YAS Podcast: Cat Hollis #21 Transcript
Cat Hollis is a revolutionary, a force to be reckoned with and a very high in demand person. They have created the PDX Stripper Strike movement and is the driving force. From Portland, Cat gave us the lowdown. This is one amazing stripper and activist!
*This transcript was auto-generated and may contain minor errors.* Begin transcript after opening credits.
AM: Hey there. Welcome back to another episode of Yes, a stripper podcast. Crazy times. We’re in still the same, still in the room, still in the bedroom not in the studio yet, but it’s been really great because not being in the studio means that we’re able to have these interviews with different people around the world, around the country, in different parts.
Because when we were doing podcasts in the studio, it was like if you were in LA you were getting interviewed, right? And it’s cute and everything, and I liked it, but I’ve just been having such a great time getting to know other people of the community and other parts of the world and other parts. Of the country, and especially during this time because strippers are revolting.
They are starting revolutions and they’re, it’s happening in more than one place. And, everyone’s starting to pay attention. And it’s I feel like I’ve been yelling about these problems for the last 12 years, and it’s finally everyone’s yeah, okay. I get it.
So it [00:01:00] feels like really relieving in a way but also just so exciting and what’s going to happen next. And also, I have to tell you, there’s something really fulfilling about getting on the phone with a stripper. In a different part of the country and feeling right away, like you’re in the dressing room with her.
And that’s a really special connection that I think only strippers really understand. So I am meeting a new stripper for the first time, and she’s on this show today and she’s calling in from Portland. I want you all to welcome Kat to the show. Kat, we please say hello to everyone.
Cat: Hi everybody. Hi.
I’m so happy to be here.
AM: Thank you so
Cat: much. Long time listener. First time caller.
AM: Oh hi. Oh, that’s great. Have you been listening?
Cat: No,
I haven’t had any time to be honest with you. I just
AM: think, I’m sure. I’m sure
Cat: it’s what you say when you call into a show, but I have been following. I think Tipper is amazing. And I think that yes, a stripper [00:02:00] is super necessary.
AM: Thank you. Yeah. It is just, it’s really important for the actual workers to have a platform with their voice.
And I really try to make sure that we have guests on here that aren’t like super famous, well known. They have all the platforms. Let’s give the actual people on the ground the platform to speak about what’s happening. And that’s the whole point. And tell everyone where you’re calling from, where are you at in the world?
Cat: So I am in Portland, Oregon. I’m actually at a safe house right now. I’ve had a lot of blow back as far as the white supremacist community in Portland goes, not appreciating my work. So I have been moving from Safe House to Safe House every couple of days and trying to keep myself safe. So I’m in an undisclosed location in Portland, Oregon.
Okay. And I am on day. I’m on day 26 of our strike here in Portland, and I’m on day [00:03:00] seven of not being able to go back to my own home because I’ve been doxed.
AM: Yeah, when you’re making big, risky moves like that. That happens. Yeah.
Cat: I’ve heard before that video games, if video games have taught me anything, it’s that running into enemies means you’re going the right direction.
The more serious people’s reaction is and the more, the more people are like, it’s directly upsetting, racist. I’m like, this is going really well. Yay. And it’s easy enough. I feel like I have put myself forward as the face of the movement and it’s become really easy for me to protect my fellow dancers.
And just people in the adult industry in general, by creating this sort of like bubble of awareness around me, that people know who I am. If they wanna martyr me, that’s fine, but the wave is much bigger than me. And so we only have to keep one person. Moving and safe versus trying to make sure that all of us are safe.
And so it really allows us a lot more freedom [00:04:00] as far as talking to the press and things like that goes because I’ve just, I’ve lost my privacy.
AM: Yeah. You said a few things, and I wanna make sure the audience has some context, so we know that you’re, and I know what you’re doing. You’re protesting, you’re in Portland, your strippers.
So let’s talk about what exactly fueled this fire to begin your strike. How
Cat: did
AM: it all start?
Cat: The strike really took off on. And there’s, just to be very clear, there’s been stripper strikes in the past. New Orleans did a stripper strike a couple of years ago, as well as
AM: New
Cat: York, Giselle Marie in New York less glitz.
Bless Giselle Marie and bless their building. They’re doing amazing work, but really how it catalyzed in Portland was. Blackout Tuesday happened, and there was a club who had put Black Lives Matter signs all over their stage in a closed club. So there’s nobody in there, there’s [00:05:00] nobody coming through.
And they plastered the whole stage with signs that they had gotten for free. And what ended up happening was people were commenting on the speed and saying, you have more Black Lives Matter signs on that stage than you ever have had black, but. Because many of us, have felt the sting of showing up for auditions after, you call in, Hey, can I audition this afternoon?
They say, yes, of course. And then you show up and suddenly the manager is not there, or suddenly they’re not contracting that day. And so I feel like a lot of black strippers in Portland had experienced this. And as the discussion is happening dancers from that particular club were feeling like they needed to defend the club against our allegations.
And I think that one of the things that was really interesting was one of the, one of the dancers at the club said, I get that this is upsetting and it’s hard because we don’t, we have some POC dancers, but not really black dancers. And I don’t know what you want the [00:06:00] girls to do.
What do you want individual dancers at this club to do because we can’t change the club. And I said, I think the best thing to do would be a general strike. Let’s all throw our hands up and say, we won’t work at a club that doesn’t hire brown butts. And why don’t white women stand up with us?
And I was really surprised because they did, and this club had been open as a food delivery service. And I don’t feel it necessary to mention their name because they don’t need more advertising. Okay. But they are signed on with us at this point, doing a food delivery service, but exclusively four or five dancers who were generally white passing, or white, who were the only dancers working in the whole city, and they were making maybe $75. And people were contacting me and being like, oh, you didn’t get unemployment. Why don’t you just go work for this delivery service? And I was like that because they didn’t hire me before.
They’re half staff now. There’s nothing to do. Those dancers at that club stopped working and they [00:07:00] went on strike for a week in solidarity with us until the club would sign on
AM: the delivery girls.
Okay. Gotcha. That.
Cat: And it’s just that, it’s just that, dancers often have to defend clubs for doing all sorts of things because we advertise for these clubs.
Our livelihood is through these clubs. And so asking them to change often means losing your employment opportunity. Or not employment, excuse me, work opportunity.
And and so I think this is a rare time when, especially dancers have this opportunity to get ’em in their wallets. Yeah.
And really say, if you’re only hiring four people back, those four people have every hole in order to say what they want. Because we’re independent contractors, we can say whatever we want to, having our contracts,
AM: Technically, yeah, but they, history, they don’t do that for us.
Like they don’t, they’re
Cat: so
AM: they write the contracts and then they expect us to adhere to it, and we don’t say anything. We just sign it. That’s been
Cat: his.
And so part of what we’ve, [00:08:00] part of what we’ve really discovered in that, I think you hit the nail on the head, is that we signed these contracts.
We don’t necessarily know what’s in them. And I have found that a lot of times I don’t get a copy of my contract. And so how am I supposed to even know? And that’s, that is not something that is really legal. When you sign a contract, even McDonald’s, Walgreens has to give you a contract.
When you buy a Snickers bar, that is a, that receipt is a contract that you said, I gave you a dollar, you gave a bar. What we’ve done, because we, that. The failings in the past have been around reclassification of our employment status from 10 99 independent contractors into W2 employees. We are trying to cut out that argument and say, no.
What we’re looking for are civil rights. And these civil rights apply whether or not you are a dancer, whether or not you’re a bartender, whether or not you’re a client, customer. Because we are all part of federally [00:09:00] protected classes, whether or not you are a woman, gay, black, there’s really, I’m sure that there are some straight cis men in our community but for the most part they’ve been showing up for us.
Now. And so I, because we’re all part of these protected classes, we have the right to make a good faith. Observation to a business that they have not been compliant with anti-discrimination law that exists on a federal level. If you lose your contract because you advocated for protected classes, that’s a problem.
So like I give the example of you’re working for a carpenter company that’s building a lollipop shop, and, you’re almost done and you say to your boss hey man this lollipop shop has seven steps in the front and no wheelchair ramp. If the lollipop shop cuts your contract, if the contractor cuts your carpenter contract because you said, Hey, I think you need a handicap ramp, that is not okay, right?
It is not, you can’t, and so the thing is, at a certain point, they’re a place of business. Our [00:10:00] relationship to them does not matter. Them as a business. Oh, excuse me. I don’t mean to make that symbol. Their business entity has requirements by law for reasonable public accommodations. This is some Jim Crow stuff of like lunch counter, sit-in.
Separate is not equal all power to all the people. Like their stop telling black girls to go to the black club. Oh, that’s not our look, you need to go to a black club. That’s not. Legal at all, and the fact that we don’t have a contract at that club doesn’t matter. Them turning us away is enough.
You being a concerned citizen in your community, going up to your lolly, local lollipop shop and saying, Hey, I think you guys need a wheelchair ramp. That’s a responsibility of every citizen to demand of our local businesses.
And because these businesses pay interstate tax, they have a requirement to follow federal procedures.
This is actually how they ended Jim Crow in the south as well, is that they sh were able to show that, okay, so like you’re in Podunk, middle of [00:11:00] nowhere that hasn’t hasn’t changed any of its laws and is okay with segregation. That’s fine. The state didn’t vote to desegregate. Your city didn’t vote to desegregate, but I see that you have salt on your counter and that’s from Utah and I see that you have apples over there and those are from Washington.
I see that you have cheese over there and that’s from. Wisconsin, which means you are not a private entity only in your state. You are a federal entity. And so as long as you’re paying interstate taxes, you have to apply to reasonable accommodations for protected classes. So we are not even, we are just a collective of invested in of.
Excuse me, of vested individuals. And what that means is that we have the ability to advocate for our community as a whole, including sex workers who are not strippers or do not have clubs to work at, including the customers who come in and aren’t allowed in because they have a passport from Mexico or they’re wearing a red hoodie and the bouncers being, crappy.
We have a right and a responsibility as citizens of this country to. [00:12:00] Advocate for these protected classes. And the cool thing about it is, as you advocate for that, it falls down into the rest of our rights of labor rights and of of trans rights and of gay rights and of gender identity and and class.
And so those things are actually really well protected. And it’s been suggested to me that if you’re ever concerned about where your rights stop, right? Oh, I can do all this and then I’m an independent contractor and I run out of rights. Instead start from a place of what would you be doing if those rights didn’t exist in the first place?
You had no contract with this club. You still have a right to have a grievance with a place of business due to non due to lack of non-discrimination policy.
It doesn’t matter if you’re a stripper, you can go into any place of seriously, it’s so much fun. Go into your local, I don’t know, McDonald’s, Starbucks, and say, what’s your non-discrimination policy?
They have it under the left side of the counter. Every employee, every manager has to be [00:13:00] trained on where that non-discrimination policy is. Because in that non-discrimination policy, it has a process of plan for reporting grievances. So if your business has not recorded those grievances or has a policy in place to report those grievances, that’s part of the problem.
So if you’ve complained to a club manager and it didn’t get to the owner, that’s a problem. If you talk to a bouncer and they did nothing, that’s a problem.
Because there’s no system in place,
AM: but you bring up a really excellent point, but like. Why the fuck aren’t they doing this? How has this happened?
I’m just like that. I’m sitting here and I’ve been a stripper for 18 years and I’m like, yeah, it’s great. And but like how
Cat: so the,
AM: all these owners gotten away with this,
Cat: The thing is, and so it’s really, I think it’s helpful to look back into previous. Civil rights movements and both reflect on and reflect those movements.
And if you look at how Jim Crow was overthrown [00:14:00] is that Jim Crow was a defacto, system, so everything was on paper. If these clubs would like to write down in their non-discrimination policy that they only hire white dancers who have tattoos and dance to rock and roll, by all means, go ahead and write that down in your company policy and see how that goes.
But it needs to be written down. And so at a certain point, excuse me, at a certain point it is deur racism. So defacto is on paper, it’s written down, it’s practiced widely throughout the community. Things like redlining, things like voter ID laws, those are all defacto racism and discrimination versus UR is today.
And it’s racism. Ur like the soup deur. Yeah. Yeah. And the idea is that. As long as there is no way to. They’ve just been isolating us, is the answer. And I think every dancer has spent a night at 2:00 AM trying to figure out who to tell about an assault, [00:15:00] about something, about racism, about, a bouncer extorting them for tips. Or a dj, trying to bang ’em in the back and like we’re done sucking dicks for Friday shifts, like that’s over. Yeah,
AM: totally.
Yeah,
Cat: and I think that’s something that everybody can get behind. And the reason it’s been happening so long is ’cause they will scrub one person at a time and there’s always new butts for those seats.
And God bless the baby strippers, I love them. But part of the problem in the past is because we tried to unionize, it puts a concrete system into place. That then the next generation is held to these standards, but it’s from the dancer side. And we need to hold the clubs responsible because they are the place of business.
They are the ones who are responsible for providing us with a safe and effective work environment.
And it doesn’t matter if we’re independent contractors, you don’t have to contract at a club. That doesn’t protect you and that ability and that privilege doesn’t exist for black dancers because when we have to leave a club, there’s only [00:16:00] one other club.
That we can work at. And so it is white dancer’s responsibility at this point to make sure that those clubs that have the ability to push people out, we’re blackballing them. And I think everybody hasn’t knows that term. And that complaints get you blackballed and then you can’t work at any clubs?
There are so many of us. We are in 17 states. In Portland we have 27 clubs. That are signed on and I think over 50 local businesses who have intent on going to cultural sensitivity training, addressing their written policy and trying to be, create a system that’s in compliance to the current law.
Because that’s the problem is that. If you’re making a good faith argument that someone has broken the law, you actually have a lot of protections, like as a whistleblower in the public as a, as just a citizen of the United States. And so addressing these concerns instead of as individuals ’cause us having a problem with the club [00:17:00] is an individual problem and they can just not contract us.
But if we are. Focus in on defending the rights of others and getting them compliant with current law. There is no they literally cannot say no to us. They need to give a copy of their non-disclosure or of their anti-discrimination policy. And luckily because of Me Too, a lot of non-disclosure agreements.
Around reporting crime have been scrubbed
AM: right,
Cat: O over the next five years. A lot of those laws are passing, so I just really encourage people to like, look up your local liquor code.
AM: And that’s where Kat’s interview got cut off. Her phone overheated and she couldn’t connect back to Zoom. And Kat’s time is extremely valuable right now and in very high demand with the stripper strike.
Heating up not only in Portland, but in several cities across the country. Kat is the leader of all of this and [00:18:00] she’s the catalyst for this. So you can imagine how much time is being demanded from her. We are hopefully going to catch up with her at another time when she’s made more headway.
And in the meantime, we’d like you to check out the Rolling Stone article that just came out featuring CAT and all of the stripper strike gang babes that are working so hard and so tirelessly to create real industry reform and change for us. And there’s so many of us watching and so proud of the work that they’re doing, and so just really please make sure that you support these babes.
Please follow them. P dx, stripper strike on Instagram. And you can find Cat at Pussy Control, but pussy control is spelled with underscores and an X. So we’re gonna look that up for you, right? And here we go. It’s lower dash [00:19:00] P-X-S-S-Y control. Lower dash. Lower dash. Alright, so it’s pussy controlled, but the.
The A is an X, or the U is an X instead. Go ahead and follow her there, follow her journey show support to these amazing strippers. And yeah, and hopefully we’ll be able to get a more in depth interview with Kat when she has the time. So show your support. Friends, thanks so much for tuning into Yes or stripper podcast.
This is a short episode. We’ll see you next week. Bye. If you have any
Cat: questions, comments, or concerns, you can email us
AM: at yes, a stripper podcast@gmail.com. Be sure to follow us on Instagram at Yes at stripper podcast, and you can catch the show on YouTube, Spotify, SoundCloud, anywhere that you can find podcasts.
We hope you tune in next week. I’ve been your host, AM Davies. See you soon.