Striptease: From Gaslight To Spotlight is an ovaries out no holds barred look at the history of this art form. From the birth of the striptease in the mid-19th century and culminating with its garish heyday in the 1950s. its the only fully illustrated book of its kind and it highlights such performers as Isadora Duncan, Loie Fuller, Maud Allen, Gypsy Rose Lee, Tempest Storm, and Blaze Starr.
I got a chance to talk to the books author Jessica Glasscock.
Buy Striptease here
Daniel Robert Epstein: I heard that your book might be the first on its kind.
Jessica Glasscock: Its not the first of its kind but its the only one in print right now. There was a book called This was Burlesque that came out in 1967 or 1969 by Ann Corio, who was a former stripper, which was a pretty good illustrated history although it also included a lot of history of the comedy as well. This is the only illustrated purely striptease history. There are some other histories of striptease but none are illustrated as this one is. This is my claim to fame.
DRE: What got you interested in this subject?
JG: I was looking for something to write about and I was doing a lot of costumes for drag queens and people in the S & M industry then eventually for people that were doing new burlesque. I was in graduate school at the time getting a degree in costume history so I started to want to know what the origins of striptease were. Then I ended up doing my thesis on Salome dancing. That became the kernel for the idea of the book.
DRE: Was it difficult finding out all this history?
JG: It was very difficult. Its sort of easy to get a shallow history and a lot of anecdotal stories but finding out what actually happened is hard because there is a lot of hype. A lot of times when you go back and read original source history you realize you are reading the equivalent of like an Ashcroft take on what someone was doing at the time. You spend a lot of time parsing through stuff wondering if it was really scandalous or was it just someone who was professionally scandalized. I think finding out what the real deal was, was hard. There are a lot of stories out there. A lot of the great performers wrote autobiographies but those are also hype histories as well. Going to the original sources was helpful but there was no taking anyones word for it.
DRE: Where did you start?
JG: At the library. I basically started with New York Times accounts of the Salome dancers of which there were a lot because it was a vaudeville performance. There was a lot of that because it was a very mainstream performance. I did a lot of that then I also spent a lot of time at the New York Performing Arts Library at Lincoln Center. That was a lovely wonderful library that was very helpful.
DRE: How did you collect the photos?
JG: It was tough to find good stuff that hadnt been seen a lot. For the 50s I had a harder time because it was so hard to find out who owned the pictures because you cant use them unless you can pay for proper permission. For the earlier stuff and the Victorian stuff I had the libraries and I found a collector who was willing to share his own collection. Then I also spent some serious time on eBay where I got some neat postcards and calendars. But really libraries were my main resource.
DRE: What was the collector like?
JG: His name is Ken Glickfeld and he actually collects theatre ephemera. His goal is to have a program from every theatre that ever existed in New York City to which I wish him luck. He had a rather large collection of cigarette cards, which featured burlesque queens, and he had some neat programs. He was also really knowledgeable.
DRE: Did you have to go to any sleazy places for research?
JG: I actually didnt go into a strip club until I was halfway done writing the book. I was in New Orleans with my husband and we were going to see a friend of mine who is a stripper at The Gold Bar. I actually had never been to a strip club before that. We went in and I thought the lighting was very kind. It was weird that there were mirrors everywhere so there was nowhere to look and not see the naked girls. That was cool. I was the only woman in there that wasnt working which I think really confused a lot of the men in there. They didnt know whether or not they could talk to me.
DRE: Those Victorian strippers featured in the book were really hysterical.
JG: I think those were really funny people.
DRE: Were there any famous ones that came out that people still talk about?
JG: Lydia Thompson was a huge star on par with Jenny Lind or any other Victorian celebrity. She had a 25 year career that started when she came to the US in 1867 and was still touring in the 1890s. She was mainly known as a comedienne than some kind girly show act. A lot of the burlesque that came out of that period was much more about comedy than it was about skin. It wasnt until the 1890s when it started to become more of girly show with people like Isadora Duncan and Ruth St. Denis coming up through the ranks as modern dancers in vaudeville. The other challenge of doing this research was when burlesque and vaudeville started to overlap. You find that someone is burlesque and vaudeville but you find out that they are playing in the same places. You cant tell who is doing something naughty and who isnt.
DRE: Since you are a woman do you feel like this gave you a different perspective?
JG: If anything I think I may have compensated a little. My book was reviewed in Bust Magazine and the reviewer liked it for the most part but was appalled that I didnt use the word feminism once throughout. I did that on purpose in part because I didnt want it to be about that. I was really interested in the history of striptease and not it being on one side of women or the other. I think I was really careful in not wanting to write that.
DRE: Maybe a man might have written something like that to protect himself.
JG: Yeah I think so. I read a lot of older striptease books where they would write this breezy aside like But of course feminism changed all that but then it wouldnt explore or explain that. I thought if I was going to talk about feminism it would add another 5000 words to the book. It would have been a big issue from the beginning to the end of the book. There were feminists that whole time who had opinions about how women were presenting themselves onstage in public. With earlier burlesque such as with Lydia Thompson feminists, were also against it but then Isadora Duncan and Ruth St. Denis were sort of bohemian avant-garde feminist types.
DRE: Are you a feminist?
JG: Oh yeah. Before I went to graduate school I was at the ACLU Reproductive Freedom Project for four years then I was Women's Rights Project so my feminist credentials are in order. Im not as rowdy as I was when I was 23 but who is.
DRE: Do you see the early strippers as a feminist act at all?
JG: I think that with modern dancers, who I wouldnt equate with the burlesque performance of Salome dancing, would have considered themselves feminists and artists. They would have understood that getting on stage and controlling their performance was a feminist act in as much as it was defined then. I would also say that they new burlesque who are coming in part from feminist performance art or queer culture in the tradition of Annie Sprinkle and Karen Finley. I think those people would be identified with feminism. When you are talking about people in the 50s such as Blaze Starr and Lili St. Cyr I dont think they would have called themselves feminists or considered what they were doing as a feminist act except in as much as they were self-directed.
DRE: What prompted the birth of the striptease at the turn of the century?
JG: It was sort of an idea whose time had come. In the 19th century there was all this skirt dancing which was an increasingly flash of ankles then knees then pantaloons. I think it had been working towards more of a display. Then you had Oscar Wildes idea of the Dance of the Seven Veils and Salome which immediately suggests, what could be so startling that it would get this girls head on a platter. Thats where the idea of it comes from.
DRE: Did you find out when the first lapdance was given?
JG: No I didnt get into that period except when I wrote about it briefly in the epilogue. But there has always been that element even going back to the 19th century with the waitresses in the concert halls in their skimpy little outfits. Also like the scene in the western movies with the girls on the stage doing the can-can and hanging out with the card players. Those women were also, to a degree, not having sex for money but there was certainly some touching and exchange of money if not fluid. There is always a strata of sex service in society where thats being done. I dont think that would have been an invention but just that it became legal.
DRE: Blaze Starr said that porno killed stripping. What do you think she meant by that? Maybe it became too easy or you didnt have to go out?
JG: I think thats part of it. She was an interesting character in that she was really comfortable with what she was doing. In her autobiography she talked about the loss of the live band. That was something that was really important to her and her performance. She actually owned and ran a strip club into the late 70s in Baltimore. In the late 70s porn was becoming very mainstream and in the 80s there was a shift back to strip bars and the pole. I dont know if porn killed stripping and now I think its bigger than it ever was, but its a bit more confrontational.
DRE: When did stripping start to become really sleazy?
JG: Really in the 60s. For me it had to do with the removal of the stage because up until the 50s all these women were performing on a stage. They were elevated and away from the audience with props and lights where they could control the presentation to a degree. In the 60s we started to have these go-go bars and anybody could open a go-go bar. You could even open one in a pizza place. So youd cease to be a performer in front of an audience and become just a girl in a room. That was what put a stop to any kind of theatrical performance. It went from the fun performance with pasties to just being paid to hang out naked in a room which is more of a shifty line with sex work. I just know strippers are going to freak over me saying it.
by Daniel Robert Epstein
SG Username: AndersWolleck
I got a chance to talk to the books author Jessica Glasscock.
Buy Striptease here
Daniel Robert Epstein: I heard that your book might be the first on its kind.
Jessica Glasscock: Its not the first of its kind but its the only one in print right now. There was a book called This was Burlesque that came out in 1967 or 1969 by Ann Corio, who was a former stripper, which was a pretty good illustrated history although it also included a lot of history of the comedy as well. This is the only illustrated purely striptease history. There are some other histories of striptease but none are illustrated as this one is. This is my claim to fame.
DRE: What got you interested in this subject?
JG: I was looking for something to write about and I was doing a lot of costumes for drag queens and people in the S & M industry then eventually for people that were doing new burlesque. I was in graduate school at the time getting a degree in costume history so I started to want to know what the origins of striptease were. Then I ended up doing my thesis on Salome dancing. That became the kernel for the idea of the book.
DRE: Was it difficult finding out all this history?
JG: It was very difficult. Its sort of easy to get a shallow history and a lot of anecdotal stories but finding out what actually happened is hard because there is a lot of hype. A lot of times when you go back and read original source history you realize you are reading the equivalent of like an Ashcroft take on what someone was doing at the time. You spend a lot of time parsing through stuff wondering if it was really scandalous or was it just someone who was professionally scandalized. I think finding out what the real deal was, was hard. There are a lot of stories out there. A lot of the great performers wrote autobiographies but those are also hype histories as well. Going to the original sources was helpful but there was no taking anyones word for it.
DRE: Where did you start?
JG: At the library. I basically started with New York Times accounts of the Salome dancers of which there were a lot because it was a vaudeville performance. There was a lot of that because it was a very mainstream performance. I did a lot of that then I also spent a lot of time at the New York Performing Arts Library at Lincoln Center. That was a lovely wonderful library that was very helpful.
DRE: How did you collect the photos?
JG: It was tough to find good stuff that hadnt been seen a lot. For the 50s I had a harder time because it was so hard to find out who owned the pictures because you cant use them unless you can pay for proper permission. For the earlier stuff and the Victorian stuff I had the libraries and I found a collector who was willing to share his own collection. Then I also spent some serious time on eBay where I got some neat postcards and calendars. But really libraries were my main resource.
DRE: What was the collector like?
JG: His name is Ken Glickfeld and he actually collects theatre ephemera. His goal is to have a program from every theatre that ever existed in New York City to which I wish him luck. He had a rather large collection of cigarette cards, which featured burlesque queens, and he had some neat programs. He was also really knowledgeable.
DRE: Did you have to go to any sleazy places for research?
JG: I actually didnt go into a strip club until I was halfway done writing the book. I was in New Orleans with my husband and we were going to see a friend of mine who is a stripper at The Gold Bar. I actually had never been to a strip club before that. We went in and I thought the lighting was very kind. It was weird that there were mirrors everywhere so there was nowhere to look and not see the naked girls. That was cool. I was the only woman in there that wasnt working which I think really confused a lot of the men in there. They didnt know whether or not they could talk to me.
DRE: Those Victorian strippers featured in the book were really hysterical.
JG: I think those were really funny people.
DRE: Were there any famous ones that came out that people still talk about?
JG: Lydia Thompson was a huge star on par with Jenny Lind or any other Victorian celebrity. She had a 25 year career that started when she came to the US in 1867 and was still touring in the 1890s. She was mainly known as a comedienne than some kind girly show act. A lot of the burlesque that came out of that period was much more about comedy than it was about skin. It wasnt until the 1890s when it started to become more of girly show with people like Isadora Duncan and Ruth St. Denis coming up through the ranks as modern dancers in vaudeville. The other challenge of doing this research was when burlesque and vaudeville started to overlap. You find that someone is burlesque and vaudeville but you find out that they are playing in the same places. You cant tell who is doing something naughty and who isnt.
DRE: Since you are a woman do you feel like this gave you a different perspective?
JG: If anything I think I may have compensated a little. My book was reviewed in Bust Magazine and the reviewer liked it for the most part but was appalled that I didnt use the word feminism once throughout. I did that on purpose in part because I didnt want it to be about that. I was really interested in the history of striptease and not it being on one side of women or the other. I think I was really careful in not wanting to write that.
DRE: Maybe a man might have written something like that to protect himself.
JG: Yeah I think so. I read a lot of older striptease books where they would write this breezy aside like But of course feminism changed all that but then it wouldnt explore or explain that. I thought if I was going to talk about feminism it would add another 5000 words to the book. It would have been a big issue from the beginning to the end of the book. There were feminists that whole time who had opinions about how women were presenting themselves onstage in public. With earlier burlesque such as with Lydia Thompson feminists, were also against it but then Isadora Duncan and Ruth St. Denis were sort of bohemian avant-garde feminist types.
DRE: Are you a feminist?
JG: Oh yeah. Before I went to graduate school I was at the ACLU Reproductive Freedom Project for four years then I was Women's Rights Project so my feminist credentials are in order. Im not as rowdy as I was when I was 23 but who is.
DRE: Do you see the early strippers as a feminist act at all?
JG: I think that with modern dancers, who I wouldnt equate with the burlesque performance of Salome dancing, would have considered themselves feminists and artists. They would have understood that getting on stage and controlling their performance was a feminist act in as much as it was defined then. I would also say that they new burlesque who are coming in part from feminist performance art or queer culture in the tradition of Annie Sprinkle and Karen Finley. I think those people would be identified with feminism. When you are talking about people in the 50s such as Blaze Starr and Lili St. Cyr I dont think they would have called themselves feminists or considered what they were doing as a feminist act except in as much as they were self-directed.
DRE: What prompted the birth of the striptease at the turn of the century?
JG: It was sort of an idea whose time had come. In the 19th century there was all this skirt dancing which was an increasingly flash of ankles then knees then pantaloons. I think it had been working towards more of a display. Then you had Oscar Wildes idea of the Dance of the Seven Veils and Salome which immediately suggests, what could be so startling that it would get this girls head on a platter. Thats where the idea of it comes from.
DRE: Did you find out when the first lapdance was given?
JG: No I didnt get into that period except when I wrote about it briefly in the epilogue. But there has always been that element even going back to the 19th century with the waitresses in the concert halls in their skimpy little outfits. Also like the scene in the western movies with the girls on the stage doing the can-can and hanging out with the card players. Those women were also, to a degree, not having sex for money but there was certainly some touching and exchange of money if not fluid. There is always a strata of sex service in society where thats being done. I dont think that would have been an invention but just that it became legal.
DRE: Blaze Starr said that porno killed stripping. What do you think she meant by that? Maybe it became too easy or you didnt have to go out?
JG: I think thats part of it. She was an interesting character in that she was really comfortable with what she was doing. In her autobiography she talked about the loss of the live band. That was something that was really important to her and her performance. She actually owned and ran a strip club into the late 70s in Baltimore. In the late 70s porn was becoming very mainstream and in the 80s there was a shift back to strip bars and the pole. I dont know if porn killed stripping and now I think its bigger than it ever was, but its a bit more confrontational.
DRE: When did stripping start to become really sleazy?
JG: Really in the 60s. For me it had to do with the removal of the stage because up until the 50s all these women were performing on a stage. They were elevated and away from the audience with props and lights where they could control the presentation to a degree. In the 60s we started to have these go-go bars and anybody could open a go-go bar. You could even open one in a pizza place. So youd cease to be a performer in front of an audience and become just a girl in a room. That was what put a stop to any kind of theatrical performance. It went from the fun performance with pasties to just being paid to hang out naked in a room which is more of a shifty line with sex work. I just know strippers are going to freak over me saying it.
by Daniel Robert Epstein
SG Username: AndersWolleck
missy:
Striptease: From Gaslight To Spotlight is an ovaries out no holds barred look at the history of this art form. From the birth of the striptease in the mid-19th century and culminating with its garish heyday in the 1950s. its the only fully illustrated book of its kind and it highlights such performers...
ponette:
Speaking of which - I recently saw a very good striptease at a new club in Vegas called Tangerine I'm not one to promote Vegas, but these girls were pretty damn incredible.