This film relates the efforts of "exotic dancers" at a San Francisco establishment called The Lusty Lady to organize a labor union and improve their working conditions.
The narrator and central character is Julia Query, a feminist, Jewish, lesbian, stand-up comic, who turned to stripping to make ends meet. The film relates the conditions the strippers worked under, how they decided to organize the union and negotiated their first contract. The club apparently engaged in arbitrary and discriminatory practices, for example, classifying the dancers by race, hair color and other physical attributes.
Negotiating the first contract took many months and the film shows the agony of making decisions on what was and was not negotiable.
On the one hand the dancers do have legitimate grievances, on the other the work they do is sleazy and some would say antisocial and not to be encouraged. While their working conditions are not ideal, they are not coal miners or migrant workers. Compared to some other jobs, strippers have it pretty easy.
Another plot line of the film is Julia's relationship with her mother. Her mother is a physician in New York, who as it happens, works with prostitutes. Julia has not told her mother what she does for a living. When Julia is asked to speak at a conference on the "sex industry" she discovers her mother will also be at the conference and she can no longer put off revealing her occupation to her mother. Needless to say, her mother is not at all pleased and the two become estranged for some months.
The film has moments of humor and drama. The production values are amateurish, in some scenes the color is off (although that could have been due to the poor quality of the print). The film contain adult language and nudity.
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