Live Nude Girls Unite!

The parting epigram by Emma Goldman, "If I can't dance, I don't want to be part of your revolution," seems particularly appropriate for a film about striking San Francisco strippers that manages to equitably balance abundant cheekiness (both figurative and literal) with serious months-long, back-to-the-negotiating-table fighting spirit. Filmmakers Julia Query and Vicky Funari's Live Nude Girls Unite! combines Query's personal story as a stand-up comic, peep show stripper, and daughter of prominent feminist activist Dr. Joyce Wallace (whose outreach work with prostitutes was profiled by 20/20 and Barbara Walters) with her spearheaded effort to unionize her workplace, the Lusty Lady Theater. Although the film features a fair amount of live nude girls, so to speak, the footage of working girls shaking their stuff for a closeted clientele in quarter booths is anything but erotic, especially in the context of talk about sick days, health benefits, and better wages. Needless to say, the film sports a fair amount of expected humor: the ladies' picket line chant is "No Contract, No Pussy" and the lawyers are uncertain how to handle certain sex industry slang in legal documents, not to mention negotiating representatives with names like "Decadence." Still, laying claim to being the first strip club in America to unionize and causing a ripple effect among other subjugated workers in the sex industry is no mean feat, and we cannot help but applaud the successful efforts of Query and company, unorthodox approach notwithstanding. Ultimately, however, the more interesting aspect of the film is the relationship between Query and her mother, who Query finally "comes out" to when they find themselves speaking at the same conference. Here, where the film touches on the shadowy and controversial intersection between feminism and pornography--i.e., the freedom to do with my body what I please as long as it cannot be construed as demeaning to women debate--Live Nude Girls Unite! rises above its novelty labor union story to tackle wider, underlying issues. Recommended, with reservations. Aud: C, P. (R. Pitman)