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It's Tuesday evening, and the tourists have said goodnight to the Lincoln and Jefferson memorials. At the end of the Mall, the dome of the Capitol shines like a moon. Almost in its shadow, seven blocks away, is a neighborhood few tourists have reason to visit. Lining the streets beneath the noise of I-295 is a mixture of auto-repair shops, chainlink fences, and taxi-cab companies. A bouncer sits on a stool outside a building at 900 First Street, Southeast. The awning reads NEXUS GOLD CLUB. Parked cars line the street. Inside, the VIP balcony is filling up, and the downstairs lounge is teeming with businessmen trying to show clients a good time. Scantily clad women hobnob with customers, exchanging pleasantries and cruising for tips.
A young woman in a sheer blue dress and high platform heels introduces herself as "Sugar." Tan and lean, she says she is a 29-year-old graduate student who's just wild enough to take her clothes off for money.
"I know that guys look down on me and see me as just this hot chick without a brain," she says, "but it doesn't bother me. I know I'm smart. This is just one part of me, and I'm having a lot of fun."
Sugar says she grew up in a Bethesda neighborhood off River Road and graduated from an area college. "I can't tell you my real name," she says, "because my parents don't know I'm doing this."
On stage, she sheds the dress and is left wearing a baby-blue garter and the platform heels. Her dance moves are not elaborate. She looks a bit bored. Men approach her to slip dollar bills under her garter. When the R&B song she's dancing to ends, she puts her dress back on and is replaced by the next dancer.
Sugar says she began stripping on a dare three weeks earlier. She and some friends were out at another strip club when Sugar–a little drunk, she says–started talking to a dancer on stage. The dancer dared her to go up, and "Sugar" was born. She danced for a few minutes and got $25 in tips.
"Why do I do it?" Sugar muses while rolling her long blond hair around her wrist. "Because I'm crazy."
But not crazy like a Fanne Foxe, some old-timers might say. Today's strippers, like Sugar, may have toned bodies, but they're about as exotic as cashiers at a suburban mall. Most say stripping–or dancing nude–is a means to an end. A stripper can easily take home more than $1,000 a week, according to dancers. Stripping may not make many résumés, they say, but it may help pay for the credentials on them.
Gone is the old red-light district along DC's 14th Street, where neon lights led the way to peep shows, go-go clubs, and burlesque halls and where the late congressman Wilbur Mills, an Arkansas Democrat, fell madly in love with Fanne Foxe–the "Argentine Firecracker"–then fell out of power when she fell into the Tidal Basin.
The gaudy downtown clubs have been replaced by office buildings; the striptease acts have given way to in-your-face nudity. As a result of laws that keep new strip clubs from locating in DC, the only X-rated action that remains in public view is a handful of clubs that feature nude dancing. The rest of X-rated Washington is now largely out of sight–a flourishing underworld of escort services and massage-parlor brothels.
Thirty years ago, you could walk through DC's red-light district and take in Jell-O wrestling and 25-cent peep shows. Prostitutes walked the streets and hung out at clubs; conventioneers could pop into "model studios" off the street for an intimate but anonymous $125 encounter. There was also burlesque, with big-name headliners like Blaze Starr, who performed in sequined outfits and plumes of feathers, and comedians who filled in between acts.
Wilbur Mills met Fanne Foxe at the Silver Slipper on 13th Street. One October night in 1974, Mills and Foxe and some friends were driving around in a Lincoln when US Park Police pulled them over near the Tidal Basin for speeding. In a panic, Foxe leaped into the Tidal Basin. Soon after, Mills sought help for a drinking problem and resigned as head of the House Ways and Means Committee.
By 1986, the neon demimonde that thrived in the blocks around 14th, H, and I streets had vanished. New laws and tighter restrictions have kept X-rated Washington from making a public comeback.
In the early 1990s, DC placed a freeze on liquor licenses for nude-dancing establishments. "If you owned a place, you could keep it and you could sell it, but you couldn't move it," says Jack Evans, city councilman in Ward 2, the downtown and close-in Northwest DC area where most of the strip clubs are. "It protected all the existing clubs, but you couldn't get a new license. It was a compromise between eliminating them and letting them expand. And we didn't want them to expand."
The law was amended to allow clubs to relocate within certain areas, but they must be more than 600 feet from any residential building and at least 600 feet from another strip club to prevent the kind of concentration that marked DC's 14th Street.
The freeze on licenses gives DC club owners job security–it prevents national chains like Scores and Larry Flynt's Hustler Club from moving in. Those chains–and thousands of independent clubs–constitute a big business boom. The 3,800 "adult cabarets" in the United States earn about $15 billion of a $75-billion worldwide legal adult-entertainment market, according to Angelina Spencer of the Association of Club Executives. "This is one market that remains strong nationally and sees regular growth year after year," Spencer says.
There are 20 licensed strip clubs in DC; three are advertised in Northern Virginia–one in Crystal City and two in Springfield; and just over a dozen operate in Prince George's County. There are none in Alexandria or Montgomery County, police say.
The six largest markets, Spencer says, are Dallas, Houston, Atlanta, Miami/Fort Lauderdale, Orlando, Las Vegas, and Los Angeles. There are about 40 major strip clubs in Atlanta, she says. "Even a conservative estimate of the economic impact of such clubs translates to . . . far above the economic impact of the Braves, Hawks, and Falcons combined," she says.
Despite possibilities for increased tax revenues, Evans says, the District is not looking to allow more clubs. "It's just an issue we don't want to visit again," he says. "What we have is working."
What DC has is a handful of clubs that range from glitzy showrooms like the Nexus Gold Club to places that feel more like neighborhood bars–albeit with women dancing nude. Several even serve good food.
The best-known club is Camelot Show Bar on M Street downtown, where the decor is classier, the dancers are more attractive, and the mid-fortyish clientele is older than elsewhere. Not far away, Archibalds on K Street has the feel of a local pub. At happy hour it's packed with a mix of whites and blacks, often including a few women, all of whom chat amiably; the nude dancing almost seems secondary.
The Royal Palace, a short walk from Dupont Circle, inside looks at first like a bingo hall; both the clientele and the dancers are racially diverse, and the atmosphere is friendly. Good Guys on Wisconsin Avenue in Glover Park feels like a party: The music is more rock 'n' roll than R&B, and the dancers, who have more tattoos and piercings than elsewhere, actually use the pole in their acrobatic performances. Across the street, JP's is a utility strip club–nude dancers, a younger crowd of regulars, and a dark but hospitable atmosphere.
Across the Potomac River in Crystal City, just off Jefferson Davis Highway, the Crystal City Restaurant looks like a sports bar. There are pool tables, video games, and dozens of flat-screen televisions showing sporting events; an electronic board displays the starting time and point spread for upcoming games. Near-nude dancers perform on two stages. Unlike in DC, dancers must wear G-strings and pasties that cover their nipples. The atmosphere is relaxed. Men wearing everything from suits to shorts and T-shirts sit at tables eating and drinking and watching TV, handing out dollar bills as the dancers walk by after finishing their acts.
As with the clubs in DC, police say the Crystal City club seldom generates trouble. "The complaints we get there are about clients being intoxicated," Arlington County detective Rick Rodriguez says.
That's not always the case in Prince George's County, where clubs are located in industrial areas and a few residential neighborhoods. Patrons say there's an anything-goes atmosphere in some of the clubs, and the scene can be more rough-and-tumble than in downtown DC and Virginia.
DC's strip clubs attract their share of out-of-towners, but most patrons are local, club owners say. "Conventioneers are a bonus," says one, "but the locals keep us in business. I'd say conventioneers maybe make up 25 percent of our customers."
"We get a healthy number of people who get sent to us by their hotel concierge and cab drivers," says another club owner. "That's the way most visitors find us."
Club owners also say business is pretty much the same no matter which political party is in power. "Republicans, Democrats, they all come," laughs one owner. Says another: "I'm sure President Bush hates us, but having a conservative in power hasn't affected our business."
DC's gay strip clubs are decidedly different. Instead of being scattered, the gay clubs are in one location–off South Capitol Street, Southeast, in cavernous warehouses. Far from feeling like neighborhood bars, the gay clubs are explicitly sexual.
Ziegfeld's and Secrets is a combination showroom and strip club. Ziegfeld's is the showroom, a large hall where drag performances are held on a wooden stage surrounded by cocktail tables and chairs. There's a bar in the back. Through a glass door to the right of the bar is Secrets, the strip club, where muscular men dance naked on stages and on the bar. About a dozen televisions show hard-core gay pornography. Dancers allow patrons to stroke their genitals–a practice almost never seen in the heterosexual clubs.
Allen Carroll and Chris Jansen have owned Ziegfeld's for almost 30 years. They opened the first gay club in the warehouse district south of the Capitol. Now there are some half dozen gay strip clubs, theaters, and bathhouses in the area. But not for long. The new baseball stadium will carve up the area and force at least six clubs, including Ziegfeld's, Heat, and the Follies Theatre, to vacate.
"They're destroying a community," Carroll says. "[Gays] have been coming down here for 30 years, and they're all worried to death. Customers in here are always saying to me, 'You've gotta open another place. What are we going to do?' "
Councilman Jack Evans acknowledges that the gay clubs in the area face a difficult situation. "No one has come up with a credible solution to the problem," he says. "The dynamic there is it's close to downtown, it's isolated, and there's a concentration, so it works. There's nowhere else in the city where we can re-create that. The land doesn't exist."
"I want to open another place," Carroll says, "but where can I take my license? I don't want them to just stick us in some neighborhood and have to work on gaining acceptance again. . . . I'm hoping they'll be lenient with license and relocating laws with us and take into consideration how long we've been here."
At the Bada Bing strip club featured on HBO's The Sopranos, sexual favors are traded, drugs are readily available, and gangsters gather to plot their moves.
One DC manager says the only relationship his club has to The Sopranos is that "they showed people drinking Grey Goose vodka at the Bada Bing, and immediately Grey Goose sales went up more than 100 percent. . . . In any business you have some bad apples, but the club owners here make real good money, and there's no reason to do anything extracurricular."
In the old days, the "extracurricular" was standard. "The country was looser," an owner says. "There were fewer laws and less enforcement. You even had [then-mayor] Marion Barry accused of doing cocaine at the This Is It club in the mid-1980s. Washington has changed. The most important thing I tell my managers is that we have to keep our license, so we can't do anything that would cause us to lose it."
It would be naïve to think that Washington strip clubs are free of drugs and prostitution, but they are not readily evident. DC's Alcoholic Beverage Regulation Administration (ABRA) has been monitoring only one establishment and that because of violence, not sexual activity.
Sergeant Mark Gilkey, the DC police detective in charge of the antiprostitution unit, says police get involved primarily when they receive complaints from citizens. "We've done several investigations of clubs over the years," Gilkey says, "but that doesn't seem like a high-problem area. The clientele for clubs is totally different than it used to be. The clubs have cleaned up considerably."
The law broken most often in DC clubs is the one requiring that dancers perform on a stage at least three feet from the nearest customer. According to ABRA director of operations Jeff Coudriet, it is technically a violation for a patron to go up to a stage and slip money in a dancer's garter while she performs. But Coudriet acknowledges, "It's so historically done here that we look the other way on the tipping issue. . . . For the most part, DC is pretty clean."
Dancers themselves have something to do with that, says one manager. "It does happen that girls will go home with a customer, but the girls police each other because it makes them look bad. It makes the guys think that all the girls will do it because one girl is doing it, and the majority of girls don't want that stigma."
And drugs? "We still have drug problems with girls, but even five or six years ago it was a lot worse, and we're cracking down on it more. If we catch a customer using drugs, we'll kick him out. There are ten people who will fill his spot at the bar."
Says another manager, "If I see a girl who looks like she's on drugs–you know, falling asleep or drooling–I say something to her. Of course, they always deny it. But I tell them I don't care if they're doing it or not, you look bad, and people will always assume the worst. So I tell them that if they look or act this way again, they're gone. And of course the ones who have a problem will always f— up again, and we have to fire them because you just cannot have that."
That strip clubs are no longer the places to go to find sex doesn't mean there isn't a sex industry here. Says one regular at a strip club, "If you're looking for sex, you go to the street, the escort services, or massage parlors."
Based on statistics from the Polaris Project, a Washington-based international organization that combats sex trafficking, the value of the sex trade in Washington is estimated at nearly a quarter of a billion dollars a year.
The Yellow Pages list 133 escort services, most of which operate as outcall brothels. That's a tenfold increase since 1983. A Google search for "Washington DC escort service" yields hundreds of results. Average advertised rates range from $200 to $500 an hour. Massage parlors and "spas" offering in-call and outcall services, often sexual, advertise in the Yellow Pages, newspapers, and magazines.
More than 40 Asian massage parlors–mostly Korean–operate as fronts for in-call brothels, says Derek Ellerman, coexecutive director of the Polaris Project. Each earns an average of $1.2 million a year. More than 200 massage parlors that do not advertise–and operate largely out of private homes and apartments–serve mainly Latino clients; the average take is estimated at more than $800,000 a year.
A street pimp controlling four women can make about $632,000 a year, according to Ellerman. In September 2004, Gary "Sweat" Gates was convicted of sex trafficking in the District and sentenced to 178 months in prison. Gates controlled more than 30 women–including girls as young as 14–who sold their sexual services on the street and on two Internet sites.
Tina Frundt has large eyes and a smile that puts people at ease, useful traits in her old life that now help her in her new one. She used to be a prostitute. Now she does outreach work with prostitutes and others in Washington for the Polaris Project.
At age ten, her foster mother's boyfriend sold her for sex. Frundt later left home in Chicago at age 14 and soon met a "wonderful guy" in his twenties. They teamed up, living mainly in motels. They talked of living the good life together, of buying a home and getting rich. Then one day, Frundt says, the man told her "if I loved him, I would help make money for us."
They drove to Cleveland. That night some friends of his came to their motel room. He told Frundt to have sex with a man. She refused. They raped her. Like most women beginning in prostitution–many when they are barely more than children–she blamed herself.
Afterward, she recalls, "he said that wouldn't have happened if I would have just listened to him at first. So I took it as my fault. Instead of being angry at him for being raped, I was angry at myself for not listening to him in the first place. Right after is when he picked my clothes out, told me what to wear, and forced me to go out on the streets." Soon she learned that he was pimping several other women.
On the streets Frundt had to make $500 before she could come in for the night. When she brought in only $50, "he beat me up in front of the other girls and made me go outside until I had made the money," she says. "This is the same man who took me out to eat, listened to me when I complained about my parents, and gave me advice, but increasingly I was seeing a side of him I had never seen before. A brutal side. . . . I was scared."
One day Frundt worked from 6 AM to 10 PM without eating or sleeping. She made her $500 quota, but the pimp, still angry, put her back on the streets until 5 the next morning. When Frundt was finished, he bought her some food but locked her in a closet to sleep.
"Pimps are sadistic," Frundt says. "They train you. I've had my arm broken with a bat. After the abuse, the pimp would tell me to sit on his lap and would ask me what was wrong. When I said, 'You broke my arm,' he hit me and asked me again what was wrong. I had to say, 'I fell down.' "
A pimp usually takes the woman to a new city where she doesn't know anyone. Most of the women Frundt's organization helps are from elsewhere, she says. "They're like, 'This is DC!' and they're so happy to see the Capitol. Then, when they want to leave, where do they go? Would you go to the police who keep arresting you? No, you wouldn't."
Frundt says her story is the norm for most prostitutes, whether they work on the streets or through escort services.
"A lot of escort services are pimp-controlled," says the Polaris Project's Derek Ellerman, "and are fronts for prostitution. No one believes they're just for dates. There may be some very, very high-end services where there isn't full intercourse, but in general it's prostitution where they come to your hotel room or home. They don't escort you anywhere."
High-end escort services are sophisticated operations in which women's services can cost thousands of dollars–and the women have some freedom to choose whether to have sex with the customer
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