Ministry brings hope, more to strippers
Group founded by child sex trade survivor goes to clubs, helping workers find value within, possibly work outside industry
It’s a Saturday night at a strip club, and the air hangs heavy with the odor of alcohol. Strobe lights and pulsating neon signs compete with the pounding bass of the club’s sound system as a rotating roster of barely clothed young women twirl, twist and twerk on the elevated stage.
As the club’s huge double doors open, in walk Lisa Michelle and her coterie of like-minded female volunteers, their arms laden with pink gift bags containing lip balm and hoop earrings.
The club is a strange setting for a Christian outreach ministry, but it’s a fitting one for Michelle. As a child, she was abused by a neighbor who took sexually explicit photos of her, which he shared with other men. It took her decades to recover.
Seven years ago, she began her nonprofit ministry, No Strings Attached. Since then, she and her crew have been reaching out to women who work in San Antonio’s “gentlemen’s clubs,” bringing them gifts, cupcakes and other tokens of care, but most of all hope.
As a survivor of the child sex trade, she brings a certain level of understanding to the women who work in the clubs, many of whom are themselves survivors of sex trafficking or early sexual abuse. Some clubs have been known sites for prostitution, especially in their “VIP” rooms, an official with the San Antonio Police Department vice unit recent-
ly said in court.
“The dancers trust us because we love them where they’re at,” Michelle said over the din of the club. “They’ve learned we’ll do anything we can to help them find their potential, pursue their dreams. We help them realize they are valued because we see them as human beings, not as transactions.”
In some cases, she said, the dancers form bonds with Michelle and her volunteers and meet them outside the club for coffee or Sunday visits to church. The nonprofit holds a monthly support group meeting, which can draw as many as a dozen young women.
“This is all about building relationships,” she said. “It’s about consistency and trust, two things that are missing in the club world. Some of the girls ask, ‘Why are y’all doing this?’ ”
Aside from bolstering the dancers’ self-esteem, part of the mission of No Strings Attached is to help the women explore ways to leave the club scene one day and find work and purpose outside the sex industry. Michelle and her nearly dozen volunteers provide, in a nonjudgmental way and with little proselytizing, resources, guidance and support to those interested in changing jobs.
Over the years, numerous women have found an alternative to working in the clubs, Michelle said.
“We want to fill the gap, build a bridge for them,” she said. “This lifestyle can become very ingrained. But what little girl dreams of growing up to become a stripper? We plant seeds.”
Despite this element of the nonprofit’s work, Michelle said managers of the half-dozen clubs she and her crew visit once a month welcome them because they see them as offering moral support and practical assistance to employees, such as helping to arrange medical appointments.
Running from the past
The old funeral home owner who lived across the street in California began sexually exploiting Michelle when she was 7. He showed her pornography, then took photographs of her re-enacting what she saw. This went on for three years.
She’d been molested by relatives starting when she was 4. As a preteen, she began hanging out on the streets of San Francisco and drinking. Hard-core drugs followed a few years later.
“I felt like something was wrong with me, but I couldn’t think straight,” said Michelle, now 50. “I didn’t understand everything I’d been through.”
The sense of being flawed followed her for years, as she moved across the country with a rockstar boyfriend and numbed herself with drugs.
“I was running from my past and everything that had happened to me,” she said.
She had stints of sobriety, but things didn’t start clicking until she found a strong Christian faith, met a good man at church and got married. But then the pain of the past bubbled up. Michelle was diagnosed with bipolar disorder and put on medication, which she would take for nine years.
It wasn’t until she began “trauma-informed” therapy that the wounds of her early experience healed. She discovered she wasn’t bipolar: She was suffering from post-traumatic stress disorder.
“It’s taken a lot of work to find my sanity, to discover who I am, who I’ve really been all this time,” said Michelle, who has been sober for 22 years. She moved to San Antonio six years ago with her husband and two children.
Today, Michelle works with Survivor Sisters Leadership, a program with an Austin-based nonprofit called The Refuge that connects older, recovering survivors of sex trafficking with younger victims.
In San Antonio, she visits the Cyndi Taylor Krier Juvenile Correctional Treatment Center, where she provides support and guidance to young women who have been trafficked for sex.
‘So glad you made it’
The black Suburban pulls up to another strip joint. A volunteer pops open the back, and the women excavate more armfuls of the pink bags. Michelle grabs several baggies full of cookies to give to the doorman and bouncers, smiling broadly all the while.
Inside the club, dancers in skimpy costumes and towering stilettos come up to the women, hugging them like old friends.
“Yes, I want a cupcake!” one squeals, her dramatic makeup looking otherworldly up close.
The volunteers also bring in a half-dozen containers of formula and diapers for the dancers who are single mothers.
Later, Michelle talks to a dancer who starts to cry as she describes past and recent trauma: drug addiction, a miscarriage, the death of a husband. Not long ago, she barely survived a drug overdose.
“I’m so glad you made it,” Michelle said.
Before she leaves, she slides into the dancer’s hands a copy of “Fallen,” a book about one woman’s journey out of the sex industry.
Another seed planted.