In Central Florida, Les Vixens, one of the nation's largest and longest-running all-queer burlesque troupe, is transforming the queer space with what they said is their bold displays of sexuality, sensuality, and creativity.
The group of 15 performers is led by Ivy Les Vixens, who started running the team 18 years ago after noticing the gay community was widely dominated by men.
“When I first came out, and I started going out to the gay bars, it was all drag queens,” Ivy said. “I was raised by a wild pack of drag queens, but there was nothing specific for queer women.”
Upon that realization, she said she rallied together a few women to start her burlesque-based group.
Ivy runs what she calls the “glitter and grind” of the group, where she works over 80 hours a week to book bars, club residencies and theatrical performances with lines that can wrap around the block.
“I work with all the behind the scenes (backstage), on traveling and performing at almost every single event,” she said. “I also run the entire business side, but it's still a dream.”
One performance in particular is called ‘Girl The Party', which is Les Vixens' residency at the Orlando nightclub, Southern Nights, where they dance for over 1,000 people every Saturday.
“Queer women just ate it up because they've never had something like that, they never had something specifically for them, catered to them by other queer women who absolutely know what it's like to come out and know what it's like to lose family and friends,” Ivy said. “It was something to give queer women a sense of safety and understanding and a space for them to feel like they are catered to, understood, loved, celebrated.”
Ivy said their ‘Girl The Party’ event is the closest thing Les Vixens gets to a lesbian bar, noting that there’s none in Orlando, only lesbian nights sprinkled in.
So, with her performances, she aims to focus what she calls the sapphic gaze.
“So many women had been taught how to be sexy based on the male gaze, and what men would find attractive,” Ivy said. “What we kind of do is we put that on its head, and we only focus on what women actually truly find attractive.”
A burlesque history
Chloe Edmonson is an assistant professor of theater history at the University of Central Florida. She has studied burlesque’s evolution and said there’s nothing more organic than Les Vixens running the queer burlesque scene.
“Burlesque is not only a sexy striptease, but it's also about this woman's command of her own body, or it's about capitalism, or it's about climate,” Edmonson said. “There's just so many different ways to embed whatever personal message the performer has into the art form.”
Edmonson said that burlesque was conceived in the 1860s, originally created to be narrative performances that mock society or systems of power.
“The roots of this art form really are with these all female casts. You can trace this all the way back to the mid 19th century troupes of women that kind of ran their own business,” she said.
But as the industry grew, entrepreneurial men took over the business side burlesque and focused on what men wanted to see. However, Edmonson said she welcomes the change that Les Vixens is bringing to Orlando’s burlesque community.
“It’s cool to see Les Vixens reclaim that historical women doing art for women,” she said. “It's not just an incidental thing that you've got these women dancing, they're dancing as queer women. In terms of what it means to be publicly queer, their work is pretty important right now.”
A space for support
And it’s not just Edmonson who thinks their work is important. Ivy said she receives messages on the daily from her supporters.
“Since I started, I've gotten messages from people telling me they came out because of us, they feel safe in their identity because of us, they were going to do some pretty bad things to themselves and decided now they're going to stay,” Ivy said. “Now they feel seen, they feel understood. They send us messages every day that they have never felt more comfortable in who they are, since they started coming to see the Vixens.”
Ivy added that audience interactions are not just a wink and a nod, they form deep, long-lasting connections.
Taneisha Jenkins is an MRI tech assistant at Orlando Health by day, but by night she’s escaping the realities of her day-to-day life through Les Vixens’ performances.
“I went to Southern Night’s one random day and we saw her (Ivy) there. I was like, who’s this?” Jenkins said. “I thought there were drag queens performing, but then I was like, oh these are women.”
She said that watching Ivy for that first time was something she hadn’t experienced before.
“Ivy will look at you like you're the only person in the room. It's different from drag queens, very different. This is for us women, it's just for us,” Jenkins said.
Two weeks later, her mother, one of the only people in her life who knew she is gay, passed away.
A few days after the funeral, she said she took another trip to watch Les Vixens perform and take her mind off of the hardships of grief.
“I needed a distraction from what was happening at home,” she said. “Over the next couple months, we went almost every weekend to see Ivy because it was what I needed to take my mind off everything.”
Jenkins said she knew that with Les Vixens, she did not have to go through her grieving process alone.
“I was in a really, really bad place mentally and I told Ivy,” she said. “They took me in. I do not think I even could pay her back for everything she has done for me to help lift my spirits. The Vixens have my heart and I love them so much.”
Ivy said she understands the power behind her posse and makes sure that everybody can love them as much as Jenkins.
“I want audiences to be able to see themselves in the Vixens, so when you see us performing, there's at least one Vixen, who you can relate to,” Ivy said. “The underlying purpose is so much bigger, and it's actually happening. People are feeling it, they are feeling that connection, and they're living out loud themselves, because they see us doing it.”
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