Imperfect Paradise: Strippers Union: Part 3
California Love
LAist Studios
4.5 • 1.3K Ratings
🗓️ 6 March 2024
⏱️ 49 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
Part 3: The Star Garden Topless Dive Bar reopens as a union strip club, but the fight doesn’t end there. What happens after the victory? LAist Producer Emma Alabaster has the story.
Here are some resources that informed our reporting:
- Working It: Sex Workers on the Work of Sex (In particular, the essay "White Supremacy in Organizing" by Domino Rey)
- Yes, A Stripper Podcast
- Unequal Desires: Race and Erotic Capital in the Stripping Industry by Siobhan Brooks
- Tits and Sass: Service Journalism by and for Sex Workers
Grow your business–no matter what stage you’re in. Sign up for a one-dollar-per-month trial period at SHOPIFY.COM/paradise
Support for this podcast is made possible by Gordon and Dona Crawford, who believe that quality journalism makes Los Angeles a better place to live.
Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | Come see the new quiz show, go fact yourself, with special guests Andy Richter and fresh airs |
| 0:05.2 | Tanya Mosley. |
| 0:06.6 | It's March 23rd at the Crawford. |
| 0:08.5 | Get your tickets at LAS.com slash events. You're listening to our series Strippers Union, part three, the behind-the-scenes story of the first US |
| 0:26.0 | Strip Club to unionize in decades. |
| 0:29.2 | Last time on imperfect paradise, the Star Garden dancers went on strike to become union employees. |
| 0:35.0 | Strikers United will never be divided. |
| 0:40.0 | And their campaign got pushback from other strippers. |
| 0:43.2 | The employee status thing ain't working. |
| 0:45.0 | We need to get the most people in the club to work. |
| 0:47.8 | It goes back to harm reductive solutions. |
| 0:50.0 | We also learned that Star Garden Management challenged the Union vote and then declared bankruptcy. |
| 0:57.0 | Buy the club! |
| 0:58.0 | Buy the club! |
| 1:01.0 | Which led the dancers to believe they had a shot at taking over the club. |
| 1:06.2 | The dream is walking into a worker-owned strip club knowing that it's only going to get better. |
| 1:16.1 | On this episode, we find out that there was even more at play behind the dancers unionization. We didn't want it to look like we had been scheming |
| 1:25.9 | this the whole time. But we were. |
| 1:29.7 | Everybody had a mutual commitment to try to see if they could make Star Gardens reopening work. |
| 1:39.0 | We are aiming the highest of the highest while they're aiming like the lowest of the lowest. |
| 1:45.0 | So that was not what I was expecting. |
| 1:49.0 | In part three of this series I finally get to go inside the strip club with Elias |
... |
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