[laughs]

Always.

They always talk about what happened in the club.

And the interesting thing about a lot of these laws is that some of them come originally from New York's, in this region, come originally from New York's Committee of 14, which was an early 20th century committee on vice, and they would go into nightclubs, which weren't necessarily strip joints, 'cause strip joints as we know them didn't exactly exist, and they would comment on what the dancers on stage were wearing and how scanty it was and how it needed to be controlled, and they would also complain consistently about miscegenation, the interaction of white and Black people and how they should not be dating.

Whenever you come across someone who's really opposed to sex work, you'll find these other threads of things that they're opposed to that make you wonder if they're the best moral example to follow.

So these laws are old, and pe- like I said, Theodora in Byzantium had to deal with them when she was still a performer.

So there's a famous, among strippers, article from 1953 that shows how far you can go in various states because, like I said, even though they're county to county, they tend to be regional.

Mm-hmm.

So could you tell us a little bit about how the seeds for this project were first planted, and then its germination into its current incarnation?

I've always known it, but it wasn't conscious realization.

Everything was sort of sublimated, and I think that probably has a lot to do with being indoctrinated to thinking that sex workers don't have much to contribute to society or culture generally.

And the thing is, I've been an activist, and I very much know better, but there's still that trace of indoctrination that sort of blocked my realization.

And then when I was working on the history of leopard print, I ran across an Urban Dictionary definition of leopard print that says anything that is leopard print can be described as whore, and gave the example of a whore bra.

And I'm in the middle of researching leopard print, and I'm already finding all these different interpretations of what it means to be leopard print and seeing all these influences from other cultures that make leopard print so powerful, and I went, "Wow, dressing like a whore is a really potent concept in people's minds." And then I realized it's a really potent concept in my mind.

It's really important to me.

[laughs]