Morality at Play
As Reno perpetually rebrands, parts of the Biggest Little City which persist don’t always fit wished for narratives.
“We used to be known as a city full of vice if you want to call watching strippers a vice, but I don't know, Reno is trying to get away from that,” said Mark Thierman, from his Lakeside Dr. office at the Thierman Buck Law Firm.
As part of his recent workload, he filed a lawsuit late last year on behalf of eight strippers seeking $15 million in a class-action case, arguing that new constraints placed on clubs were prejudiced and unjust. 2019 Reno licensing requirements now ban women younger than 21 from working in strip clubs, but has no restrictions on male dancers.
“They seem to wanna, you know, treat these women differently for no good reason, no scientifically valid reason. So I sued on behalf of those under 21, because there is both sex and age discrimination,” Thierman explained.
Thierman believes the city is using what he calls the “Stripper Archetype” as alleged victim to crack down on the strip club business model.
“The whole myth or mythology about strippers being poor or underprivileged people I mean some of these women are making fifty to a hundred thousand dollars a year. And this is a living it's just as much of one as anything else,” he said in our interview.
“These women are marginalized for no reason. They’re just being told -because most of them are women-they have to be protected against themselves or against the world or something like that. And every time we've gone through this with city or whoever else you, they realize that these women make very good money. Some have professional degrees. They are not the victims that people wanna make them out to be. If they want to be helped they will either help themselves or reach out for help which they're not doing, and so it's not a question of morality and victimization. It’s just a question of one group asserting their political or moral views on another.”
Thierman above was interviewed on a local lawyer show in 2014 about a case involving Amazon workers.
Supreme Court Precedent
In the Supreme Court decision of Schad v. Borough of Mount Ephraim, the Supreme Court ruled that nude dancing has First Amendment protection from official regulation. The ruling means municipalities such as Reno cannot impose a complete ban on live entertainment, including nonobscene nude dancing.
“When you legislate morality, you wind up with nothing but problems,” Thierman told Our Town Reno.
“They (Reno City Council members) really didn’t consider the strippers financial situation or, you know, their livelihood...My fear is that they will lose hope and either move out of the area, which is a shame to lose their family connections, or they will drift over on to other things which may not be as healthy.”
He says there has been a long tug of war history between strip clubs and the city of Reno, with Thierman helping play defense in recent years. He believes local government should let residents and market realities be the deciders.
“If people don't want to live next to a strip club, they won't. If the strip club wasn't making money, it would go out of business, you know. The market will take care of everything if you just give it a chance.”
Unemployment Benefits Now at Stake
A Reno exotic dancer also joined a 2020 class action lawsuit filed by Thierman against Nevada over her inability with others to get pandemic unemployment benefits as self-employed workers, with stage dancing still not allowed to this day and other occupations such as massage therapy shut down for months as well.
The case has been before the Nevada 2nd Judicial District Court and the Nevada Supreme Court, but remains mired in delays in terms of getting a satisfactory conclusion for his clients.
“We believe that the eight declarations from class members that we filed, plus the two declarations from our staff showing official DETR documents and a summary of the content of class member communication, describes the typical experiences and frustrations most self-employed gig workers are having with DETR,” Thierman wrote in a letter posted in June.
In October, a judge in the Second Judicial District Court in Nevada set a hearing for early December to determine if the state is in contempt and disobeying an earlier court order to pay unemployment benefits for Thierman’s clients in a timely manner. Thierman is not about to let that lawsuit or any fight he is involved in go by quietly.