Stripping was once an artform that was transformed in an 80s Sydney theatre, by "hot shows". Photo / Getty
Decades ago, David Herkt worked in a strip club/porn movie theatre. He writes of the sadness and the beauty.
For a time, I worked as a lighting operator and projectionist in a strip-club and porn-movie theatre called the Eros. It was one of those jobs you fell into, rather than envisioned, as a career-path. I had a friend, a singer and performer and she'd told me about the vacancy. The hours were good and the pay was reasonable.
The Eros was on George St in Sydney. I started work at 9am, travelling on the Eastern Suburbs line to Town Hall station with the morning suit-and-briefcase commuters – then I would peel off at the Eros instead of a multi-storeyedoffice building.
Most often - and particularly in the weekends - there was already a short queue of men waiting for the cinema doors to be unlocked. I always found this surprising, but then it was the 1980s and there was no internet. Access to any form of erotica was limited.
The Eros also had real girls – on the hour, every hour – who stripped for 12-15 minute performances between movies. It was another attraction.
I'm going to generally stick to the term "girls", here. It was what they called themselves as a group then. It was what they were called by everyone else. Anywhere between 18 years old and their late-30s, they were also students, dancers, freelance journalists, artists, mothers, wives and partners.
Some were born women, others were transgendered – not that many patrons noticed the difference. The management didn't actively hire trans but many of our best performers were. I remember one short-time manager telling a trans performer that he wouldn't ever hire a trans stripper and that he could "always tell" – a story she relished repeating.
Most often even I couldn't tell and I was using a forensically-bright spotlight as they performed. It is amazing what hormones and – in the case of a pre-op transsexual – some strategically-placed tape can do, even during the most energetic and revealing of dance
routines.
On arrival, the cashier would unlock the doors and we would open up. I'd turn on the lights and the projectors while the cashier took the patron's ticket-price and let them through the turn-styles into the cinema. The bright film beam would already be flickering above the waiting seats.
All the movies were 16mm and sourced from a single American company. Mostly they had plots – or if not plots, at least pretexts. One of the many I recall was called The Erotic Diary of a Young Woman whose first shot revealed the star in a negligee, sprawling on a bed with an elaborate wickerwork head in an absurd cyclamen-coloured room.
She was writing her journal with a ball-point pen to which a big purple-dyed feather had been clumsily glued. The director had obviously instructed her to look like she was "thinking", so she frowned, went slightly cross-eyed, and sucked the writing end of the ball-point a little before painstakingly putting it to paper.
Then at 10m, the first stripper arrived, carrying her costume-bag.
Every stripper also brought a cassette with her music on it. There were usually four tracks. The first was "the dance", which was dressed. The second was "the strip", where she took off her clothes. The third was "the nude dance". The fourth was referred to as "floor-work". The music was diverse, from Grace Jones to Meatloaf, Donna Summer to Tim Buckley. One girl had David Bowie. Another had Eartha Kitt.
Each act was a creative expression. The songs had been chosen carefully, thematically linked and the dance-moves had been developed and rehearsed. Lighting the acts was an evolving process from a first idea to a practised routine. Eventually a performance became a seamless melding of the two disciplines.
The Eros had an extremely good lighting-desk of an oddly professional quality. Later I'd work as a lighting-operator for bands in large venues but the Eros lighting-desk remained one of the best. There was the ability to suffuse a backdrop with colour, use ultra-violets, or light a performer with follow-spots. We had gels, washes, floods and many moveable pin-spots. There was a mirror-ball and lasers.
Jo was often the first stripper of the day. Dark-haired and fit, she'd bring her 2-year-old son and the lighting operator would mind him while she changed in the dressing room behind the stage. Her son was usually given a rice-rusk to entertain him – Jo had never given him any sugar.
He was a calm and easy child, in contrast to Rebel's daughter, who was about the same age but was given a baby-bottle full of soft-drink for amusement. One day I was concentrating on my lighting but noticed a movement out of the corner of my eye. I had to grab Rebel's daughter as she attempted to wriggle her way through a narrow, unused projection-slot, into the audience.
Another time, as Rebel was leaving, I watched her daughter hurl her baby's bottle of soft drink out on to George St, where it rotated furiously, spitting fizzy soda from its nipple, just like some weird wet firework. Confused pedestrians watched it cautiously.
The morning shows were a pleasure. Everyone was relaxed. Businessmen in search of erotic arousal would wander in for an hour or so. Girls would come and go, carrying coffee and pastries. The lunchtime shows were more crowded with patrons.
Our clientele tended to scatter themselves through the theatre, not sitting too close to anyone else, though with a tendency to cluster towards the front where the view was better. In age, they were anywhere from their 20s to their 70s, with a predominance of 40 and 50-year-olds. Our patrons were mainly men, although couples were not unusual.
Morgan was another of the daytime strippers. I liked Morgan. She charmed me. Sometimes I would wander down to the dressing room as she unpacked her costume-bag and we talked as she dressed to undress. Morgan's act included Tim Buckley's Song to the Siren, which she used for her nude finale. It gave her whole performance a haunting quality.
Lighting Morgan was fun. Her skin took the radiance well. She had high cheekbones and I could emphasise the pleasing shape of her breasts. Morgan was also one of the Eros strippers who used her dance training to great effect. Her performances looked effortless, athletic and alluring.
The girls usually had full schedules and worked several clubs during the course of a day and evening – in the city, on Oxford St, in King's Cross. It was possible to make a good living that way. The projectionists/lighting guys like me were a diverse group and included students. There were also techie boys, roped in through a contract electrician, who were interested in matters of wiring.
It was an easy job. The performance was the focus. After it, the movies came back on and it was only necessary to be alert to changing reels or any accident with the film for 45 minutes until the next stripper.
However, in the Eros, there was a single big film reel, where one of the three movies on it had been spliced in wrongly and therefore had no sound. This silence taught me some wonderful things.
When the movie began, I had to grab an audiotape from our limited selection and play it during the soundless 15-minute stretch. One of our cassettes was the music to a 1968 Sergio Leone Spaghetti-Western, Once Upon a Time in the West, composed by Ennio Morricone. It changed that small porn movie into something epic and profound.
Music designed to reveal great vistas of the American West was now backing the intimacies of a woman's body. The sounds and clicks to a suspenseful moment during a gun-fight changed a filmed sexual encounter completely. A sad, wistful melody made another erotic moment unbearably tender. An echoing harmonica solo and a woman's eyes made you want to cry.
The movie with its new soundtrack became a film about the loss of innocence and a woman's eventual personal triumph – though not without cost. I had no idea what my audience was making of it, but it pleased me.
Rhonda would perform in the early afternoons. Rhonda was trans. She had been born as one of a pair of identical male twins but she grew up to be a girl while her brother grew up to be a boy. She was intelligent, had attitude and was a fine performer. There was an air of practical competence about her that I enjoyed immensely.
Rhonda usually stripped to a whole sequence of Meatloaf tracks from his Bat Out of Hell album. She was the first Eros girl who, on our initial meeting, gave me detailed and precise instructions as to exactly what she wanted for lighting. Nothing was being left to chance. She began her routine with You Took the Words Right Out of my Mouth (On a Hot Summer Night) and prescribed a sultry colour scheme.
Rhonda had a straight boyfriend. I could see why he was attracted to her – and vice-versa.
She was definitely beautiful with a small beauty spot just above the left-hand corner of her mouth. She had taut breasts, a shapely waist and the simple matter of an additional penis was really no problem. Her boyfriend had taken her home to meet his mother but I gather there had been a glacial reception.
Rhonda would also go off her female hormones occasionally for her "health". I didn't understand this logic but it was interesting. I asked her what the difference between the two states felt like and she replied that – without female hormones and back to her male-hormoned state – she suddenly felt like she was being led around by her penis all the time. It sounded like the near-perfect description of masculinity to me.
It is odd to say but I got a lot of reading done at the Eros, sitting behind the projectors. I would bring a satchel of books and I'd work my way through everything from histories and biographies to the great classics of literature. It would have been an impossible job without a book.
Between strippers there was just you, the sound of sex on the speakers from inside the darkened theatre, and desultory conversation with the cashier. There were nearby second-hand bookstores and a quick lunchbreak visit often provided me with new reading material.
Some of the other strippers had completely different characters, like Bettina. She was Scandinavian and had taken her stage name from a famous Vogue model of the 1940s and 1950s. Bettina was older, in her late 30s, I suspect. She had worked as a dancer when young and had been a stripper for a long time.
Bettina was a stiff and perfunctory performer. I couldn't detect even the smallest erotic charge in her act but I still tried to light her to find one. Her instructions for "blues" didn't help much.
She came in every day, precisely on time, made only necessary conversation, performed and left. I did wonder what she did in the rest of her life but obviously I was never going to find out. I don't think she particularly cared that the other girls weren't overly fond of her.
In the many fantasy lives I constructed for her, sometimes I even saw her as a long-married woman, with a husband working in a bank and a child at a private school.
Steve, our manager, came into the theatre in the late afternoon and stayed into the evening. He was short and usually dressed in a well-cut, dark suit with an open shirt and gold cufflinks. Steve was of Armenian heritage, descended from that diaspora that had left Turkey following the genocide conducted against them in the early 20th century. He was young and he was relatively handsome – if you liked that sort of thing.
The Eros was not a stand-alone enterprise. There was its sister-theatre, the narrow Lido further up George St. The men who owned them also had many other businesses. Things weren't entirely above board.
Sydney, at the time, was a city where money could buy anything, including exemption from planning strictures, licensing hours and censorship codes – and none of the Eros' movies had been passed by the censor. Exhibition of them was a criminal offence.
Steve had given me instructions about what to do in case of a police raid – precisely nothing. We would be bailed if necessary. There were stories that existed in Eros legend about raids where the police were only intent on politely proving they were doing their job with regard to the law against exhibition of pornography. It was an occasional thing – and it might even have been done by arrangement.
A year or so before I started, a lighting-projectionist and a cashier had both been arrested, charged and remained in the police cells overnight. Needless to say, management and owners went scot-free.
Terry Clark, the head of the well-known Mr Asia drug organisation, once said in the 1970s that the NSW police force were the best money could buy. In those years you could also throw in much of the Sydney City Council, their planners and inspectors and the state's Customs and Excise staff.
There were two men who often dropped in to see Steve and just generally hang around in the foyer in the late afternoon. Their job, as far as I could tell, was to foster contacts in the nearby Sydney Council building on behalf of the owners of the Eros, who included at least one well-known Sydney "property developer".
The pair were old-style Sydney men, from the world of back-handers and bribes. One wore a flat-cap. There was always hushed talk of planning permits and names that they all seemed to know and understand. Conversation paused if you got too close.
They looked exactly like the English crims from whom they were probably descended and they'd completely at home in any tiled Australian public bar in Surrey Hills or Redfern.
In the Eros, though, change was in the air.
We were told we were to have Hot Shows. The Eros staff and the girls who worked there prided themselves on the fact that their job approached an art – given the constraints and the necessities of catering to our patrons. Stripping was regarded as a skill requiring talent and work. A good show involved story, creative costume, dance and movement, as well as the ability to generate an erotic charge.
The performance was usually framed and distanced by the stage itself although some girls briefly used the aisles and got men to undo the hip-links on their bikini briefs or the back-catch on their bras. I would follow their movements with a spotlight.
A Hot Show, on the other hand, required the girl to come down from the stage and dance in front of each patron, allowing herself to be touched "within reason" – or wherever the girl herself would draw the line. There were contentious staff meetings and objections but management, in the form of Steve, were firm and "Hot Shows" were on the agenda.
We gained some girls from suburban clubs and lost some of our own performers. After I had lit the first Hot Show with one of the new strippers, where she had laid her herself free to all comers, I said to her, "You don't have to do all that, you know." Until then, she hadn't realised she had a choice about curtailing how far men went in touching her body.
Most of our strippers stayed on and simply transferred part of their act to the auditorium, walking up and down the gangways between seats; and deftly teased their way out of being handled. Rhonda was expert at it, so were some of the others.
It was the beginning of the end, though, as far as I was concerned. Stripping, I had discovered, was an art with a form and content – and a long history. It had traditions and a whole body of trade-craft. A feather wasn't just a feather but could be a metaphor for fingers as a girl ran it along her thighs. Hooks and buttons presented the audience with tantalising and teasing instants. Zips offered completely spectacular moments of revelation.
I would eventually be fired because of my lighting. I had discovered the ability to "suspend" one girl in mid-air by cutting down the other stage lights and using a slightly pulsing, single circular spot with a light drench of colour and a hint of ultra-violet.
There was no background reference – no floor, no walls, nothing – just a pearly nude girl turning suspended there in a radiant globe in the night, seemingly free of gravity and gleaming with a heartbeat of pink, lustrous light. I loved it. It was subtle and beautiful. When she moved across the stage it was as if she floated dreamily in the black.
Steve summoned me up to his office and said that he had watched the show and that I was "losing interest", which was perhaps true in some ways, though not the way he intended. I had also seen Steve working the lights – it looked like a garish carnival with no rhythm. All his lights were turned on all of the time.
In some ways I was sad to go. I had discovered that a strip club could be like a slightly dysfunctional family - but aren't all workplaces? I had met women I esteemed. I had discovered an art in its last years before its final debasement. I had learned about radiance, luminosity, the human body and what I thought of as beauty.
But, above all, I had been taught a lot about our fallible humanity. Somehow, we can all gather together in the communal but anonymous dark in order to desire or to admire, out of longing or need – and maybe, even, just for the company.