like, well, these women came out, my story's a little edgier, maybe doesn't have quite so seamless an ending, so I'm going to come forward with that, and some other girl's going to go, "Well, I don't happen to be a middle-class white girl, which all these others are, so I'm going to come forward with that." I think we're going to see women become increasingly emboldened. I do realize that when I came out with the book. People would project all this weird stuff onto me because it wasn't their stripping life. A stripping story is not the stripping story, and people would be like "that's not what my life was like, so fuck you, you prude!" or "Fuck you, you whore!" There's all these subtle gradations about what women will or won't do, or think is or isn't cool. But that'll go away over time, because there'll be twenty stripper books out there, because there are twenty, thirty, fifty different stripper experiences. But that's a luxury problem. I really don't worry about it at all because I still get these emails from these women that are not just nice, but they become personally attatched to the book in a way that I never would've dreamed, and it's awesome. It's like the best feeling there is.
SJ: Ever since I first read the book, when I've talked about it to people, they've had great things to say. One girl said she took it to work and passed it around the dressing room, another said she had given it to a women's studies professor who plans to teach it.
LB: Now, literally, my big dream when I was writing this was that I wanted it to be in the dressing room, because that's the heart of the strip club. Everybody's like "What about the guys?" but we don't even think about that, we think about the money and the dressing room. So for me to think that there's a woman out there with it in the dressing room, I'm like "I'm alive!" I know I sound like the total post-punk Pollyanna, but I am!
SJ: I was sitting in the bar the other night with your book and my notebook, just scribbling down questions that I wanted to ask, and this guy sitting next to me asks, "What are you doing?" and I pass him over the book and ask him, "What would you want to ask her?" and he immediately said, "Who screwed you up to make you become a stripper?" And that answer is so. . .
LB: Guys like you! There's your answer.
SJ: He automatically assumed that there had to be something wrong, and didn't think that maybe some people just get into it because it seems like a good way to make money, and don't realize how hard it really is.
LB: Yeah, and also to go back to what we were saying about people's reaction to the book, I didn't try to curry any kind of critical favor with the elite, pampered book-reviewing masses, because I knew I was just going to get thrashed on every angle. Either too uptight, too manipulative, or too slutty. I was even surprised when it got good reviews at all because I knew the real critics of this book were going to be people that either loved somebody that did the work, or did the work themselves. So you get this reaction critically like that guy in the bar that are so far removed from it, all they know is what they think about it. People have their ideas from a distance, but when you know somebody who does it or do it yourself, you realize that the concerns are so different from what people expect. The concerns are, Am I going to get out of it? Am I going to meet my goal? Am I going to be able to keep my body image in check? Because you do turn your body into a commodity, your body and whatever portion of your personality you choose to present. And then when you get out, even if you're kooky alterna-girl with twenty-five piercings like me, with your purple hair under your wig, it's almost like your alternativeness becomes commodified too, like "Ooh, you're kooky alterna-stripper! Hi, kooky alterna-stripper! Why don't you come over here and say something about William Burroughs?" You realize that you are your brand, and that's such a modern, Gen-X nightmare existential thing to realize, but the strip club drives that home so hard, then you have some clown on a bar somewhere going "Did Uncle Pete touch you?" And it's like well, yeah, maybe Uncle Pete did touch me, but right now that's not what I'm trying to fix.
SJ: And you think that guys like that, with that attitude, are the ones who come in and give you money. The ones who are sitting there thinking, "What's wrong with this girl?"
LB: That was always one of the hardest things to deal with. It comes out of that scrim--like I said before, about being a scrim for people's sexual projection--of the confused guy. You get worshipful puppydog guy and you feel kind of bad for him, and sometimes you get plain dickhead guy, and he's just like "Well, you're too fat for me," or "I already tipped you two dollars," but at least his hostility is clean and you can get away. But then you get the guy who's like "Well, I am sexually titillated by you, but I also hate you and hate myself, so I'm going to be drooling and judging at the same time." And you walk away from there going, "I'm not sure if that twenty dollars I made was worth it." People's sexual neuroses are contagious, and it's not like that attitude goes flying into the lapel of your business suit and that acts like a shield. No, you're standing there in your fucking thong, and that attitude goes right into your skin, and into some receptacle in your soul.
That's something that people don't even think about, the stripper brain scramble. I think about it to this day. People are like "You didn't end up killed and dumped in a dumpster, it didn't seem to hurt you in the least!" Just because there's no physical bruises, doesn't mean you don't get that bruised-melon feeling in your heart. You can get ego boosts stripping, but you get ego bruises too. There's no "every man's dream." That's total rubbish. That's one thing that stripping is good for, because it does toughen you up a bit, you realize that that kind of girly need to please everyone is impossible so you just kind of let it go. Especially if you're an alterna-chick, because you know damn well that a lot of clubs won't even hire you. That's part of the reason that I did get all Barbie-d out when I did Strip City, because that's one look that does tend to fit in better everywhere you go, but you know, I'd be at a go-go bar in New Jersey with mostly Portuguese and Russian girls and I was dead air. You can't please everybody.
SJ: I think you do a really great job in there of showing that it's not always bad and that it's not always about the guys or the money, but that you can get off on it.
LB: Oh, absolutely. When we miss stripping, what we miss is like Friday night, everybody's making money, so you kind of kick over into "don't give a fuck" mode, and you start dancing to entertain each other, and Tiffany's making the most money, so she sits at the rail and tips everybody, and Mary Beth's like "I've made enough money, I'm going to go put on my catholic schoolgirl uniform and dance around to Ministry," and it becomes like this advanced carnal playground, and I don't think you can get that anywhere else. It's this total half-naked talent show feeling. I think strippers honestly miss that when they leave the business. There is this element of this carefree romping quality, and when you get it, it's like the most precious thing ever. We're not a particularly sexually playful society, so there is that element of exhibitionism combined with a play ethic that is a lot of fun.
One of the marks of professionalism as a stripper is being able to appreciate when another girl does a great show. I feel really privileged to have seen some incredible dancers. And these are not women who necessarily even wanted to be dancers, it's like, "I just finished following Phish around," and they strip down, take off their granny glasses and their Uggs and do this routine that just drops you on your ass. Regardless of the politics of stripping, there's a beauty to the performance that you can't really argue against. I do think we see more appreciation for that now that pop culture in general has become so bump-and-grindy.
SJ: Your use of music is so great that I feel like you should just release a soundtrack with the book.
LB: That's my dream, girl!
SJ: It's so well described that even if you don't recognize the song, you can still almost hear it.
LB: That's like the mark of a gazillion-dollar successful author is when they do issue a soundtrack. They've only done it like twice in the history of publishing. But I keep thinking I've got to rip a CD with all of these songs on it because it would be so funny to go from "Cherry Pie" by Warrant or "I Love Little Girls" by Oingo Boingo or whatever, to hear them side by side and and try to imagine them in one strip club.
SJ: What are the last five CD's you bought?
LB: I don't really buy CD's anymore, but let's see. . . I've become a huge Top Forty country fan so I am the ultimate cheeseball now. Why don't I just tell you what's in heavy rotation right now?
SJ: That works too.
LB: I've been listening to lots of Johnny Cash because he just died and we're all sad. It's that voice, that "Hello, I'm Johnny Cash," that's like, "Hi honey, Daddy's home." What am I going to do? I'm not going to hear that anymore. I've become obsessed with George Strait, the Strait out of the Box boxed set. I think it's because the book I'm working on now is a novel about a rodeo cowboy. I'm using George Strait as a role model. I think "If I could just make this guy a little more conservative," and then I put on some George and I know I can do it, I can make him an even gooder good-ol-boy.
Of course, "Cowboy Take Me Away" from the Dixie Chicks, because what I'm writing is very much a western romance, for people like us, anyway. Not like a Harliquin romance, I think a Harliquin editor would burst into flames if she read this book, she'd be like "What is that thing doing in there!" And Allison Moorer, whom I love. Allison Moorer wrote this song called "The Alabama Song," girl, if that song does not get your zipper down, either your zipper is broken or you are. It's this beautiful deep butterscotch maple syrup voice. This song is so slow and so southern, and I'm not southern at all, so it's just like, the whole southern gothic thing. It's a good thing this song is only four minutes long, because I'd just be melted into a puddle of girly goo if it was one minute longer. Also have been listening to--I'm so embarassed, my taste in music is so lame!--but I absolutely had to, because we're discussing stripping, dig out the Dracula soundtrack with Annie Lennox singing "Love Song for a Vampire." Which makes me sob uncontrollably. You never let go of that part of yourself that started kissing girls because of Susan Sarandon and Catherine Deneuve in The Hunger. It's like this incredible swoop of crimson velvet, it's big and it's romantic and it's showy and it's just achingly sad. And that part of you doesn't go away, even if you're married to an army officer sitting at your army post somewhere in your sweatshirt and jeans. There's still this little part of you that's like "Come over here so I can pierce you." That song is the link to that part of my soul.
SJ: In the book you say that punk is a "Fuck You" with a philosophy, and I think a lot of your book is a search for a philosophy to go with the "fuck you" of stripping.
LB: Somewhere in the urge to strip, regardless if it's to pay the bills or whatever, is a woman's quest for self-discovery. In a way for a lot of women, stripping is like the sexual equivalent of Junior Year Abroad. Some people might disparage it, and I know that it does easily become a cliche, but that speaks for how far we've come, that we've gone from this inconceivable entity to a cliche. But I think it's real. Women who are out there, shakin' their ass who are of a slightly countercultural bent are looking for something. Sometimes we don't even know what it is, often it's not about what you end up discovering, but there really is something about--two little strippers in yonder wood, and one is being a good girl and keeping her clothes on, and another one is going "well, I'm going to take everything that everyone has told me about this job and put it in the back of my head and go find out for myself." And that doesn't mean that that person is going to come out being a radicalized person, but maybe a more knowing person, and that isn't worthless. I don't even care if you go on to renounce stripping later on in your life, because some women do and they're entitled to that. I might, but I doubt it. But it opens the gates for the confident, questing part of yourself. I know that this is a controversial point, that someone's going to say, "Oh, she's just a pretentious blatherer," but I am a pretentious blatherer! But it isn't just about the money. It's also about the discovery. Sometimes you just have to wander into the dark.
SJ: Another quote from your book that I love is when you talk about the guy following you around the club offering to give you a new Corvette in exchange for having sex with his wife and girlfriend, and you say, "Please, like I'd be caught dead in a new Corvette anyhow." Which I just think is great because it's not what anybody expects you to say. Not that we actually think you'd have taken him up on it, but it's funny to read that. If someone was to tempt you with that kind of offer, though, what kind of car would it be?
LB: It would either be a classic Camaro or a Stingray, like '60's or '70's--the Corvette would be okay if it wasn't new--or it would be the total pimped-out Toby Keith half ton diesel pickup truck. Black with grey interior, tinted windows, because as a truck drivin' woman, I can attest, there's nothing like pulling up at a stop light and being the chick in the truck. It's kind of like peace through superior firepower, but oh well. The new Corvette, I was just so offended, I was like, "What kind of whore do you think I am? I would never be seen in that silly car!"
SJ: Tell me some more about this book you're writing about cowboys.
LB: It's not really a western story that hasn't been told before. It's about a young ranching girl who moves to the big city and has to come home to sell the ranch, and all her life all she's ever heard is "Don't ever date a rodeo cowboy," so she meets the rodeo cowboy, and let's just say it's a very educational experience.
SJ: Sounds like fun. Can't wait to read it.
LB: Well, I don't know if it's going to go any further than the top drawer of my file cabinet, but it sure has been interesting.
SJ: What else are you up to now besides that?
LB: Doing a lot of book criticism, which is sort of just keeping an oar in the water, because when you become a novelist, which I'm only now learning because I never thought I would write a novel in my life, you really do go into this complete parallel universe. I always thought that people who talked about what their characters would eat for breakfast were like crazy freaks, but it's true. You find yourself completely absorbed by minute details, thinking, "Wow, I wonder if he would ever eat Spam?" So it keeps me rooted to terra firma, because I don't really want to get any further out of my body than I already am on this novel. I do a lot of gender books and a lot of sex books--I don't know why [laughs], but that's pretty much it. Once I finish this novel, regardless of its fate, I'll sort of be ready to attack life again. My big goal for the upcoming year is to finally make it to the Playboy mansion. Aim high, right?
SJ: Even though you don't really say "I'm this tall, this size," you do a really good job of bringing your physical presence to the book. I wish I got to meet you in person because I have such a good mental picture that I want to see if I'm right. Without too many details, you're very physically present in the book. There's so much tendency to shrink away physically among women, so I think that was great.
LB: Well, I could have given my physical stats, which are not particularly unusual, but part of it just like, tall, blonde hair, big rack, and that seems kind of dorky, like why would you say that? Also, there's something about it--it doesn't matter what I look like. Of course when you strip it matters what you look like on every level, but in terms of telling the story of stripping, all you need to know is that I'm not perfect. And I know that. And I have my own mixed relationship with not being perfect. But that's what stripping is all about anyway, walking that fine line between "I kind of have to be perfect but I can make really good money not being perfect," and that paradox, you try to live within that. There are a lot of books where the women are like "I never thought I could be a stripper because I'm flat-chested," or because I'm whatever, it's kind of like, well, I did it, it doesn't matter if you're a golden goddess, there's still going to be all that self-doubt in there anyway. It has nothing to do with packaging, god knows we all know that. I think that the only thing I felt was important to say was that I was blonde, because I was aggressively fakely blonde, and that I had big shoulders and big thighs.
SJ: But you come across as physically strong, that no one is going to push you around.
LB: Which is kind of funny, because aside from the big shoulders, I don't even have the upper body strength to open a pickle jar on my own. I try to make up for that in mental fortitude. I think part of that does come from stripping and part of it comes from punk rock. If you come from the peace-punk background, you come into it and see the girls on the side of the mosh pit holding their boyfriends' leather jackets, but as soon as you see that you think "I don't want to be that." And that does give me that edge, makes it a little harder to translate into mainstream society, but I don't care. That's what I needed to see so much in other women, that it would just feel like such a compromise to let go now. It did cost me a dollar and fifty cents as a stripper that I wasn't this submissive, feathery-voiced little miss. But how much of yourself are you going to give up to make money? That's the eternal question.
SJ: People always want to save the stripper, take her away from all of that, but no one ever wants to save me from waitressing. I never hear guys saying, "Oh, my girlfriend works in a sleazy bar but I want her not to have to do that anymore." No one treats that as anything other than what you have to go through to be where you want to be. But just about every guy that I know that dates a stripper wants to save her from it.
LB: It's like Pygmalion with a go-go pole. It's a tough one, because I think that what makes guys want to save strippers as opposed to saving waitresses is it would give them a sense of contributing to a woman's moral uplift, and that's not to say that that part might not even be real--it is real. I certainly know that the guy that I'm married to now, who is not the guy in the book, we would not be together if I was stripping, he's made that very clear. It's been very interesting for me to be with someone who is not only like no, but fuck no, it's cool that you did it, but I don't want to deal with what you go through. I won't watch you do it. It's not that he's a prude, it's more that he sees what stripping takes out of women and doesn't want that for me.
It's been very interesting to be with somebody that I wouldn't have been with ten years ago. I would've been like "If you can't handle it, then. . ." Now I'm having to see it from the point of view of the guy. What it's like to watch your woman come home, and it's this woman that you think is beautiful and wonderful and all she can do is talk shit about herself because she had a bad night at the club. It is hard to share your woman with 200 guys in a week, especially if she's a lap-dancer or maybe you just don't want all these guys looking at her boobs. It's a tough thing to look at it from the guy's point of view because I'm one of those people that always sides with the chick. Now I'm like, "Wow, maybe these guys have something to say about it." And it's not that they want to be the white knight or they think you're some whore that they have to pull out of the gutter, it's like "I look at you in the strip club and all I can think of is pearls before swine, why are you wasting yourself on these ingrate losers?" That's not a moral judgment, that's a guy thinking that you're selling yourself short by doing this job and it has nothing to do with your sexuality, it has everything to do with taking something that he sees as valuable and putting it in front of guys who might as well be snoring. That was a real wake-up call for me.
But as far as the guy trying to save the girl, I can guarantee you one thing. If a girl quits the business because of a guy, she'll go right back in. Strippers cannot be saved, they have to save themselves. I don't care if it takes two years, ten years, or twenty years, she has to do it on her own. She's probably going to quit and go back, quit and go back, but she's got to hang up her stilettos on her own. Because external pressure to a stripper, let me tell you what the response to that is. A certain finger held aloft. I think there's a difference between a guy who thinks you're selling yourself short and a guy who thinks he needs to swoop down from a white horse and carry you away to a life of piety. I get a lot of email from guys who say "that guy in the book was really amazing, I couldn't handle it when my girlfriend stripped." Because most people don't even have to think about sharing their partner sexually, it's just a given. I do think a well-intentioned, egalitarian, earnest stripper boyfriend probably deserves his own medal. Which he's never going to get. It's also hard for female lovers of strippers--plenty of lesbian relationships break up over one girl stripping.
SJ: If you don't mind me asking, what did happen to the guy in the book?
LB: Oh, I don't mind at all. It had nothing to do with stripping, he would've been cool with stripping. I wasn't cool with it anymore. It was really just a matter of I wanted to be here, and it sort of started as a happy country love song and ended as a sad country love song.
That's something I've noticed with strippers, too. You become such a cartoon girl that sometimes you end up attracted to the cartoon guy. Because there is an element of camp to any gender role, so if you're a little exaggerated as a stripper than you look for a guy who's a little exaggerated too. Sometimes that can work out really well, and sometimes it's a little sad, but I certainly was grateful that somebody trusted me enough to allow me to include them in the book. I think that's something that people wonder about, how does it affect your relationship? It is intense, but you just go on and life goes through all these changes. . . I never thought I'd be where I am now, but then again I could never see myself being any older than 27, because that's the rock'n'roll age when everybody cool dies, and then on your 28th birthday you're like "Oh my god, better do some quick thinking!"
SJ: Tell me some more about how you started writing while you were dancing.
LB: Zines and punk-rock fanzines and stuff sort of sustained me through high school. I felt really alienated, I was not in a particularly punk-enriched environment, and I'd read Maximum Rock'n'roll or Flipside or Punk Planet and it was almost religious zeal, they became bibles to me. Then as a teenager I became attached to certain books, like The Bell Jar because of course Sylvia Plath was like the poster child for the self-styled artiste girl. I started writing for fanzines a little bit here and there, and it wasn't until I had started a zine called Taste of Latex which was sort of like a punk porn zine, maybe a precursor, a primordial shadow of SuicideGirls, because there wasn't really anything that combined sex and punk rock, and it had a short life. Making a zine was very demanding and it probably would have been easier as a webzine, but you know, we didn't have the World Wide Web back in the day! I'm one of those people where that's the campfire for me, those are the kinds of things around which my tribe clusters, certain books and certain zines.
When I was speaking at an OutRight conference--OutRight was cool because it was about the queer literati and writing as a non-heterosexually-identified person, which I was at the time. The only straight guys I knew were the ones that were paying me to talk to them. Doug Brantley, who has since moved to New Orleans and is actually connected with the Tennessee Williams Literary festival (funny how it comes full circle), was the editor at The Advocate at the time and he asked me if I wanted to start writing for money. I was like "I can't believe this whole writing plus money! That can actually happen in the same equation?" It wasn't like I'd planned to become a professional writer, I certainly had not, I spent my late teens and the earliest part of my twenties going around thinking "I like to do lots of things, which of these things is going to pay," and I just sort of gravitated towards writing, and learned the structure of journalism because of The Advocate, in terms of how to set up a story structurally and how not to be scared when you're on the phone (which I still have not gotten over), various things like that.
From there it was literally like swinging from vine to vine, never like I sat down and drafted out a master plan, which as I'm reading about the lives of writers I'm finding is actually more what happens. You don't really think you're going to be a writer, you just find one little peg and pull yourself up by it, and find another one, and by the time I was ready to quit stripping I had gotten some relatively decent clips, you know, I had published something in Mademoiselle and a lot of stuff in The Advocate and LA Weekly, and I decided to move to New York and quit stripping and starve. And I did that very well. My talent for starving is boundless. I wrote something for New York Magazine about stripping, and one of the things about stripping that's kind of cool is that it is of perpetual fascination to straight people, so I would pitch a story about it somewhere which is very helpful if you are a struggling writer. And I really did not make a lot of money for a very long time, and then all of a sudden it exploded, and I choked. I got all these really incredible assignments that I was too petrified to do, so I had this period where I kind of sucked. It was very embarassing and I'm still trying to recover mentally from that, but there's something to be said for rising slowly, rather than moving to New York and then within a year somebody's offering you ten grand to write a story for Esquire, and you're like "That can't be me," and I fucking blew it, completely.
Strip City came from a GQ story that I did, which was a fascinating experience and made me even more hungry to write more about stripping in a way that didn't feel like pressure to be the crazy empowered bad girl or the snivelling tearstained wretch. And I sold the book originally to a sympathetic publisher, kind of mainstream publisher, and they were very enthusiastic about it, and then when I turned it in, the fact that there was even the most cursory mention of prostitution made the editor kill it. He said "You can take out all the references to prostitution or you can deal with the fact that I'm going to kill the book." And I was like, "Please. A stripper trying to pass herself off as honest that doesn't at least mention prostitution is like somebody trying to write about disco and not mention coke. It's a very real pitfall of this business and I cannot possibly take this out." It was so ridiculous that he would even think to ask me to do it and I had to watch this book deal, this book that I had spent so much money to write and chewed up an advance and traveled all over and exhausted myself just completely go into the shitter. I was crushed, but somewhere inside of me was this little voice saying "Someone will get it," and we took it back out and within a month had sold it to Miramax.
It was such a good feeling to have somebody have the exact opposite opinion of, "It has to be in there, it's real, it's as real as what you go through to get your costumes on, or what you go through to try to do a dignified gas-station piss when your quads are aching from being in high heels all day." I was very happy with how it was handled there, because in the interim period where I didn't think this book was going to see the light of day I was really crushed. And it made it very hard to try to write another book because in my mind I had this picture of this big censorian editorial finger from the heavens going, "Bad girl, you can't go there." I don't react particularly well to the "Don't ask, don't tell," editorial policy, and I'll pay the price for it, but I ended up with a book that I don't feel too bad about. So that's the kind of thumbnail of my writing career. For the most part I've supported myself as a journalist and I like to sort of poke around in a dilettante-ish way and examine a facet of culture and then move on to the next thing. It's been a real exercise in discipline to be working on the same thing for a year and not be able to put on stiletto heels and a big hairpiece and shake off all my doldrums. I can't do that anymore, so it's really a very much "time to make the donuts" feeling.
SJ: I loved the way you ended Strip City, with passing on your costumes to the young stripper. Emma Forrest talks about emotional networking between women, and how her career started because of older women helping her, and she believes in doing that for younger girls. But I think that goes tenfold more with stripping because it is basically a woman's business. You get help from older women or you don't really have a chance.
LB: It's the ultimate apprenticeship. Until I went to that stripper school, which I still think is the only existing formal stripper school, I didn't realize that there was any other way to learn but from other women. You have someone who tells you the rules, but you don't really learn the rules rules until you talk to the other women. It's a business where within a year you attain veteran status, and I don't know any other business where you're considered a veteran within twelve months. You learn what you need to know and you turn around to the new girl and tell her, "You'll probably do better if you wear a different kind of bra," and that sounds like piddling shit, but it isn't. Your aesthetic is your bread and butter so to have some woman tell you about a different pickup line.
People who are outside of the business tend to see it as one perpetual catfight, but first of all, who has the energy for that? Our feet hurt, and we just want to count our money and go home. Second of all, when you're part of an outlaw class, there is this sort of instant solidarity. It doesn't matter how many spandex asses you see on MTV, it's still an outlaw business. So there's the unity that comes about from being widely misunderstood. Are all strippers friends? Absolutely not. There are clubs that are downright nasty, and you have to work very hard to ingratiate yourself with the other dancers, but I've found that typically it's more sympathetic than not. It doesn't really affect your money to help someone else out, and I think women grasp that very quickly.
These little dressing room niceties help keep you sane. Because there is so much hostility in the outside world, and there is such a dizzying emotional maelstrom when you're on the floor in the club, that it's nice to have this place that you can retreat to that's chick space. You don't need it as much when you leave, but it's nice to have had it. Even as a writer, if it weren't for somebody like Susie Bright, who is probably like 45 right now, she did On Our Backs and the Best American Erotica series and really was a pioneer, I met her when I was 21, and if she had not been very encouraging of me and my fanzine who knows if I'd have written at all? It helps when it comes from another chick because there's not that perceived sexual opportunism that there can be from a guy. "Is this guy just helping me because he's trying to get some off me?" which as a stripper you're very sensitive to anyway. You can realize that it's just an honest-to-god encouragement, and that can be the difference between becoming who you want to be and not, and that in essence means everything.
SJ: You talk about the nude clubs and the difference between dancing nude and dancing topless, and one thing that always pissed me off about nude clubs is that they don't serve alcohol. The idea that a man after a few drinks is going to be so overcome by the sight of a woman's vagina that he can't control himself. It really makes me mad.
LB: Vulva equals war!
SJ: It's kind of flattering, but it's stupid.
LB: Maybe that's based on experience, that a nude club does tend to get wilder, and it's OK if that's true, but I worked at a nude club in Alaska that had alcohol, so it's less a matter of how much pink you're seeing and more a matter of how good your security is. So I see it as a sort of antiquated thing, maybe it's less about the actual behavior in the club and what they're seeing and more as a sort of intimidation, like "If you really want to get nasty, we're going to take away your booze." It might be more about trying to regulate what they perceive to be decency from a legislative point of view, that it might be more about thinking they can keep the full-nudie gross people out of they don't let 'em have alcohol. But I worked totally nude in Alaska with lots of alcohol flowing and it was safer than a lot of other clubs I've been in. It seems just as weird to me.
SJ: In the book, when you ask Randy why he thinks guys go to strip clubs, he replies that he thinks guys get fixated on a certain girl and think that if they keep going back they may have a chance with her. And then you say that you had never really thought about hope as part of the strip club economy. I don't know if that's a nice way to look at it or not.
LB: It was something I hadn't thought much about. As a stripper, you have so much else to think about that you're not really thinking very deeply about why the guys are there or not. Is he a nice guy or is he not, that's all I need to know. I don't think that's why most guys go there at all, I think most guys go there as a form of escapism. They may fantasize in a way, maybe the way they fantasize that they'd take the Lamborghini out of the showroom, but they don't actually think that they're actually going to do it. I think it's more like mental playtime then actually fantasizing about taking the stripper out--"Gee, I wonder what that would be like? I bet she's really freaky, hee hee," and less about actually strategically trying to get the girl out of the club. But it was interesting to hear that because it really brought home for me that I haven't thought about that very deeply. It was more about what are my goals here, am I feeling OK today, do I need time off right now, thinking about it from a financial point of view or a psychic health point of view. I didn't think about the guys that much at all.
When you do think about the guys it actually becomes harder to do the job, so I don't know if women who are actively stripping should actually think "What's his motivation?" because that takes a lot of time and a lot of energy. I think there are a million different reasons why guys go to a strip club, and most of them aren't as chivalrous as "I want to date the stripper." Truthfully I do think of it for most guys as a form of escapism. As much as it is stepping into a parallel world for the dancers, it's even more so for the guys. It's this complete other world that you're not going to get from ESPN or whatever, and you can just sink right into it. That can be as harmless as doing it once in a while with your buds or as dangerous as a full-on addiction, but if somebody were to ask me what's the most compelling reason for a guy to go, I would say it's escapism. It's also an escape from the gender roles--most of the time they have to pursue, but they can go there and have these girls coming up and saying "Would you like a dance? Would you like me to sit with you?" and it's a buyer's market. I think most guys are out there having to campaign, and here instead they have the girls coming up to them and they're like "Mercy! I don't even know what to do with this embarassment of riches!" and of course the answer to that is, "Tip more!" As far as guys coming in there trying to court a woman out of the strip club, it's simultaneously touching and deluded. I can count on one finger the amount of girls I know out of all my years in strip clubs who married a customer.
I think that's why a lot of girls, including myself, preferred lap dancing when we really just wanted to make bucks. It's like, "Do you want a dance?" "Yes," "OK," grind, grind, grind, OK, song's over, "Do you want a dance?" "Yes," "OK," grind, grind, grind, "Do you want a dance?" "No," "OK, next!" It's mechanical, systematic, you don't have to seduce the money out of the guy's wallet, he's got the twenty in his hand, and you can take it, do your thing for two minutes, then move on. It's not the sort of agonizing, extended mating dance. I really had to learn when I was doing Strip City how to do it the other way because I wasn't doing lap dances. But sometimes you just don't want to seduce for your supper. It's like "Dude, give me your money, you know why you're here, I know why you're here," I know it's cold, but. . .
SJ: It's cold, but that's how it is. Even waiting tables, I get guys who leave me their phone number or ask for my phone number and I'm like, "It's my job to make you feel good, make you laugh, make your experience more enjoyable. I'm not doing it because I like you." It's this equation that some people just don't get.
LB: It's the blessing and the curse of stripping. If every man really internalized the extent of the artificiality of stripping, all the clubs would close tomorrow. It's this suspension of disbelief that guys do shockingly well, and it's shocking to women because women for whatever reason don't buy into that kind of thing. It can be shocking particularly when you start stripping how easy it is to seduce money out of someone. Two seconds of Scarlett O'Hara eyelash-batting and you've got four hundred bucks. There's a whole bunch of guys who are like "No way, I can't be turned on my ear that easily," but it can go to your head, and it can also depress you too, like "Wow, men are that easily manipulated around sex. I don't know if I like the world as much as I thought I did." It's kind of weird how much you can get for how little flattery.
SJ: Okay. To wrap this up, what's the last book that you read?
LB: The last book that I read was Skin Deep, by Karol Griffin, the subtitle is something like "Of tattoos, the disappearing west, very bad men, and my deep love for them all." It's kind of a rollicking tattoo-chick memoir. I could definitely see myself becoming best friends with her very easily. She's a Wyoming tattoo artist, and that combines two of my loves right there. Plus she's a chick, what's not to love?
You can pick up a copy of Strip City at your local bookstore.
VIEW 14 of 14 COMMENTS
azurite:
Good interview and rapport. Relaxed and open. Memorable and thought-provoking remarks. Haven't read the book -- and I'm not sure I will -- but I came away with insight into this woman's life and the world of stripping.
pogue_mahone:
Excellent! I dashed right over to amazon and ordered the book. 