Guys don’t stand much at PT’s Showclub in Denver. They sit slack-jawed and submissive, fanning $5 bills at the topless sirens smiling and swaying and coming close, whispering in their ears the words the guys want to hear.
Dangerous temptations? Aggressive home wreckers?
How about “art, like the Mona Lisa,” says Rich Williams, 37, a self-employed Northglenn resident relaxing at PT’s on a recent Saturday night with a friend.
Williams usually comes to PT’s with his wife, who, like her husband, enjoys watching the beautiful women.
Or how about the stripper as a pressure valve?
Darren Blakley, 39, a Brighton resident, comes to strip clubs in part because of “the feeling of not having to compete.”
“There’s less ego,” says Blakley, sitting at a small table with a beer while strippers dance on stages all around. “The dancers are here for everyone.”
Chris Nixon, 30, and his wife, Angela, 32, drive to Denver from Colorado Springs for the “excitement,” they both say.
“People are going to look anyway, so why not go and just look?” says Chris Nixon, a fit and tanned U.S. Postal Service employee with a silver spike in his lower lip. “Here the inhibitions are gone. At a regular bar, you have jealous men and jealous women.”
Strippers as calming influences? As testosterone inhibitors?
Yes, and strippers as almost cuddly icons. Strippers once conjured notions of the forbidden, the hidden, the deeply naughty. For some, they still invoke all that and more. But for many, the stripper is becoming something like a role model.
“I wish I could do it,” says Chris Soren-
sen, 42, an Aurora native now living in Phoenix, visiting PT’s during a raucous bachelorette party on a recent Saturday night, a feather boa wrapped around her neck. “I think now that I’m single again, I could do it, but I can’t. I think it’s very sexy.”
Why the merger of the stripper with the American mainstream?
“The explosion of pornography on the Net and everywhere else has made women want to do something that makes them feel sexy, but is not explicitly Triple X hardcore,” says Rachel Shteir, a theater professor at DePaul University in Chicago and the author of “Striptease: The Untold History of the Girlie Show.”
Want to learn to strip? Head to Flashdance Studios in Broomfield, where moms and even grandmothers take classes in pole dancing and stripper workouts.
“Our average is 35 (years old),” says Flashdance owner Dana Currence, who opened a new studio in Boulder this year to meet the demand for stripping classes. “It’s mostly middle-aged housewives with kids and a husband at home.”
That would describe Dana Besbris, 32, from Erie, who is married with one child.
“It’s all women, and it’s dark and the music is nice. It’s exciting to let loose. My husband couldn’t be a bigger fan,” she says after an evening practice. “We’re probably going to buy a (stripper) pole” for the house.
She could buy that pole at Spencer’s Gifts in the mall.
But the dancing that might go on in Besbris’ suburban living room probably won’t mirror what goes on in strip clubs.
At the Penthouse Club, behind Target and the Shotgun Willies strip club on Colorado Boulevard, dancers roamed the big space, shaking on stages, sitting close with customers, holding their hands and delivering them to the lap-dance area.
At the upscale Diamond Cabaret in downtown Denver, a seasoned partner in a big Denver law firm ate dinner with a friend in the club’s Palm-like steakhouse, while a topless woman danced on a small round stage lined with bars, like a birdcage.
Stripping may be grandmothers in dance studios, but it’s also this – undressed women whispering in men’s ears, embracing them, gyrating in their laps; men enthralled, tucking money into garters, guzzling $8 Budweisers and revealing sexual fantasies their wives don’t know about.
Is the actual flesh-and-blood stripper celebrated? Maybe not.
“It’s the symbolic nature of what they do that is OK,” says Barb Brents, a sociology professor at the University of Nevada-Las Vegas. “Pole-dancing classes are seen as exercise. It’s part of all of these larger cultural trends, what people are calling the sexualization of culture.”
Going places
Katherine Frank, a former stripper who has a Ph.D in cultural anthropology from Duke University – and who studies sex culture – says in an e-mail that strippers are “still stigmatized, unfortunately.”
“The important thing about the fact that women can play at being strippers is that they aren’t really strippers,” she says. “If stripping does not keep its naughty edge, at least for some portions of the population, the clientele will change over time.
“The regular customers at the clubs, after all, are not the guys who think that nudity isn’t a big deal, or who are likely to be out at nightclubs where all of the girls are pole dancing and kissing each other. They are older, mostly married, conservative men for whom watching a girl take off her clothes is transgressive. If this isn’t the case, they lose interest, they get bored.”
Pop culture today buzzes with strippers.
Carmen Electra’s workout video revolves around stripping; Sheila Kelly’s Los Angeles-based empire of stripping schools draws actors like Teri Hatcher, who so took to stripping that she gave Jay Leno a tame demonstration during his show.
The fellas in The Sopranos spend half their time in a strip club, and what song has electrified the charts this year? Hip-hop artist T-Pain’s “I’m N Luv (Wit a Stripper).”
What was one of the spring’s big Hollywood releases? “The Notorious Bettie Page,” Warner Bros.’ take on one of the country’s earliest successful cultivators of feminine raunch.
Who is the new “It” girl in Hollywood? The Los Angeles Times earlier this year coronated erotic dancer Dita Von Teese with the title. Von Teese recently married rock star Marilyn Manson, published a coffee-table book filled with sexy pictures of her, was featured in Vogue magazine and is swiftly minting her own brand of retro risque.
“Never in a million years would I have dreamed I’d see the places I’m seeing, flying first-class, making the money I’m making,” she says. “When I was working in the strip club in 1990 wearing my corset, I never imagined I’d be doing the stuff I’m doing. I’m shocked.”
“It’s an outlet”
Boulder dancer Brandy does it all: stripping, burlesque and other erotic-dance arts.
She started dancing topless in Michigan, two days after her 18th birthday, following several of her friends.
“I knew how much money they made,” says Brandy, a sprite-like 25-year-old, sipping a Mike’s Hard Cranberry Lemonade after a stripper workout at the studio. “I wanted a car, I wanted to go to college, I wanted everything my parents couldn’t give me.”
She’s traveled the United States, most of it paid for with nights at clubs.
“If you strip, you can pack up your heels and travel,” says Brandy, who strips at a Boulder club, performs circus routines along the Front Range, teaches classes at Flashdance Studios and is pursuing several degrees at different Boulder schools, including CU.
After more than six years, she says the business hasn’t changed much, with the exception of a fresh embrace of stripping and strip clubs by women.
“I think people are starting to understand that sexuality is fun,” she says. “Everybody does it; everybody has it.”
But few have made as much money at it as Troy Lowrie, the chairman and chief executive officer of VCG Holding in Lakewood. The publicly traded company started by Lowrie’s father owns 13 strip clubs around the nation, making it one of the nation’s largest strip-club empires.
His clubs – four in Denver, five in St. Louis, and one each in Indianapolis, Phoenix and Louisville – haul in about $41 million in revenue a year. With the new public financing, though, the company is expanding quickly, adding three new clubs in the past 18 months. In five years, Lowrie says, he hopes to have 30 clubs pulling in more than $150 million a year.
The strip-club industry, he says, is poised for consolidation. Many of the clubs opened in the 1970s and ’80s; the owners are in their 60s and ready to sell and retire. Only VCG and a few other big companies have the cash and wherewithal to buy.
Lowrie wants his clubs to have a recognizeable feel, whether they are in Seattle, Miami or Denver.
“That business traveler wants brand recognition when he’s traveling,” says Lowrie, 41, a compact man with swept-up-from-his-forehead short hair and a trim mustache. He could pass for a police sergeant, except his workplace involves a leather-topped desk in a corner office, with views of foothills dominating every window.
And what does the expense-account salesman get at one of Lowrie’s properties?
“Acceptance,” says Lowrie. “I don’t think what I do is sexual.”
“Where else can a 50-year-old guy go and talk to a beautiful girl and be complimented, to not be rejected?” he says. “We’re in the fantasy business … It’s an outlet, it’s a male relaxation center.”
More online: For a history of strip culture, go to denverpost.com/style
Staff writer Douglas Brown can be reached at 303-820-1395 or djbrown@denverpost.com.
