Lexi is everything and nothing you’d expect. The exotic dancer—she doesn’t
mind if you call her a stripper, in the right company. Lexi, who prefers
to go by her stage name, works weekends at Th’Katch to support her kids
aged 21 to two. She’s never revealed her profession to Tennessee
officials: I moved to Tennessee, and I’m the devil, she says. At
PTA meetings, church and the bank, she keeps her profession to herself.
Lately, Lexi’s livelihood has caused her more grief than ever. She’s
utterly dismayed by the two stringent ordinances, passed unanimously by
both Knox County (on March 28) and the city (on May 24), that will
mandate the licensing, location and conduct of adult businesses. In
other words, in the strip clubs there will be no more nudity, no more
lap dances and no more alcohol on site. From now on, each employee and
business will be required to obtain a license, and bookstores and
cabarets will close each night by midnight, on Sundays and on national
holidays.
Before they voted on the ordinances, Chattanooga attorney Scott
Bergthold presented both the County Commission and City Council with
enormous binders of case studies from across the United States, in an
effort to cite the deleterious secondary effects of adult operations.
Such effects allegedly include decreased property values, increased
crime and prostitution rates, and the spread of sexual diseases.
Lexi and hundreds of others in the industry adamantly dispute these
accusations, and fear for the fate of their careers and their families.
I work in a safe, controlled environment, Lexi says. They can
look at all the police records. There’s never been a prostitute arrested
at our club.
[Legislators have] picked on us from day one, says Don Rowe,
manager of the Mouse’s Ear, a Kingston Pike strip club. “I’ve been
doing this for 25 years now. One year they want us to keep our clothes
on, the next year we can take them off. It’s back and forth. They can’t
seem to make up their minds, but it seems very serious this time, and
we’re going to try to do something about it.
We’re talking about 300-plus families affected by this, says Lynn
Davis, who’s worked at The Emerald Club since its opening in 2001. Now that’s quite a lot of tax revenue to the city to begin with, so it’s
more serious than just a frivolous thing like, ‘We’re going to take a
morality stance and wipe out these businesses.’ Davis says his club
has always upheld strict rules in order to comply with the letter of the
law. We get compliments all the time from officers who work this end
of town, who thank us for running a tight operation where they never get
called out here, If you really want to get rid of prostitution
and crime, there are 120 of these [adverts for escorts in the phone
book] to look at.
Not everyone is quick to point out the cons of Knoxville’s adult
industry; in fact, some say we’ll miss it sorely when it’s diminished,
or gone. After all, as Knoxville works to grow into its convention
center, the absence of adult nightlife might be a deterrent for
travelers looking to book a conference here. Davis says the Honda Hoot,
and a recent bowling tournament, significantly increased his business,
as does most any event that draws out-of-towners.
In response to the ordinances, Towne and Country Bookstore and Knoxville
Adult Video Superstore have filed suit jointly against the county for
violation of their First Amendment rights, among other things, and at
least four of the city’s adult-oriented businesses—Th’Katch, The Mouse’s
Ear, West Knox News and The Last Chance Adult Theater, another strip
club—say they’re gearing up for lawsuits of their own.
First Amendment activists have long reasoned that nude dancing warrants
the same protection afforded to “legitimate” theater and dance
performances and that it’s a viable form of artistic expression. At Last
Chance, for instance, there’s a sort of naked gymnastics that occurs,
replete with hand walking and tumbling, in glittery, platform shoes, no
less. The costumes are theatrical, if brief.
Because litigation of this sort is a hotbed for First Amendment lawsuits
and often requires a lengthy appeals process, some community members are
fuming over the potential cost to taxpayers.
City Councilman Joe Bailey says his concerns during the voting process
were relatively inconsequential, as his constituents seemed resolved to
vote for the ordinance. We’ve already got a tight enough budget
without going and duplicating a lawsuit. I thought we should just wait
and see what the courts [ruling on the county lawsuits] say before we
start going into another lawsuit.
Rowe says he attended the City Council meeting during which the
ordinances were unanimously approved. “I was so mad. I was the first
one in that meeting and the first one to step out. There was a room full
of people there to protest the thing, and bam, bam, bam, it’s gone.
There was also a concern that the city would become an attractive place
for adult businesses to relocate, Roddy says.Right there in front of
the whole Council, the city attorney said that was the whole reason, but
I don’t know where that came from.... These other businesses are
grandfathered in, says Bailey, who feels Council was wrongly
supplied with the relocation excuse. As it is, strict zoning regulations
would make it arduous if not impossible for new adult businesses to open
shop in the city of Knoxville.
Many business owners scramble to “go bikini,” preparing to become
“go-go” bars once the ordinances are in effect. The women at the Emerald
Club, for one, will wear bikinis, but many are convinced that go-go bars
won’t be as well attended as strip bars.
In the meantime, the new ordinances have not yet been enforced, as the
businesses have been granted a preliminary injunction. County Law
Director Mike Moyers says the county is filing a motion to dismiss
most, if not all, of the claims and arguments made by the other side.
The plaintiffs will have 30 days to respond, and a hearing will be
scheduled in late July or early August: Our position is that it will
be dispositive and that we’ll have a case more clearly focused on the
issues that remain.
Lexi works only one or two nights a week at Th’Katch, but often makes in
one night (on average $200 to $300) as much as she makes all week at the
lawyer’s office. This may soon change. Besides prohibiting full nudity,
the new codes specify that all sexually oriented businesses be closed by
midnight. Because she makes 50 to 60 percent of her money between one
and three in the morning, that threatens to severely hamper Lexi’s
income. The new regulations would limit hours of operation from 8 a.m.
to midnight.
Dancers claim they’ll lose further income when the implemented
ordinances essentially do away with the lap dance, as customers must
keep a distance of six feet from dancers at all times. Lexi says she
derives the bulk of her money from chair or couch dances, not stage
performances.
Men aren’t going to want to see a beautiful woman from six feet away,
says Sherrie, another local dancer. You can’t even tip a woman from
six feet away.
City Law Director Morris Kizer says the lap dance provision was included
because “there’s a case in the court of appeals in [Jackson, Tenn.] that
says that lap dances fall within the Tennessee statute’s definition of
prostitution.” The Tennessee Code Annotated defines prostitution as
“engaging in, or offering to engage in, sexual activity as a business,”
and the particular case to which Kizer refers took issue with whether
lap dancing could be included in this definition, ultimately determining
that it could.
Supreme Court cases regularly determine that lap dancing is conduct, not
speech, thus obviating First Amendment concerns. However, some federal
courts have struck down six-foot buffer zones, in favor of a three-foot
buffer zone that wouldn’t ban as much expression.
Lexi thinks the local strip clubs will lose a lot of business without
personal contact from dancers. When [customers] come in, that’s what
they need, not just touching, but the closeness of being able to sit and
talk,
Yet another specification will force strip clubs and adult bookstores
to close on Sundays and all national holidays.
The “brown bag” rule, also, will no longer apply, doing away with any
alcohol on the premises of a strip bar, and simultaneously “taking away
the party atmosphere,” says Lexi, who doesn’t see a need for the
changes, as the clubs in town already tightly regulate alcohol. Under
the previous ordinances, all alcohol had to be consumed, and off the
tables, by 1 a.m.
Some employees are disturbed by the new ordinance provision requiring
businesses and employees to obtain a sexually oriented business license
from the clerk’s office, to be renewed once a year. That was reportedly
included to ensure that anyone with a drug or sex-related felony history
could not work in the business.
Lawyers and employers have taken issue with that for a number of
reasons. It’ll knock out some people who don’t want their name
associated with the job, some students who are going into a law
profession, people who don’t want this to come back and bite them at a
later time, Davis says,
Ed Summers, attorney for Th’Katch, says he disagrees that criminal pasts
ought to determine a person’s vocation. One or more of the dancers
will be plaintiffs in the lawsuit on the theory that if you’ve been
convicted of certain offenses and you’re not able to receive your
license to work, they think that’s an unlawful restraint on their
ability to make a living. If they have been convicted of something, and
they’ve paid the penalty, why shouldn’t they be able to proceed with
their lives?
Recently, the Knoxville Adult Video Superstore moved into a building
just off I-40 on Lovell Road. Many community members were chafed by the
new shop, perhaps because roughly a mile away in either direction of the
bookstore sits the sprawling US Cellular Soccer complex and the Lovell
Heights Church of God. Though it certainly wasn’t the community’s first
adult-oriented business, the repercussions of this particular shop were
far-reaching, creating the current chain of litigation.
Lovell Heights’ pastor, John Hughes, says that his church, along with
Concord Baptist on Kingston Pike, let its displeasure be known to the
county. I’m against any business like that. It’s just an unhealthy
thing for the environment. It’s a slippery slope once that gets into
your community, and it appeals to the lowest common denominator, to the
base instincts. Hughes was especially appalled that the bookstore
opened directly across the street from a truck stop. They’ve targeted
the truckers specifically, he says, and Lexi says that indeed
Th’Katch, just down the road from the same truck stop, does get a lot of
truck driver customers.
After the county received complaints about the bookstore, Moyers
contacted Scott Bergthold, a Chattanooga lawyer in his early 30s with a
lengthy resume and a reputation as one of the nation’s only lawyers
focused exclusively on drafting and defending municipal adult business
regulations. Bergthold, who refused to comment, is also the former
president of an organization called the Community Defense Counsel,
funded by the Alliance Defense Fund, a religious group devoted to
family-values and sanctity-of-life causes.
After he drafted the county’s ordinances, the city hired Bergthold to
configure theirs as well. Despite Kizer’s and Moyer’s appraisal of the
man, whom they say they’re “enormously impressed with,” not everyone
feels confident that Bergthold’s got Knoxville’s best interests in mind.
This guy out of Chattanooga goes around talking to cities about his
ordinances, and he knows they’re going to be generating lawsuits, so he
makes a pretty good living, says Seymour, The Last Chance’s
attorney. I think they got sold a bill of goods by this guy.
Even Councilman Bailey questions the attorney’s motives, saying: I
really did not buy what this attorney was saying about our community. It
didn’t hold true to this area. If you’re an attorney, that’s a good way
to make a living. I’d like to have a business like that. He spends 50
percent of his time creating a lawsuit and the other 50 percent of his
time defending it.
This legislation isn’t the first of its sort to move from Knoxville into
the court system. The city’s case against Entertainment Resources, owner
of a defunct adult bookstore called Fantasy Video, was resolved just
this past Wednesday after seven years of litigation. The state Supreme
Court determined unanimously that the City’s 1998 ordinance specifying
the definition and location of adult businesses was unconstitutional.
From the day of the store’s opening on Papermill Road in ‘98, KPD
conducted almost daily inspections of Fantasy Video, each time issuing
citations for violation of Knoxville City Code. Four months after the
store opened, the city was granted a temporary injunction against
Fantasy Video, shutting it down because they deemed a “substantial” or
“significant” portion of the store’s stock was composed of videos
depicting sexual activities. That violated the city code because the
store was within 1,000 feet of an establishment that sold alcohol, a Boy
Scouts Administrative Office, and a residentially zoned district.
Fantasy Video filed its answer, declaring the city’s ordinances
unconstitutional, and questioning the “vague” wording of Knoxville City
Code 16-468. Along with two Nashville attorneys, Knoxville lawyer
Richard Gaines argued that the terms “substantial” and “significant”
were too broad, as his clients did stock the shelves in its front room
with thousands of G-, PG- and R-rated films. This is the biggest case
of its sort that’s come out of the state Supreme Court in a while,
says Gaines, who calls the case a huge victory for First Amendment
rights. It’s an attempt to exclude these businesses, and just a clear
and open violation of the First Amendment to the Constitution. After
the Entertainment Resources case, Gaines says, Any judge is going to
think twice about backing the city up.
County Law Director Mike Moyers isn’t sure what impact the case may have
on current litigation: We’re studying the case, and if we need to
make any changes to reflect what the Supreme Court has done, we’ll make
those changes,
The Supreme Court opinion rewarded Entertainment Resources damages and
attorney’s fees. Though the exact amount has yet to be determined, it
may cost Knoxville taxpayers up to $1 million dollars. Some fear that
the new litigation over adult businesses could be even more costly.
Some adult entertainers worry that they’ll be unable to find jobs
outside of the business they’ve worked in for many years. Already
looking into a move to Georgia, where adult ordinances are more lenient,
Lexi might just have to pick up and start over again, though it’s surely
no easy task to relocate 10 children.
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