The Las Vegas Dancers Alliance was an organization of adult entertainment workers in Las Vegas founded in 2002 by Andrea Hackett in response to regulations adopted by Clark County, Nevada, that criminalized lap dances. It grew to include 1,000 members from strip clubs throughout the Las Vegas valley including Crazy Horse Too, Spearmint Rhino and many others.
At the height of its power, L.V.D.A. was covered in media outlets across the globe including CNN, MSNBC, CBS News, Washington Post, LA Times, Seattle Times, and The Times of India. Hackett appeared on The O'Reilly Factor on September 18, 2002 to lobby her cause and was approached by Dateline, A&E, PBS, and ABC News. Her struggles were documented in Marc Cooper's book, The Last Honest Place in America. Hackett wrote a memoir in 2006 and has been interviewed for documentaries.
Las Vegas Dancers Alliance was established as a non-profit corporation in Nevada in the summer of 2002. Its purpose was to advocate on behalf of adult entertainment workers and mediate issues between its members and management. By October, club representatives had been elected from twelve of the twenty-one strip clubs in the region and served as its board of directors. To lobby candidates and local officials, a political action committee was established (LVDA-PAC). A third organization was created in 2003, the Committee to Protect Dancing. That organization educated its members on the initiative process and coordinated a signature drive to overturn the so-called Lap Dance Ordinance.
In its short life (2002âÂÂ2003) L.V.D.A. was credited with derailing efforts to institute business license fees for dancers in Clark County and efforts to prohibit the popular practice of G-string tipping. It also brought attention to unscrupulous industry practices such as house fees in excess of $100, dance fees, late fees, stage fees, missed stage fees, missed shift fees, mandatory tips for disc jockeys, valet parking, "house moms", and floorwalkers, and indiscriminate firings, as well as the practice of mandating work cards in Las Vegas that require FBI background checks for dancers. L.V.D.A. was the only organization of adult entertainment workers in Las Vegas to confront these issues.