Attorney John Weston was surprised to find that there are only about 35 strip clubs in the City of L.A.. He'd expected more, since there are about 4 million residents in the area - and he was also surprised because a Los Angeles deputy police chief told the city council that the city was considered "the mecca for lap dances," according to the Daily Breeze newspaper.
"What I think they were trying to say was that because most of the jurisdictions in the area have regulations of one form or another, L.A. was a vacuum and theoretically thousands and thousands and thousands of lap-dance clubs would have come in here," Weston analyzed.
Thankfully, 35 clubs were enough, with the help of lobbying firm Afriat Consulting, to gather more than 100,000 signatures on a petition to put the city council's recently-passed lap-dance ordinance on the next city election ballot.
"The success we had in gathering well more than the facially required number of signatures in the midst of this double whammy of adversity - the supermarket workers strike and the transit mechanics strike - suggests to me how strong in opposition much of the constituency is," Weston said. "My guess is that most of the people who signed the petition are people who want to vote 'no' on this law, but there are others who undoubtedly signed saying, 'Yeah, I think the citizens ought to have a chance to vote on it,' who were expressing a more neutral position. But I think the vast bulk of people are saying, 'Yeah, we don't like this and we want to tell you so.'"
"I was very impressed by the alacrity with which people wanted to sign and the degree to which people were enormously pissed off at what the city council had done here," he continued. "Now don't get me wrong: The city of Los Angeles is a wonderful place. However, it has grave problems, three of which are the traffic, the schools and crime, and people were basically trying to get a message across to their elected officials, to say, 'Deal with those issues. Keep the cops on the streets and out of the gentlemen's clubs, and just leave choices in entertainment to the people. We are a hugely diverse city, lots and lots of different people, nationalities, interests, sexual orientation groups, all sorts of diversity here, and we glory in that diversity, and that ought to be decided by the people who spend the dollars, make the choices, and not by government.' And invariably, when we would approach them, they would say, 'For God's sake, this is Los Angeles; not such and such,' and then they'd name, always, three or four cities generally in the Bible Belt or the deep South or in the rural heartland of America, and they'd say, 'Maybe such legislation is appropriate for those cities, but it's certainly not appropriate or needed here in Los Angeles in 2003.'"
Weston and Roger Jon Diamond, another prominent First Amendment attorney in the L.A. area, came up with the idea of putting the ordinance to a public referendum at almost the same time - not surprising, since both men have long represented dance clubs, and both have used the same maneuver elsewhere within the past few years.
The cost of the referendum, which will occur if the city council fails to repeal the ordinance, won't be cheap. Estimates place the cost at over half a million dollars - something the cash-strapped city can hardly afford.
The Breeze also quoted Councilwoman Cindy Miscikowski, the main sponsor of the ordinance, as saying that if the measure qualifies for the ballot, the council could adopt portions of the ordinance not mentioned in the petition, such as the ban on private VIP rooms, where strippers typically perform for a single patron. Weston, however, disputes that interpretation of the referendum law.
"I can tell you that they're required to place the entire ordinance in the referendum package; they can't pick and choose; it's the very first word to the very last word," he said. "I would assume 'repeal' [in the petition] means repeal, and what the city can do independently about that at this juncture, I'm not clear."
The ordinance, Weston pointed out, is not directed solely at dance clubs.
"This is a multi-faceted adult entertainment ordinance," he stated. "The primary, the most significant changes that are effected in terms of conduct will be those obviously involving the gentlemen's clubs, but on the face of it, it also applies to motion picture theaters and also to arcades. The changes with respect to arcades are not insubstantial but they're subtle and I would prefer not to talk about them in this discussion. The ordinance does potentially have a very significant impact on the arcades, and a number of arcade chains were contributors [to the petition drive] as well."
"What I also found fascinating, but not surprising to me," Weston noted, "was that this wasn't simply a male issue; it wasn't just guys who were racing to sign. I would say, of the people I personally had sign, it was close to 50 percent females, and they were very angry about it, in the sense of, 'Why are they putting women out of work? Women have a right to make a living. This is just silly.'"
But simple fairness to clubs and their employees were concepts that apparently paled in comparison to the concerns of the ordinance's proponents.
"I think things like this [are proposed] from time to time for a lot of reasons, most of which have nothing to do with the subject matter," Weston opined. "There may be a bad club or bad adult business that's operating somewhere and causing real problems for the neighborhood, and people in a particular neighborhood are understandably upset about it and they start complaining. And when the bad business does not respond intelligently and properly to the notices that are given to it, then the elected official has to respond to his or her constituency and begins to take a broader view of things than otherwise would be taken, and then it's kind of like a snowball: Somebody starts talking about it, somebody then starts to get other agencies involved, and it begins to build and build and build and then they start reaching out for the old kind of nonsense, secondary effects reports, and then they'll get some cops in and the cops will then begin to talk about the occasional act of misconduct that they like to talk about, and pretty soon it gets to be a public issue.
"Even today, it is very difficult for elected officials to stand up publicly and say, 'You know, I think this is silly, and I really think we should move on.' It's hard to take that position even though there clearly are vast segments of our population that feel that way, and secondly, even though it's obviously the appropriate position to take in an era of enormous budgetary problems and crying needs for governmental attention. And it's even harder at these city council meetings because you get 20 or 30 people that come down, they're very passionate about things; they talk in great measure about things that are largely irrelevant in the sense that they will talk about, 'What kind of community is this for our children?' It's the old notion that somehow what's best for children ought to govern everything in society, and of course, the Supreme Court, in 1956, in a case called Butler v. Michigan, concluded that we are a society which does not condition what's fit to read for adults on the basis of what's fit to read for kids."
Weston ought to know about such notions: It was he, back in 1970, who brought the first lawsuits in California to attempt to legalize oral sex acts between consenting adults - though he notes that it wasn't until Willie Brown, now mayor of San Francisco, championed the cause in the California legislature in '76 that the laws were finally repealed.
The lap-dance ordinance referendum should appear on the next city-wide election ballot in March of 2005, though by expending even more money, the city could put the issue on any earlier election ballot.
Until then, however, dance club patrons will have the same rights to enjoy lap dances and VIP room performances that they've always had.
