Almost two decades ago, Stacey Clare began stripping to make ends meet. After attending dynamic life drawing classes and specializing in performance arts at the Glasgow School of Art, she proposed a stripper life drawing class as a course project to her professor. In 2012, Clare decided to revisit stripper life drawing using a small room on the upper floor of the White Horse, an infamous, now-shuttered club in Hackney. One year later, the life drawing class had evolved into the East London Stripper Collective (eastlondonstripperscollective), a sex worker-led organizing body that advocates for sex worker rights and hosts regular stripper life drawing sessions. “We were like, the laws are crystal clear — we are allowed to do this because this is what it is in an art context — it’s not sexual entertainment,” Clare explained, citing the UK Police and Crime Act’s definition of sexual entertainment as an act with the sole or principal purpose of “sexual stimulation.” “When we try to tak...