Why Lap Dances In Nashville Are Illegal But Group Sex Isn’t

“I thought we were all supposed to be equal before the law,” says Joe Savage, who has worked at a number of Nashville clubs. He teaches the dancers new routines, creates elaborate costumes and consults with club owners on lighting and sound. Savage most recently worked for Club Platinum, which was shut down by a Nashville judge last October for failing to comply with SOB guidelines. “Some businesses get away with murder while others get shut down over meaningless infractions. It’s ridiculous.”

“We’ve absolutely seen a spike in this kind of local restrictionism,” Spencer says.

Many of these ordinances are not very popular with judges or the communities that they’re meant to enhance. Last fall, a law that would have severely restricted topless clubs from operating in Scottsdale, Ariz., was soundly defeated by a referendum vote. This effort came after the city had spent hundreds of thousands of dollars trying to shut down some of these businesses.

In June, the Detroit City Council had to shell out almost half a million dollars—and may yet have to pay more—to settle a lawsuit brought by a strip club that contested the legality of city licensing laws restricting strip clubs. The Detroit Free Press reports that these laws could end up costing that city millions more if other pending suits are not settled out of court.

Houston, Tampa Bay and Pittsburgh all have wrestled with this issue in the past year, at great cost to their taxpayers. In two of these cases, courts ordered that the strip clubs should be allowed to operate with even less regulation than before.

Eventually, Nashville also may find itself having spent a good chunk of taxpayer money fighting for and enforcing a code that may be overturned in court or scrapped by public officials who deem it overly restrictive.

What makes Nashville different from these other cities is the kind of double standard that our adult businesses face in regulation, and the sordid history of sex clubs here.

By the late 1990s, Nashvillians had had enough of businesses masquerading as “massage parlors,” “saunas” and “spas” that were really no more than houses of prostitution.

“In those days, Nashville had a problem with whorehouses,” says at-large Metro Council member Adam Dread.

At Dawn’s Day Spa, Babe’s or any number of spots in those days, a few dollars would get you a half-and-half and some company morning, noon and night.

And then one night in 1996, two 18-year-old women were stabbed to death in a gruesome double homicide at the Exotic Tan Club on Church Street.

“The mother of one of the women who had been killed came to me to see if something could be done to protect other young women from the same fate,” recalls Scene publisher Chris Ferrell, who was a Metro Council member at the time. “I had Metro lawyers look at what other cities were doing to regulate adult establishments and asked them to draft a law that would pass constitutional muster, but would let the city regulate establishments to protect the health and safety of the employees and patrons.”

Within a year, Ferrell helped craft the SOB ordinance that the Metro Council passed. Included in the bill was the creation of a board to enforce and administer the new law. The ordinance defines a sexually oriented business as “any commercial establishment which for a fee or incidentally to another service, regularly presents material or exhibitions distinguished or characterized by an emphasis on matter depicting, describing or relating to ‘specified sexual activities’ or ‘specified anatomical areas.’ ”

When asked how to define hard-core pornography, U.S. Supreme Court Justice Potter Stewart once said, “I know it when I see it.” In creating the Sexually Oriented Business guidelines, the Metro Council was taking no such chances with Nashville strip clubs. “Female breasts,” the ordinance says, must be covered “below a point immediately above the top of the areola.” The same goes for the men. “Human male genitals in a discernibly turgid state, even if opaquely covered,” must be hidden.

The penalties for violating these—or any of the dozens of other provisions of the code—range from a $500 fine to revocation of a business’s license to operate.