Lap Dancing Is OK--but Feet Are Off-Limits

Worried that excessive contact between topless or nude lap dancers and their customers breeds prostitution, Clark County commissioners on Wednesday adopted an ordinance that strictly limits what parts of a dancer’s body can touch a patron and that outlaws putting tip money behind a dancer’s G-string.

The new ordinance, which affects 20 clubs near the Strip and in outlying neighborhoods of the county, replaces a 1994 law that had outright banned exotic dancers from performing up close and-personal for individual patrons, frequently in curtained rooms. The law had gone unenforced because strip clubs had successfully challenged its constitutionality.

“These restrictions will still allow people to come here and have fun,” said County Commissioner Yvonne Atkinson Gates. “But many of the activities that had been going on were prostitution, or close to it.”

The new law defines which parts of a patron’s body the dancer cannot touch, and which parts of her body are off-limits to customer contact. But Atkinson Gates, who initially wanted a 6-foot separation between dancer and patron, supported the final draft, which allows the dancer to slide down a patron’s leg as long as she doesn’t touch his groin or his feet.

Officials said the restrictions were needed because an 18-month undercover vice operation resulted in 63 arrests of 52 dancers on prostitution charges.

Casino executives have grown increasingly frustrated that a growing number of conventioneers and others are abandoning the Strip in favor of strippers, and they hope the restrictions will temper the clubs’ popularity.

Las Vegas Mayor Oscar Goodman welcomed the crackdown--so customers would visit the strip clubs in his jurisdiction. “In my city, as long as no law is broken, anything goes,” he said. “That’s what Las Vegas is all about. That’s what makes us mythical.”