January 21, 2003 09:46am
Clubs Spurn Dancers' Help
Source: Letters to the Editor
by: Company Press Release
Steve,
Yesterday I interviewed with Veja, Brazil's largest-selling news magazine, we did an interview two weeks ago that will be out in the Nation sometime this week, Kcal is doing a piece on LVDA for California television Friday evening, and Ms. Tolman and I will be doing interviews concerning our charges to the NLRB on local television stations throughout the day.
I wish I could report that the club owners are behind us all the way and that we're all just one, big, happy family out here, fighting to protect the adult industry, but unfortunately that's not the case. The big clubs out here are dead set against us and they've been against us, almost consistently, from the beginning.
We started LVDA with the idea that our large numbers, if registered to vote and organized, could augment the owners' power and bring about changes in local regulation favorable to the industry. Had these owners backed us from the very beginning, we could easily have defeated the lap dance ordinance and gone back to work.
But the big clubs threw every obstacle they could in our path, blocking us from entering their clubs and resorting to intimidation rather than working with us. Industry leaders like Playboy, Larry Flynt, and Howard Stern then declined to get behind us. Now we've changed our strategy. Dancers, like everyone else in America, have the right to organize and that's what we intend to do--organize.
The big club owners in Vegas have brought this fight on themselves. In the end, their tactics may very well ensure the very thing they hoped to prevent.
Andrea Hackett
LVDA
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