Church by day, strip club by night...
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At the Manor Adult Entertainment Complex, the only strip club in Guelph, Ontario, you can feel the end coming. Some nights, the dancers outnumber the customers. The women perform pole-dance moves with evocative names—the Genie, the Hot Cherry, the Boomerang, the Hello Boys, the Static Chopper—to thin, scattered applause. The top forty that blasts from the speakers becomes a soundtrack of almost unfathomable loneliness: “Nothing lasts forever / but wouldn’t it be nice to stay together for the night?” The ceiling is low and black, the lighting a gloomy throb of oranges and blues. There are no windows. Maybe you think strip clubs are fun; maybe you believe they’re de*grading; maybe you see them as just another workplace. The Manor doesn’t feel like any of those things. Instead, the mood is mostly funereal.
In Guelph, local bylaws forbid any other adult-entertainment facilities. If the Manor closes its doors for good and becomes, say, a condo development, the city will never see another strip club. But the Manor, ever the chameleon, isn’t finished changing. In 2014, it underwent its strangest iteration yet: every Sunday, a church service started meeting in the club, pole and all. When I first heard about Church at the Manor, it seemed so literal—sin and salvation, the sacred and the profane, side by side—that I *decided I had to see it for myself. In the years since, I’ve come to know the remarkable community of outcasts who, in one way or another, call the Manor home. It isn’t just a strip club to them—the Manor is a sanctuary. “I don’t think it’s going to last,” one dancer admitted to me. “But hopefully it stays, because I honestly love this place.”
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https://thewalrus.ca/welcome-to-the-...club-by-night/