A well-known strip club in San Francisco’s North Beach neighborhood has announced that it will shut its doors early next month.
A message posted on the Lusty Lady’s Facebook page on Tuesday stated that the business was shutting down on Sept. 2 because of rent increases.
Related: The Sexual Manifesto: On The Other Side Of The Peep Show Glass
“It is with shaking hands & tear stained cheeks that I write to say, we just heard from our land lord, they will NOT agree to a new lease, they are closing our doors,” the post read. It was signed by “The Lusties.”
The website for the club, located at 1033 Kearny St., touts the Lusty Lady as “the world’s only unionized worker-owned peep show co-op,” after its dancers voted to unionize in 1997 as a result of “random firings and pay cuts, ambiguous shift policies and other unsavory business.”
The fight to unionize the Lusty Lady dancers was the subject of the 2000 documentary “Live Nude Girls Unite!”
Under a prior threat of closure in 2003, the dancers purchased the Lusty Lady and ran it as a co-op, but saw declining revenues in recent years as Internet pornography grew in popularity, according to its website.
The dancers wrote Tuesday on Facebook, “Please help us spread the word, and make it a glorious & glamorous two weeks!”
Photo: Thomas Hawk Report: Dan McMenamin, Bay City News
