In 1990, Cammie Toloui was working at the Lusty Lady Theatre, San Francisco’s women-owned strip club. The job was meant to pay her way through San Francisco State University, where she was pursuing a degree in photojournalism. “So, after talking to a few friends who worked there, I got up the nerve to audition and before I knew it, I was a stripper a few nights a week.” For $5 punters got 3 minutes to watch and direct her.
Toloui turned the camera on her customers inside the ‘Private Pleasures’ booth, creating an extraordinary series of portraits and journal entries collected in the new book 5 Dollars for 3 Minutes.
The Lusty Lady was a unique place to work. Part of the theater is a peep-show, where customers sit in a private booth and feed money into a machine, then watch as a panel slides up to reveal a mirrored room full of nearly-naked women, dancing, slinking and pressing their sweet parts to the glass for the customer to ogle. There is no physical contact, and the dancers got paid an hourly rate via paycheck with taxes taken out and everything, just like most people do.
The other part of the theater’s live show is called the Private Pleasures booth. The customer is enticed into a small booth adjacent to a windowed-booth wherein sits a lovely Lusty Lady. Once in, he (or she) can see the dancer through a large window. Curtains and doors to the outside world are shut, leaving customer and dancer alone.
– Cammi Toloui
I wasn’t sure how I was going to document my job, but eventually I got up the nerve to bring my camera into the Private Pleasures booth one evening. I was so sure that none of my customers would allow me to photograph them, that I had asked a friend to come in and stand on the other side of the glass so I could take a picture of the booth. Luckily, he never showed up, because it forced me to take a chance, and the first customer I asked said yes. I couldn’t believe it. Even more unbelievable, he came back a few days later and asked me to take his picture again. A few customers later, I was getting the hang of offering a free dildo show in exchange for a picture or two (a ten dollar value!) and to my surprise, people were saying yes!
– Cammie Toloui
“The truth is, I found being a stripper liberating. Who would have thought it?! It allowed me to shed sexual inhibitions; it gave me a huge pool of strong female friends who were intelligent, radical, open and great fun; it empowered me with a decent income that allowed me to be independent, supported me through my university degree and offered a tremendous creative opportunity that has resulted in a lifetime of positive artistic recognition and eventually this very book.”
– Cammie Toloui
The Lusty Lady
At its beginning in 1976, The Lusty Lady on Kearney Street in San Francisco showing 16mm peep show films. In 1983, the place began to host live nude dancers, known as Lusties, on the main stage and in one-on-one booths.
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. The dancers were also available for more explicit private shows in the VIP and Private Pleasures booths. These were also glass-separated private booths where customers could give direction to the show and tipping was possible.
In 2003, the place was bought out by the strippers working there and began to be managed as a worker cooperative. The San Francisco branch had already entered the news in 1997 when it became the first successfully unionised sex business in the U.S. The Lusty Lady closed on September 2, 2013, on Labor Day.
You can buy Cammie’s work at her site here. There you can also buy the book of here work, 5 Dollars for 3 Minutes.
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