Decline in Toronto Strip Clubs

Where have all the GIRLS! GIRLS! GIRLS! gone?

Three decades ago, downtown Yonge Street was a mecca of XXX-rated entertainment. Today, only 17 strip clubs remain in the entire city. Inside the slow death of a scrappy, embattled industry.

BY: STEVE KUPFERMAN

Downtown Yonge Street in the mid-'70s was a much different scene than the gradually gentrifying shopping and restaurant strip we know today. It was a place where no self-respecting storefront went without a giant neon sign-flashing words like "nude," "girls" and "XXX"-and where seediness was a simple fact of life. (See this map for proof.) At the time, Yonge was home to countless so-called body-rub parlours, where the discerning gentleman could duck behind the street's glittering facade for a quick massage, complete with happy ending. For do-it-yourselfers, the strip's erotic movie houses screened the finest pornography the decade had to offer. Interspersed were other businesses that offered comparatively simple pleasures. Places like Starvin Marvin's (313 Yonge), Le Strip (237A Yonge) and Zanzibar (359 Yonge) featured nude or semi-nude stage shows. These clubs helped form the nucleus of an X-rated scene to rival anything in New York at the time. Even before the city had attained its current skyscrapery grandeur, Toronto's sleaze was world class. Almost 35 years later, Yonge Street has changed dramatically. Most of the seediest businesses are gone and the remaining strip clubs seem like stragglers living on borrowed time. Zanzibar is the street's last holdover from that '70s golden age of strip joints. Walk through the door beneath the club's bright marquee, lit with neon and hundreds of incandescent bulbs, and you'll find yourself in a surprisingly narrow space, about the size of a coffee shop, where a crowd of men, mostly 30 and older, is arrayed in small groups, in black-lit semi-darkness. On a recent Saturday night, there were no wild bachelor party antics, only little knots of tough guys with shaved heads, middle-aged men in sweaters and the occasional shamefaced student, nursing an $8 bottle of beer. A guy in a windbreaker took a seat at the bar and started having a one-sided conversation with a stripper about his ex-wife. Nearby, a mostly nude woman performed on stage against a backdrop of silver party-store streamers-a homespun touch that made the place feel like exactly what it is: a neighbourhood business trying to make a go of it. At another aging club, For Your Eyes Only (located on the rapidly evolving stretch of King Street West between Bathurst and Spadina), I met James, a 32-year-old real-estate agent who, in the company of his two brothers, was visiting a strip club for the first time. "It's lame as hell," he said. "I feel like I'm in the '80s." His assessment of the scene was blunt, but also pretty accurate. From a peak of 63 licensed strip clubs in 1982, the city's supply has dwindled to just 17. There are currently only 1,537 licensed dancers in Toronto, down from 3,755 in 1998, the earliest year for which reliable numbers are available. Those dancers are as nude as they ever were, and the beer is still cold. So what killed Toronto's strip-club industry?

Setting aside the one moment when he compared dancers to Tim Hortons donuts ("You need a variety"), Howard Adams, the owner of Filmores, a strip club near Moss Park, doesn't conform to the stereotype of the sleazy proprietor. He has close-cropped hair and a fast, confident way of talking. On the day we spoke, he was wearing a dress shirt with a monogrammed cuff. Adams knows James is typical of the new generation of downtown partiers, and it worries him. Today's young urban men are immune to the charms of velour seating and V.I.P. lounge lap dances, in part because they have resources at their disposal that weren't conceivable in the '70s-namely, their computers. Strip clubs have always been limited in what they can offer customers. "It's about a male-bonding experience, more than anything else," said Adams. "But that became tame compared to what was available out there online. And it was available for free." And yet the rise of the web, he says, was not really the beginning of the industry's troubles-at least, not in Toronto. "I think it all began in 1993," Adams says. Around that time, there was growing concern among officials that full-contact private dances in local clubs were leading to illicit sex behind the scenes. After an Ontario superior court judge ruled that lap dancing wasn't indecent, in 1994, Metro council tried to ban all contact between dancers and customers. Subsequent court decisions have muddied the issue, and though lap dancing is still banned in Toronto, the rule is widely ignored. "Prior to '93, guys would come in groups," said Adams, with a hint of wistfulness. "They'd come before the game, during the game, after the game or after their game. And it was fun, you know?. Everybody's having a great time, there's a great buzz in the room." But backlash from the introduction of lap dances led to negative coverage of strip clubs in the local press. In 1999 and 2000, the industry's public image was dealt another devastating blow. A multi-jurisdictional police force raided a number of Toronto-area clubs-including The Fairbank in midtown and the now-defunct Features and Solid Gold II in Etobicoke-and charged owners and staff with offenses related to pimping and sex trafficking. No convictions resulted. Adams thinks the bad publicity scared off some of his clientele. After the '90s had taken its toll, he said, "the perception was that it wasn't good, clean fun." The numbers back him up. According to information obtained from the city, there were still about 60 active strip-club licenses at the start of the '90s. "It was devastating," said Adams, who, like other owners, wouldn't discuss precise financials. "The decline from '93 until basically 2003 is what wiped out the clubs." On a recent Saturday night at Filmores, the performance area was perhaps two-thirds full. The buzz was gone.

In fact, the industry's war with the city goes back much further. The first newspaper accounts of a strip show in Toronto date back to 1966, when reporters were invited to The Mynah Bird, a cafe in Yorkville, to witness a scandalous topless dance. The city had seen burlesque-style stripteases before, but bare breasts were still a sensation. By 1977, downtown Yonge, which had previously been a live-music destination, had fully morphed into a seedy strip-and-body-rub district. Metro Toronto had yet to pass any enforceable regulations, and so an entrepreneur who wanted to feature nude performers was limited only by the relatively lax zoning policies of the former municipalities. A turning point in the story of Toronto's sex industry came in August 1977, when Emanuel Jaques, a 12-year-old shoeshine boy who worked on the Yonge Street strip, was sexually assaulted and murdered by three men in an apartment above Charlie's Angels, a body-rub parlour that occupied a building just south of present-day Yonge-Dundas Square. The Jaques murder further inflamed an already heated debate among municipal politicians about how to deal with the encroachment of the sex industry on Toronto neighbourhoods. In January of 1977, city council commissioned a report on the situation on Yonge Street. Their researchers found plenty to be alarmed about. "The City of Toronto at present has a greater concentration of nude 'services' in the portion of Yonge Street between Gerrard and Dundas streets (16 establishments as of May, 1977), than in a comparable length of New York's infamous 42nd Street," the report begins. It goes on to blame the industry for the degeneration of Yonge and surrounding neighbourhoods. Following the Jaques murder, the city immediately cracked down on Yonge Street's body-rub joints, some of which closed down. In 1979, they adopted a bylaw requiring that all strip-club operators and workers be licensed. Finally, in 1981, Metro capped the number of strip-club owner's licenses that could exist at any one time at 63. Metro Toronto reached 63 licenses in 1982, and the cap remains in place to this day-though with only 17 clubs left in the city and falling, it's evidently no longer needed. Currently, a strip-club owner's license is the single most expensive category of business license issued by the city. Each one costs more than $11,600 and needs to be renewed annually, for almost as much. The city's licensing regime also makes it a struggle for some Toronto clubs to put bodies on their stages. Each dancer needs a $350 individual license (also renewable annually, for a little under $250). Owners feel this has created a labour shortage. One dancer at Filmores, a university student, told me she's not too concerned about the fee or having to file her personal information with the city. Another dancer, who didn't want the name of her employer mentioned, said she finds the city's regular inspections demeaning. She questions the purpose of the entire licensing regime. "How is interrupting my worknight [to check my license] protecting me from exploitation or workplace safety violations?" she wondered.

In recent years, bad press and unfriendly legislation have taken such a toll on the industry that Toronto-area strip-club owners hired a guy whose job is to be indignant about all of it, all the time. His name is Tim Lambrinos, and his title is executive director of the Adult Entertainment Association of Canada. Before Lambrinos took his job at the AEAC seven years ago-he won't discuss his professional background in any detail, but it's a matter of public record that he was Giorgio Mammoliti's executive assistant for a time in the late '90s-the group was hell bent on suing all three levels of government. Now, thanks to Lambrinos, it concentrates on lobbying. "[The city is] to the point of harassing the industry unnecessarily," he told me. Currently, the association's major project is attacking what it sees as unfair application of the city's licensing bylaws. So much attention has been focused on strip-clubs, they argue, that it's driving the sex business elsewhere, where public officials can't see it. Small body-rub parlours (a.k.a. rub-and-tugs) are proliferating throughout Toronto, some operating under the shelter of $238 "holistic centre licenses." (There are 407 such licenses on the books right now.) These illicit parlours, according the the association, have emerged as winners of the regulatory battles of the past three decades, in part because they can operate in small spaces and advertise discreetly in alt-weeklies and online, which makes them hard to police and enables them to offer services of questionable legality. Bryan Byng, acting director of licensing for the city, conceded that his division isn't able to subject massage parlours to equal scrutiny. "I would expect we'd love to," he said. "But it's a question of available resources to do that." There are simply too many of them. Councillor Peter Milcyzn, whose ward includes the Queensway, where he estimates that 12 illegal body-rub parlours currently operate, considers them problematic. "They don't appear to pose a danger," he said. "But it certainly detracts from the quality of life in a community. Arguably it detracts from the ability to attract better kinds of businesses." The city is currently reviewing its strip-club and body-rub licensing practices, and the AEAC is fighting hard for an advantageous outcome.

Among the fallen are dozens of clubs with innuendo-happy names: Scanty's Exotic Dancers in North York; Cheater's Tavern at Yonge and Eglinton and its successor, Mystique; Players on the Queensway; and Nookies in the north. But at least a few strip clubs will continue to do business in Toronto for the foreseeable future. "We're in a good location. We do well," said Allen Cooper, who took over Zanzibar from his father, David, about five years ago. "I intend to continue with it as long as we possibly can." Adams, however, who bought Filmores about 10 years ago from a partnership that included his father, says he has no intention of sticking it out until the bitter end-although business is still good enough for the time being. The owners of at least one other club-the New Fairbank Hotel, near Dufferin and Eglinton-are planning to close down and build condos. "We'll wait a couple more years," said co-owner Nancy So. "We'll take it slowly." If and when the last strip club closes, Toronto will have lost a distinctive marker of its seamy past, and the local sex industry will have been pushed almost completely underground.

Source: http://www.thegridto.com/city/sexuality/where-have-all-the-girls-girls-girls-gone/ (The Grid replaced Eye magazine for several years before folding )

Toronto Exotic Massage Home