Dancers struggle to find work as Eastern WA’s last strip club closes

The benefit of dancing the day shift at Deja Vu in Spokane Valley was twofold: paying her more on average for every hour of work than other service industry jobs, and giving her more time and flexibility to be around when her kids needed her. She’d considered looking at careers outside of stripping, which most dancers define as sex work, but struggled to find anything that worked as well for her family.

“It’s hard being a single mom in this economy,” she said. “There [aren’t] many jobs that would allow me to be at my kids’ events and doctors’ appointments every time I need to be there. Being the sole provider and being a good parent do come with a cost: stripping.”

Until its closure in September 2023 (and subsequent sale to Christian anti-trafficking organization Helping Captives), Deja Vu was the only strip club in Eastern Washington, and one of about 10 in the entire state. The day the club — which dancers lovingly called “The Vu” — shut its doors, around 30 dancers were left unemployed and with limited options in an economy and culture that isn’t friendly to people with a background in sex work. (Montana asked us to only use her stage name for those reasons.)

Montana first applied to two bikini-barista coffee stands: 2nd Base Espresso in the Hillyard neighborhood, and one of the stands owned by Black Sheep Coffee Co., which owns the other six bikini-barista coffee shops in the county.

With her background in stripping and seven years of experience in the service industry prior to dancing, Montana thought she was an ideal candidate to work in one of the stands. She had the server experience to pick up the food-handling elements of the job quickly, and she was comfortable doing that work in lingerie. Perhaps most importantly, she knew how to make customers feel seen and desired while maintaining safe boundaries.

“I feel like dancers are the perfect people to hire for that industry, just because at the end of the day we know way better ways to be flirtatious with men without getting anywhere near a level that a lot of girls would think they have to,” Montana said. “Out of everybody that you’re going to have as an applicant, there aren’t a lot of girls that are going to be great at making sure that they’re keeping themselves safe.”

She didn’t hear back from either stand.

Still, Montana was persistent and “kind of buggy.” She called the manager at one of the Black Sheep stands and treated the phone conversation like an interview, highlighting her background in serving, her dancing experience, her open daytime availability and her bubbly personality — which Black Sheep management says is the key quality they look for in candidates. At the end of the call, the manager told Montana they wouldn’t be moving forward with her application.

According to Montana, the manager told her that “strippers aren’t usually a good fit” and that Montana’s appearance wasn’t right for the stands either — she’d had to include a photo in her original application. Montana acknowledges that she doesn’t have “massive boobs,” which she thinks may be important for working at a bikini-barista stand, but it seemed to her like there was a larger problem: “They seemed really hesitant about hiring people with dance work.”

Her impression wasn’t wrong.

Bikini-barista blues

While working in one of Spokane’s bikini-barista coffee stands could be an effective vehicle for upward economic mobility, that opportunity isn’t afforded to everyone. Sarah Birnel, the owner of the Black Sheep chain, said that it’s not very often a stripper is “a good fit” for her stands, because she sees stripping as “a little bit seedier of an industry.”

“I think there’s a lot of girls, not in their right mind, stripping,” Birnel said. “And I am going to offend so many strippers out there, but the girls that work for me … have their head on straight.”

Shay, who asked to use a pseudonym to protect her safety, is Birnel’s current general manager. She said hiring strippers made it hard for stands to enforce boundaries with customers.

“If we had a girl that had been stripping and then came to work at the stand, if the customer is used to seeing her or used to having that physical relationship with her in a sense, and she says, ‘No, she can’t do it in the stand,’ it’s just hard to make sure that she stays safe in those situations,” Shay said. “I think a lot of our current girls would not want to work at the strip club, just because they want to avoid that physical aspect with customers.”

Montana didn’t think that was fair. “I tell probably 30 or 40 men a night that I’m not going to go home with them,” she said. “I could definitely handle the occasional person asking for something extra and being able to say, ‘No,’ because that’s a very easy thing for me to do at this point.”

RANGE found a few other dancers who had applied to bikini-barista stands in Spokane. Those dancers, as well as others who chose not to apply to bikini coffee stands, pointed to a word-of-mouth warning among dancers that stand managers don’t like to hire strippers.

Ashe Ryder, a former dancer at The Vu and activist with the advocacy group Strippers Are Workers (SAW), said that though she had never tried to get a job at a stand, she’d heard from multiple co-workers that stand managers cut off job interviews at the first mention of dancing experience.

Back in 2017, though, Ryder’s friend Lila got a job at one of the Black Sheep stands (it was called Devil’s Brew at the time, but still owned by Birnel) through a recommendation from a friend.

Lila, who is also referred to by her stage name, was on maternity leave from The Vu and needed a less physically demanding job in the meantime to recover from her pregnancy.

On Lila’s first day, she said the woman training her remarked that she was in really good shape and asked where she’d worked beforehand. “I danced my whole pregnancy,” Lila responded. The trainer advised her not to tell anyone else she had danced.

After that conversation, Lila mostly kept her dance background to herself, but she worked only five shifts, which she claims were unpaid, before she was fired. A former customer of hers from Deja Vu came through the drive-thru, and her co-workers asked where she knew him from. She said from a club she used to work at.

“That’s when they started treating me differently,” Lila said.

The next day, she showed up for her scheduled shift and was told she had the day off. Then, she couldn’t get hold of the manager or anyone else to tell her when she was scheduled to work next. After a few weeks of texting, she went through the drive-thru and talked to the manager. Lila said the manager told her, “No, you just don’t work here anymore.”

According to Lila, during that conversation, the manager accused her of selling her breast milk out of the coffee stand. Lila was shocked, and when she asked for clarification, she said she was told, “This is why we don’t hire strippers.”

Lila was never paid for any of her labor, she said. She said she messaged her manager asking for payment so many times over the course of two months in the fall of 2017 that the manager blocked her number.

Birnel said she doesn’t remember Lila or Black Sheep’s exact payroll processes in 2017, but the day-to-day hiring and firing was handled at the time by a manager who is no longer with the company. Still, she said it’s never been their practice to have unpaid training shifts, and that hours were clocked by individual baristas, submitted by managers, and then reviewed by a general manager, so she thinks Lila’s story is unlikely.

Eventually, Lila says she gave up on getting paid and went back to work at Deja Vu until its closure in 2023.

Dancing across state lines

When it became clear her persistence was getting her nowhere with bikini-barista coffee stands, Montana started to look elsewhere, and quickly found a new home at State Line Showgirls, a club in Post Falls, Idaho, about 20 miles east of downtown Spokane.

“The day that Deja Vu closed, I went and applied at State Line,” Montana said. “I got hired that same day.”

She wasn’t the only one, she said: “Quite a few of us came over here.” Montana said State Line, which dancers call “The Line,” is cleaner than The Vu, with more stage maintenance and showers available onsite. Beyond cleanliness, Montana also makes a lot more money at The Line.

“It’s just a more promoted establishment. They actually make sure to post on Instagram and keep it updated,” she said. “I did alright at the Vu, but now I’m making at least twice as much.”

But that extra income comes with tradeoffs, meaning The Line isn’t a great option for everyone, either. When the Washington club closed and some of their dancers started driving to dance in Idaho, it created what Ryder called “dancer saturation” at “The Line.”

“The amount of dancers working there has gone up since we closed, but it doesn’t mean the customer count has gone up,” Ryder said. “Some of the Deja Vu clients will travel to State Line, but for some it’s too far out of the way.”

Instead, Ryder started “travel dancing,” the practice of taking trips to dance at clubs in other states, sometimes for weeks at a time.