Sarah Luck Pearson [2]

I didn’t know stripping was such a sore spot in rural Minnesota, until I nearly hung for it. Since my move two years ago from East Los Angeles to my boyfriend’s hometown of Cannon Falls, I had little to talk about with all the country wives. I had no recipes to exchange when we sat around the kitchen while the men played foosball in the rec room downstairs. I was the only one drinking the men’s beer, while they preferred wine coolers or hard lemonades. I was the only one who dyed my hair darker than my natural color, the only non-Lutheran. But it wasn’t until my boyfriend hosted a bachelor party that the subtle differences came into high contrast, and things got ugly.

I had cloistered myself inside as the men commandeered their fun outside. They’d golfed, jet-skied, played volleyball until pregnant storm clouds swelled over the lake, forcing them back to the house with lightning flashes snapshotting their way. I watched from the window as our lawn became a mudslide they’d careen down, attacking each other with high-school wrestling moves. I watched them laugh and stumble and slap arms around each others’ shoulders as the beers and the Jägermeister and the nostalgia slid back. Watching out the window, my disdain for the brutish ritual softened as they became a pack of muddy drunk boys celebrating the time when they were a team, and girls didn’t matter. When the best man slopped in and handed me a smeared business card for exotic dancers, I agreed to call without much thought. It seemed like ordering a clown or an inflatable trampoline. A party favor. Lame, perhaps, but inoffensive. In my book, ordering a stripper at a bachelor party was no crime other than the transgression of predictability.

I requested the strippers for a 10 p.m. arrival and quickly called a few of my boyfriend’s sisters for what I hoped could be theatrical remedy. The plan was, after the strippers performed, we’d enter dancing in full regalia: Slouching padded bellies, blackened teeth, curlers, signs around our necks that read “After.” If they were going to pleasurably mourn the disappearance of eroticism in marriage in a staged send-off seduction, then we would complete the dubious morality play with a tragic 10-years-later conclusion. We giggled on the phone, scripting our theater of de-seduction, a flurry of whips, torn fishnets, and banging cookware and party favors of aspirin, fake Viagra and Rogaine.

I was pulling costumes from my closet when the bride-to-be called, tipsy with her lady crew, but voice hawk-like to hear how her fiancée was ferreting. “It’s so cool,” I reported, an aide-de-camp giddy with our plan. “We’ve got your back. After the strippers come, then Bob’s sisters and I are…” But the phone quaked with a scream: “Whoooooo called strippers?!” California fault number two: Addictive straightforwardness. “I did,” I admitted.

The phone muffled for a moment and another woman was on. “Listen, Miss footloose and fancy-free Californian,” she hissed, accent strong. “These are our husbands you got there. And my Jason isn’t even allowed to have a Playboy in our house. You call yourself a feminist, well I’d just beg to differ. You couldn’t give a nickel for women nor for our men, who have evidently fallen into your godforsaken hands! I pray for you. I just do.”

The phone is passed around for more berating until the bride gets back on and demands to speak to her groom. I tell her he has nothing to do with it and apologize for not knowing their feelings. I lean out the door, calling, and a couple perk up as if I’m now the Bachelor-Cruise-Director and will announce strippers on the main deck at 10, but it’s my emergency voice.

The recess bell has toned. Muddy men pause mid-wrestle, brake a mudslide, squelch a Jäger slug. They file in as the phone is passed around from man to man in a chain of reproach. A best friend of the groom gathers his things to go home, sheepish in his goodbyes. Another urges me to cancel the strippers immediately. The men barnyard the floor as they pace with the phone, attempting damage control.

“No,” one pleads, “I knew nothing about it. I swear. I wouldn’t have stayed.” I’m at the kitchen table, rubbing the question place on my forehead. “I just don’t get why you asked me to call strippers,” I say, “and didn’t tell me that your wives were so opposed.”

Eyebrows go up, shoulders shrug. “Well,” someone says, “we thought you knew.”


Turns out I didn’t know that Minnesota is having an identity crisis when it comes to erotic dance. Of the 44 adult entertainment clubs statewide, only two have escaped litigation, and only one has gone without painstaking challenges from its city council. In the last year, Minnesota country strip clubs made exotic national news: Elko, population 472, an 82-year-old Ojibwe man declared his strip club a sovereign nation; Nicollet, population 800, a 20-year-old co-owner opened his club to the local high school in protest of city ordinances requiring dancers to be scantily clad; Litchfield, population 6,577, required their only strip club to operate on Main Street downtown in full view as a tactic to strip customers of their anonymity and thus shame them; and in Cosmos, population 267, prostitution charges are pending. Other cities currently involved in litigation with respect to adult entertainment are Monticello, Little Falls, Hopkins, St. Louis Park, Crystal, Apple Valley, Mankato, Winona, Hermantown, Arlington, Forest Lake, Elko, Coates, and Eveleth.

Clearly the skin war in Minnesota has high stakes for both sides—good old Christian morality versus First Amendment rights. And while Minneapolis experiences a degree of peace hosting Rick’s Cabaret, the only publicly traded gentleman’s club in the nation, the Twin Cities are hardly a no-fly zone: As the ruralization of strip clubs continues, a backlash has developed that may help explain how a proponent of conservative values ended up in the governor’s office. Just as a bachelor party broke down in apologies and bitterness, the body politic of Minnesota is still plenty confused about how to let its people undress.

The first thing I learn is that it’s hard to square Minnesota’s conflict with the sexual state of the union. Despite our puritanical roots, America has a lascivious appetite: The $4 billion that Americans spend on pornography is larger than the annual revenue of the NFL, the NBA, or Major League Baseball. Americans pay more for sexually explicit material than for movies, more than for all the performing arts combined. Sexually oriented web businesses, which account for only one-fifth of the porn industry, are the only dot-coms that have managed to expand after the collapse. It’s difficult to identify the 700 million porn-video rentals with 700 million perverts nationwide. It gets even more confused when you consider that two of porn’s most prominent vendors, the Marriott (through in-room X-rated movies) and General Motors (who recently sold satellite DirecTV to Rupert Murdoch) were also principal sponsors of the Bush-Cheney Inaugural. With about 3,000 strip clubs nationwide—doubled since the 80s—strip clubs carve out a billion-dollar business, constitute a quarter of total porn consumption coast to coast, provide substantial local and state taxes, and employ more than 200,000 wage-earners.

And yet, even though we are all naked under our clothes, many believe the skin trade is not what Minnesota is about. The League of Minnesota Cities, which provides city members with sample ordinances to restrict adult-oriented businesses and insures against their litigation fees, has received 314 requests for adult ordinance packets since 1998. Tom Grundhoefer, general council for the league, says, “The issue of how to deal with adult-oriented businesses is significant for cities and is shown by the number of cities trying to get prepared.” The porn industry is not us, say many religious groups that operate in Minnesota, such as the American Decency Association, the Community Defense Council, Focus on the Family, and numerous local churches of a conservative stripe. Turn your head the other way, and you’ll hear a different tune: The First Amendment Lawyers’ Association, the American Civil Liberties Union, Feminists for Free Expression, and local liberal churches believe the progression of sexually accepted norms is us. The only thing we agree on seems to be that the issue of sex is causing a persistent burn in the chest of the heartland. It’s the word of God against the letter of the law. I set out to hear both.Lowell Lundstrom is the founder and pastor of Celebration Church in Lakeville. It’s a congregation of one thousand, and they’ve just built a $5 million hall. When I ask Lundstrom about strip clubs, he gives a long and relaxed laugh. “If you gather a lot of men at a nightclub and someone walks out with a T-bone steak,” he says, “everyone will hoot and throw money. You have, then, an unhealthy desire for meat. When a woman takes off her clothes and men hoot and put money in her garter belt, it’s an unhealthy desire for sex.”

He’s clear about how cities should deal with strip clubs. “Adam and Eve had to put on fig leaves after they sinned and people have been trying to take them off ever since. Anyone who believes in Christian ethics has to come down solidly against strip clubs. It leads to lust and committing adultery and fornication in your heart.” Lowell invites me out to lunch with him and his wife, tells me he’ll treat and that if I come on Sunday, it’ll be like I’ll get a free concert but with a Billy Graham message. And then he adds in a warm and drawing voice, “The last thing that Ted Bundy said before he was put to death was that pornography destroyed his mind and that was what led him to rape and kill those women. This is a heavy one you’re writing about. Come on Sunday. It will help.”

Instead, I head on Sunday to what fundamentalists call “petting zoos,” “sexual assault parlors,” “rape cubicles,” and “glory holes.” There’s one strip club in Cannon Falls, a town that has signs on both sides of Highway 52 inviting travelers to “Pray to End Abortion.” Our club, “Class Act,” is famous legally. Here, Minnesota courts found that a city ordinance claiming that nude dancing does not hold artistic merit was found to be unconstitutional under the First Amendment. The city of Cannon Falls lost, Benton County soon after, and ever since then, obscenity charges against strip clubs have largely been abandoned in favor of zoning and licensing battles. (The First Amendment Lawyer’s Association frequently says that instead of being experts in T&A, they must now be experts in P&Z—planning and zoning.)

The travelers off Highway 52 and the local working-class patrons are largely unaware that Class Act was able to settle their victory by allowing an upstairs bar, a strip club below, with separate entrances both allowing re-entry. Alcohol and total nudity coexist in only one strip club in Minnesota—at the King of Diamonds in Inver Grove Heights. Two places in St. Paul, the Lamplighter and Casey’s, allow patrons to watch a nude stripper through a glass wall, so that her room is technically next door to the liquor-licensed property. Thanks to the 21st Amendment, which repealed prohibition and consequently gave state governments extra authority to regulate liquor, drinking in the presence of nudity is still considered a dangerous cocktail that Americans can’t handle.

Inside Class Act, 26 men—and four women sitting close to their dates— watch a woman in a Goldilocks wig stream down the runway on white platforms the height of cruise ships. Front row, most men are chewing gum, some have their caps turned backwards to decrease the distance between themselves and “Paradise,” who’s announced by the D.J. in a barker voice reminiscent of Star Search. Paradise waves the air in a slow move that rolls like an invisible hula-hoop is circling down her hands to her shoulders to her hips. She teases one negligee strap down, gathers the chiffon up her thigh, eyes sweltering at half-mast. Patrons reach for money, and she chooses one who tries to suppress a childish grin that he’s been singled out first. She spirals to the floor, scissor-kicks her legs open and shut like she’s taking his picture, the whole time laughing and plucking at a nipple. Dollars feather down on the stage. When she toys with her G-string, flashing, the man looks both baffled and amazed (the Shock and Awe tactic for easy surrender). His eyebrows raise and his chin sinks back as if his face is stunned on the top and grateful on the bottom. Legs up on his shoulders, her fingers trace pricey folds. He’s in a vortex of reverie, lost to the crowd, wholly transported. You can see him mechanically snap back to Earth, bowing slightly as he lays money at her feet. But as soon as he’s made the customary obeisance, it’s Paradise lost; she’s up, cruising on her heels, spiraling the pole like she’s winged, eyeing the next shoulders where she’ll dock her stalwart seduction.

For me, it all changes when she sheds the last bit of clothing. Our highest court has decided that full nudity doesn’t extend the non-verbal message of exotic dance. In essence, they’ve said the vagina has no artistry. Watching Paradise dance naked, I actually start to feel something different than the detached analysis I’m here for, something different than the queasy feeling I have watching a stranger gape like an amateur gynecologist into a dancer’s privates. I take this tremendous deep breath. I feel less self-conscious.

She seems to be literally dancing out of some kinds of bonds, not going for seduction as much as for joy—conjuring for me the image of Snoopy vibrating in parenthesis of happy movement off the page. This “yippee” in the face of prudes and prigs—not suffocating behind masks, but bare, whole. The difference between the fragmented naked and the restored nude. The prelapsarian welcome. I’ve left the Guthrie less transported.

Afterward, I meet Paradise in the dressing room. It’s a four-foot-by-15-foot sealed off corridor where 20 dancers squeeze in to prepare themselves before they exit through a mirrored door directly onto the stage. The air is thick with smoke and perfume, littered with makeup and costumes. There is a small curtained-off toilet with a dispenser on the wall offering tampons, Advil, breath freshener, and condoms. Two women are huddled counting out bills and talking about savings plans, another is checking her crotch in the mirror, and Paradise is crimping her wig for her next act.

“Any place outside of Las Vegas, stripper equals prostitute,” she says, her voice surprisingly crisp. “They think you’re sleazy, unintelligent, unemployable, do drugs, can’t be trusted, and have some type of Jerry Springer background. You’re kinda like a leper to most—can’t be trusted with women’s boyfriends or around children. It’s really out of ignorance.”

Paradise can strip assumptions too: She works a full-time job in human resources for the corporate office of a home security firm in Minneapolis. She is in charge of hiring the people that protect your homes, valued, I think, for her judgment in identifying reliable people, while she is routinely judged as unreliable. Neither her employer nor her family knows that she dances here for extra cash. She has stripped for five years, and while she has saved enough to buy a home and a nest-egg for a future business, she says she could be a millionaire if she knew then what she knows now. “The biggest problem with the industry is that strippers are not trained how to invest their money, which is why we all got into it,” she says, her pupils narrowing, intent. “If even half of us understood that, we could stimulate the economy rather than just a handful of guys. Imagine: Strippers making sometimes a thousand a night. My ass could get more than just a few men out of this recession.”

Paradise laughs when I ask her if she feels exploited—as if she’s heard this question too many times before. “I’m the one walking away with the money, which in my mind is no different than the feeling I imagine any model gets,” she says. “Except there’s also the buzz you get from performing, which I got from theater too. Stripping is artistic and athletic. You should see the Poleympics in Vegas if you doubt the skill.”

Mid-question, she interrupts me, placing her hand on mine in apology. “I’m sorry, I can’t talk to you anymore… I’m getting out of my bubble. I do what you’re asking nine-to-five: Think, answer, analyze. Here it’s a role, a fantasy I play.”

Her expression is already transforming as she speaks. The question I had started to ask—how exotic dance constitutes art—is answered by just watching Paradise, as she preens in the mirror, eyes finding again their bedroom gaze. She is becoming the persona that makes her audience feel desired. She is an actor preparing backstage. She will build the drama by playing with her chiffon, marking her stage placement as she eddies around the pole, plucking her erect nipples, playacting a climax, and the viewer will leave like everyone leaves a theater—confused, relieved, unchanged, maybe transported. Some may leave with a loosened breath in their chests, others will find their way back to their lives as frustrated as they came. Still, no matter how private one’s reaction is to stripping, none will escape the social drama: Whether it’s a nudie sign by the road you struggle to explain to the children, a venue you lament being closed, or how the shrinking budget of your town chooses to dish up its fiscal pie, everyone in Minnesota is paying for a seat in the exotic show.If Minnesota’s skin drama has a central villain or hero, it’s Richard Jacobsen, our Larry Flynt of the 10,000 Lakes. He made national news last year for allegedly rigging the city of Coates’ election by getting 94 club supporters to sign voter registration cards indicating that they lived at Jake’s—his strip club. This in a town that has a population of 163. He made news last summer when he dumped 600,000 pennies of fines at the feet of the Coates city council (Larry Flynt dumped bags of cash on a courtroom floor). His father, who owns Class Act, helped diminish the ability of cities to prosecute under obscenity charges, but Rich has, in his 11-year fight to keep Jake’s open, put more on the legal books than any other strip-club owner in the state. Although not the most successful club owner in our region, Rich has profited greatly from taking the most hits. If there’s a guerilla fighter in the moral battle, Rich is, at age 32, one of the more decorated veterans of the nudie trenches.

I meet him first at Class Act, where he temporarily set up shop when Jake’s closed last October. Immediately, he is beguiling—buying me a beer, talking to me against the advice of his attorneys. Thin and tightly wired, he speaks quickly and quietly, his disarming intelligence streaming out in a secretive mumble that I’ve only heard among college professors and fugitives. His face is at war with itself: darting eyes that settle with kindness, hair businessman-slick, although I can picture the mullet he recently trimmed off, a boyish smile that mitigates against his piquant, often libelous tongue. I feel myself having to adapt not only my ear, but the tenets of how I’ve viewed things. Suddenly I feel conservative, wary; sharing a wine cooler with one of the wives now seems more my speed than a beer with the man who’s declared himself “the King of Southern Minnesota Smut.”

“I’ve been called the devil in St. Augusta township, where I had a club,” he whispers. “This old fart stood up in that meeting with nearly 250 people that hated my guts, and he says, ‘We’re all good Christians and you’re the devil!’”

Rich, who considers himself a Libertarian, recently became an ordained minister, apparently for strategic reasons, with Universal Ministries, a non-denominational church in Illinois that offers mail-order licenses. “Next time you think you’re holier than thou, I’m holier than thou. It’s my combat gear. I’m a minister on official business the next time I get pulled over.” His eyes flash around the club and then settle on me. “It’s a moral battle—for some reason they’ve turned business into a religious experience. The two are not related whatsoever. At least what I’m doing is legal. It’s the towns who are breaking constitutional law. I’m just a businessman.”

A graduate of Cannon Falls High, where he got good grades and played raquetball in three state tournaments, Jacobsen went on to Arizona State to major in finance because, as he explains, “I kinda always liked money. I anticipated being a stockbroker, a financial advisor to a bank, but that obviously took a hard left.”

He lights a menthol UltraLite, offers me another beer. “You could be sitting there naked and I probably wouldn’t notice. And if I did, it certainly wouldn’t corrupt my mind. All this Christian crap. All this moralistic bullshit I can’t handle. Sex isn’t a sin… how do you think we got here? And these people aren’t having sex, they’re just running around naked. Hell, my driveway is one third of a mile long and I’ll get the mail naked in the summer. I don’t give a damn. We’re born naked and what the hell’s the matter with taking it off when you’re older?”

Many have stepped forward to answer that question in the 11 years that he’s been a club owner. He has been harangued in city council meetings, had a strip club burned down by an arsonist, and been followed by cops on his way from Coates to his hometown of Prescott, Wisconsin. Over the years, Rich has spent more than $500,000 in court costs, around 15 percent of his income on attorneys, and has been, for the time being, driven out of operating his neon-pink club in Coates.

The 11-year battle exhausted every legal—and sometimes illegal—tactic a city and a strip club can use. It became a costly game of cat-and-mouse, with Mayor Jack Gores and a city council largely tied to the Gores clan on one side, and out-of-towner Rich Jacobsen on the other. (The mayor hung up on me when I asked for an interview, and other Gores have declined interviews.) In 1988, the first fight was about serving liquor with nude dancing, which was upheld as constitutional in two district courts. The decision was reversed in 1994 in the Court of Appeals under the Tenth Amendment, which provides state and local government with regulatory authority known as “Police Power.” It is a doctrine considered by many lawyers to be the worst piece of constitutional illiteracy ever written. Jake’s liquor license was yanked.

While Jake’s appealed the liquor injunction, Rich allowed patrons to bring in their own beverages. But without a bottle-club license, the place was raided by 20 sheriffs, money was seized, and Rich was charged and fined. In 1994, Coates amended an ordinance that made Jake’s adult use illegal, requiring Jake’s to relocate to an agricultural area close by or move entirely by 1998. (Known as “amortizing,” this is when a municipality changes the zoning use on a building, and the owner is made to move after recouping their investment without being paid by eminent domain.) But to the chagrin of Coates, they also had a contradictory ordinance on the books allowing only agriculture uses in agriculture zones. More litigation followed.

The fight continued, and got dirty. Patrons at the nearby bar, The House of Coates, refused drinks that Rich offered, someone poisoned the cat of one of Rich’s associates, Rich threatened to fire any of his employees who went to the Coates Corner gas station. “It got pretty bad,” he admits. “I hired a private investigator to check into their backgrounds. I never used what they found, but I still may. They pissed off the wrong jackass this time.”

In 1998, Coates got further tangled up in their ordinances, which were once again found to be unconstitutional. While they now would allow non-agricultural uses in the agrizone, they required anything built there to be subdivided, with 10 percent of the property devoted to a public park. Problem was, their adult entertainment zoning ordinance said it couldn’t operate within 700 feet of a public park. More litigation ensued, with the city paying $35,000 in fines.

Hope came for Rich in 1998 when the city of St. Louis Park forced a 25-year-old concrete factory to shut down. It was the same way that Coates was attempting to amortize Jake’s. The Supreme Court refused to hear the concrete factory’s case, but the Minnesota business community was outraged that a successful business could be put under by the whim of local government. In the 1998 session, they pushed a bill through which entirely outlawed amortizing any non-conforming uses in the state of Minnesota. Jake’s had, for a priceless moment in legislative history, been supported by business peers as a victim of city zoning, welcomed into the flock of the powerful and the legally vindicated.

Rich and his attorneys had champagne on ice when, in the eleventh hour, DFL Senator John Marty from Roseville, the son of Lutheran theologian Martin Marty and a crusader against adult entertainment, added an amendment exempting adult-oriented businesses, making Minnesota the only state in the union that outlaws the amortization of non-conforming uses for every existing business except adult entertainment.

“Our wonderful governor, who has publicly admitted to patronizing a brothel in Nevada, signed off on it too,” Rich explains. “I was the test case for it in Coates, and I got to set precedence in a bad way. The minute they did to established businesses what they had been doing for years to adult businesses, the community was pissed. Could you imagine if the bill read that you couldn’t amortize any business except Lutheran churches? Everyone else is protected, but not us, because of the content of what we do. That is a bulls-eye violation of the First Amendment. And if the Supreme Court ever finds their balls, it will go down in history as one of Minnesota’s most fucked-up, prejudicial bills ever passed.”

If Richard Jacobsen is the leading villain or hero in this drama, his principal attorney, Randall Tigue, is the director. Past president and national chairman of the First Amendment Lawyers Association, and former president of the Minnesota ACLU, Tigue has represented the majority of adult businesses in the region and is often the first call club owners have made over the last 29 years when they’re in a pinch. Tigue is hands-down the most vocal defender of First Amendment rights in the state. Sometimes, the messenger gets all the blame: In 1994, he was shot for his trouble.

While 54-year-old Tigue lives in the suburbs and has served on the board of his local First Unitarian Church, his home plate is in court. I meet up with him at the federal court restaurant just after he has successfully convinced a federal judge not to dismiss his case representing Tuna’s Bar vs. the City of Eveleth, whose counsel is provided by the League of Minnesota Cities.

“This case is the key into your story,” he says, a slight smile escaping his gnome beard. He paws through his worn, outdated briefcase, eyes his cell phone, and then tries to settle his desk frame into a cafeteria chair. “Today was the first step of taking the bullets out of the biggest weapon cities have against strip clubs,” he says. “I’m working on the Colt .45, the great equalizer. That’s what the First Amendment is all about—protecting the most unpopular beliefs. People who are for God, mother, and the American flag don’t need protection against censorship.” Tigue explains how the city of Eveleth had unconstitutional ordinances on its books that they made no attempt to defend, but rather quickly jumped to amend, the minute his suit hit the table. The city argued today that the case was moot just because they’ve agreed not to enforce their errant doctrines. The judge disagreed, following Tigue’s reasoning that—like the precedent set by an American Disabilities Act plaintiff who sued for a wheelchair ramp but was stuck with the legal bill, even though the city rectified the problem before it went to litigation—the city of Eveleth can’t play chicken first and then not pay later. For decades, cities that violated constitutional law had to pay for the plaintiff’s legal costs, but since 2001 when the Supreme Court overturned the Civil Rights Attorney’s Fee Act, cities can disregard the law first and wait for legal complaint second without any consequence. Civil rights has become, in this context, largely an issue of who can afford to enforce them. “First time a city did this,” explains Tigue, “I got screwed out of my legal fees. Now, I’ve attempted to adjust my strategy by putting in a damages claim. This will give the cities some incentive to stand up to the religious nuts so they don’t pass ordinances that flat out disregard our civil rights just so they can keep their posts.”

Tigue also takes issue with his opponent, the somewhat sacred League of Minnesota Cities, an independent organization that offers free lawyers and money to paying municipal members. Tigue says the League, which sends out sample ordinances of how to fight adult-oriented businesses and pays for their defense, is backing towns that have, in essence, insured themselves against committing a crime. “You can’t slap something illegal on your books and expect to be covered. This is an insurance company that regularly defends violations against our First Amendment. Keep with that logic, and suicide bombers can claim life insurance.”

Attorney Jim Thompson of Kennedy and Graven, who has represented a number of cities for adult-use claims on behalf of the League of Minnesota Cities, believes that Tigue’s claim that the League unlawfully insures cities against crime is unfounded. “The League supports public policy across the country by lawfully regulating adult-oriented businesses. It is the right of cities to do so, and the League appropriately supports public policy by providing for their defense.”

Indeed, the Supreme Court has upheld the regulation of adult-use facilities under the powerful justification that communities can restrict First Amendment rights if they can prove that their codes combat the alleged harmful side effects of increased crime and decreased property values that exotic dance may encourage. In judicial jargon, this is called the “secondary-effects doctrine.”

Here are some excerpts of the sample city ordinances that the League of Minnesota Cities sends out as boilerplate for concerned communities: On Albert Lea’s books: “Sexually oriented business can have a dehumanizing and distracting influence on young people and students attending school, can diminish or destroy the enjoyment and family atmosphere of persons using parks, playgrounds, forest preserves, and other public recreational areas, can interfere with or even destroy the spiritual experience of persons attending church, synagogue, or other places of worship, and can interfere with or even destroy the opportunity for solemn and respectful contemplation at cemeteries.” The city of Cloquet agrees, adding that such businesses also exert a dehumanizing influence on children attending daycare and people using libraries. Orono’s ordinance expresses a common fear that “adult businesses can increase the risk of exposure to communicable diseases, including, but not limited to Acquired Immune Deficiency Syndrome (AIDS) for which there is currently no cure.” And although studies exist that prove the contrary, Orono relies on data that says adult businesses increase the incidence of “rapes, prostitution, child molestation, indecent exposure, and other lewd and lascivious behavior.”

Park Rapids could outlaw popular dance, with its description of sexual activity in public as “physical contact or simulated physical contact with clothed… pubic areas or buttocks… or breasts whether alone or between members of the same or opposite sex.”

Bloomington reserves the right to deny massage therapists a license if they are “not of good moral character and repute.” And most cities have issue with displaying “human excretion” including “menstruation” in public. I have to get out my dictionary when city ordinances repeatedly refer to the social dangers of “anilingus, buggery, coprophagy, coprophilia, cunnilingus, fellatio, necrophilia, pederasty, piquerism, sapphism, zooerasty.”

In its ordinances, the city of Stillwater makes the dubious claim that the sex-crime rate in the vicinity of adult business is “on an average six times” worse.

Randall Tigue yanks at his tie as if the air in the federal building has gone thin when I ask him about secondary effects. “The idea that strip clubs hurt a community is mythological. The Roman Catholic Church has paid out $100 million more in damages for priests sexually molesting children than the adult entertainment industry, which hasn’t had to pay a dime. You have absolutely no evidence that strip clubs do a damn thing to children. But you have all kinds of evidence that there are priests who have done things to children. Why have offending Catholic churches never been required to move to the industrial or agricultural zones and limit their hours of operation or been amortized out of existence?”

Minnesota cities, however rural, have based their “proof” on studies conducted in urban cities. Many believe that these studies do not meet the basic requirements for the acceptance of scientific evidence established by professional academic standards. Judith Hanna, senior research scholar at the University of Maryland, has risked her Ivy League Ph.D. in anthropology to defend exotic dance as a rightful art form. “These studies are not valid, reliable or relevant to time, place, or circumstance. The few studies that are scientifically credible demonstrate either no negative secondary effects associated with adult businesses, or, in fact, positive effects such as economic development.”

Hanna, who is regularly called upon as an expert witness in strip-club cases, says, “There is absolutely no discernable evidence that exotic dance is a prelude to prostitution, that it attracts drug use, that it decreases property values, that it causes disease, or that it exploits, oppresses or degrades performers. Exotic dance is a lightning rod for the Religious Right, certain feminists, and the misinformed.” Study it, as Hanna has for over eight years, and the whole basis of secondary effects is moot.I don’t have eight years to make sense of secondary effects, so I do what any potential home buyer in Coates would do: I research the turf. Two faxes deliver great clarity: First, according to Gloria Pinke at the Dakota County Assessing Services, the total estimated market value of properties in Coates has gone from roughly $5 million in 1990 to $10 million in 2000 to a projected $14 million in 2004. Second, according to numbers compiled by Chief Deputy Dave Bellows of the Dakota County Sheriff’s Department, they received double the calls in 2000 to Coates Corner gas station than to Jake’s strip club.

“I was the largest employer in town,” Rich says. “I increased property values, tripled taxes since I was there. I’m just trying to help them out, I think. I bring them industry, business. I think it’s an asset, really. I’m doing them a big favor. I put those fuckers in Coates on the map. I gave it character. It didn’t have any before. Just one little incest-filled little puke of a suburb. I brought heterosexuals to town.”

Rich doesn’t scare me anymore. I see now that once you get used to his furtive inflammatories and threats, it’s what he’s saying that matters. He says what he thinks, none of the “Minnesota Nice” rhetoric that I encountered at the House of Coates, where patron after patron denied comment, or whispered off record that they believe in the principle of “live and let live.” Where an older man inched away from me saying, “I had no bimbles about it then, and I don’t have any now it’s gone.” Where one woman made sure my tape recorder was tucked back in my purse before she said in a top-secret voice, “Listen, I’ll tell you this: It’s a floozy operation. And who, pray tell, wants that kinda thing in their town?”

A young woman who works at the store won’t give her name because after her mother was interviewed on the news, “the whole town called and reamed her a new one, and all she said was that if you raise your kids right, it shouldn’t matter if there’s a strip club in your town.” Her co-worker, Sarah Hosten, is the only one in town who will go on record—perhaps because she doesn’t live in Coates central. “Personally, if Jake’s was a Muslim church and I didn’t like it, I’d just turn my head and look away. It’s a free country.” What bothers her most is how expensive the battle was, costing nearly $400,000 in legal fees, draining the city coffers, and raising taxes.

“It’s nuts how much money they spent. I guess it was worth it to get them out of town, but it could have been used for a lot of things in Coates. We don’t have our own water or sewer or police or library or even a town hall. The council meets at St. Agatha’s church. And also, we’ve got a lot of kids here and if they’re so concerned about children and what goes on in Jake’s, why don’t they build the kids a park? They could have gotten us an ambulance.”

Few in Coates know that Rich offered to settle the lawsuit and pay a daily fine of $110 for operating in violation of the ordinance, which would have matched the city budget and allowed them to eliminate property taxes for all homeowners and businesses in the city. But the city council wouldn’t even take a vote on it. What everyone in Coates—strip-club owner, dancers, managers, attorneys, locals, council people, and mayor—seem to have overlooked in their 11-year war was the more readily provable negative secondary effects that come from living two miles south of the Koch Refinery, now called Flint Hills Resources, which is one of the nation’s largest refineries. In recent years, Koch has had to pay some $19 million in fines and $80 million in air pollution control equipment for problems involving air, water, solid, and hazardous wastes.

Nearby resident Myron Napper, one of the closest neighbors to the refinery who lost his wife to cancer, doesn’t care much about Jake’s when, as he explains, every other house has someone who has asthma or has died of cancer. “This valley is nothing but blue smoke. In a five-mile radius, there are more than fifty industries and every one of them is a kind of polluter. Pressure from the city of Coates would help… we need wells to be capped, mercury to be tested, and some emergency system to notify residents in real-time if our windows need to be shut or if we should evacuate.”

A patron at Class Act in Cannon Falls who used to frequent Jake’s on his trucking route puts a point on it: “Listen, pussies don’t pollute. Ya ain’t gonna die from lookin’ at one,” he says. “It seems like Coates got their priorities all screwy. But maybe it’s easier to fight something small when you got that big rich refinery there. No way in hell could they take on that battle. Besides, Koch gives more jobs than Jake’s did.”

The metaphor is instructive: Rich Jacobsen blows into town with his moral pollution, threatens public health and welfare, makes people sick. The pink skin-factory is shut down, the town vindicated, and the toxic cloud overhead continues to pass as innocent sky.

Rich, however, won’t dissipate that easily. In fact, only 50 days after Jake’s closed, he opened up Fat Jack’s in Bock, a town that’s the mirror of Coates, north of the Twin Cities. So why bother with another conservative small town? While generally stable industries have suffered economic downturn, adult entertainment has remained one of the most sustainable industries around. Satellite and cable companies have found that even under the public pressure of censorship, the more explicit their offerings, the more their market grows. Rich follows the principal tenet of supply and demand: If it’s harder to get something, you will pay more for it.

Although Dakota County Attorney Jim Backstrom sees a trend of strip club owners moving to the country to prey on small towns who don’t have the ordinances in place, Randall Tigue isn’t so sure that there is a ruralization of adult entertainment underway in Minnesota. “My clients tell me that from an economic standpoint, the more religious and conservative a community is, the more money there is to be made there. Why so much litigation comes out of Southern Bible-belt states is because adult entertainment does real well there. People who are subjected to repressive negative religious attitudes toward sex in large measure don’t really believe them and don’t really practice them. When straight-laced organizations like the Lions Club had its national convention here, business from adult facilities skyrocketed.”

Up in Bock, a city of 106 with two main streets forming a T, the town meeting is a mini-replica of the U.N. in recent months: a city council resisting all they can with sanctions and inspections (they quickly established a moratorium against the proliferation of more adult businesses, and took a long look at Rich’s business history), but boxed in by previous resolutions (Fat Jack’s opened as a sports bar). War appears imminent in the strained, tired faces of the council members, who are divided in support. Rich’s attorneys say they are just an inch away from legal battle. It seems the council knows that Rich has the money and the will to go all the way, that he won’t leave his mission uncompleted like the first time around. They may have heard about the load of pennies that allegedly cracked the axle of the mayor’s truck in Coates, the dead cat, the building painted Pepto-Bismol pink in defiance. They may have heard about the $400,000 in court costs—an attention-getter, considering there may be a few other things in their town that demand fiscal consideration. They certainly are considering how they want to spend the next 11 years of their lives.

Tonight, though, Bock appears to have little in common with Coates. A signed petition from 300 men and women is presented to the council in favor of Fat Jack’s getting its liquor license restored. I can’t see Rich’s face from the back of the room, but I know he is doing everything to suppress a smile: For once, the community is mad and it’s not at him. If the city continues to disallow Fat Jack’s from serving booze, it will immediately become a juice bar, serving to 18 and older tomorrow. Local bar owners are furious at the liability and headache this will cause them, and locals don’t want their kids at the club or other wild teens attracted from out of town.

“I want you to accept this tonight,” says local bar owner Laura Bekius, “because I don’t want to operate my business with 18-year-olds in town. With them around, I’m going to need cops in town all the time. I’ve been in this business for 19 years and I know what 18 to 20-year-olds do: They will have their alcohol in the trunks of their cars and when they get into an accident after they’ve been in Bock, who will get blamed? Roy’s. Or my Kountry Kettle, and I’m not willing to go to a lawsuit because an 18-year-old has been to the strip joint in this town.”

The county clerk, Linda Sjolberg, stops typing and speaks up. She’s visibly upset. “The original liquor license was granted to them under false premises. The fact that the city was told they were going to be a sport’s bar, not a strip club, and they flew it in under the wire.”

The room explodes for a moment, and then the mayor, Margaret Girard, asks Rich if he’s willing to follow their ordinance of no nudity with alcohol if they grant the liquor license—will he, in essence, keep the private parts private. Rich mumbles no, and his attorney jumps in. “We can get into a pissing match if we all want to. He has said that he won’t abide by that ordinance. And if it’s going to be a costly lawsuit, then that’s the way it’s going to go.”

The mayor asks Rich for a statement of why they should grant him liquor.

“I believe we’re responsible business owners. We won’t create any trouble for you. If you need help putting together any ordinances, I can help you.” He restates an offer he made at a previous council meeting to give them $12,000 a year or $1,000 a month. “You can spend it however you want. I don’t want to spend your money. I want to give it to you.”The council members all but scratch their heads and call for a break. A more anarchistic meeting forms outside as the smokers light up and the snow feathers down. I find Rich. “You’re pretty up front about bribing the council,” I say, and he’s speaking even faster than usual, as if the battle has his tongue going in Morse Code. “Hell, yeah, I’ll pay,” he says. “Target goes into a town and offers a bunch of jobs in exchange for a break on their taxes. It’s the same goddamn thing they do all the time. They disguise it as employment, and the city disguises it in tax breaks. Well, I bring employment to a goddamn community and they try to get rid of me.”

Laura, of Kountry Kettle, jumps in. “The bottom line is that we can’t stop them. Nudity is here to stay. Whether it’s Bock or Bemidji, there’s money to be made from girls taking off their clothes.”

A man in a suede fringe jacket leans in. “Listening to them, it seems like we need to walk the streets of Bock with a whole-body condom suit on so we’re not a threat to the community.” A lady with a long thin cigarette ignores him. “I think there’s a very mixed feeling in town. Our main concern was that we didn’t want signs of naked women on the buildings. It’s a very conservative town here. But it’s a broke town that’s going to go more broke if they fight this. I may not like it, but I also have a sign out front of my door that says ‘Proud to be an American.’ It’s only our freedom that separates us from our enemies. Here, you pray for it, you don’t outlaw it.”

A crew of men, hands stuffed in their pockets, mills around. “If they don’t give them their license, it is going to be a big, expensive battle, because Rich here will go all the way,” says one. “Bock don’t have that much money. We could put a parking lot in with that money he offered,” adds another. The suede jacket wants back in. “Someone in one of the last meetings said they thought stripping was degrading to women,” he smiles. “I think it’s a beautification to women. The female body is extravagant to me.”

Laura ignores him. “In the last meeting, some people brought up the religious part. That really got my goat afterwards because I was brought up in the Church and I still go to church. You don’t walk into a place and call people scum, thieves, rats, but before that you say, ‘I’m a born-again Christian.’ I’m sorry, in the Bible it says those that judge will be judged.”

Rich is smoking his second cigarette. “At the last meeting, this lady wished me off the face of the Earth,” he says, checking in the window for the meeting to start up again. “I turned around and said to the minister behind me, ‘Well, that’s a real nice Christian you have there.’” But Rich switches between prey and predator. “It’s their choice, but I’m getting the kids in here tomorrow. When this happened in Coates, I had every car flyered in Dakota County Vo-Tech, every car at Inver Hills Community College. Tomorrow there’ll be flyers at the high schools around here.”

I know Rich well enough now that if I ask him about any concerns of corrupting the youth, he’ll respond with a characteristic explanation that they see it all in anatomy class. “Whoop-de-ding,” he adds, seeing my expression. Inside, the mayor is calling everyone back. Rich looks uncharacteristically stressed, off-guard, jolted off his Larry Flynt soapbox for a brief moment, as if this battle is so consuming it can even burn out the igniter. “The mayor has been in three times,” he says slowly and slightly out of pitch. “And I heard she said that she thought it was tastefully done.”

Inside, a mother in a high-buttoned shirt with her hands tightly clasped is standing while her teenaged daughter sits staring at the floor with wide, embarrassed eyes. “I’m not saying I condone what’s going on in the back room,” the woman says, “but I don’t want this town overrun by a bunch of 18-year-olds. We have enough trouble with the minors.” A man on the other side agrees. “I don’t think we want our seniors going to school on Monday morning and talking about what they saw in Fat Jack’s. I have four daughters.” A man in the back bellows, “Here’s the question we’re up against right now: Do we want nudity with 18-year-olds or do we want nudity with 21-year-olds. That’s it. There’s nothing more here to talk about.” A guy in camouflage sitting on a back table with the two sheriffs speaks real slow when he comments. “We live in the country,” he says, as if it’s a particular nation. “We see dogs and chickens and horses getting it on all the time, so what’s the big deal?” The mother ignores him, waving for the mayor’s attention, voice pinched with concern. “If we don’t have the liquor license there, then what control do we have?”

The mayor sighs audibly and slaps both hands out on the table. It’s been a long meeting, over three hours of her being seated between a rock and a hard place, and she appears tired of this discomfort only two months into what could drag out to 11 years. “We don’t have control whether their liquor license is there or not there,” she says. “All we have is the moratorium.” Someone sitting in the front row by Rich graciously puts the nail in the coffin. “Last page of the liquor license application, ma’am, ‘state’ is spelled wrong.” The mayor looks to the clerk, deadpan. “Just make sure ‘thong’ is spelled right.”

After the meeting, there is a veritable convoy of locals to the nearest bar, where Brad McBride, the buoyant manager of Fat Jack’s, immediately buys the entire bar a round. “They’re not going to win it,” he says. “They can’t even handle the first round. We don’t want to bankrupt them. Most people here have been absolutely wonderful, very vocal and supportive.” Brad raises his glass to locals who this time raise their glasses back. “This is home,” he clinks. “We’re glad you have us.”

When Randall Tigue looks at the 11 years he spent defending Rich in Coates, he sees little victory in his career crusade to protect the unpopular views our forefathers made as the first thing to guard in their list of Amendments. “I do think the First Amendment in this state has lost so far in this battle. But I also think the notion that cities can use their zoning to run people out of business will eventually be as unsuccessful as the obscenity prosecutions. In ’73, after a successful obscenity trial in California, Charles Keating held a press conference saying all porn would be wiped off the face of the U.S. within a year. Thirty years later, there is more sexually explicit material available than ever dreamed of in ‘73 and it’s Keating that has served jail time. In the long run, these heavy-handed attempts to suppress free speech will always fail.”

Historical reality check: Ballet was once considered obscene. In 1827, citizens reviled a ballet dancer for the “public expose of a naked female” when the prima wore loose pants covered by a long skirt. Seventy years later, when a leg was still covered entirely for bathing or swimming, the forerunner of exotic dance was first performed in public at the Chicago World’s Colombian Exposition. It was known as the cooch dance or danse du ventre or hootchy-kootchy (belly dance).

Flash forward a hundred years, explains Randall, and even in the last bastion of Reagan-ethics, the cooch dance had massive public support, however private. “In the largest political landslide in history, when 51 million people voted for Ronald Reagan, 55 million adult video tapes were rented that year. We’re just not the same Puritans we were. During the Clinton Administration, there was a virtual suspension of obscenity prosecutions. After two-plus years of John Ashcroft under Bush, there hasn’t been a resumption of them, even though he is every bit as much of a moral censor as Ed Meese ever was. Reason one: Osama bin Laden is giving Ashcroft something to crusade against. Reason two: You have to prove that a given piece of work exceeds community standards, and those are being set by what’s on the Internet, what’s available at the public library, what’s on cable, what’s playing in every hotel/motel. Even the Ashcrofts have to contend with what are our community standards now.”

I caught up with the History Channel filming at Rick’s Cabaret in Minneapolis, where producer Scott Miller came to shoot for an hour-long show on gentleman’s clubs to air this summer. When TV’s equivalent of a Mensa meeting takes an interest in T&A, you know how G-rated the skin drama has become nationally.

Miller didn’t come first to Minnesota by chance. “I had been in touch with Rick’s in Houston, their home base, and they said we had to go to Minnesota. For me, the draw was… this is Minnesota,” he says, emphasizing it in an over-rounded New York accent as if we’re a particular nation. “It’s just not somewhere you’d think a gentleman’s club would be. You think L.A., you think New York, you think Vegas. You don’t think the wholesome, Midwest thing. Sex in the heartland, you know.”

I think back to the ruined bachelor party, me rubbing my forehead trying to figure out Minnesota’s conflicted conventions. “I just don’t get why you asked me to call strippers,” I had said to the guys as they packed up to go home. “And you didn’t tell me that your wives were so opposed.”

Eyebrows had raised, shoulders hunched. “Well,” offered one, “we thought you knew.” So far, the bare truth I’ve learned about Minnesota’s skin war is this: Strip back to the economic truth, and we’re still naked capitalists. Sex is a growing $56 billion industry, and like it or not, it seems to have the ultimate moral authority behind it—the American Constitution. A buck is still a buck, whether it’s tossed onto a country stage or into the till at Sex World. And in the land of supply and demand, it doesn’t ultimately matter what you feel about whether the fig leaf should be worn or not. The blue sky will still claim innocence. Big business will still dance in pricey clouds overhead. It depends wholly on what pollution we choose, collectively, not to breathe.