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A fierce, first person documentary, LIVE NUDE GIRLS UNITE! follows Julia Query, a peepshow stripper and daughter of a feminist activist, on her raucous journey to help organize the only strippers union in the United States. This unique film weaves together footage of dancing, labor organizing, street protests, stand-up comedy and animation.

In need of money, Julia seeks the most lucrative work available and, never one to be shy about her body, begins dancing at San Francisco's notorious Lusty Lady Theater. She quickly comes to love the tough and iconoclastic women with whom she works. In time Julia learns that many of the dancers feel club owners are exploiting them. They complain about newly instituted stage fees that make dancers pay to work, and about being asked to 'date' the owner's friends. The work seems to be less like performing and more like prostitution every year. After discovering that they are being covertly videotaped for amateur porn, Julia and her colleagues contact the Service Employees International Union. The Lusty Lady Theater responds by hiring a notorious anti-union law firm. So begins the battle that rocks the sex industry with street protests, lockouts, and confrontations.

A sub-plot emerges when Julia is invited to the First International Conference on Prostitution to speak about the union. Julia discovers that her mother, Dr. Joyce Wallace, well known for her pioneering work with prostitutes, is also scheduled to present at the conference. In a painful 'coming out' sequence, Julia reveals to her mother that she is a stripper fighting for rights, hoping to gain her mother's support. But her mother sees Julia as an ideological enemy in the feminist sex wars. While Dr. Wallace ardently speaks about the victimization of the women in the sex trades, an equally impassioned Julia contends that as a professional dominatrix she is an empowered woman working for social justice.

As additional setbacks mount the union organizing becomes more complicated than ever imagined. Everyone's spirits are low and Dr. Wallace, furious at Julia for being a stripper and for tainting the Dr's professional reputation, is not speaking to her daughter. LIVE NUDE GIRLS UNITE! deftly ties together the parallel stories of the first sex worker's union and Julia's relationship with her mother with a surprising and poignant ending.

"Part of the rich tradition of labor documentaries that includes Barbara Kopple's "Harlan County, USA" and "American Dream" ... [LIVE NUDE GIRLS UNITE!] quietly dismantles stereotypes about women who work in the sex industry and makes its powerful feminist and pro-union argument with unpretentious good humor. A movie that would make any mother proud." -- New York Times

"One of the sweetest tributes to solidarity you will ever see. Film stock has seldom been used for a better purpose." -- Professor Andrew Ross, Director of the Graduate Program in American Studies, New York University

"Wickedly funny and provocative." -- Village Voice