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Denver strip club scene.

shadowcat

Atlanta suburb

Police stings, undercover officers and a vice squad: Though 2024 is far from the golden age of strip clubs, city authorities in Denver are still keeping close tabs on illegal behavior in its adult cabarets.

PT’s Showclub received unwanted publicity in November after it struck an agreement with the city acknowledging wrongdoing by dancers. Police busted the southwest Denver business for prostitution and solicitation, and the agreement required the adult entertainment club to close down for two weeks in January — a penalty that the business finished serving this week.

PT’s is one of just five licensed adult cabaret businesses operating under the watchful eye of the city. The others are Dandy Dan’s, the Diamond Cabaret, Rick’s Cabaret and Diamond After Dark, with additional strip clubs located in some of Denver’s neighboring cities.

But disciplinary cases are considered anomalies in Denver’s strip club industry, partly because of the rules clubs must follow and partly because so few businesses operate within the city. A Denver licensing official attributed that success to the city’s tight regulations.

“When people think about adult entertainment clubs, their minds might imagine some bad activities,” said Eric Escudero, a spokesperson for the Denver Department of Excise and Licenses. But “when you look at the overall recent history — the fact that most of these clubs have been compliant — it makes you think that Denver must be doing something right.”

In the last 13 years, Denver has recorded four other incidents at clubs, Escudero confirmed. In 2020, PT’s Showclub violated the COVID-19 public health order. At Dandy Dan’s, an undercover police officer was solicited by an employee for a sex act in 2019.

PT’s Showclub sold alcohol to an underage individual in 2016. And in 2011, PT’s earned a disciplinary action, Escudero said, but documents with details were not available.

The most recent case involving PT’s started with an anonymous complaint filed in January 2023 with Denver police’s vice team. It alleged that “younger dancers were actively pressured into having sexual intercourse for money by older members of the club” located at 1601 W. Evans Ave., according to documents provided by Excise and Licenses.


Police began investigating. Near midnight on March 31, during a sting operation, an undercover officer was solicited by a dancer for sex for $600 and another uniformed officer was fondled, the records show.

The first dancer was arrested for prostitution, while the second was cited for public indecency. And in late November, the licensing agency accepted a settlement agreement between PT’s Showclub and the Denver City Attorney’s Office that required the cabaret to shut down Jan. 2-15 as a penalty.

The club admitted that prostitution and solicitation of prostitution occurred on the night of the sting, and it agreed in the settlement to ban the two dancers and to enhance its video surveillance to cover all private dance areas. Under the agreement, new violations within a year will result in a 20-day closure.

PT’s was free to reopen on Tuesday following the agreed-upon closure. On the club’s Facebook page, it portrayed renovations as the reason for the closure, writing in a post: “Watch magic unfold at the newly revamped Showclub!”

Attempts to reach representatives of PT’s and the four other cabaret businesses to discuss city regulations were not successful. ACE National, the Association of Club Executives — the trade association for America’s licensed adult nightclubs — also could not be reached.

Melissa Sisneros, a spokesperson for the Denver City Attorney’s Office, didn’t respond to questions about how often the office takes enforcement action against adult cabarets. DPD was unable to specify the number of stings at clubs over the last year.

Dancer says prostitution is “rampant”
One dancer in Denver suggested illegal activity was more common than shown by licensing enforcement and other city actions.

Rebecca Dolana, who’s danced intermittently at PT’s Showclub and other Denver area clubs, described prostitution as “rampant” in the industry.

“It’s everywhere,” she said in an interview. “I don’t see they’re cracking down on it.”

Prostitution within clubs counts as a controversial topic among dancers. On one hand, Dolana says she understands that the women who do engage in it often face dire circumstances, with families in need of money. But the practice angers some dancers because “it devalues what the rest of us are trying to do in the club.”

She appreciates the police because they’ve helped her in the past, but “everybody holds their breath in the club whenever police come in,” Dolana said. “You feel protected — but you also don’t.”

During Dolana’s career, she has felt safer dancing in Denver than she did in Tucson, Ariz., but not as safe as she felt in Las Vegas. That’s largely because of gun violence at Denver clubs, she said.

“It’s like the Wild Wild West in the strip club industry,” Dolana added.

The city mandates that its adult cabarets, and even some individual striptease dancers, get licensed, and it isn’t unique. Other big cities, such as Seattle and Phoenix, have similar protocols.

But the strip club industry generally lacks commonplace standards for regulations, with rules varying depending on the locale and “how conservative the area is,” said Bernadette Barton, director of gender studies at Morehead State University.

For instance, “some places allow lap dancing, and, some places, you have to be 10 feet away,” she said. Portland, Oregon, is recognized as having the most strip clubs per capita among major U.S. cities — with 54 total — in part because the state supreme court there has held that nude stripping is protected as free expression under Oregon’s constitution.

Few dancers have individual licenses
In Denver, five businesses now claim adult cabaret licenses, which permit adult entertainment and liquor. Just eight exotic dancer licenses were active in Denver as of last week, Excise and Licenses said.

That’s because whether exotic dancers need licenses or not is circumstantial, Escudero said. Dancers are more likely to need them, he added, if they perform away from clubs at businesses, homes or events, such as bachelor parties.

Last summer, the exotic dancer license type was at the heart of a privacy issue.

Denver city government established a new online permitting and licensing center in November 2022, and data listing the addresses tied to those licenses was available online as website search results. Escudero said that happened because of an old license application process that’s since been eliminated.

Once the oversight was brought to the agency’s attention by the team at the podcast City Cast Denver in August, Excise and Licenses pulled the information — “all mostly licenses that were expired and not renewed” — from its website the same day, Escudero said.

“We don’t want to do anything that could potentially jeopardize anyone’s safety,” he said.

Barton pointed to dancers as protective of their privacy: “Even if it’s not the danger of somebody stalking them and harming them physically, there’s the danger of [the information] getting out and them not getting another job down the road,” she said.

While Barton supports city oversight of cabaret working conditions, including safe stages and sanitary dressing rooms, “I wouldn’t say we want more police oversight,” she said.