Portal de Periódicos da CAPES

Whatever Happened to Class?

2024; Duke University Press; Volume: 2024; Issue: 149 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1215/01636545-11027404

1534-1453

Jo Weldon,

Postcolonial and Cultural Literary Studies

In 1980, when I started stripping, the term classy strip joint was considered an oxymoron. By 1985, it was a marketable one.In my career I've moved through strip joints large and small, pretentious and homely, across the country and around the world, and rarely have I encountered a word more weaponized against dancers (and even clientele) than classy. That word, and its close relatives upscale and gentlemen's, were used to delineate a crushingly competitive set of standards for appearance and behavior and to drive up the revenue for clubs through cover charges, inflated drink prices, and extortionate tip-out practices.I began working my way through college (it's stereotypical because it's true) at the Classy Cat (RIP) in Atlanta, Georgia. The name said "classy" but the place was literally tacky—the carpet sticky with spilled drinks, sugary shooters deliberately and surreptitiously tipped over by dancers attempting to entertain customers without swallowing.The club may have been using the word classy ironically or defiantly. Even before I worked at the venue I knew it wasn't high-class and didn't aspire to be. The place was small, the lighting bad, the costumes minimal. The music was on a jukebox (Top 40 only, no hard rock, rap, or punk allowed), the tipping was desultory, the drinks were watered, the customers were needy. The housemothers—women who had been burlesque stars decades ago but now haunted our dressing rooms purveying body spray, cigarettes, gum, and used costumes—often bemoaned the loss of sequined gowns, live bands, and high rollers. At that time, in that region, strip clubs were frequented almost exclusively by loners, men who would have been considered deeply deviant for patronizing the venues.The massive strip joint boom of the trickle-down economy was on the horizon. While the Classy Cat's sister club, the Cheetah III (still operating), would be in the vanguard—and I would join it there, with fresh tan lines and implants—the Classy Cat would remain small-time, considered by many to be a dive due to its location, decor, and small size. I'll always remember the Classy Cat fondly because it was an anarchic environment where schedules were ignored and eccentricity was expected, and it was the first place I ever felt it was safe to be queer.When I started, it was common practice in Atlanta for dancers to tip-out 10 percent of gross earnings to the DJs, who constantly urged customers to tip us, so we benefited directly from motivating them. We might also tip the housemother, but that wasn't required unless we used her resources and services.In the mid-1980s, however, strip clubs became places where men brought business associates to party on expense accounts. They spent extravagantly not to impress the dancers or pay us what we were worth but to impress each other with how much money, and therefore acumen and influence, they had. Clubs began to unironically call themselves classy.The dawning of this change was the brief but emphatic reign of the "gown clubs" that bridged the era between table dancing and pole dancing, where strippers wore gowns either throughout their shifts or on "walkouts" where all the dancers came onto the stage at once. Versions of this took place at the Cheetah III in Atlanta, Stringfellows in New York City, and other clubs in Florida and Texas. A reference to formal evening wear, the gowns were usually made of unlined stretch fabric with thigh-high slits in the skirts, sold to us by vendors the club brought in at a cut of the profits.The customers, too, had to be "classy"; the dress codes required collared shirts instead of T-shirts and banned baseball caps indoors (although the club sold T-shirts and baseball caps with their logo on them and required the dancers to help sell them). The male employees wore tuxedos. Cigars and expensive whiskey were available. We began to be literally showered with money, "making it rain" as a demonstration of the conspicuous consumption—although since it wouldn't be "classy" to bend over to pick up money, in some clubs we had to pay a percentage for people to sweep it up for us.The word classy was thrown around like credit from a predatory bank, used to define the dancers who were the youngest, most fit, and most compliant. Their hair was smooth. Their breasts were perky. They drank just the right amount. They often had a bit of dance training. They resembled Victoria's Secret models. Anything they said or did that disturbed the calm, even surface of their appearance and behavior would be considered a downgrade from classy, and they might not be hired if they were considered overweight, sloppy, or "too urban" (i.e., Black—natural hair and AAVE1 were discouraged).Dancers rarely complained openly, even though clubs were powerful enough that they didn't feel threatened if we did. However, anyone who complained to management about tip-outs was not "classy" enough, not able to effortlessly make the grade. (Privately I complained about supporting employees such as bouncers, who should have been paid by the club rather than by the dancers; we came to describe ourselves as "jockstraps who support all the men in the industry.") She who didn't conform to the club's standards of classy would now hear about it.Hence my distaste for the word. Classy can mean stylish, sophisticated, or gracious. But those who say this often have an agenda, a hierarchy to uphold. In the clubs, classy was employed by the management to overvalue our jobs and to devalue anything about us that did not have the veneer of respectability—anything too queer, too eccentric, too ethnic, too loud, too difficult, but most importantly anything that prevented them from maximizing their own profit. It is not difficult to find similar examples outside the strip club doors, the word weaponized to bolster the self-perceived superiority of those using the word, making the use of classy invariably classist. It's built into the word, as it refers to socioeconomic class. There can't be a reference to class without a reference to compliance with respectability standards that are classist—and, by extension in our society, cis- and heteronormative, ableist, and racist.While many dive bars continue to thrive without the veneer of respectability that "upscale" clubs conferred on us, I heard the Classy Cat got closed down for drugs or credit card fraud or losing their lease or something. The memory of its name remains the only use of the word classy that doesn't make my skin crawl, as I nurse a fond nostalgia for the first time I had more freedom than class.