It was 1999, and the latest battle over the right to get a lap dance in one of Tampa’s infamous strip clubs was about to start in the rowdy, crowded auditorium.
Women who worked as dancers leapt to their feet with the arrival of Joe Redner, then-owner of the well-known Mons Venus club and the city’s undisputed strip club king — a man who went to jail beside them when clubs got raided.
In his lawyerly charcoal suit, Redner counseled them: We will be ladies, he told them. They should be calm and polite at the hearing and tell the politicians and protesters about their kids, their friends, their lives.
“These people think you’re something else,” he said. “You go in there and tell them you’re their neighbors.”
Joe Redner, Tampa’s outspoken, oft-arrested strip club mogul — described as his city’s most complicated patriot and its wild uncle — legal scholar, relentless candidate for office, political provocateur, medical marijuana advocate and vegan, died peacefully in his sleep Friday morning, one of his children, Joy Lynn Redner posted. He was 86.
“We love you,” she wrote Oct. 16. “You will be missed Dad.”
Tributes were swift to emerge.
“‘Iconic’ is the right word,” former mayor Bob Buckhorn said Saturday. “He’s one of the colorful figures in Tampa’s history who’s made us who we are — good, bad and different. It’s part of the flavor of this community.”
“Joe Redner was a Tampa original, a successful entrepreneur, a defender of individual liberties, and a man who was never afraid to stand up for what he believed was right,” Tampa City Council Chairman Alan Clendenin wrote on Facebook. “His willingness to challenge government, advocate for equality, and defend our constitutional freedoms made him a towering figure in Tampa’s history.
“Tampa loves you.”
Born in Hackensack, New Jersey, Redner moved to Tampa with his mother after his parents separated when he was 8. Agnes Redner worked as a waitress at a downtown drugstore.
“We survived on her tips. It was like $5 or $6 a day,” Redner said.
He was different from other kids, he said, never seeming to laugh at the same things. School was a struggle. It took many repetitions of facts to keep them in his head. “I couldn’t remember, you know?” he said. “Other kids would get A’s in spelling without even trying. I’d study and study and still not pass.” He was a 16-year-old sophomore at Chamberlain High when he dropped out.
Redner did odd jobs, stocked shelves, worked for a can company, sold furniture and spent five years in the carnival business. When his then-wife became a dancer in a club, he took money at the door.
He got hired to manage a go-go bar called the Deep South where women danced in pasties and G-strings. After he heard about a high court ruling that nudity was protected speech, he converted an existing bar into Night Gallery, his first nude club, in 1976.
It was promptly raided, with hundreds of arrests, including Redner’s.
He would also own clubs called 7 Seas, Tanga and Rapture. In 1982, he debuted his best-known venture, the “World Famous Mons Venus” on Dale Mabry Highway near the stadium where the Buccaneers play. Sports figures would get arrested there.
By 2007, Redner’s net worth was $18 million.
Tampa gained its reputation as the strip club capital and the birthplace of the lap dance in part due to the outspoken Redner. As opponents went after clubs like his with ordinances and arrests, a media star was born.
He went to jail along with the dancers. His charges included allowing lewd and lascivious acts and indecent exposure and running a house of ill fame.
“Zoning violations, that was their favorite,” he said.
Redner said the women who worked in the clubs appreciated that he got handcuffed and taken away, too. “They thought I had a cult (of dancers), the police did,” Redner said. “But it was all because I went to jail with them.”
By the new millennium, his rap sheet was 12 feet long. He would ultimately get more than 150 arrests by his own count. Sometimes he paid the fines, sometimes charges were dismissed and sometimes he was acquitted.
But at some point, police seemed to realize they were improving Redner’s soapbox. They stopped taking him to jail.
“I tried to get them to take me. I said some outrageous things,” Redner said. He said something ugly to Tampa Mayor Jane Castor when she was still in the police department and later apologized “profusely” to her. “She said she understood,” he said. “Very gracious.” In fact, Redner said Tampa’s women mayors had been good to him.
“Never when we’ve had a female mayor did I get raided,” he said. “I think they have more compassion and common sense than men do.”
Indeed, Pam Iorio, mayor from 2003 to 2011, helped steer police attention toward crime in the community and away from strip clubs. She recalled Redner as soft-spoken but straightforward, unafraid to speak his mind.
“I appreciated his willingness to challenge government when he felt it needed to be challenged, to really stand up for all people,” she said.
To engage in the city’s epic battles over strip clubs — one in 1999 was so big it was held at the Tampa Convention Center and lasted 13 hours — Redner haunted law libraries studying legal documents and decisions.
“When I first met him, he was quite, I would say, rambunctious and definitely knew how to have a good time on any number of bases,” said First Amendment lawyer Luke Lirot, who started working with Redner in 1987 and soon was hired as his in-house lawyer.
As Lirot and Redner worked on the strip club battles, then on championing LGBTQ rights and medical marijuana, the pair bonded over the First Amendment.
“I’d be sitting there at four in the morning and he’d call me up, and say, ‘Hey, I just read this case,’” Lirot said. “And then our cases would be used in other First Amendment areas. You know, protests at army bases and things like that. I would think, ‘Joe, look at the difference we’re making.’”
For Redner, the painstaking legal learning process was “misery,” he said. But to make his case that strip clubs were a First Amendment issue, he had to keep up. He flew to Washington to hear a lawyer argue to the U.S. Supreme Court about whether nude dancing was a protected form of expression.
Redner said he believed nude dancing was covered by the same constitutional amendment that guarantees free speech — that it was art no different than a Norman Rockwell painting.
“Is there true freedom in this country when we can’t do what we want even when it doesn’t hurt anybody?” he said in 1991. “What’s the American flag all about?”
Opponents accused him of exploiting women and peddling filth.
Activist David Caton, who described himself as a former pornography addict, was a frequent critic back then.
“I called him once at home and told him I was worried about his spiritual destiny,” Caton said in 1991. “He was very congenial on the phone. But in person he’ll point to me and call me a censor. I pray for him every morning.”
Redner, an atheist, had little patience for such prayers. “I haven’t done anything wrong. I’m on the side of right,” he said. “And I’m comfortable with myself.”
After the city passed a rule mandating that dancers and customers remain 6 feet apart — meaning no more lap dances — Redner taunted police and politicians from the marquee of the Mons Venus, ridiculing then-Mayor Dick Greco and others when they did not enforce it.
“Greco You Coward Enforce Your Ordinance,” one read.
“I love what I do,” Redner said in 1991.
Subsequent city administrations were less interested in enforcing the ordinance. Buckhorn, a vocal advocate of the 6-foot rule when he was on city council, later acknowledged he spent too much time on the issue. When Buckhorn ran for mayor, Redner voted for him.
Now Buckhorn is running again, and while he went knocking on doors in a drizzle on Saturday, he reflected on the “very civil” relationship the men had developed.
“Our battles were epic and went on for probably a decade,” Buckhorn said. “You don’t have to agree with what he did for a living, but you can respect how he lived in his life.”
Redner had his demons. In 1983, he was caught snorting cocaine at a Bucs game and charged with narcotics possession. Later, sitting in jail on a zoning infraction, he started questioning his drug use.
“I was beating my head on the wall and said, ‘You know, are you going to let drugs control you? You don’t let the government control you. You don’t let anyone control you,’” he said. Redner gave up drinking and drugs and became a decades-long gym devotee and vegan.
He ran unsuccessfully for office several times, including the Tampa City Council and Hillsborough County Commission.
In 2007, he made the runoff for a city council seat but ultimately lost. Observers thought his offer of free admission to the Mons Venus for anyone with an I-Voted sticker was likely a factor. Redner appeared perplexed by this.
When he ran for the state House in 2010, someone warned him that if he made it to Tallahassee, the powerful would assign him a substandard office and parking space, stick him on useless committees and stomp on his bills.
“I’d thrive on it,” Redner said. “Thrive on it.”
Strip clubs weren’t Redner’s only issue.
With money he won in a lawsuit against the city, he built a park in West Tampa in 2002. He later let the Occupy Tampa protestors who had been a vocal presence downtown until they were ousted camp on the property for several months.
Also in 2002, Redner protested a police crackdown in Ybor City over the distribution of political literature. A year later he sued the Secret Service after he was arrested for protesting outside a designated area when President George Bush was in Tampa.
He made headlines a few years later when he declared himself to be gay in federal court papers. Many saw this as a strategy to give himself standing in his lawsuit against Hillsborough County’s vote against recognizing gay pride events.
When then-commissioner Ronda Storms said she didn’t want to have to explain to her child what gay meant, Redner brought a sign to a gay pride event suggesting Storms should explain to her child “what a homophobe is.”
That same year, Redner and several others wrote $1,000 checks to a Planned Parenthood teen theater group that lost county funding after Storms called the organization “prodeath.”
Though best known for the Mons Venus, which he sold last year, Redner had a varied business portfolio. He had been an investor in the successful Cigar City Brewing, started by his son, Joey Redner, and owned Florida Avenue Brewing and the Brew Bus craft beer tour company.
In 2011, Redner was at a gentlemen’s club convention in Las Vegas when the pain hit him. His doctor said it was Stage 4 inoperable lung cancer, but after treatment, he remained cancer-free for 10 years.
In 2018, he won his lawsuit to be able to grow his own marijuana to help fight lung cancer, but the state later prevailed on appeal.
In 2022 Redner said he was starting treatment for a different cancer, one that was not Stage 4 and that doctors thought could be knocked out with radiation.
Reder is survived by children Teresa Redner, Joy Lynn Redner, Joey Redner and daughter-in-law Jennifer Redner; longtime companion Edie Burns and her son Kyle Burns; and nearly a dozen grandchildren. He was preceded in death by mother Agnes Redner nee Statella, brother William Redner and daughter Reyline Harris nee Redner.
A reporter interviewing him in 2022 asked Redner if he had any regrets about his failed runs for political office.
“Oh no,” he said. “I’ve never regretted anything in my life that didn’t hurt somebody.”
