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Frontmatter -- Contents -- Acknowledgments -- Introduction -- Part One -- 1. Shaking the ground: The emergence of lesbian-feminist discourse -- 2. Independent lesbian-feminist organizing -- 3. 'Family of Womon We've Begun': Envisioning Lesbian Nation -- Part Two -- 4. The politics of lesbian-feminist life/style -- 5. Mining lesbian-feminist sexual discourse and practice -- Part Three -- 6. LOOT's structure and program: Politics redefined -- 7. Coalition politics: Lesbian feminists meet gay liberationists -- 8. Coalition politics: Lesbian feminists meet women's liberationists -- Part Four -- 9. LOOT's closure: An evaluation -- 10. Back to the future: Concluding notes -- Appendix -- Notes -- Bibliography -- Illustration credits -- Index

Preface : beginnings, backlash, and brazenness -- 1. Uncloaking the striptease past -- 2. 'I ain't Rebecca, and this ain't Sunnybrook Farm' : men behind the marquee -- 3. 'We were like snowflakes--no two were alike' : dancers and their gimmicks -- 4. 'Peelers sell beer, and the money was huge' : the shifting conditions of selling fantasy -- 5. 'Everyone wanted to date a dancer, nobody wanted to marry one' : occupational hazards in the industry -- 6. 'You started to feel like a dinosaur' : exiting and aging in the business

AbstractIn the mid‐1970s, following a series of police raids on prostitution inside downtown nightclubs, a community of approximately 200 sex workers moved into Vancouver's West End neighborhood, where a small stroll had operated since the early 1970s. This paper examines the contributions made by three male‐to‐female (MTF) transsexuals of color to the culture of on‐street prostitution in the West End. The trans women's stories address themes of fashion, working conditions, money, community formation, violence, and resistance to well‐organized anti‐prostitution forces. These recollections enable me to bridge and enrich trans history and prostitution history – two fields of inquiry that have under‐represented the participation of trans women in the sex industry across the urban West. Acutely familiar with the hazards inherent in a criminalized, stigmatized trade, trans sex workers in the West End manufactured efficacious strategies of harm reduction, income generation, safety planning, and community building. Eschewing the label of "victim", they leveraged their physical size and style, charisma, contempt towards pimps, earning capacity, and seniority as the first workers on the stroll to assume leadership within the broader constituency of "hookers on Davie Street". I discover that their short‐lived outdoor brothel culture offered only a temporary bulwark against the inevitability of eviction via legal injunction in July 1984, and the subsequent rise in lethal violence against all prostitutes in Vancouver, including MTF transsexuals.

This article explores the postwar performance of striptease in Vancouver, British Columbia, and sheds new light on received understandings of exotic dancing's "golden age," which flourished until the mid-1970s. Specifically, the racialization of the industry is charted using the hierarchically structured geography of the city's nightlife—West End vs. East End—as a frame through which to analyze archival documents and interviews. Inequalities structuring the business of bump and grind unsettle notions of stripteasers as a homogeneous category, while simultaneously revealing the diversity within dancers' experiences of stigmatization and their strategies of resistance. The article discusses the ways in which white women and women of color were differentially located within local and transnational circuits of erotic entertainment. That striptease staged the performance of not only sexual but also racial Otherness prompts a comparison of the prestige and profitability of white headliners with the resilient stereotypes and limited marketability that constrained dancers of color. An approach that probes the intersections of gender and sexuality with race and class captures the complexities of this industry and the rich histories of the business insiders, especially the erotic dancers, who gave it life.