When a stripper associate and I ran into Lindalee Tracey (aka “Fonda Peters”) in Montreal in the early 1980s, I was dutifully impressed. To be a famous stripper in a city that is so girl crazy that it features les serveuses sexy in its hot dog stands is quite an accomplishment. I also – with some squeamishness – watched Tracey’s wan conversion to the feminist movement in Bonnie Klein’s doctrinaire NFB film, Not a Love Story. The film’s final moments, of Tracey dancing away her oppression on the beach, was, until now, the only image I had retained of the bump-and-grind star of my youth.

It was with great curiosity then, that I read Tracey’s memoir, an account which, quite dazzlingly, surpasses its own genre. Beyond its confessional elements, which are candid and intelligent, the book’s merits are more precisely located in its narrative beauty and its philosophical nature. Growing Up Naked is, ultimately, a treatise on visibility, a theme that is explored deftly, and with great poetic skill. Visibility, or invisibility, for Tracey, represents both self-image (the repression of the self that is the sine qua non of the born outlaw) and public self-image, the ways in which strippers are seen. Among the many exceptionally touching scenes in the book (among them is one in which a group of strippers listen to Tracey read O’Henry’s Gift of the Magi, enraptured), involves Yvette, an aging, retired showgirl whose presence perfectly explicates Tracey’s problematic relationship with her profession. Comparing contemporary peeling to Yvette’s more burlesque “glamour,” she observes: “We’re exhibiting too much of our surfaces, too little of our deeper, distinctive selves.”

It is, finally, the increasing demand for more graphic and dehumanizing modes of stripping that leads to Tracey’s disenchantment with a form she now sees as poisoned by “corporate agenda(s)” and the “numbing venom” of hard-core porn. Tracey is so articulate about the complexities of stripping, self-actualization, and feminism’s evangelical misprisions, that her dour and nostalgic conclusion (which laments the end of the “wonder of illusion”) is strangely miscalculated. Having watched innumerable prosaic strippers in Tracey’s time, wading their way through Nick’s Sex Aquarium or carpet-humping at Le Cave du Sexe, I simply cannot accept this version of history. The mystery and illusion Tracey elegizes belongs to the era of Dixie Evans and Sally Rand. And, in many ways, to Tracey herself, who was always, like her colleague “Emma Goldman,” more of a stripping terrorist or performance artist than an exotic dancer. In the process of honouring a great number of women, with grace and heart, Tracey somehow eclipses herself. Her writing, thankfully, distinguishes her as a genuine artist, as distinctive as Lili St. Cyr, the “queen,” a “fantasist (who) could make you fly away with her.”