First things first – Live Nude Girls Unite! isn’t a sequel to Live Nude Girls, the 1995 sex comedy with Kim Cattrall and Dana Delany (thank God).  Unite! is actually a documentary about a struggling lesbian stand-up comedian who becomes a peep show dancer to make ends meet. While the film starts out as a goofy demonstration of women using their “feminine powers” (read: stripping for men) to get ahead in life, the film quickly focuses on the strippers from a small San Francisco parlor who launch a six-moth battle to become the first unionized strip club in the country.

Julia Query (her stage name) moved from New York City to San Francisco at 27 to become a writer and a comedian, but quickly found that it just wasn’t paying the bills.  She needed a job that paid well but had flexible hours, and found it at the Lusty Lady Theatre.  Sure, Julia could have made more money if she performed in stage shows or gave lap dances at other clubs, but she couldn’t dance (luckily, there’s a pole for her to hold on to at the peep show).  And the Lusty Lady was run by woman managers, so it seemed like a perfect fit for the daughter of a Jewish doctor well known as an activist for safe prostitution in New York.

Before long, however, Julia found out that the club wasn’t all it was cracked up to be.  The management discriminated against, among other things, race, age and hair color.  There was no sick pay and no health insurance, and missing a shift usually resulted in termination.  There was a growing concern that the dancers were being filmed by patrons through one-way mirrors in each private booth.  In general, the girls were getting paid less and less to do more and more, and there was an increased sense of danger to boot.

At the mere mention of the word “union,” the club’s management hired anti-union lawyers to break up the possibility of the dancers banding together.  Unite! follows the trials and tribulations of the lengthy battle to unionize the club’s strippers.  There’s also an interesting subplot, where Julia tries to hide her stripping (and lesbianism) from her distinguished mother.

Co-directed by Query and Vicky Funari, Unite! is a film that would make Michael Moore proud.  It effectively blends serious subject matter with a deft comedic edge.  There’s something very funny about seeing a wall of time cards with names like Velvette, Ginger, Sapphire and Isis, not to mention hearing the strippers chant, “Two, four, six, eight – don’t go in to masturbate” while picketing the club.

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