City fought over sex businesses long before ‘dolls’
Decades-old conflict continues even as innovation seeks to meet demand
Somewhat sheepishly, the city official tried to explain why he had spent more than $2,000 in public funds entertaining out-ofcouldn’t
town clients at a topless bar.
“They wanted to go there,” said Jordy Tollett, who regularly wined and dined prospective conventioneers when he worked for the Houston Convention & Visitors Bureau. “I
say, ‘You can’t go there.’ ”
That was in 1989. Since then, countless topless bars and adult bookstores have opened and closed, the city has rewritten its “sexually oriented business” law, Harris County and other jurisdictions have struggled to enforce their own rules, and litigation challenging
“You can’t change the morals of everyone by passing a simple ordinance.” Chris Tritico, Houston attorney
these rules has filled court dockets.
Yet Tollett’s simple observation — “They wanted to go there” — conveyed a truism that still confronts Houstonarea leaders seeking to repel or regulate such enterprises: Sex sells. This is true of the upscale “gentleman’s clubs” where business exec-
utives unwind after work, and it’s true of the seedy “massage parlors” — thinly disguised fronts for prostitution and human trafficking — that generate about $107 million in illicit revenues a year in Houston, according to a recent study.
The sex business, like others, has responded to demand with innovation.
In 1983, when the City Council passed Houston’s first ordinance regulating sexually oriented businesses, no one could have imagined that people might someday pay $120 for an hour of intimacy with objects made of synthetic skin and highly articulated skeletons. But 35 years later, the council reacted quickly to reports that a Torontobased company, KinkySdollS, planned to open a shop in Houston that allowed prospective buyers of lifelike “sex dolls” to take them for a spin on the premises for a fee.
On Oct. 3, the council amended the applicable city law, adding language that forbids the use of the dolls on company premises. The revised law means that to open in Houston, the company would have to change its business model and find a location allowed by Houston’s rules. Last week, Harris County revised its rules to match Houston’s in a move intended to keep “robot brothels” from opening in unincorporated areas.
The Houston Chronicle’s efforts to contact KinkySdollS have been unsuccessful. Its owner, Yuval Gavriel, told KTRK-TV that he was appalled at accusations that his business might help fuel human trafficking.
“We’re here to prevent human trafficking,” Gavriel said. “We are actually considering to donate a portion of our business to help fight human trafficking and prostitution, which is an issue for many, many years.”
It’s easy to see the connection between the most lurid components of the sex industry — the East End cantina where a brothel flourished, the southwest Houston massage parlors advertised on online sex forums — and the misery of human trafficking. Owners and operators of well-appointed nightclubs featuring topless dancers, however, say it’s unfair to paint them with the same brush.
In 2013, city officials effectively established two categories of topless clubs — those associated with crime, and others considered, if not desirable, at least tolerable — when it agreed to a legal settlement with 16 clubs. The deal, which ended years of litigation, authorized the participating businesses to ignore certain rules, such as those forbidding lap and table dances. In exchange, the clubs agreed to make annual payments to support antihuman trafficking efforts.
“Establishing a working relationship with these 16 clubs will assist law enforcement in reducing criminal activity, help us combat human trafficking and, hopefully, allow us to focus police resources on the rogue clubs that have opened up more recently,” then-Mayor Annise Parker said of the agreement. Since 2013, at least five additional clubs have been added to the agreement, and the city has collected more than $5.4 million from the participating businesses, according to city records.
To many engaged in the fight against human trafficking, however, they’re all rogue clubs — each contributing, at least indirectly, to a culture that sanctions the commercialization of sex and, in its ugliest forms, turns women into slaves.
“A quote-unquote ‘good’ strip club, a quote-unquote ‘bad’ strip club, they’re still explointing women,” said Robert Sanborn, president and CEO of Children at Risk, a nonprofit that has done research on human trafficking in the Houston area.
The same is true of a business that sells or rents sex dolls, he said: “Once you get past the hygiene and safety and health issues, if men are buying dolls that look like young girls … it’s bad for us. It’s not a far reach in a town like Houston, where girls are so accessible, that they might think, ‘I’ll go ahead and get the real thing.’ ”
Houston lawyer Chris Tritico, who has represented topless clubs, said he understands this reasoning. The problem, he said, is the use of local laws to resist such businesses often fails to produce the desired result. “You can’t change the morals of everyone by passing a simple ordinance,” he said.
Even if the city succeeds in shutting down a business deemed undesirable, he said, the establishment often just moves to a jurisdiction with looser rules. As then-Montgomery County Attorney Jim Dozier put it in 1985: “Those businesses are kind of like roaches. You get rid of them in one apartment and they move right on over to the next one.”
Local officials, often under pressure from neighborhood or religious groups, have used a variety of tools to regulate sexually oriented businesses and, in some cases, to close them.
Houston, lacking a conventional zoning ordinance, has based its laws in part on distance requirements from churches, schools, day care centers, parks or residential neighborhoods. It established a 750-foot requirement in the 1983 law, then doubled the distance when it rewrote the ordinance in 1997. The new law also added requirements such as badges for all employees, including dancers.
In addition, Harris County has used a state civil statute to seek injunctions closing businesses that represent a nuisance as defined in the law.
“We used a civil law to close down criminal enterprises,” said Linda Geffin, a former senior assistant county attorney who worked on human trafficking cases.
She was assaulted in her home by an intruder in 2012. She believes the attack, which left her badly injured, was related to her work — an illustration, she says, of the violent crime associated with the sex industry.
Her experience, and those of the women she tried to protect, can bolster the argument that commercialized sex in all its forms reflects an intolerable sickness in the culture. Houston business leaders can be part of a long-term solution, Sanborn argued in a 2015 Houston Chronicle opinion article co-written with James B. Caruthers, a staff attorney for Children at Risk.
“If you as a business owner or employee take clients to such establishments — stop,” they wrote. “You are perpetuating the cycle of demand for commercial sex and making it easier to exploit our children.”
At the same time, legal principles tied to free speech and property rights have benefited challenges to laws targeting sexually oriented businesses. This has led to compromises such as Houston’s 2013 settlement with 16 strip clubs.
The conflict persists, even as the players change.
Jordy Tollett left the Houston Convention & Visitors Bureau years ago. Rick’s, the nightclub that his clients were so intent on visiting, does not list a Houston location on its website. And the Houston Post, the newspaper that broke the story, ceased publication in 1995.