The Houston club scene has been...

The Houston club scene has been on a major downward trend for the past year. Even the St. James which was one of the crown jewels of the city (the other being Treasures) has undergone a lot of transition during the past year. It has been well documented how Treasures has been destroyed and is a faint shadow of its former glory. Fortunately, after a slight down period, the St. James seems to be rebounding. The St. James is outside of city limits so dancers are allowed to go truly topless and wear g-strings and thongs instead of full bottoms, unlike dancers within the Houston city limits. This and the high quality of its girls has been one of its great strengths. Things started to go downhill a bit when they took out about half of the free lapdance booths and made it into an ultra expensive VIP room, the sanctuary. The booths that were taken out were the most private and coveted of the booths in the club. The Sanctuary now requires either a $3500 lifetime membership fee, or can be entered on a nightly basis by buying $500 of alcohol. Things really went downhill for a while, when they started requiring all dancers have a dance license. The dance license stays permanently on your police record, and pretty much kills your chance at many future careers and jobs. This scared away about half of the club's dancers, including many long-time favorites. It has taken a while, but they have gone on a major hiring spree, and the quantity of dancers is now again close to previous standards. The quality is slightly lower than before, but the quality has gone down even more in most of the city's clubs. There are a lot more black girls than before. Before the change in policy, there were few black girls by design, but I think now they are having trouble filling their ranks without accepting a lot more black girls. On this Saturday night, which was actually kind of slow for them, there were about 40 girls, about 1/3rd of them black. There were a few unattractive 5's, but for the most part the girls were 6's and 7's with a few 8's.

I ordered some food, which remains one of the St. James' strengths. It has the best food bar none of any strip club in Houston. This is especially true if you order off of the VIP menu which is available to you if you are within either the VIP room or the Sanctuary.

This night I shared some food with one of my regular girls, and got some great dances from her as usual. I now have about 5 regular girls at this club, so I'm rarely lacking for company. However, this is a new crew than previous years, because most of my old favorites left when the new license policies kicked in. It's taken me time to rebuild my group of regulars. Lack of interaction with girls is a major problem for many customers, as reported before by myself and many others. There's usually not enough girls to go around for the number of customers. On this night, which was extraordinaly slow for a Saturday, there were about 40 dancers but still over 200 customers. Many guys were sitting around wondering where they could find a girl for a dance. Though there were about 40 dancers, most of them were occupied either in the VIP rooms, or in the 20 or so private dance cubicles. At any one time, outside of the 4 dancers on the stages, you could see maybe about a half dozen circulating the crowd. Additionally, at this club, it pays to be a regular because dancers usually stick with their regulars. Things have improved somewhat over the last few months, as the club has tried hard to bring in a fresh influx of new dancers.