IT IS EARLY on a Tuesday night, and already the parking lot is filling up at Roanoke’s only striptease club.
Like moths to a porch light, men are drawn to the hot pink sign on Franklin Road Southwest that marks the location of Girls, Girls, Girls of Virginia Inc.
A distinguished-looking man wearing a gray suit flashes his membership card to the doorman. He is followed by a man wearing dusty blue jeans and a sweat-stained T-shirt. The next patron keeps his head down while saying he’s in town “on business.”
Inside the club, before patrons get a glimpse of the stage, a sign informs them: “These are original artistic productions that allow each dancer to create her own individual and special artistic dance.”
While each dance might be different, the one performed on this night by “Miss Scarlet” ends the same way most do. She is soon completely nude, her skimpy outfit discarded halfway through a Melissa Etheridge tune.
Men peering down from a balcony toss balled-up dollar bills as Miss Scarlet cavorts across the stage. The song ends, and she saunters off to a smattering of applause. Patrons then turn back to their conversations, their drinks and their pool games to await the next show.
Most likely, no one that night thought about whether they had just witnessed an artistic expression or an obscene performance.
But that will be the question for a jury this week, when the city’s first obscenity trial in more than 20 years is conducted in Roanoke Circuit Court. Starting Monday, seven jurors will be given the unusual – and unwieldy – task of using community standards to judge what is acceptable in Roanoke.
Just how criminal case number CR97-957 got started is something of a mystery to Keith Guthrie.
Guthrie, co-owner of Girls, Girls, Girls, knows this much: On four nights in May, a team of undercover police officers paid to get into his establishment and used a small video camera to secretly tape the dancers. The officers then went to a grand jury, which returned a 31-count indictment in June alleging violations of the state obscenity law and a city ordinance that regulates exotic dancing.
Instead of charging Guthrie – or dancers with such stage names as Passion, Vixen and Kitten – prosecutors aimed their indictments at the club’s financial heart. The charges could subject the corporation to $40,000 in fines.
Why? Guthrie asks.
“It’s just nudity,” he said. “There is no sex. We feel that what we are doing is far less obscene than what you can see any day out in the community. You can turn on HBO tonight and see far more obscene material than what’s going on at this club.”
Jack Kennett, a Roanoke lawyer who represents the club, argues that the dancing is art and therefore protected by the First Amendment – for those who choose to watch it.
“We’re not doing this on a church pulpit, and we’re not doing it on the courthouse steps,” Kennett said in court. “We’re doing this in a closed area where people have to pay money to get in and sign a statement that nudity doesn’t bother them.”
But there’s more than just nudity at Girls, Girls, Girls, prosecutors allege.
The jury is expected to see videotapes of dancing that includes “lewd exhibition of genitalia,” Assistant Commonwealth’s Attorney Dennis Nagel said at an earlier hearing. And that, some say, is an affront to the community standards of Roanoke.
“It’s hard for women to establish self-esteem, with all the sexism on TV and in music – and now in our local dance hall,” said Barbara Duerk, who became one of the club’s few public critics during her unsuccessful bid for City Council three years ago.
Others question how stripping can be art.
“If all the men who go there really wanted to see art, we’d have much larger audiences at our dance concerts,” said Jenefer Davies of the Roanoke Ballet Theater.
Earlier this month, Circuit Judge Jonathan Apgar denied a motion by Kennett to dismiss the charges, setting the stage for this week’s conflict between community standards and First Amendment freedoms.
Commonwealth’s Attorney Donald Caldwell says his office is not on a crusade to clean up the town.
“Neither myself, or this office, or the Roanoke Police Department is trying to impose our views on other people,” Caldwell said.
After a few people complained – including the ex-boyfriend of a dancer and a female customer shocked by what she saw – police investigated and found enough evidence to take to a jury.
“This is a situation where the community will come in and decide, and whatever the jury says is fine with us,” Caldwell said. “This is something that needs to be decided by the citizens, not by lawyers or police officers.”
Marvin Miller was a California entrepreneur who wanted to sell some books.
So he conducted a mass-mailing advertising campaign for his books – which happened to have titles like Intercourse, Man-Woman, Sex Orgies Illustrated and An Illustrated History of Pornography.
When a restaurant owner found the unsolicited brochure in his mailbox and complained, Miller was charged and convicted of distributing obscene material. He appealed all the way to the U.S. Supreme Court, which reversed his conviction in 1973.
In deciding Miller vs. California, the Supreme Court crafted a new definition of obscenity, but allowed localities to make the call based on their own community standards. The definition is still followed today and will be used to judge the dancing at Girls, Girls, Girls.
Under what is known as “the Miller test,” something is obscene if the jury answers “yes” to all three of the following questions:
Whether the average person, applying contemporary community standards, would find that the work, taken as a whole, appeals to the prurient interest. (Case law defines prurient as a “shameful or morbid” interest in sex.)
Whether the work depicts or describes, in a patently offensive way, sexual conduct as defined by the applicable state law.
Whether the work, taken as a whole, lacks serious literary, artistic, political or scientific value.
It soon became clear that Miller raised more questions than it answered. Who is an average person? What are contemporary community standards? And how do you judge what is art?
“It really was a legal quagmire,” said Harvey Lutins, a Roanoke lawyer who defended the city’s first obscenity case brought after the Miller decision came down. “Our argument was we shouldn’t have to give up our constitutional rights based on something so nebulous.”
The argument worked. In that case, where the owner of an adult bookstore was charged with selling obscene movies, Circuit Judge Lawrence Koontz – who now sits on the Virginia Supreme Court – threw the case out, ruling that prosecutors had not shown evidence of what Roanoke’s community standards were.
“Establishing a community’s standards is an enormously difficult task, and the burden is on the prosecutor to establish it in a convincing matter, which may be why there are so few prosecutions under this law,” said Kent Willis, executive director of the state American Civil Liberties Union.
Nine years passed before city prosecutors tried again.
In 1985, a Roanoke grand jury indicted seven owners of adult bookstore on obscenity charges for selling videos and magazines that carried hard-core photographs of homosexual activity and a pregnant woman having sex.
This time, both sides were ready to present evidence of community standards. The prosecution lined up a group of witnesses, including a local advertising executive, who were prepared to testify that they considered the magazines obscene.
The defense had its own expert witnesses.
“We had psychologists, sexologists and everybody like that” ready to testify that the material was not harmful to the community, said Burton Sandler, a Baltimore lawyer who represented one of the bookstore owners.
The case ended with a plea agreement in which the owners agreed to rid their shelves of the objectionable material. Had there been a verdict, though, some wondered how the unanimous opinion of seven people – the number of jurors in misdemeanor cases – could accurately represent the sentiment of 100,000 citizens.
Especially when the issue is so subjective.
“The problem is that Potter Stewart was right,” said Galdino Pranzarone, referring to the U.S. Supreme Court justice who once said that while he could never intelligibly define obscenity, he knew it when he saw it.
“It’s all in the eye of the beholder,” said Pranzarone, a psychology professor at Roanoke College.
Pranzarone, who teaches human sexuality, worked with Sandler, the Baltimore lawyer, to build a defense when the bookstore owners went to court in 1986. In a survey of video rental businesses, he found that X-rated material was not restricted to the Williamson Road stores that had been charged.
Nor did the store’s customers fit the traditional stereotype. “It’s not just dirty old men in raincoats,” Pranzarone said.
The same can be said of the clientele at Girls, Girls, Girls.
“We get everything from construction workers to doctors, from lawyers to auto mechanics,” Guthrie said. “We’ve got more than 2,000 members, so somebody in the community is seeing something worthwhile in this, or they wouldn’t be coming out here.”
(The club, which does not sell alcohol, has gone private since the charges were filed in June. That means its doors are open to anyone 18 or older who can pay a $10 membership fee and a $5 cover charge.)
But do the strip joint patrons really represent the community standards of a city often described as a good place to raise a family, where the telephone book carries six pages of church listings, and where some theatergoers recently complained that the musical “Tommy” was too racy for Mill Mountain Theatre?
“This will be decided on local community standards,” Nagel said.
In other words, what goes unnoticed in New York might get you convicted in Roanoke.
“You know damn well that if they’re going to use the community standards of Roanoke, Virginia, as a yardstick to measure what obscenity is, the defense is going to lose,” Sandler said.
Perched on a bar stool, Lexie takes a draw on her Marlboro Light and explains why she will soon be dancing naked on the stage behind her.
“Everybody has their own reasons,” she said. “Me, I’m working to put myself through school and put food in my daughter’s stomach. First it was all about the ego trip, but now it’s more about my daughter.”
A single mother of an 18-month-old, Lexie – who asked to be identified only by her stage name – hopes to save enough to put herself though nursing school.
While she admits she does it for the money – dancers earn up to $1,000 a week – Lexie says there’s an art to exotic dancing.
“To me, art is an expression of yourself,” she said. “Every girl here, and every dance she does, is expressing herself in one way or another.”
But if it is art, it is certainly not ballet.
And to some members of Roanoke’s arts community, it is not art at all. “I can readily see why they would leap behind that as a defense,” said Jere Hodgin, the artistic and executive director of Mill Mountain Theatre. Hodgin said it’s not his place to judge or censor anyone.
“But I do have a problem with them calling it art,” he said.
Most traditional artists contacted for this story seemed uncomfortable with the notion of putting an “exotic cabaret” that shares a building with a tattoo parlor on the same level as an art gallery or symphony hall.
“My suspicion is that the arts community would have had more of a problem with these charges if the case involved a more recognized and generally agreed-to form of art, such as theater, which has some sort of social commentary and is not designed to appeal to people’s prurient interests,” said Mark Scala, chief curator of the Art Museum of Western Virginia.
Guthrie – who, by the way, is engaged to one of his dancers – admits naked women are the main reason people come to his club.
But that can still be art, he argues. “What we’re trying to do is put a showcase and a theme to it, instead of just having a bump-and-grind thing right in your face.”
All the dances at Girls, Girls, Girls are carefully choreographed, Guthrie said. For every performance, the dancer must fill out a script that includes her choice of a theme, a musical selection, costume, props, lighting and dance steps.
For example, a science fiction performance is done to the soundtrack of “Men in Black,” with the dancer starting out in a black suit and boots with a UFO poster as a prop.
Each routine is recorded on choreography charts kept on file at Girls, Girls, Girls. Signs posted in the club note that many of the dancers have had professional training. One sign includes a Webster’s definition of art as “a skill acquired by experience, study or observation.”
That’s good enough for Sharon Martin, one of the club’s few female patrons.
“They’re just expressing themselves artistically to the music,” Martin said. “It’s not like this is some sort of sleazy joint.”
Some say the city is exercising a double standard by hitting Girls, Girls, Girls with 31 indictments, while looking the other way when “Oh! Calcutta!” came to town four years ago.
The Broadway production was considered serious art and thus exempt from prosecution, even though it featured, as Kennett said, “men and women buck naked on the stage of the Roanoke Civic Center.” Some of the skits in “Oh! Calcutta!” contain strong sexual connotations.
The only difference between that and Girls, Girls, Girls, Kennett said, “is one was sponsored by the city and one was sponsored by a private individual. I guess the commonwealth doesn’t want to prosecute the city, so they’re going to go after people like us.”
Willis, of the ACLU, called it “a typical case of prosecutorial selection.”
“Prosecutors have always picked on what they consider lowlife,” he said. “The more money associated with something, and the higher the class it’s associated with, the less likely a prosecution is to follow.”
Nonetheless, Roanoke’s arts community should be concerned about the plight of Girls, Girls, Girls, said David Greene of the National Campaign for Freedom of Expression, based in Washington, D.C.
He cited an example in Oklahoma City where a citizen group first went after explicit comic books, but has now succeeded in bringing obscenity charges against the showing of “The Tin Drum,” an Academy Award-winning foreign film.
“What we have seen all over the country is that this sort of moral movement – the attack on art – gains a foothold by first going after the nontraditional,” Greene said. “But they can very quickly move to the more traditional forms of art.”
Clarification: The Sharon Martin quoted in a story Sunday about obscenity charges against a Roanoke striptease club is not the Sharon Martin who works as an instructional aid at Clearbrook Elementary School.