Like most dancers, Hot Jam performers are generally just happy to be employed. Muñoz, like all Hot Jam dancers I spoke with, have a loyalty to their boss that bleeds into an assumption that they are paid fairly. "Of course we'd like to get paid more, but Pamela pays us what she can, I'm sure," Muñoz reasons.
Canellas says she takes a minimal share of what her dancers make. Percentages vary according to the job. "I charge based on costume changes," Canellas says. "If Level wants three costume changes, then I charge a percentage cut of that. But the girls always get $100 per night. If we have rehearsals, then I pay them a little more, like 50 bucks or something. If there is some money left over, I try to give it to them. My girls are my family, and I try to take care of them."
Colby Katz
Colby Katz
Clockwise from top left: Canellas preps for a show; Canellas dons headgear; Hot Jam's Eva is caged; and Canellas assumes the pole position at ZuBar in Fort Lauderdale
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Of the approximately $270,000 Hot Jam grossed last year, Canellas says she took home only about $20,000.
"It's hard enough trying to get booked by someone as a performer without wondering about the specifics of that," says Eric Davis, one of a small group of male dancers Canellas employs. "We are a family, and I believe we love each other as a family."
Although Davis sounds a bit sugarcoated when he says "family," he's hit on a basic principle of Hot Jam: security. Just as ravers created their own safe space, so do club dancers. Literally, they dance in a space that is protected from the crowd. Unlike strippers, they don't have to engage anyone for money. And, with rare exceptions, they are never supposed to touch or be touched. Figuratively, they've gained some kind of special acceptance in an often-finicky, snotty subculture. They get inside clubs through the back door, never mind that velvet rope. And that, to many, is a desirable privilege.
Thomas Frank's 1960s counterculture opus The Conquest of Cool reasons that "consumer society" relies upon "unrestraint," which he defines as freedom in spending time and money to achieve and take pleasure without shame. So when someone raises an eyebrow after I say "club dancing," I don't use that tired argument that we're turning a sexist society on its head by getting paid to bump and grind on a pedestal. I always think of the Riot Grrls, the grunge-era feminist ideology that proposed the wild idea that women should support one another no matter what they do.
The night I danced at Level, I walked back to my car about five blocks from the club at 4:30 a.m. Anyone who's ever been on South Beach at that hour understands that false sense of safety there on a weekend night. I wasn't thinking about anything; I was tired and just wanted to go home. It was spring break, and the air was unusually breezy. To curb the chill I felt from my sweat-soaked neck, I wore a sweatshirt that fell over my shorts. I was still wearing layers of makeup, tan fishnets, and sneakers.
As I rounded a corner, two frat boys hung out of their red pickup truck. They shouted to me something like "Wooh... ass... yeah... fuck!" They did the same thing to another woman who was also walking to her car. On my last block, a guy on a bicycle leered at me and slobbered a Spanish catcall. I flinched and found my keys.
I started the ignition and drove, feeling safe inside my car. Once I got to MacArthur Causeway, I rolled the window down to breathe in the last few hours of darkness and let the wind cool me.
