No Clowns Allowed
A shot of strip club Jumbo’s Clown Room in Hollywood, Calif. For more of my photos, follow me on Instagram.
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Filtering by Tag: STRIP CLUBS
Call Me Definitely
In my latest newsletter, we’ll take the call, Diddy and male escorts, an adult star gets sentenced, a strip club closes its doors, the Cannes Film Festival screens kink, the Playboy Mansion undergoes a reno, and more.
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Triptych (Girls & Boys)
A Van Nuys estate sale, fake John Cena, and Crazy Girls. For more of my photographs, follow me on Instagram.
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Meet The Strip Club CEO Who Wants To Get Guys Off Their Phones And Into The Clubs
A dancer works a convention crowd, Las Vegas, NV | Photo credit: Susannah Breslin
This article was originally published on Forbes.com on May 9, 2022.
“Everybody wants to party.” That’s how Eric Langan, the CEO, president, and chairman of the board of RCI Hospitality Holdings, Inc., the only publicly traded company that owns gentleman’s clubs, describes the state of his business today. Pandemic? Fuggedaboutit. Two years of dark news, quarantining, and masks have resulted in a surge of consumers who want to go out and have fun. The strip club business may not be pandemic proof, but according to Langan, it’s pandemic resistant. After an initial dip early on in the pandemic, the company has come roaring back and is doing better than ever. According to Langan, its suite of businesses are on track to generate between $260 million and $280 million in revenue in 2022.
You might not have heard of RCI Hospitality Holdings, which trades on Nasdaq under the symbol RICK, but you may have heard of its establishments, which include over forty strip clubs and restaurants. Among its gentleman’s clubs are Rick’s Cabaret and Vivid Cabaret in New York City; Club Onyx, which has outposts in Houston, Charlotte, St. Louis, and Indianapolis; and Tootsie’s Cabaret in Miami. (“The place is so big they've got a giant room in the back for making the furniture upon which the laps get their dances,” this reporter discovered during a 2015 visit.) There’s also Bombshells, a military-themed chain of restaurants and bars (think: Hooters, but the servers wear fake ammunition belts instead of orange shorts) with multiple locations across Texas. The company brand is a mix of food, booze, and attractive women. The company went public, as Rick’s Cabaret International, in 1995 and hasn’t looked back since.
“They’re having fun,” he notes of the twenty-something to forty-something customers who are frequenting his establishments. “They’re way more into experiences than things. They want human interaction. They want to be seen. They want to be heard. They want to flex in front of their friends. It’s about being out and feeling like you’re somebody.” The pandemic isolated people, restricted their freedom, kept them apart. “This is just a retaliation against that lack of freedom,” he observes. “Now they’re expressing their freedom in every way they can. I think it’s great.”
So, how do you pry the young men whom comprise his customer base off their sofas, away from their Netflix shows, out of their homes and into his clubs and restaurants to spend their money? Thanks in part to Langan’s son Colby, the company’s director of administrative operations, who introduced his father to NFTs, “the crypto world,” and web3, RCI Hospitality Holdings is strategically employing a series of tech-focused initiatives. There’s AdmireMe, a kind of OnlyFans for dancers—or “entertainers,” as Langan refers to them—that connects dancers to customers; Tip-N-Strip, an NFT-based points-program with VIP benefits; and the company’s next earnings call, on Monday, May 9, 2022, at 4:30 p.m. ET, will be held on Twitter Spaces.
“We’ve become a mainstream company,” Langan asserts. “Yes, we have strip clubs, but really we’re in the cash flow business.” Of course, his job isn’t like every other CEO’s job. (“I’m the head janitor,” he says.) Active on Twitter, he’s not one for holding back. “Diamond Cabaret Denver has so many beautiful entertainers tonight,” he tweeted not long ago. “I can’t decide if it should be a blonde or brunette kinda night. What do you think ?” In another tweet, he advised his followers: “Just remember you can take the stripper out of the club but you can’t take the club out of the stripper !!!” No matter. In the end, this is the strip club (and restaurant) business. After the Twitter Spaces earnings call, he’ll be mingling with investors at Tootsie’s, along with a few dancers.
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Showgirls
A strip club on Hollywood Boulevard. Follow me on Instagram for more photographs from my life in L.A.
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Gold Diggers
Just Say No to Robot Strippers
Image credit: Jonathan Tippett
After a break, I am back. Check out my Forbes blog for my deep dive into the world of strip club robot security guards, and while you’re at it, subscribe to my Substack newsletter: The Reverse Cowgirl. A good time, all.
I cover the business of sex | Blog | Forbes | Twitter | Instagram | LinkedIn | Email
All the Smut That's Fit to Print
Dancer with money, Las Vegas, Nev. (Photo credit: Susannah Breslin)
A couple new things:
I wrote a Forbes post about a strip club CEO:
“Pandemic? Fuggedaboutit. Two years of dark news, quarantining, and masks have resulted in a surge of consumers who want to go out and have fun. The strip club business may not be pandemic proof, but according to Langan, it’s pandemic resistant.”
I wrote a newsletter about the story behind that story:
"I had forgotten about that fact, and several other details in the piece, like the dancer who made $800 to $1,000 a night who told me: ‘I have a lot of spunk.’”
Don’t forget to subscribe to my newsletter here.
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Pussy Valley
I’m watching “P-Valley.” That’s Pussy Valley. A strip club in the Mississippi Delta.
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The Pandemic Hustle
For my latest on my Forbes blog, I interviewed Chase Kelly, who runs Survive the Club and coaches strippers, about how the coronavirus pandemic has impacted the strip club business. Read it here.
An excerpt from “A Strippers’ Coach Reveals How Strippers Are Surviving the Coronavirus Pandemic”:
Dancer, Las Vegas, NV | Photo credit: Susannah Breslin
“Clubs will close, but in their place new clubs will open. I’m not giving up my art form, anyway, so we will have to find a way to make it work. Maybe if we’re lucky, we will see the return of the peep show in the U.S.”
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Where the Girls Entertain
Image via CREXi
Looking to buy a strip club? Look no further than this LinkedIn post. It offers a “Profitable Adult Topless Club” for sale in “Big Texas City, TX.” For $850K, you get 3,500 square feet of “Topless with Full Alcohol Club.” Gross sales were either $780K or $790K last year — it’s not entirely clear. To buy, you’ll need to put a mere 5% down, and if you want to know more, well, you’ve got to sign a nondisclosure agreement.
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The Golden Beaver
On Twitter, I offered up an entrepreneurial question. Hypothetically, were I to open a strip club where all the dancers were 50+, what would I call it? The contenders were COUGARS, OLD MAIDS, and THE GOLDEN BEAVER. To little surprise, the winner is: THE GOLDEN BEAVER. In theory, all dancers would keep 100% of their earnings, the house moms would also be financial advisors, and Jennifer Lopez would be the headliner. Think I’m kidding? Given that MILF is the #4 most-searched-for term on Pornhub, this model was built to scale.
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Hustlers & The Oscars
Vanity Fair’s Mark Harris has a great take on why Jennifer Lopez got shut out of best supporting actress in the Academy Award nominations. According to him, Lopez did everything wrong.
“She dared to play a character who used her sexuality as a professional survival tool and didn’t regret it; she committed the unforgivable sin of being sympathetic and then not; she took her public image and spectacularly amplified and reworked it to suit a complicated character. That is not what Academy voters want from J. Lo. What they want is for her to scrub off her makeup and play a poor mother dying of something who tries to find someone to take care of her kids. They want a role that says, Look how serious I am. Look how willing I am to punish myself for you. That kind of self-abasement has always been something Academy voters love to see from actresses; even if we set aside the grim social implications of that kind of thinking, what remains is a disappointing limitation of vision. The Academy has never been good at looking at a performance like the one Lopez gives in Hustlers and understanding that it is as serious, committed, and carefully crafted as the kind of stuff it usually likes. Actors, of all people, should know better.”
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Not a Stripper
Not long ago, I got an email from someone with a company that was trying to hire me to deliver a presentation. But I wasn’t sure what the company was or what the presentation would be about. We went back and forth in email for a bit, and I remained confused. So, she told me to call her. Then she explained that she works for a company that owns all the strip clubs in a major city. After a bit of back and forth, I realized that she thought I was a former dancer, and she wanted me to come in and coach the girls. “Like on etiquette and stuff,” she said. In any case, since I’ve never been a dancer, but only written about dancers and clubs, I emailed her a few names of women who are and/or were dancers and do that sort of coaching. I was never a dancer. I lacked the guts. Much respect to the girls that do.
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Valley Girls
Star Garden sounds like a San Fernando Valley strip club worth checking out. It's a dive bar but with dancers. Time Out calls it "'the Jumbo’s hipsters haven’t ruined yet.'" Here's a fun YouTube review by a woman named Moonshine Bonanza.
Memphis Money Wars
36 Likes, 5 Comments - Susannah Breslin (@susannahbreslin) on Instagram: "$1K bundles of singles, to be sold, minus 10%, out of a gym bag at the foot of a strip club stage..."
When I was in Memphis, I visited a black strip club. This Instagram image is from that visit. I will write a post about it, likely this week, probably on my Forbes blog. I wasn't sure whether or not to go to the club. When I asked white people about the neighborhood, they said, don't go there. When I asked black people about the neighborhood, they said, you'll be fine. So, I went. It was really late, and I wasn't sure where the club was. I accidentally walked into the wrong club. The guy behind the bulletproof (?) window where they took the cover charge finally figured out where I was trying to go. They told me to go around the corner. So, you know, I did.
Hustling for Dollars
I did an interesting interview with a veteran stripper who coaches other dancers on how to make more money.
Stripping ain't easy, kids:
"Our work ravages our bodies and many dancers are managing chronic pain without insurance. Like athletes, we often tolerate the intolerable because our options are limited. A good club is worth dealing with the occasional unsavory business."
$$$
I ended up in this $8M house today, for reasons that are neither here nor there. It had a lovely pool, and a massive master bedroom that led to a deck that looked over the pool, and the guy made some comment like your 60-foot boat in the dock would be the same size as your pool, or what have you. Across the street, homes were going for five and six times as much. It was the middle of the day. Mostly, the people driving and walking around the area were workers: lawn care specialists, housekeepers and children-minders, huge teams of men building castles bigger than I've ever seen facing the ocean.
Jumbo's Clown Room
Jumbo's Clown Room, Los Angeles, CA / Photo credit: Susannah Breslin