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No More Swinging Dicks

STORY: When I was in Fort Lauderdale on a year-end vacation in 2014, a friend and I decided to stop by Swinging Richards, the Pompano Beach spinoff of an Atlanta institution.

The Swinging Richards we visited was a large, fairly upscale-looking nightclub situated in a desolate warehouse district to avoid prying eyes. Inside, the club offered a nightly-changing array of handsome, buff male dancers who stripped completely naked, while pole dancing for a largely gay male clientele. And, even though it was the night before New Year’s Eve, the club was packed.


Patrons could pay extra for a private lap dance with the dancer of their choice in an area at the far end of the club. I didn’t partake of this activity, but I surreptitiously flouted the club’s rules against taking photos of the dancers and snapped a couple of pics of them in action.


The Fort Lauderdale club closed in 2015, and recently, I ran across a headline in Queerty, the gay news blog, informing me that “Unpaid dancers sue Atlanta’s stripper bar Swinging Richards into bankruptcy.” Management had apparently been underpaying its strippers for years and recently lost a court case on the merits. It seems those fabled dicks are fated to stop swinging soon.


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