Joe Redner, the so-called strip club king of Tampa, who became an outspoken champion of a woman’s right to bare it all for paying customers — and, as the years went by, a vocal defender of free speech, gay rights and reproductive freedom — died on Oct. 16 at his home in Tampa, Fla. He was 86.
He had been fighting cancer that had metastasized from his lungs, his son, Joey Redner, said.
During his 50-year career in adult entertainment, Mr. Redner owned an empire of strip clubs in and around Tampa, a longtime hotbed for both adult entertainment and its culturally conservative critics.
But his best-known venue, by far, was Mons Venus, on the city’s west side. After opening in 1982, it immediately became one of the area’s most popular adult venues. Dozens of women could often be found parading on its platforms, all in various states of undress.
The club was a lightning rod for religious groups, which held vigils outside its doors. One paid for a billboard above the club that read, “Forgive them, Father, for they know not what they do.”
Mr. Redner also faced a steady campaign by city politicians, who tried to use zoning regulations and public-nuisance laws to shut him down.
But whenever challenged, he stood his ground. If he knew the police were coming, he made sure to be on the premises so he would be arrested alongside his dancers and patrons. (He claimed to have been thrown in jail 150 times.)
He ran his club in shifts, so that when one set of dancers and employees was taken to jail, another moved quickly into place. If the second set was arrested, a third crew was waiting.
“It was a game — who’s smarter?” he said in the documentary “Strip Club King: The Story of Joe Redner” (2008).
Mr. Redner also fought back in court. He paid his dancers’ and patrons’ legal fees, and his business partner was a bail bondsman, which meant his people could move through the system quickly and be back at the club within a few hours.
Though he had dropped out of high school, he spent years studying First Amendment law and worked closely with his longtime lawyer, Luke Lirot, to oppose city ordinances against nude dancing. On the shelves in his office, law journals shared space with back issues of Playboy.
“He’s at the Tampa law library all day, day after day, week after week, trying to study ways to make the best argument he could make,” Mr. Lirot said in an interview.
A political independent with a strong streak of civil libertarianism, Mr. Redner mounted several campaigns for Tampa City Council, as well as the Hillsborough County Commission and the State Legislature. He never won, but in 2007 he forced a runoff with an incumbent councilwoman, Gwen Miller. (She won, with 56 percent of the vote.)
He ran for office, he said, to fight for others’ rights — not just the rights of adult performers, but those of women, L.G.B.T.Q. people and political protesters.
Mr. Redner fashioned himself as a sort of Sun Belt Diogenes, the Greek cynic, denouncing corruption and hypocrisy in Tampa’s civic leadership. At public hearings, he liked to point out which politicians had visited Mons Venus.
“They say the golf club is where deals get made,” he said in “Strip Club King.” Shaking his head, he added: “It’s the Mons.”
In addition to campaigning at the ballot box, he found other ways to fight. In 2002, he bought a piece of land, landscaped it and opened it to the public as Voice of Freedom Park. A decade later, he allowed members of the local branch of the Occupy movement to camp out there.
In 2003, Mr. Redner was one of several people arrested outside a rally in Tampa where President George W. Bush was speaking.
After the County Commission passed a law forbidding government agencies from expressing support for a local Gay Pride march in 2005, Mr. Redner sued. When the court ruled that he lacked standing because the new law did not affect him, he announced that he was gay (he was not). He still lost the case, but the commission reversed its decision in 2013.
And in 2018, following a cancer diagnosis, Mr. Redner won court approval to grow marijuana for medical use, though 17 days later an appellate court reversed the decision.
“I’m a freedom type of guy,” he told The Daily Beast in 2012. “I think people should do whatever they want as long as they don’t hurt anyone or intrude on anybody else.”
Joseph Richard Redner was born on July 2, 1940, in Hackensack, N.J. After his father, William Redner, left the family when Joe was a young child, his mother, Agnes (Statella) Redner, moved with him and his brother, William, to Tampa, where she waited on tables.
Joe dropped out of high school at 16 and spent several years working odd jobs in shops and warehouses. For a while, he traveled with a carnival.
In 1972, one of his employers, impressed by his work ethic, asked him to manage a go-go club, the Deep South. Mr. Redner began looking for ways to expand the business, adding more dancers and promoting ever-more-risqué performances.
After the Supreme Court ruled in a series of cases that nudity on film could be considered speech, and was therefore protected under the First Amendment, Mr. Redner decided to test to see whether that ruling covered live performance as well.
Though the Supreme Court ruling did open the door for nudity in adult clubs, cities like Tampa fought back with tight restrictions on where and how they could operate. Mr. Redner found himself spending almost as much time in zoning meetings and courtroom hearings as he did at his club.
He finally opened his first fully nude strip club, the Night Gallery, in 1976. Later, he added other clubs in and around Tampa, culminating with Mons Venus in 1982. While the other clubs eventually closed, Mons remained his flagship.
Mr. Redner developed a reputation with Tampa-area dancers for running an enlightened business: They did not have to pay kickbacks or perform in private rooms, and set their own hours.
And because he believed that the job of manager attracted the wrong kind of man, he mostly hired women to oversee his clubs.
“I think they have more compassion and common sense than men do,” he told The Tampa Bay Times in 2022.
Mr. Redner’s marriage to Lorelei Jackson ended in divorce, but they remained close friends.
Along with his son, he is survived by three daughters, Teresa Redner, Joy Lynn Redner and Angela Smith; his longtime companion, Edie Burns, and her son, Kyle; and 11 grandchildren. His brother died in 2016, and his daughter Reyline Harris died in 2017.
Mr. Redner sold Mons Venus last year, but stayed on as a consultant. It remains one of the most popular adult clubs in the country.
“Sex is a very strong attraction,” he told The St. Petersburg Times in 1999. “I didn’t make it strong; nature made it strong.”
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