In his 2024 ED EXPO Keynote Address, film critic and television host Joe Bob Briggs offered his unique perspective on Dallas’ club history and how it evolved. His insight into how legal changes and social attitudes have impacted the adult entertainment industry and his unflappable support of the First Amendment earned him a roaring applause from the crowd followed by a well-deserved standing ovation.
(NOTE: This story appears in the January 2025 issue of ED Magazine.)
Joe Bob Briggs spoke on the history of topless bars in Dallas and shared his perspective on the current state of the industry at the 2024 ED EXPO, delivering an unforgettable Keynote Address that had the audience in fits of laughter. As a journalist, Briggs reported on the hottest go-go clubs and burlesque bars in Dallas dating back to the 1970s, witnessing the evolution of adult nightclubs firsthand. He wrote for publications like the Dallas Observer and D Magazine, allowing him to provide EXPO attendees with his inspiring insight into the city’s past.
Briggs transitioned to a career in television in 1996, hosting “Monstervision” on TNT during which he became known for his wit, insightful commentary and unapologetic love of exploitation films. Today, his legacy continues with “The Last Drive-in with Joe Bob Briggs” on the Shudder streaming service (a division of AMC), further cementing his position as an influential figure in the world of film criticism.
Always a crusader for the First Amendment, his continued support for the adult industry has been invaluable. Before we dive into a selection of comments from his Keynote Address, as Briggs would say, let’s take a look at those Drive-In Totals:
1 Kissing Bandit
3 Fabulous Freebirds
27 Armed Officers in Ski Masks
1 Assault by Blouse Bunnies
1 Invented Legal Term
Gratuitous Legal Brickbat
Gratuitous Hooter Hating
Four stars, ED says check it out!
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Several years ago when I was a reporter for the newspaper here in Dallas, Morganna the Kissing Bandit, do you guys remember her? Morganna the Kissing Bandit? She was a legendary entertainer with a 60-inch bust line, and she made herself famous by running on the baseball diamonds and smooching the players.
Morganna was performing at a topless bar in what was called the “Hooter Heaven” area of Dallas, and she was arrested and charged with assault. They said she had assaulted a man with her boobs. There was a cop in the audience, and he brought up the charges. Well, I was obviously the guy who told that story, so I took some liberties with the terminology. When I reported on the case, I investigated and discovered that she supposedly attacked the customer with her blouse bunnies, apparently boxing his ears while smothering his face deep down in the valley from which few men had emerged alive.
Fortunately for her and for society at large, all the lawyers involved in the case sort of got into the spirit of the club, and they made remarks in court like, “Well, next time she should register those things as lethal weapons,” and “Thank God she didn’t poke an eye out!” And, since the victim did not require hospitalization, she was allowed to plead no contest, and she got a stern warning from the judge: “Don’t point those things unless you intend to use ‘em!”
So, for the rest of Morganna’s career (I think she finally retired around 2009), I would receive an annual Christmas card because she remembered my broad, in-depth coverage of that case, and the event lives on in the collective memory of those of us who believe a little harmless hell raisin’ in close proximity to naked bazoongas has never hurt anybody and possibly contributes to the overall sanity of the world!
I’m recalling that story right now because those days are not only gone but they’re now regarded as a dark age of civic lawlessness that everyone took too lightly.
Nobody got all that upset about Morganna bouncing her bazoongas out there in public, but if she were to show up today and batter somebody’s bald head with her bouncing biddies, she’d be handcuffed, booked, fined, probably jailed for a considerable length of time, the club owner would be in danger of losing his liquor license and the whole incident would be trumpeted seriously as evidence of the depravity of the Dallas underclass. The new Puritans were trying to take away our fun back then, and they’re still trying to take it away today and I’m here to tell them to go to hell.
Now, a little history is in order. At the beginning here in Texas, there were always a lot of titty bars, skank road houses, biker dives, clip joints, all kinds of prefab shacks out on the highway where you see these blinking neon “Girls, Girls, Girls.” We’re going back to the prehistoric ‘70s now. You could be fleeced by the strippers. You could get short-changed by the bartender. If you got rowdy, you would get kicked out into the alley by a bouncer named Hal.
The new Puritans were trying to take away our fun back then, and they’re still trying to take it away today and I’m here to tell them to go to hell.
— Joe Bob Briggs
It was Dallas that made the world safe for exotic dancing. The first thing they did was they stopped calling it exotic dancing. Exotic was always a Bourbon Street word, and it was invented to replace burlesque artists, which, in turn, replaced “stripper.” At some point, “stripper” became a bad term, and so when the Million Dollar Saloon opened in Dallas in 1982 they introduced the term “gentleman’s club.”
Now, at first, they had problems with the term “gentleman’s club” because people thought it was gay. They had to do publicity to say, “No, no, no. We do not mean that only gentlemen are dancing at our club. It’s for gentlemen!” And they would later bill themselves as the first gentleman’s club. It wasn’t much by today’s standards, but they had a dress code, they had a DJ, they had multiple stages, and they had what they called at the time, a VIP room. It cost $3 to go to the VIP room, and they had other amenities, but all of this created something new in the world of exotic dancing. You could walk in the Million Dollar Saloon without feeling like you had a bullseye painted on your forehead.
I don’t know if you guys remember a three-man wrestling team called the Fabulous Freebirds. It was Michael Hayes, Buddy Roberts and Terry Gordy. I don’t know why, but somehow we became friends, I think because of something that I wrote about them. So, I would sometimes join the Freebirds on their adventures out to their gentleman’s club of choice, which was the Million Dollar Saloon. Now, these were serious, hardcore redneck guys. They would headbutt each other to show their excitement when they saw a girl they really liked.
Their whole persona was red, dead, nasty, loud, violent. But when they went to the Million Dollar Saloon, they would wear ties out of respect for the girls. And so I thought, “Oh, my God, this gentleman’s club name thing, it’s working!” If it worked on them, it would work on anybody. So in terms of changing the behavior of guys who went into gentleman’s clubs, it really did!
Now, the club that eventually became the gold standard in this part of the world was a club called Cabaret Royale. In its heyday, which I would say was the ‘80s and the ‘90s, there were dancers based as far away as London who would routinely fly to Dallas on a Thursday afternoon to work three nights at Cabaret Royale and then fly home. The guys behind these clubs should have been regarded as visionaries. Their designs and their management techniques were copied in clubs as far away as Moscow and Buenos Aires, and some of their clubs became publicly traded. However, they were regarded as public enemies.
Without knowing why or what they did wrong, they started a war with the city council and mayor, and they became targets of every legal brickbat the city could throw at them for the past 20 years, and it still goes on today. Several times with their army of lawyers, they agreed to every single thing that the city wanted, but every time a deal was made with the city, the city would pull some kind of bait and switch and then ask for more. For two decades, the city said, “Well, all we want is for you to move away from churches, schools and residences.” When they were done all that got zapped again. Now they don’t like what goes on inside of the club.
This is a great quote from one of the city councilmen. He said, “I just can’t imagine any reason anybody would need to be out after 2 am.” So, shades of the movie “Footloose,” right? Then there was an attempt to pass a rule that probably would have shut down most of the clubs. The six-foot rule, which would have made the lap dance obsolete, probably would have made the table dance obsolete and threatened to return the industry to the standards of Jack Ruby, who owned clubs here in 1962.
For some reason, the topless bars became the focus of everything that was considered depraved about the city, even though the clubs were so squeaky clean that they tried to hire off-duty Dallas police officers as bouncers and parking lot monitors only to have the city pass a law that the cops were not allowed to work there. I won’t go over all the various proposed laws and ordinances that have kept their lawyers busy for the past 40 years, but suffice it to say, the city has never been able to prove that the clubs are unsafe.
So, let’s figure this out psychologically. What is it they really hate about these clubs that they will invent any reason to shut them down? And the answer seems to be simple. The answer seems to be boobs. They just hate boobs! It’s like they didn’t learn anything from the Morgana the Kissing Bandit incident. The fact is, concentrating on why and how clubs have had to defend themselves is beside the point, because the legal reasons are always changing, but the goal remains the same. There’s a consistent pattern of lying, subterfuge, legal fictions practiced by officeholders, practiced by bureaucrats, that add up to one conclusion: they’ve always been trying to drive the clubs out of business.
The real question I want to ask is, who are the hooter haters trying to protect?
— Joe Bob Briggs
Now they’ve never said that in public because that would make for an interesting debate on morality and individual freedoms. Instead, they say, “Well, we have nothing against these operators. They’re entitled to run their businesses without interference, so long as they’re not close to a school, or a church or a residence.” Once the clubs found locations that complied, which in Dallas was maybe 11 percent of the land, the city added other things. They didn’t want clubs to be close to a hospital, a historic district or another club.
Now, the justification for that was always horse hockey. I have yet to find a city official, and I’ve been writing on this topic for a long time, who can point to an actual crime that occurred because a topless bar was close to any of those places. And in fact, in Canada, topless bars can be located almost anywhere, and the expected social chaos has failed to occur in Canada. So the legal record is there for anybody to examine.
The amazing thing about it is that city officials always lie about their intentions, and the topless club owners always tell the truth. They’ve said repeatedly, “We want a coherent and permanent set of rules so we can obey the fucking rules!” They’ve repeatedly sought private meetings with city officials so they could institute more than is required by law so they can run their business in peace without running up millions of legal bills every year. They’ve been better citizens than the elected officials.
What’s more illuminating than the legal fishers, I think, is the way topless bars have been treated by the media. Whenever this subject is discussed, the writer takes one of two texts. One is, “Well, I personally wouldn’t go into one of those places, but I will defend their right to exist.” This is the, “We can tolerate a little sleaze for the sake of free speech” argument. Well, if you wouldn’t go into those places, shut up.
Number two. “A topless bar is a magnet for crime. It’s not the nude dancing, it’s what happens before and after the nude dancing.” This is the argument that’s been used to justify almost every anti-strip club ordinance for the past 50 years, claiming these places are hotbeds for prostitution, drug sales and gunplay. There have been many studies and not one proves this.
It seems to be some kind of ingrained attitude among law enforcement types, because if somebody wants a hooker, what he does is call a hooker. It is not hard to do that! Here, I can Google one for you right now if you’d like. A topless bar is not the right place to go!
Secondly, anybody who’s been to a topless bar knows that every parking lot around those places is illuminated like Yankee Stadium. You can literally read a book any place in a gentleman’s club parking lot. It couldn’t be a worse place to commit a crime.
And third, almost every club has a rule that a dancer who leaves the club with a customer is subject to termination, so that eliminates a whole lot of stuff. The whole “topless bars are a hotbed for crime” argument can be dealt with easily by paying the city of Dallas off-duty cops to provide 24-hour security, both inside and outside the club. The easiest way to make sure nothing happens, make sure everybody gets arrested if it does happen, and it costs the city nothing. Instead, the city has a policy forbidding officers from working in sexually oriented businesses during their off hours.
The concept that nobody can seem to wrap their minds around is that topless bars, especially upscale ones, just might be good for the city. At the very least, they’re innocuous but, judging by the names and the alliances of the attackers, the war against dancing is part and parcel with the whole paranoid conservative backlash of the past few years, based on the idea that the country went to hell in the ‘60s, and it must be forcibly hoisted out of its decadence.
The case that sums up what’s going on here is revealed in the short troubled history of Baby Dolls. Baby Dolls was always a unique institution, but I use this particular club to prove that the root cause of everything is fear of boobs. Baby Dolls is a unique institution that opened in an all-but-derelict shopping center in the early ‘80s and quickly became one of the most popular clubs in the country. It was not the prettiest club, but it was larger than most clubs. It was rowdier. You might say it was blue-collar. There were dozens of girls on the floor at all times, most of them hometown Texas babes.
When the new ordinance came in 1986, the existing clubs were given a number of years to comply with the new regulations. Meaning, they had to move, because that shopping center was too close to everything. Normally when we pass a new law like that the clubs get grandfathered in, but they said, “No, you have three years to get out. The only way you can avoid moving is to argue once a year before the authorities that you would lose money if you were forced to move, but there’s absolutely no other way you could keep your business.”
So a lot of the clubs would go every year and prove that they can’t move or they’ll lose business, but it was difficult to do that. Baby Dolls didn’t like the uncertainty of going through that process of proving every year that they couldn’t move, so they decided they would just stay where they were and cease being a sexually oriented business. There’s a different kind of license you can get if the dancers cover up, so they just brought back the era of pasties.
Once Baby Dolls became a bikini bar, it technically became a dance hall, not a sexually oriented business. The issue should have been over right there, but the city was pissed that they did that, and so there ensued a series of arguments about the precise definition of nudity and the actual form that a pastie could take.
There’s a consistent pattern of lying, subterfuge, legal fictions practiced by officeholders, practiced by bureaucrats, that add up to one conclusion: they’ve always been trying to drive the clubs out of business.
— Joe Bob Briggs
The first Baby Dolls pasties were clear latex. The city called that “simulated nudity.” They invented a new legal term, brought it to court and ruled that illegal. So Baby Dolls put food coloring in the latex, but still, it was not okay. The city wasn’t satisfied. There were arguments about the precise percentage of the nipple that was exposed, which became very difficult to enforce if you’re a cop, especially since you could see greater percentages in a Victoria’s Secret ad.
There was more or less a constant amendment to the definition of the word “topless” for many years after this ordinance was passed, and Baby Dolls eventually got sick of the whole thing. They were seeking to have a peaceful existence, so they moved to their current legal location in a warehouse district a couple of miles away.
The real question I want to ask is, who are the hooter haters trying to protect? Are they trying to protect the dancer? Because the six-foot rule will put the dancer out of business. Are they trying to protect the customer? I doubt anyone would advise the argument that the customer needs to be shielded from a drug transaction from a naked woman. Are they trying to shield the public? Where are the crimes? Aside from the violations of the judge ordinance, which got prosecuted many times, there is so much less crime in these places than in any Texas beer tavern or roadhouse you can name.
One of our worst police chiefs ever a few years back, in order to prove crime existed at Baby Dolls and that they were not making these things up, sent 27 armed officers in ski masks to arrest everybody in the club one night. They ran every ID for warrants. Zero convictions. Zero drug dealers. Zero prostitutes. Just a lot of scared cowboys trying to call their wives to say they’d be home really late tonight.
So my question is, is this really what America has come to? You know, I don’t think so. I don’t think any normal American wants to spend money on doing crap like that. I admire all of you guys who own clubs or work in clubs or work in the industry. I admire you so much for putting up with everything you have to go through just to run a business. You may not think of yourselves this way, but you are actually crusaders for the First Amendment.
All those legal bills, all that reporting that you have to do, all that paperwork, all that wrangling with the police and wrangling with the politicians. You are fighting battles for people who can’t afford to fight those battles. So you are fighting for free expression, individual choice and of course, the sacred right to party and to party however you want to party. May you prosper and may you make the world safe for boobs!
