NEW YORK -- They're wearing clothes in the naked city.
On a recent Friday night at Ten's World-Class Cabaret, a glitzy Manhattan strip club, three couples share the blue-lighted dance floor. An intense-looking loner clings to his partner and whispers in her ear, a drunk executive assures a towering brunette that he is not having a midlife crisis, and a young man stares deeply into a blonde woman's eyes as if it is the last dance at the senior prom. Not a single woman has so much as lowered a dress strap.
A sorry excuse for sin, but the strip club remains open. Less naked, but open. Nearly a year after Mayor Rudolph W. Giuliani launched his campaign to blot sex-related businesses from the city, this industry has undergone a cultural shift.
It has done what it must to survive.
The result: Strangely quaint experiences like the one at Ten's. The strategy at many New York adult entertainment establishments is to use a loophole in Giuliani's law, adding a finely calibrated amount of non-nudity to keep the parlor from closing.
The ideas are ingenious: Sex shops are putting souvenir Statues of Liberty and Danny DeVito movies alongside the collected video works of porn star Alyssa Alps. Topless bars have continued their liveshows, but dress their performers in bathing suits, creating a kind of beach-movie burlesque. And strip clubs like Ten's have supplemented topless shows with PG-13 options -- dinner and dancing with strippers swathed in floor-length evening gowns.
Adult venues are trying to comply with Giuliani's so-called "60-40" rule, a zoning law that allows adult material with nudity on less than 40 percent of a business' floor space as long as nonadult fare fills the rest. The law applies to businesses near homes or within 500 feet of churches, schools and other adult venues -- about 144 of the city's 164 adult emporiums.
The suburban bridge and tunnel crowd is disgusted.
"If you really want a nude show, you'd better go to Jersey," said Tom, a frustrated 31-year-old who would only give his first name while searching for skin with his buddies after a Rangers game. "It's just not happening here."
Though it might sound as though the sex industry is dead in New York, flesh palaces are still registering a pulse -- in part by relying on crafty legal maneuvers.
In New York's Flatiron district, Ten's is using the 60-40 loophole to offer "taxi dancing," where men "hail" a fully clothed stripper for a fantasy date. For $20, she spends a few minutes dancing to a slow '80s song with them, lighting their cigarettes and laughing at their jokes.
In another room, patrolled by thick-fisted bouncers, topless women perform table dances (total nudity is banned in New York clubs that serve alcohol). But in the taxi-dancing area -- where management has spray-painted over the derriere of a woman in a lingerie poster -- more modest rules prevail.
The club swears the entertainment is not a flop. Deanna Star, 28, a blonde stripper and taxi dancer at Ten's, said a businessman recently spent $3,500 on dinner and a night of dancing with her. She said she does not know any actual dance steps, but her customers do not care. They like her company.
"A lot of them don't have anybody to talk to," Star said. Her clients -- many of whom work on Wall Street -- rack up big tabs talking to her about themselves and their work.
"I learn a lot about stocks," she said.
The club has its riskier side: Customers can spend $20 more for a three-minute topless performance in which their partner sheds her evening gown in the table-dancing room. This is considered a private show, and other customers are expected not to look -- if they do, they are accused of "glomming," a violation of strip-club etiquette.
Some performers call the whole arrangement unsettling -- a striptease is no longer an anonymous show for strangers, but something slightly more intimate.
"I know some girls who won't do taxi dancing," said Star. "It's a little too personal."
To the Giuliani administration, the whole idea is a sham. Giuliani argues that clubs like Ten's were supposed to be padlocked from the start, contending that the 60-40 loophole was only meant for sex shops, not topless bars. Regardless of conflicting opinions by different judges on the subject, the administration plans to move forward with the crackdown.
An end to all nude attractions, no exceptions? "That's our goal," said Steven Fishner, the city's criminal justice coordinator, arguing that the crackdown helps downtown development city business and reduces the crime and prostitution associated with the sex industry. He added that 28 establishments deemed illegal already have been closed through court action, and another 20 have shut down voluntarily.
It may be tough times for adult entertainers. But for lawyers, the constitutional issues of free expression, as well as complicated matters of zoning law, have proven fertile ground.
"That's what's making me a career," said attorney Mark Alonso, who represents Ten's. He dreamed up a variety of unusual legal strategies to fight the Giuliani administration, including the argument that since minors could enter Ten's with their parents, it was not an adult club and therefore should not be closed. That idea ultimately was rejected in court, and Ten's briefly closed. It reopened with taxi dancing and has stayed in business since.
This is just one example, some strippers say, of an industry that will never quit.
"People are going to strip, whether it's legal or not," said Michelle Matsumodo, 28, who used to make $400 a night stripping and now works for an outreach program that helps prostitutes. Matsumodo worked at Show World, the paragon of adult emporiums in Times Square, which, because of the topless ban, fired its 20 performers last year. "Clubs that could remain open got bombarded with strippers who aren't going to go away," Matsumodo said.
Some strippers say the attack on their business has contributed to a hostile culture inside the clubs that remain. Suddenly, women outnumber men in these strip joints -- a shift that some strippers say allows customers to feel they can demand more nudity, and even prostitution, from women who might otherwise say no.
"I always felt very powerful at work," said a dancer who went by the stage name Alicia before the police padlocked her club, the Harmony Theater, in Manhattan. "But with more women there, guys would try to get a lot more for their dollar. All of a sudden, the men had the power."
Some performers say they are turning to prostitution to make up the income. "I make now in a month what I used to make in a day," said Alicia, 32, who used to take home $700 a shift but is now relying on a steady customer for money while she works on her doctorate in criminal justice. "If you turned tricks for one guy before, you're doing it for 10 now."
The situation, social workers say, is much tougher for minority women -- the large Vegas-style clubs often pass over black and Latino women for Baywatch-like blondes.
While high-end nightclubs are better able to fight the law, strippers in blue-collar bars are still finding work.
At low-rent bars like Billy's Topless -- which lacks the space to devote more than half its runway to nonadult fare -- topless dancers are soldiering on in T-shirts, shorts and bathing suits. Customers know they could see more at any beach but return anyway, in part for the nostalgia for the simpler days of burlesque.
At the Chelsea hole-in-the-wall, customers still arrive every night with tips for the dancers -- even though the biker-girl-style performers never remove their halter-tops or get too crazy with the piped-in Led Zeppelin.
As long as the regulars continue to show up, Billy's has no plans to close. A while ago, management defiantly renamed the bar. It is now "Billy's Stopless."
"It used to feel like you were doing something illicit by coming here," said a Manhattan management consultant who identified himself only as Bill. "It's sort of friendly now. It's imitating an atmosphere of years gone past. I guess I don't really mind it."
Pub Date: 3/14/99