As I was researching strip-club advertisements from 1982 to 1984 in the Journal de Montréal at the BaNQ in the summer of 2018, the library had a bedbug outbreak. Since the Montreal Gazette has an online archive, I made a hasty detour to 1968. According to the Archives de Montreal, this was a banner year for business in the downtown core. As a former stripper who worked in this neighbourhood in the 1990s, I was curious to see what the urban landscape pertaining to adult entertainment looked like in the year of my birth. 

Based on advertisements, I mapped an area from Fort to Stanley, de Maisonneuve to Saint Catherine. I photographed the current locations and overlaid them with the advertisement for the club formerly located there. I call this technique Palimpsestic Collage. It is interesting to note that these ads appeared alongside other more mainstream clubs. They were not buried in the back pages. The same went for ads for pornographic films. They were not segregated to a particular section. This continued to be the case into the mid '80s.

The ads speak to a shift in entertainment styles: from the more classic bump and grind burlesque to go-go dancers and topless shows. The next major shift would happen in the early '80s with table dancing, females and males featured together, and full nudity.