Fringe Florida: Travels Among Mud Boggers, Furries, Ufologists, Nudists, and Other Lovers of Unconventional Lifestyles by Lynn Waddell

still dead
    enough to find a front parking space beside a Porsche. A couple of men
    in their thirties having a smoke underneath the front awning share

    5
    Mons lore. “You want to know how famous Mons is?” asks Kristopher,
    3
    who in glasses and a button-down seems an authority on the club.
    “I got into a cab in Hong Kong a few years ago and the cab driver asked
    me where I was from. When I told him Tampa, Florida, he said, ‘Oh,
    Mons Venus!’”
    Of course, Tampa cab drivers are even more familiar with the club.
    They claim that Mons and Bern’s Steak House are the most common
    destinations of fares they pick up at Tampa International Airport.
    About 85 percent of Mons patrons are from out of town, largely con-
    ventioneers, businesspeople, tourists, and sport fans. The home sta-
    dium of the Tampa Bay Buccaneers and the New York Yankees spring
    training field are within walking distance. Sometimes after games, the
    crowd around the Mons stage is four or five deep. Joe Redner has es-
    timated that in some years, more than a quarter of a million people
    walked through Mons’s doors.
    Florida certainly has bigger and fancier places to see skin. Based
    on various strip-club databases and registries, the Sunshine State has
    more topless and nude strip joints than any other state, which is un-
    derstandable considering it attracts the most tourists. South Florida’s
    venues are some of the loosest and largest all-nude clubs in America.
    Customers are allowed to get not only a nude lap dance but also a shot
    of alcohol along with it—a hedonistic mix prohibited in California,
    proof
    New York State, and most cities, including Las Vegas and Tampa.
    Rapper Lil Wayne sings about making it rain at Miami’s swanky King
    of Diamonds (K.O.D.) in “Hustle Hard,” and he held his star-studded
    homecoming there in 2010 after he was released from prison. A one-
    stop hip-hop he-man cavern, the K.O.D. is as big as a Wal-Mart Super-
    store with a basketball court, barbershop, shoeshine service, restau-
    rant, spa services, and tanning salon, which is a little perplexing since
    the clientele is largely African American.
    Then there’s more rural Pasco County, long home to the nation’s
    largest concentration of nudist communities and resorts. Pasco gets
    Tampa’s spillover of residents and all-nude strip clubs. And Pasco clubs
    ad
    can sell alcohol.
    ir
    Despite Mons’s lack of a bar, it ranks the best in the entire U.S. of
    olF
    A. among the one hundred thousand strip-club connoisseurs who sub-
    eg
    scribe to the Ultimate Strip Club List, a Las Vegas–based website that
    nir
    serves as a Tripadvisor® for lap dance junkies. Members laud it for the
    F
    “major contact” with dancers and the “hot girls.” Mons ranked third
    63
    among 2,800 strip clubs worldwide, losing out to two Tijuana clubs
    that are also brothels.
    Many locals know the club more for its opinionated owner, Joe Red-
    ner, who’s forever in the headlines battling social mores and running
    for political office. He’s been arrested more times than he can count
    (he estimates about 150) and canonized in the documentary Strip Club
    King: The Joe Redner Story .
    He’s Tampa’s most despised and most admired iconoclast. Church
    folks view him as the devil incarnate, while strip-club lovers consider
    him a god. Some local politicians complain that he exploits the First
    Amendment for personal gain. Many others, including some who’d
    rather get indigestion than a Mons lap dance, applaud him for slap-
    ping conventional norms on the ass and battling a government they
    view as heavy-handed.
    “Joe’s a local folk hero,” says Kristopher, who, as it turns out, is an
    editor at a national trade publication for strip-club owners. (Yes, it’s
    based in Tampa Bay.) He adds, “Some people call Joe the local Larry
    Flynt.”
    In 2010, readers of Creative Loafing , Tampa’s alternative newspa-
    per, voted Joe as Tampa Bay’s “Best Troublemaker.” That’s