Departments
Editor's Note
By Steve Lange
We’re simply asking one of those questions—like the dozens of questions we posed to local leaders and businesspeople in this month’s downtown development story—that we regularly hear asked, but rarely hear answered.
It’s also one of those questions that generates heated opposition. In early 1992, two-plus decades past the city’s adult entertainment heyday and a few years after the last gentlemen’s club had been closed, Cannon Falls strip club owner Tamara Lombardi seemed poised to open a similar establishment in Rochester.
City council meetings overflowed with the anti-erotica crowd. Newspaper quotes from meeting attendees ranged from the Biblical (“I don’t see that God ever gave anybody the right to pornography”) to the Constitutional (“That Constitution was written a long time ago. It was written before AIDS and before they wanted an erotic dancing bar in our Rochester'').
“You’re going to have adults that are sexually aroused walking in the area,” argued one area man, who presented a 2,400-signature anti-adult entertainment petition to the council, “and I consider that dangerous.”
Stay away from Aquarius at midnight, sir.
In May of that year, the council made it illegal to, among other things, appear nude in an adult establishment, do an erotic dance within an arm’s length of a customer, or to take tips for such a performance. And that, for fifteen years, has been that.
From a personal standpoint, I am not a “strip club” guy. Maybe because, deep down, I am acutely aware that the stripper dancing in front of me has not singled me out because she “thinks I’m super cool.” Maybe because close-up views of human naughty parts, when you think about it, look vague and rubbery.
I have certainly been to strip clubs, but almost always on one of those ‘Aren’t we really supposed to be doing something like going to a strip club?’ occasions. During my bachelor party, a half dozen or so friends and I sat around my apartment playing some sort of Trivial Pursuit drinking game in what was well on its way to being the nerdiest bachelor party on record. Finally, still unable to get the brown pie piece (“Another Charlotte Bronte question?”), someone suggested the inevitable: “Let’s go to the strip club.” Nobody, I think, really wanted to go. It just seemed mandatory. My wife, I’m sure, would have been more disturbed if I had spent my last night of bachelorhood playing a board game.
So we went to the classiest strip club in Lansing, Michigan. We drank six dollar beers and watched women spin around on aluminum poles that were apparently so strong my engineer brother wondered aloud if they were part of the load-bearing design of the building. I don’t remember much about the night, but I do remember this: At one point, very near closing time, I was, as the lone groom-to-be in the place, dragged up on stage and—even now, my ears get red just thinking about it—forced to take part in some sort of human spank machine. I remember I was the spankee. I remember that, somehow, I lost my favorite Detroit Tigers hat. It simply disappeared. It was probably spanked to bits.
That was almost 10 years ago and was, as near as I can recall, the last time I saw strippers on stage. Or at least the last time I saw female strippers on stage.
In May of 2005, for story’s sake, I attended a Chippendales show at Treasure Island. I had, for story’s sake, backstage passes. During the performance, I saw lubed-up guys dance in underwear so shiny the material looked like it came from the future. A guy in a doctor’s outfit did that thing where you put your arms above your head and shake your bare butt dangerously fast.
Six Chippendales in trenchcoats strutted (and this is not a strong enough word for the confidence exuded in their walk) onto the stage, then, at one point, took their long black coats off and spun them very fast, much like someone would spin a coat if they were being attacked and pretended their coat was a set of nunchucks. Or if that person thought they were an airplane.
Without the coats, they were wearing nothing but g-strings. The women in the audience screamed in the same way any of us would if some unknown guys in g-strings were spinning nunchucks at us.
I realize, now, that when we asked the strip club question for our downtown story (see page 24), we did not specify whether that club would consist of female or male strippers.
If the choice is the latter, we may have to side with those anti-erotica protesters from 1992. Because there is no way our forefathers, when framing the Constitution of the United States of America, could have envisioned g-stringed men, coated in baby oil, spinning trench coats at them like nunchucks.