“I almost got arrested”: Inside the World’s only Vegan Strip Club
This story was originally published on 20/11/2019
Tucked away in an industrial area in Portland, Oregon, is the world’s first vegan strip club.
Only a 10 minute drive from downtown Portland, its gravel driveway, car park and unassuming exterior are given away by a single white sign with black writing that says:
NUDE DANCERS
From the outside, Casa Diablo looks more like an old house with a large wrap around deck than a strip club. Inside, tells a different story: the bar is set at the back wall and the centre piece of the room is a large stage with several stripper poles reaching up to the ceiling.
It’s lit by red lights and when I arrived (around 5.30pm on a Friday) there’s less than half a dozen patrons. One sits against the stage, where a topless woman in a thong dances, and an older couple — late 50s or early 60s — sit in a booth against one of the walls. Several $2 bills are scattered on the stage. One of the poles is being cleaned by a woman in her underwear and a dark, low cut crop top. The music feels vaguely punk rock.
I sit down at a table against the wall and watch the stage until I’m joined by a dancer who is waiting for her shift to start. She’s covered in tattoos and scantily clad in a silver outfit that’s revealing in all the right places for this kind of work.
She tells me she ended up in Portland, at Casa Diablo, after running away from LA and a job at a major US TV channel. She loves working at Casa Diablo — the pay is good, Portland is a great place to live and she gets paid to stay in shape. She’s now several years sober.
Casa Diablo wasn’t always a strip club and a home for the waifs and strays.
The Sign That said “Bring Cash”
A decade ago, it began its life as a family restaurant called The Pirates Tavern. At the time, it was one of the only vegan restaurants in Portland. Before Beyond Meat and Impossible Foods and other varieties of faux meat helped take the movement mainstream.
When Johnny Zukle started the Pirate’s Tavern it wasn’t long before the 2008 recession. The industrial area — with its rusted warehouses, small mountains of empty barrels and trailers for gasoline trucks — drew a clientele that was 90% blue collar, working man. The kind that would stare at his menu and ask: where’s the meat?
“It’s like, there’s no meat, it’s vegan.” Zukle recalls, sitting on Casa Diablo’s old and large deck area partly talking to me, partly admiring a dancer that’s getting ready for her shift. “They’d look at the menu,” he continues, “a bit more and say, OK, we’ll come back. And they’d never come back. I would even say to them, look, if you don’t like it, I’ll pay for it. It’s free. But they were too chicken. I couldn’t believe that they were scared to try it. They were scared of the word ‘vegan’.”
When the financial crisis hit Portland in 2008, the restaurant scene was the first to go under. As Zukle tells it, some of the first to fall were restaurants that had been around for a long time. He started to get nervous.
“So,” He tells me, as the dancer he was admiring turns her attention to a client, “I had a girlfriend at the time, we lived together, and I told her, ‘hey, I’m thinking of turning this thing into a strip club because there are all these guys around here.’ She says, ‘oh, hell no.’ So I keep losing money, money, money. The short version is, I finally say I’ve got to turn it into a strip club and she says, it’s either me or the strip club. And I said buh-bye and turned it into a strip club.”
“It’s ironic.” He says after a pause. “Now, guys come in and say its the best vegan food they ever had. These were the same guys that came in before and wouldn’t try the food. The girls got the guys to come in.”
Zukle has been a vegan for more than 30 years. Casa Diablo only serves vegan food and vegan alcohol and the dancers are forbidden from wearing any leather, fur or other animal products when they’re working.
Casa Diablo, by Zukle’s own admission, is considered to be one of the best, if not the best, strip club in Portland. It’s success gave rise to Casa Diablo II: Dusk Til Dawn.
That success was a long time coming.
“If I knew then what I know now,” Zukle, says, “I might not have even opened a strip club because I’ve seen a lot of them go under. It’s really easy to go out of business fast with a strip club or any other business. I see strip clubs fail all the time.”
The first six months of Casa Diablo, after the recession had hit the Pirate’s Tavern and Zukle was changing the business model, where brutal to say the least. He recounts stories of being the only employee — announcing the dancers on stage, running to the kitchen to make and serve a burger and then playing a DJ set.
“I was thinking that I was going to fail at any moment. My business partner was back in LA at the time and I was out of money, my credit cards were toast and she’s grabbing all the money she can and borrowing money off her family to help me.
“It’s funny, the first day we opened I had to put a sign up here.” He points to the roof that over looks the balcony, then the carpark and then, finally, the road. “Because I didn’t have an ATM machine yet and it said Girls, Girls, Girls and then below it said ‘bring cash’. It’s funnier than shit when I look at it now. The first day we opened it was packed and then within a week,” he snaps his fingers, “the newness was off and it was crickets inside.”
Casa Diablo opened 01 February 2008 and in July of that year it made $11,000 (USD) for the whole month. Ten years later, it’s not unusual for some of the dancers to earn between $5,000 and $10,000 on a given Friday or Saturday night.
Zukle knew that if he didn’t start to innovate, Casa Diablo would be dead on its feet.
One of the first steps was bringing in $2 bills as the lowest amount a dancer could be tipped per dance. Other strip club owners called it the kiss of death and said there was no way patrons would pay $2 per dance but Zukle stuck with it. For the first promotion they put red ink around the bills to make it look like vampire blood.
“Well,” he says with a laugh, “I almost got arrested by the Secret Service for it.”
Before it was the Secret Service, the FBI knocked on the door of Casa Diablo looking for Johnny Zukle. They were responding to a tip off from a lady that said he’d robbed a bank, stolen the $2 bills and the dye pack had gone off, so he was giving them out at his club. He recounts the story over a bottle of kombucha.
“I started laughing,” Zukle says with a grin. “I said, yeah, if I’m going to rob a bank, I’m going to take the hundred dollar bills, not the two dollar bills.”
As Zukle tells it, that was enough for the FBI and they left him be until about eight months later when the Secret Service arrived at Casa Diablo.
“The Secret Service comes in,” Zukle recalls with a mischievous grin, “and goes, ‘hey, we want to talk to Johnny. You’re defacing public currency. These little red blood rings around the bills are defacing public currency.”
Zukle is light on details about what happens next, other than to say that he disputes that its against the law, proves the Secret Service wrong and they leave, only to return a couple of weeks later.
“They said it’s against the law to deface public currency and make it unusable so you gotta stop. I told them it wasn’t unusable because we [Casa Diablo] accepted the bills and I’d tested them out in vending machines and it had worked.”
Eventually, the Secret Service returned a final time. This time, carrying an official cease and desist letter with a threat that if he didn’t stop, he would end up in prison.
Zukle says he asked them what he’d done wrong this time and the response was: “‘Well, nothing but we’re tired of getting the phone calls from people saying you robbed a bank and the dye pack went off.”
At the end of the story, Zukle maintains that it wasn’t the cease and desist letter that got him to back off, but rather the cost he’d spent on lawyers. He says he got all the publicity he could out of it and that his bartenders were pissed that every night they went home with fingers stained with red ink.
“I don’t want to toot my own horn but I’ve done a lot of things [to make it work]. I broke all of the rules when I first opened up and I almost got arrested for some of them.”
It’s Not Prostitution if They’re Not Paying Each Other
Portland has strict anti-prostitution laws, which, Zukle says, meant you couldn’t get a “decent lap dance anywhere.”
“You couldn’t touch the girl and she couldn’t touch you.” He says, sipping his kombucha. “It was an air dance where there had to be air between the two of you and who would want to pay for that? I knew what the rules were and what the law was, so I changed it and we called it a ‘friction dance’ because the girls would dance right on your dick. On the clothes, of course.”
The next stop was live sex shows, all girl on girl, but the prostitution and liquor licensing laws in Oregon meant that there wasn’t as simple as just putting the shows on.
He’d been told that “your girls are licking each others pussies on stage. That’s against the law.” But Zukle is nothing if not prepared.
“I had already done some research and a couple of girls did get arrested on the east coast of Oregon 10 years earlier [for doing it] but it went all the way to Oregon Supreme Court and [the girls] won, on freedom of speech. The Oregon State Constitution says, hey, your freedom of speech is guaranteed and protected. So I knew that if I got arrested, I could probably win. I was expecting them to come and arrest me.
“In fact, a Vice cop, a female vice cop, who used to be on the Vice squad told, me they were going to come and arrest me. At one point the girls were saying, hey, if we get arrested, what are we going to do? And I said, don’t worry, I’ll pay for it. I didn’t have any money to pay for it in the beginning because I was broke from the recession but the Vice squad went to the state attorney who said, no, don’t arrest him. We found out that’s legal through the Oregon Supreme Court.”
The loop hole, as it turns out, is that because the performers weren’t paying each other for sex, it wasn’t technically prostitution. Meaning, punters could pay to watch as much and as often as they wanted. It was, effectively, live pornography.
Casa Diablo, and Johnny Zukle, are known for a lot of things. Aside from challenging the law and building a business on that reputation Casa Diablo was also the first non smoking club (when smoking was still allowed in doors at bars), remains the only vegan strip club in the world (with its sister club Dusk Til Dawn), was the first to use $2 bills and the first to offer lap dances where patrons can touch the girl everywhere except “her kitty and her crack”, as Zukle puts it.
Our conversation goes late into the evening and a bachelor party arrives and comes out onto the club’s decking. It’s still quiet but getting busier. In a few hours, the club will be almost at capacity, the girls will be dancing, hollering, giving lap dances and performing the notorious live sex shows. For now, Zukle is pulled away to take a group photo of the bachelor party and then one more time to find duct tape for guy that’s somehow ripped his denim shorts.
“It was a bit of a leap of faith and I could easily die.” He says, sitting back down. “People were telling me when I was on the brink of disaster that first year: hold on. There’s something magical about this place. Hundreds of people were telling me that, that there’s something special about this place.
“I tell people that I’ve been blessed by the vegan gods and they made it a success. The vegan part got people to come in and the other stuff I did kept them. I try to be really fair with all of the employees and the dancers…compared to all the other strip clubs, I was ahead of the pack. And then they all started following.
“They all copy me eventually and do what I do. I can only go so far because eventually you get to the end and then it’s like, what are you gonna do?”
