Confessions of a Teenage Stripper

Pacific News Service, Youth Commentary, Sayyadina Thomas, Posted: Jan 27, 2004

Editor's Note: News of nationwide crackdowns on the trafficking of undocumented immigrant sex workers causes a young writer to remember her experiences in a strip club, and the extra risks faced by immigrant women there.

SAN FRANCISCO--Recently I opened the newspapers to read about a bust of a brothel and its undocumented immigrant sex workers in a sweet-looking house in a residential neighborhood. It made me think back to my days as a stripper, working alongside immigrant girls in a downtown club.

I needed money, and a girl I knew suggested we try stripping. She didn't want to go alone. I was just 17, but a brought a forged birth certificate.

For me, the club was a place to make what I thought would be fast, easy money. The manager warned if I couldn't make $400 a night it wasn't worth my time.

I started work at 6:30 p.m. and got off at 2:30 a.m. About 20 other girls worked with me. It was really hard to make money at first because I talked too much and didn't work the customers to buy dances.

Every stripper had to pay the club's house fee each shift: $100. If there were not a lot of paying customers, some girls had to go home. I went into debt before I got the hang of it. When I started to learn how to manipulate the customers with my body I started making money, about $300 to $600, depending on the night. Other girls, the tall blondes with breast implants and the little, under-aged looking Asians, made the most money. Sometimes I saw girls pocketing $800 dollars. That's about 20 lap dances and four pole routines worth of cash.

I just wanted to get quick money, but I found out early that no money is that easy. First of all, stripping can be bad on the psyche. You analyze your body down to the tiniest flaw, finding fault with everything. You go from feeling good -- men are paying a lot of money to see you dance -- to feeling like a used hand rag, with everybody wiping their fetishes off on you. I stayed high a lot and I spent about a half of what I made getting my nails and hair done and buying expensive stripper clothes. I stripped for about six months.

A strip club is almost always a demeaning environment to women, and it is racist because every girl has to label herself. Blacks and mulattos are exotic beauties. Whites are American beauties. Once, a tall, willowy blonde pulled me aside to tell me that -- surprise -- her mother was black. She was Brazilian, but at the club she told the customers she was Portuguese. It sounded better than Brazilian and better than black, she said.

It was rumored that some girls were prostitutes, but I never saw a girl in the club turn a trick. At the club where I worked some of the most preferred customers were police officers, white-collar workers and firemen. One particular cop visited the club often for lap dances. He gave me a business card and tried to convince me to call him so he could pay to perform oral sex on me. I would give him the most expensive dance I could and casually tell him I wasn't interested.

Two Asian girls I worked with were illegal, and everybody knew the boss loved illegal immigrants. Since an illegal immigrant is a security risk, a club owner may demand that she pay three times the normal house fee. If she is popular and makes $600 nightly, she has to give $300 to the club. If she doesn't make enough money to pay the house she will most likely go into debt.

The two Asian girls kept to themselves and talked to few people. They were prized at the club because they looked about 12 years old and guys really liked them. One small-boned girl with a classic straight bang haircut was no doubt one of the biggest moneymakers in the house. She had a mean accent and could barely pronounce English.

Another stripper friend, a Central American, is a student at City College in San Francisco. She told me her boss had asked her to help him smuggle some girls from Central America to work for him. My home girl is an activist who brings money home from the club to her family because her father is a political prisoner and her family is in poverty. She turned down the boss's request.

I never got to know any of the girls intimately. We smoked an occasional joint together, but strippers tend to be wary of each other due to the competitive nature of the place. I do remember that a lot of girls started stripping thinking they'd make a few thousand dollars fast. Make money, enroll in school, find a husband, perhaps put a down payment on a house -- isn't that all part of the American dream? But in a strip club, especially if you're a foreigner, you can catch sight of the worst side of the American dream. Just like those sex workers in the pretty neighborhood house.

PNS contributor Sayyadina Thomas (sayyo_inyoarea@yahoo.com), 21, is a writer for YO! Youth Outlook (www.youthoutlook.org), a magazine by and about San Francisco Bay Area Youth and a PNS project.

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