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Lady Gaga - The superstar's Met Gala reveal might have been a nod to her past as a burlesque dancer in Manhattan's Lower East Side when she was 19.
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Lady Gaga - "I made more money stripping than waitressing," she explained to Andy Cohen during an interview on 'Watch What Happens Live.' "I didn't show too much."
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Roseanne Barr - The controversial actress revealed in a 1994 Vanity Fair story that before she made it big in Hollywood she was a prostitute in her 20s trying to support her children. She added that she has no shame and believes it should be legal.
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Roseanne Barr - She explained that she felt powerful and in control, and that sex workers are strong and intelligent people who should be able to control and regulate the business, as well as be protected in it.
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Cardi B - The hit-maker famously started her career as a stripper. She was 18, broke, and living with an abusive boyfriend. She said she started stripping so that she could make her own money and move out.
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Cardi B - The job helped her get out of a sticky situation and start her music career, but she still wouldn't necessarily recommend it, as she began to feel really insecure about her body.
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Sylvester Stallone - A year before he starred in 'Rocky,' the actor was desperate for money, and found a way to make US$200 by working for two days.
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Sylvester Stallone - He took a role in a softcore adult film called 'Party at Kitty and Stud's,' which was later re-cut and renamed 'Italian Stallion' to exploit its now-famous costar.
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Azealia Banks - The controversial artist has a lot of respect for stripping, calling it "super-athletic" and "sexy as h*ll," but she admitted in an interview with The Daily Beast that stripping was a low point for her.
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Azealia Banks - She explained, "I was such a chicken in the strip club. It was not my thing at all. I was there for just two weekends, and then I quit because '212' blew up."
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Chris Pratt - The actor underwent a huge transformation from a dork on 'Parks and Rec' to a Marvel hero, but the biggest transformation was from his early, and short, career as a stripper.
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Chris Pratt - He wasn't a very good dancer so he didn't work in a real club, but he did parties. Pratt described himself to Ellen DeGeneres as a "low-rent Magic Mike."
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Carmen Electra - A huge reason 'Baywatch' was such a hit was its sex appeal, which Carmen Electra had been honing since her stripper days in the early '90s.
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Carmen Electra - As fame took over, she never forgot her roots, and even released her own signature brand of stripper poles and a collection of exotic dancing fitness videos.
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Matt LeBlanc - Well-known and loved as Joey on 'Friends,' the actor had had a bit of experience lulling women with his charms on-screen before then.
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Matt LeBlanc - LeBlanc was part of a softcore adult show called 'The Red Shoe Diaries' in the early '90s.
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Maya Angelou - The late writer actually had quite a few professions in her lifetime, including calypso singer, Broadway actress, paint scraper, streetcar driver, brothel manager, and prostitute.
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Maya Angelou - She was a young struggling mother, but she never tried to hide that part of her life and even described it candidly in her 1974 memoir 'Gather Together in My Name.'
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Javier Bardem - When he was a young and struggling actor, Bardem decided to try stripping. It only lasted a day.
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Javier Bardem - He admitted in an interview that he had been spotted stripping as a joke for some friends in a bar, and he was hired for the next day. "I was so bad, I did it to 'Leave Your Hat On,' and I had to get my mother and sister to cheer me on."
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Blac Chyna - Before becoming famous as an entrepreneur and villain in the Kardashian story, Blac Chyna was a stripper in Miami's famous King of Diamonds club.
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Blac Chyna - Some say she met her son's father and ex-fiancé Tyga while working there.
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Mark Consuelos - Long before becoming a hot dad on 'Riverdale,' the actor was using his good looks in another field. His wife, Kelly Ripa, opened up about his stripper past in a 2012 interview with Vanity Fair.
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Mark Consuelos - Ripa said a lot of "hot guys" in Hollywood have started by stripping, and that Consuelos was fresh out of college, "gorgeous, looking to break into show business, so he started off as a roadie to a group of these guys, and then they talked him into stripping."
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Amber Rose - The model told Cosmopolitan that she had started stripping when she was just 15, under the name Paris, but she soon realized she couldn't do it. She started up again when she was 18, when she became more comfortable with her body.
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Amber Rose - After stripping for about seven years, Rose still says those were some of the best days of her life. "Oh my god, I had so much fun. I really did," she said. "I was young, beautiful, I was onstage, I wasn't really ashamed of my body."
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Brad Pitt - The Hollywood heartthrob used to be part of an all-male stripper troupe called the Dancing Bares when he was in college.
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Brad Pitt - The troupe reportedly performed a butt-naked dance with just pillowcases over their heads for a sorority girl's birthday.
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Marilyn Monroe - Some biographies about her claim that Monroe had admitted to going on dates with men in order to get a good meal or some extra money to pay the rent.
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Marilyn Monroe - One of the most recognizable sex symbols of the world, Monroe had a couple jobs before making it big. One of those jobs reportedly included being a companion to men of power in the entertainment business for the cool price of US$500 per day.
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Channing Tatum - By now, everyone knows Tatum is the real-life Magic Mike. He started as a stripper and moved into modeling, before making his break into Hollywood.
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Channing Tatum - Known onstage as Chan Crawford, Tatum once told The Hollywood Reporter in 2014, "On a good night, [I made] 150 bucks. On a bad night, 70 bucks - even 50 at times."
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Anna Nicole Smith - Before the late model ever posed in Playboy, she was a stripper. She was reportedly tired of working at Red Lobster, and enjoyed stripping much more than waitressing.
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Anna Nicole Smith - She met her late husband, Texas oil baron J Howard Marshall, in the club she was working at in Houston.
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Mike "The Situation" Sorrentino - The 'Jersey Shore' star was once a member of the "All American Male" stripper crew, TMZ reports, going under the name of Vito Durado.
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Mike "The Situation" Sorrentino - The reality star showed off his moves during an episode of the series after the crew installed a stripper pole in their house.
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Eve - Just two years before becoming a hip-hop superstar, Eve was working in a strip club in the Bronx, NYC. Though she said it was a depressing experience, being around so many women trying to support kids, it was also where she met rapper Mase who helped her start her career.
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Eve - She told Rolling Stone, "I don't regret it—I was eighteen and confused, going through personal problems. I did it for about a month, and I was glad I did it. It helped me find Eve, helped me get serious."
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Al Pacino - He's now a household name for his explosive characters, but before becoming an Oscar winner Pacino was homeless and struggling to find meals.
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Al Pacino - He told the New York Post that he had dropped out of school and was living in Sicily, Italy, "selling the only asset I had—my body. An older woman traded food and housing in return for sex."
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Courtney Love - The grunge goddess used stripping to fund her band, Hole. She told LA Weekly she was making about US$300 a day, and "for every five dollars I made, I would give Eric Erlandson three of them and that's how we bought our van and we bought our backline."
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Courtney Love - "You have to be really savvy to do it," she added. "There was a lot of temptation in terms of drugs back then."
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Dee Dee Ramone - The Ramones co-founder had a serious heroin addiction and eventually turned to prostitution in order to fund his addiction.
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Dee Dee Ramone - In an interview, in Christopher Keeley's 2007 book 'Addict,' Ramone explains that he would go to the corner called 53rd Street and Third (which loosely inspired the Ramones song) in Manhattan and pick up men so that he could have enough money to buy drugs.
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James Lipton - Long before his show 'Inside the Actors Studio,' Lipton had a little bit of experience pimping in 1950s Paris. He told Parade that he had become friends with a call girl, and when he ran out of money she helped him represent several other women. He lived off that for a year.
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James Lipton - He said it wasn't exploitation, and instead it was more like being their agents, who took a cut of their profits. "That's how I lived. I was going through my rites of passage, no question about it. It was a great year of my life" he said.
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Kathleen Hanna - Widely known as the front woman for Le Tigre and for starting the Riot Grrl movement of the '90s, Hanna was also once a stripper, which she claims was her second-worst job (behind McDonald's).
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Kathleen Hanna - She didn't like doing it, but it gave her the flexibility to go on tour, and she said it wasn't much different from how McDonald's put the female employees at the front in tight shirts to bring in more money.
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NeNe Leakes - Before 'The Real Housewives of Atlanta,' Leakes moonlighted as a stripper. It began as a way to pay rent and support her son, but she said in an interview that she would return home and think, "I made $1,000 in one night. Baby, we are doing this tomorrow night."
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NeNe Leakes
- She was stripping at Atlanta's Gold Club under the name Silk for years, until she met Gregg Leakes and he convinced her to stop. She maintains, "I felt powerful in front of those men."
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Celebrities who have tried sex work
And what they have to say about it
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When most people hear “sex worker,” they often immediately leap to people who offer sex for money, but it’s actually a very broad term for an employee of the sex industry, which encompasses much, much more.
Sex workers can also include various services, pornographic models and actors who engage in varying degrees of explicit behavior on camera, phone operators, establishment managers, strippers, pole dancers, and even toy testers.
It’s an industry with an enormous stigma around it, but it’s also an incredibly profitable industry. The key difference between sex work and exploitation is the choice someone makes to involve themselves in the commercial exchange. There are, of course, gray areas in this as well.
Some people are drawn to sex work for the higher pay, flexible schedule, ability to choose their clients, or the sexual empowerment they feel. Others, however, are forced into the industry because they are in dire need of money, whether it’s to pay off debts or to just make enough to get by, perhaps support a family. In even worse cases, sex work can be the fuel to a drug addiction.
Sex work can be a result of leaving people with no other place to go, or it can be an active choice. Many who are morally opposed to the industry see "sex work" as legitimizing criminal activity or disguising exploitation as a type of labor, but many people within the industry chose it over other service jobs, and a few of those people are actually the stars we celebrate in society.
It’s difficult for people to talk about their experiences in sex work, as Whorephobia (the fear of and discrimination against sex workers) is still alive and well. Some celebrities risked being stereotyped as deviant, hypersexual, sexually risky, or substance abusive, and could have (or might have) tried to hide their experience. But the truth is out!
Check out this gallery to see the alternate careers some of your favorite stars might have had, and what they have to say about their time in the sex industry.
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