When KB, my event producer, stormed into the green room of my space-laser-themed burlesque Shabbat, she immediately pressed her mouth to my ear and asked, “Where exactly is the new go-go dancer from?”
From her clipped tone, I could tell whatever was going to come out of her mouth next was going to be pejorative.
Under different circumstances, I would’ve told her the truth. But there were three hundred attendees outside waiting to be entertained, and I didn’t have the energy for a conversation that would inevitably begin and end with judgment.
So I shrugged.
“Instagram.”
Because I just didn’t have the bandwidth to explain to KB that I hired a stripper from AA.
The first time they shared at a meeting, I was struck by the potency of their story and the near-alarming candor with which they told it. JJ had studied classical music at NYU and had been one of the most promising musicians in their program. They were the type who gets accepted into wildly competitive opportunities and is destined to “make it.” And maybe they would have, if being a musician were a matter of talent alone.
But over the years, they incinerated every opportunity that came their way. Each time something good appeared, their alcoholism found a way to burn it to the ground, striking the match of disrepair over and over again until there was nothing left.
“I became a stripper because I didn’t have any options. But I’ll be honest, I love being a stripper.”
JJ spoke to the AA meeting with an earnestness that caught me off guard.
“I do. It’s a place where I get to meet the lost toys.”
When I got home, I looked up JJ on social media and found a video of them playing the clarinet. The music itself was exacting and beautiful but the contrast between their talent and the grimy dive bar surrounding them was so stark it felt haunting.
Eventually, my curiosity got the better of me, and I approached them. It was right after a meeting as we drifted toward the customary spread of lukewarm coffee and Trader Joe’s cookies.
At first, JJ was skittish, shy to the point of seeming antisocial. But when I asked where they performed, they slowly began to open up, eventually inviting me to a show they were producing. The show was exactly what I’d expected: half-hidden in the basement of a bar, with a sparse audience made up of visibly queer Bushwick types and a handful of strange, lurking men.
But JJ seemed completely unconcerned with the size of the crowd or the grunge of their surroundings. Their attention was fixed entirely on the performers: fat, queer, trans, artists who did live piercings, taxidermy drag, and aerial routines performed to voicemails of ex-lovers.
JJ mother-henned all of them with such tenderness and devotion that watching them felt like a performance in its own right. With strong but tender hands, they sprayed wigs, threaded safety pins through costumes, adjusted loose straps, and double-swept and mopped the sticky floors so nobody would trip. JJ’s shows weren’t just where they booked acts, it was where they built a refuge.
There was no performer who seemed better suited for my Burlesque Shabbat, a gathering where edgy Jews congregate precisely because they’re considered too sinful or strange for the more polite corners of Jewish life.
But I was wrong.
Within minutes of arriving in the green room, JJ had somehow managed to alienate half the cast.
Not only had they irritated KB, who described them as “abrasive and annoying,” but they’d apparently gotten into an argument with one of my lyra performers.
By the end of the night, KB had made it clear that she did not expect JJ would be invited back and to be honest, I wasn’t planning on booking JJ again either.
Then, as all parties do, it came to an end.
The audience filtered out and the performers packed up. The stage kitten left, followed by KB. Even my closest friends drifted away, pulled toward other parties or the promise of sleep.
Yet JJ stayed.
“I know what it’s like to clean up a green room alone,” they said simply.
And because they understood, because I was exhausted, because there are few lonelier feelings than being left behind to clean up after everyone else has gone home, when JJ grabbed a trash bag and started picking up empty bottles and crumpled chip bags, I let them.
It was only after an hour of cleaning, talking, making increasingly questionable mocktails out of warm fruit punch, and eventually lying flat on the floor, that I finally asked JJ what had happened with the performer they’d gotten into a fight with earlier that night.
They turned toward me and laughed.
“She was saying that when men tell women they prefer a shaved pussy, it’s an act of violence against feminism.”
I raised an eyebrow.
“And what did you say?”
JJ shrugged.
“I said this is why fascists won the election.”
I stared at them.
JJ let out a long sigh.
“Let men have pubic hair preferences and reserve the term violence against feminism for when it, I don’t know...matters.”
I looked at the nonbinary person in front of me—the thick eyeliner, the half-shaved head, the blue hair—and the shock must have registered on my face because they laughed.
“Look,” they said, nudging me. “I might be a woke they/them, but I’m not going along with every hill the tender-queers want to die on.”
This habit of refusing to fall neatly in line was precisely why many of my performers disliked JJ. For many leftist people, to be “in community” is to be in a unified front, and JJ challenged that. They weren’t afraid to disagree with the social groups they were fundamentally a part of.
Rather, they approached ideas with genuine curiosity. Thinking carefully about each topic they touched, often changing their mind to make space for contradiction and nuance. It made JJ unwelcome in many of the leftist spaces they inhabited, but I liked it. So, I kept bringing them back.
The only time I ever told JJ they couldn’t perform was when I knew they were relapsing.
There were stretches where sobriety seemed to slip through their fingers. I’d text them and tell them to reach out when they were back in meetings. Then I’d hear about them through the grapevine, through performers who’d witnessed some drunken outburst or humiliating scene. The gossip always arrived with the same exasperated amusement.
Can you believe it?
Could I believe it? Of course I could.
Because for years I’d been the girl with the hundred-thousand-dollar culinary education who got fired from nearly every job she ever took. I was the girl who showed up to work drunk, who ruined her sister’s birthday, who spent months begging for forgiveness, only to relapse all over again.
I don’t excuse the things JJ did while in the depths of their addiction.
But when JJ got canceled by the entire New York burlesque community, when friends turned on them, when strangers on the internet picked apart their failures for sport, when club after club quietly decided there would never again be a place for them on the bill, I felt something inside me rupture. I wasn’t just furious. I was willing to burn down every bridge standing in the way of telling this story.
JJ had a client they knew from stripping, a regular at clubs where they worked, a guy who went by the moniker “Mr. Chu,” who bought lap dances from them. When JJ brought Mr. Chu to a show and he touched a performer without consent, JJ handled it in what, at the time, seemed like the logic of nightlife damage control: telling him directly that it wasn’t okay and temporarily prohibiting him from the club. The rationale was that as a patron of strippers, he genuinely did not understand the difference in etiquette between a strip club and a burlesque show.
But a few months later, JJ brought Mr. Chu to a show they were not producing, and another transgression of a performer’s physical boundaries happened.
This time, several months after the incident, the performer he touched without consent made a public post describing how violated she felt, and the local burlesque scene shared it to everyone, each repost carrying the same warning: Don’t let this guy in, protect your performers. Several other performers shared similar experiences of boundary-crossing or creepy advances from Mr. Chu while JJ was not present. Personal accounts ranged in severity, and I do not doubt any claims of this man’s shitty, abusive behavior.
When I first witnessed the online outcry, I admired how this small community rallied to protect performers from predatory men. It’s an issue I take seriously in my own work as a producer.
But there was almost no meaningful way for the community to punish Mr. Chu himself. He was basically just some random creepy client with a burner-ish social media presence and no real ties to the scene. The person who could be held publicly accountable was JJ.
The story online rapidly stopped being “a man behaved inappropriately at a show” and became “JJ brought a predator into a safe space.” And as these things tend to do online, the accusations escalated with each retelling.
Because JJ had met this man through sex work, and because JJ existed in this blurry overlap between stripping and burlesque, the narrative mutated into JJ grooming performers into sex work and facilitating abuse.
The language in the tiny burlesque scene soon became carceral. It was demanded JJ not only be banned from producing, but banned from performing and effectively exiled from the scene entirely.
So, JJ tried to engage with their consequences. They reached out to a self-appointed mediator in the space and did their best to repent, but each step they took to move toward absolution was rejected. Their apology wasn’t long enough, so they made it longer, more specific, more self-critical.
They attempted to apologize to each individual person they harmed as the mediator told them to do, but most people blocked them on social media, making direct communication literally impossible.
So the process became circular. The stated demand was accountability, but no form of accountability was actually capable of resolving the situation. There was no off-ramp where JJ could meaningfully re-enter community life because, by that point, the real social objective seemed less about repair and more about disappearance, an opportunity to finally push a deeply messy person out of the scene for good.
So JJ lost everything. They lost friends, collaborators, venues, shows. People either blocked them outright or sent the more cowardly message of: I don’t think you’re unsafe, but I don’t want to lose my community too.
And that was the real punishment. Not just losing gigs, but losing the small world they had spent years building. In the three years before their cancelation, through active alcoholism and obvious personal collapse, JJ still religiously produced little dive-bar burlesque shows every month making sure there was a stage for people who didn’t have one anywhere else and then those same people turned on them.
That is the part I still find so devastating. Because these were people who chanted the language of supporting sex workers, believing in restorative justice, protecting addicts, making space for neurodivergent people, holding complexity. But the second it became sticky and those politics required actual discomfort, risk, or social consequence, it became clear how little of it was deeply held. How much of it was vocabulary and costuming: a set of words people used to recognize one another in the dark.
I talked to JJ throughout this, watching them lose show after show in real time. A venue would announce them, and then the internet mob would descend. The same leftists who talked endlessly about the violence of policing queer people suddenly became cops with better eyeliner, a group I called Glitter Cops.
The Glitter Cops started going show to show, venue to venue, messaging every producer JJ was attached to to take JJ off their lineup. And most people complied immediately because, honestly, if you’re some exhausted Brooklyn show producer barely making rent off ticket sales, you don’t want to touch a social media firestorm with a ten-foot pole. They didn’t care about the drama, they just saw a tidal wave of moral panic and decided it was safer to cut JJ loose than risk becoming collateral damage.
Every show dropped JJ except mine, I kept JJ on the lineup for the Red Scare Shabbat
Part of why I felt so strongly about it was because of the theme itself. The Red Scare, historically, was a period where the American government and public institutions branded artists and performers as socially dangerous people whose ideas and presence needed to be eradicated from public life. Careers were destroyed less through formal punishment than through collective fear and social contagion.
So it felt grotesquely hypocritical to make a show about political hysteria and blacklisting while simultaneously participating in the exact same impulse. Here was a performer already in the throes of public expulsion, I couldn’t get myself to cut JJ too just because it was socially safer.
Until the call…
Less than a week before the show, one of the performers reached out asking to have a call. I get on Zoom and suddenly there are four or five other performers there telling me they’ve been contacted by the Glitter Cops, that people are saying JJ is unsafe, and that they don’t really know the full story but they’re uncomfortable performing if JJ is in the lineup.
Then people began sharing their own stories. Not stories about assault or predation, but stories about JJ being drunk at shows. Stories about the particular selfishness and volatility that addiction leaves in its wake.
Soon, JJ’s alcoholism collapsed into one larger narrative.
The language on the zoom began to shift to words like predator and groomer.
I had to close my laptop because I wanted to scream.
I wanted to scream that every time they treated this person as disposable, every time they tried to make them disappear, they were talking about me too.
Because I am not the rule.
I am the exception.
I am the addict who got a second act. The addict who found an audience willing to call her dysfunction authenticity and her volatility honesty. I took traits that would have made me unemployable and repackaged them as content.
The internet found me charming but that’s just framing, baby.
The truth is that I didn’t survive addiction because I was better than JJ.
I survived because enough people looked at me in my worst moments and saw a person instead of a verdict.
That being said, as a producer, I was suddenly faced with a much more practical question: do I hold to my principles, or do I risk losing half my cast three days before the event?
In the end, I took JJ off the show.
A show they’d spent weeks preparing for, painstakingly building a custom routine and handmaking a costume that would never make it onstage.
I went up to Harlem to break the news in person, and, if I’m honest, part of me hoped they’d make a scene. I hoped they’d argue, bargain, call me a hypocrite and coward because any of that would’ve felt easier than what actually happened.
JJ just nodded.
“Yeah,” they said. “I know. I get it…I’m sorry I caused you so much trouble.”
What gutted me wasn’t that they apologized for the drama, it was that they apologized for the inconvenience of their own collapse.
So, I made JJ a promise that day, I told them: I’m going to bring you back.
I knew the act I wanted JJ to perform and I told them as much over coffee the following week.
“I want you to play the clarinet, I mean you can do an act after but I want people to hear you play.”
JJ’s eyebrows thread together before they said, “I mean… I think I could do it on the pole. Like I could probably play clarinet while spinning on the pole.”
Weeks leading up to the show, they kept bracing for the other shoe to drop. Almost every day they’d text me some version of: Hey, if you need to take me off the lineup, just let me know in advance. I understand.
They were terrified to even be publicly announced, terrified of the Glitter Cops, terrified of being torn down yet again. I’d never seen someone tremble so hard backstage, before performing what I can only describe as a religious experience.
It was the first time in almost six months that JJ had been allowed to perform for a room bigger than twenty people and by complete coincidence, or maybe fate, it also happened to fall on their hundredth day sober.
Which is almost unimaginable when your entire life exists inside bars, when your income comes from stripping, when every shift ends with shots, when every green room smells like tequila and cigarettes and stale beer. They got sober in the exact environment most designed to keep them drunk.
JJ walked onstage looking completely unlike the other performers. Everyone else looked theatrical and polished but JJ looked raw, like the person you see at a strip club, micro-bikini, platform heels, bruised knees. Not the fantasy of a sex worker, a real one. The stripper who takes warm money from old men and hand-washes sequins at four in the morning.
I held my breath as JJ got on the pole and began to play.
The punk-klezmer piece sounded almost like grief itself. The room was suddenly overtaken with the kind of silence that happens when people realize they are witnessing something they will never see again.
Because nobody else could do that act.
Nobody else is a conservatory-trained musician who became a stripper. The addict who claws their way to a hundred days sober while being publicly exiled from the only community they’d ever known. The person who had lost almost everything and still climbed onto a stage to make a beautiful thing no one else could.
It didn’t feel like a performance. It felt like a body standing under stage lights repeating the same impossible sentence over and over again:
I exist.
For six months JJ had been treated like contagion and for four minutes they transcended all of it.
The act ended and the room detonated into applause. But the moment JJ stepped backstage, they folded, sobbing with exhaustion and relief, the type of tears ripped from somewhere ancient and humiliated.
Later, after they had calmed down, I told them I wanted to take a photo together and when they quietly declined I insisted, “I don’t care what people think of me, I want to be seen with you.”
Not out of defiance. Not out of some need to flip a finger to the burlesque community.
But because I was proud.
Proud that beneath all the chaos and addiction and self-destruction there remained an astonishing performer capable of making an entire room fall silent. Proud that in a world engineered to keep us numb, they had woken up a hundred days and chose to be sober anyway.
But more than anything, I was proud that they had refused to disappear.
Jayjayy if you are reading this, I am proud you exist.
I am proud to be your friend.
Always.
Not in secret, but in the limelight, where everyone can see it.
Jayjayy is an NYC-based performer who specializes in burlesque, pole, aerial, clarinet, and saxophone. You can find them on social media behaving like a menace.
Special thank you to the many sex workers, performers, and producers who consulted on this piece to help ensure accuracy and authenticity.
I decided to listen to this piece instead of reading it and I’m so glad I did. It’s so raw. It’s honest. It’s vulnerable. What struck me the most was- “I survived because enough people looked at me in my worst moments and saw a person instead of a verdict.” MERCY. Thank you for continuing to write.
Probably one of my favorite pieces written here. I admire you for sharing this, and navigating what is clearly a complex situation. JJ, if you're reading this, good luck! I'm rooting for you to fluorish.