Meet The Strippers Union Backing the Writers Strike

The country’s only currently unionized group of strippers pole-danced in solidarity with the writers on June 15.

Elaine Low has been covering the work stoppage via StrikeGeist, a newsletter for The Ankler. Since the start of the strike, she’s been reporting from picket lines all across Los Angeles. This report may have taken the proverbial cake.

It’s 2 p.m. on a Thursday afternoon and a stripper is pole dancing on Olive Ave outside the Warner Bros. studio lot. There’s a whole group of exotic dancers and sex worker allies here in Burbank, clad in fishnet stockings and thigh-high boots and in one case, a leather vest with a name tag that reads “Mistress Juggs.” They’re not on the job — rather, they’re picketing, in their own way, in solidarity with the thousands of film and TV writers currently on strike against Hollywood’s studios. By the pole is a large karaoke machine amplifying an uneven-voiced writer belting out Shania Twain, while a dancer by the stage name of Reagan does a gravity-defying split on the steel rod in mid-air. Nearby, Mistress Juggs carries a WGA West-branded picket sign touting “Sex Workers Rights.”

The dancers stopped by from Star Garden Topless Dive Bar in neighboring North Hollywood, where they are the only unionized strippers in the country, having successfully fought to have their union recognized in May after a 15-month campaign that began in March 2022. (They are the second group of strippers to accomplish this, and the only currently unionized group.) Fed up with wage theft, lack of health insurance, inadequate protection from abusive customers and other workplace safety concerns, the dancers are now part of the Actors’ Equity Association, the 110-year-old union that reps more than 51,000 live-theater actors and stage managers.

One Star Garden dancer in particular also happens to be a member of the WGA: a local strike captain who goes by Lilith, a dancer for only about a year and half but a longtime writer who earned her Guild card as a writers assistant with a freelance script credit.

“As an assistant in Hollywood, my pay has been too low to sustain me on its own, so I’ve had to have some other kind of side hustle,” Lilith told me as the stripper pole was still being erected behind her. “After the pandemic I just didn’t want to go back to waitressing. The thought of customer service seemed really draining to me, so dancing was a new side hustle to try out, and I ended up loving it and loving the people I worked with.”

It seems like workers across the board have been showing up on picket lines to support the WGA strike. In Chicago, I’ve met workers from unions representing nurses, teachers, janitors, firefighters … but not strippers.

To read the rest of the StrikeGeist article and see some actual pole-dancing on the strike line, go here.

For the latest updates on the strike and news resources, go here.