Lusty Lady
The Lusty Lady is a pair of defunct peep show establishments, one in downtown Seattle and one in the North Beach district of San Francisco.
[1] Until 2003 they were both owned by the same company; in that year the San Francisco franchise was bought by the strippers working there and began to be managed as a worker cooperative.
The main stage featured several nude women dancing, separated by glass windows from the customers who each stood in their own booth, paying by the minute.
Once a year, The Lusty Lady SF organized a "Play Day": the dancers came out from behind the glass, explained the operation of the club to customers, and allowed behind-the-scenes peeks.
[13] The Lusty Lady is immediately across the street from the Seattle Art Museum and the marquee often commented on current exhibits or the Hammering Man statue.
In the wake of the Lusty Lady announcing its shutdown, the NPR program All Things Considered did a story focusing on the peep show's history and relationship to the broader downtown Seattle community.
[19] In March 2023, Andrew Conru, founder of Friend Finder Networks, bought the Lusty Lady's building for $3 million, calling the purchase "a gift to the city".
The first murder in the 1996 pilot of the TV series Millennium takes place in a Seattle peep show modeled on the Lusty Lady.
The San Francisco Lusty Lady was located at 1033 Kearny Street, in the Broadway strip club district of North Beach.
[29] The precipitating event was the installation of one-way mirrors in a number of booths (which also exist in the Seattle branch), resulting in some customers taking photos and videos of the show.
[32] Former Lusty Lady employee Siobhan Brooks commented in a 1997 article that "In some cases the media misquoted us as being the first strip club to unionize.
"[33][34] After management cut hourly compensation at the San Francisco Lusty Lady in 2003, the workers struck and won, but the closure of the peep show was announced soon after.
The subsequent efforts to turn the club into a worker cooperative were led by Donna Delinqua (stage name), a stripper and graduate student in English.
A dispute began in the summer of 2006 when a male employee wrote a confidential email to the co-op board, reporting customer complaints about a show featuring heavy women.
[39] The landlord, Roger Forbes (part of Deja Vu Consulting Inc. which by that time owned almost every strip club in San Francisco with the exception of Crazy Horse, Mitchell Brothers O’Farrell Theatre, and Nob Hill) refused to renew the lease after attempts to re-negotiate the rent failed.
[40][41] Carol Queen also wrote about her time dancing at the Lusty Lady, in her 2003 book Real Live Nude Girl: Chronicles of a Sex-Positive Culture.
Jennifer Worley worked at the Lusty Lady as a graduate student and participated in the unionization of the venue and its later transformation into a worker co-op later wrote about her experiences in her 2020 memoir Neon Girls: A Stripper's Education in Protest and Power.
