Today we’d like to introduce you to Kata Pierce-Morgan.
Alright, so thank you so much for sharing your story and insight with our readers. To kick things off, can you tell us a bit about how you got started?
Let’s call my story: From Boas to Battles! Or how I became a Stripper Activist, instead of a Nun. The perfect storm! By 14, I was primed for the cloistered life. I desired to be a nun, living a life of grateful prayer. I was never far from a convent! Even when my mother’s water broke to let me out, she was surrounded by fervent nuns, who had thrown her a birthday party where they resided. Dressed in black tunics and white coifs, nuns peppered my childhood education. With their vivid tales of heavenly saints and hell-sent sinners, I attended a convent-based catholic school with its backdrop of Virgin Marys, a daily visual. With Italian DNA, my internal GPS was set to Sisterhood. (Pic)
The best laid plans can go awry. The clouds began to gather when the pediatrician advised my mother to enroll me, awkward as I was, in dancing school. Even though, born on a Tuesday, I was not “full of grace,” as the poem goes. And that was the making of the perfect storm. My saddle oxfords, a dull matte white and black, collided with the dreamy enticement of pink ballet shoes. In dance class, clumsy yet limber, I received a box of lollipops for doing the splits. On stage to parental claps, I pranced in a ’50s era bikini with feather boa strips, hanging from my hips. (Pic) It was 1955.
While Saturdays meant imperfect pliés, weekdays meant the three “R”s (reading, writing and ‘rithmetic), stretched around the dogma of catechism. After school, I structured skits and marched our military housing apartment to the Luigi Family Singers. Accordions squeezed out potluck favorites like “Roll out the barrel, we’ll have a barrel of fun!” or “In a Shanty in an Old Shanty Town.” Later, as an adult entertainer, I would hand this same Luigi album to the DJ, along with contemporary 45s like “Jungle Fever” and “Love Story” or a 78 vinyl recording of “You Gotta Have a Gimmick!” from the stripper icon musical Gypsy. By eight, I was already an expert on skits, boas and accordion backup.
My Catholic upbringing, like rebar (steel added to concrete), strengthened my survivalist skills needed for the “wild life” ahead, when my risky decision to fund graduate school, as a stripper, was more entrapping than I had ever anticipated. Fresh from UCLA School of Education, with an elective background in ethnic dance, I had come to San Diego, hoping to find summer work as a belly dancer in a high-end La Jolla restaurant or Shelter Island’s Barefoot Bar. Easier said than done. Such jobs were limited. Although I was ill-fit, I ended up in the gritty world of striptease, with its renegade police, shady hang-abouts, and in-your-face strippers with back stories as different from mine as oil from baptismal water. It was 1971.
I doubted my choice. Yet a few years prior, a mystic, who could see auras, told my now metaphysical mother, who had gone holistic along the way, that I, at 19, was surrounded by angels and that I needed to “experience the earth more.” Instead of a cloistered life of silence and sacraments, I decided to enter the “den of striptease iniquity” not an unexpected act for someone raised Catholic. Like a speed reader, I figured I would be in and out, savvier “about the earth” in time for loftier goals. Later in my life, the hospice nun tending my mother told me (after the fact) that Catholic girls either became nuns or strippers. And so I had. Except there was nothing quick to it.
To my shock, just out of the starting gate, I was arrested, for lewd dancing, for doing a pique turn to the theme song from Romeo and Juliet. I learned after the fact that getting arrested was par for the course if you worked for Les Girls Theater. Its founder, James Morgan, had just been a Whistleblower when he called in the State Attorney General to expose bribery in licensing and the sexual abuse of women by cops. Women who were cocktail waitresses OR adult dancers were required to have police-approved work permits. The male bartenders were exempt.The 1971 California State Attorney General Investigation into the San Diego Police Department turned the light on a mess of bad behavior. Lieutenant Cochran forced women into copulation when applying for the horrendously abused work permit. A decade before, James Morgan, a Texas Baptist at heart, at 31, came in second in the Mayoral race, on a platform of corruption in San Diego government, as well as innovative water purification and my favorite, senior citizen rights.
My retaliatory arrest report described me in offensive detail. I loved my classy Monet-dipped slip with its water lily design. A gift from my French-Bolivian roommate, Antonia, whose brilliant family ate by candlelight. Like an x-rated porn novelist, the vice cop painted me as a seedy stripper except he also described in my arrest report that I was wearing full coverage “beige panties” – an incongruous detail!. So new, I did not have the funds to build a sexy wardrobe to fit the job. His words were pornographic. My ballet turn was not!
Sober, I spent the night in the “drunk tank” as it was called, with the streetwalkers milling about the one toilet, center-placed, in full view of everyone there. The morning donuts, made of cement flour, were lethal weapons, which only a Ninja with chucks would love. The Vice Squad cop, named Frankie, had pressed me to say the owners told me to dance lewd. To which I replied “I have had 14 years of Ballet, eight years of Modern Dance, and NO ONE teaches me how to dance!” No charges were pressed, yet that one arrest in the summer of 1971, changed the course of my life. I dropped out of the UCLA Graduate School of Education where I was already licensed to teach. Instead I completed a two-year course in Physical Therapy at City College. I supported myself as a stripper, working nights until 2am with classes beginning at 7am. (Pics)
Life was complicated becoming a college student who stripped, moving from midterms on anatomy to modeling my own anatomy for male fantasists. I had arrived, a step up, I thought, from the women with the street-smart sass who called me “Nancy Nice.” I hated that nickname and did my best to drop the good girl image. I wanted to appear tough, tried a cigarette for a prop, and told everyone what I did for work. I mingled with some wild characters: Hell’s Angels, Mafia, corrupt police, and other criminals along the way. I was fascinated by them all. I felt liberated from my conservative upbringing and vibrantly alive, until I wasn’t. It was 1979.
I needed time-out from the dark underbelly of San Diego, where rogue cops ran rampant without checks and balances and where strippers anxiously slept with manipulative cops who saw the dancers as job perks. Instead I studied Special Ed, ASL and Psych. I found identity as a researcher, an academician. and most of all, as a writer, returning to my childhood passion for poetry. Now, past 30, I wore a confidence that came with maturity, sporting the mantle of experience, yet still embroidered with the murky past and the colors of survival.
Then the phone rang! The caller, a colleague from my past, told me about an abusive Sergeant in Vice who was tormenting a young stripper, raised Catholic like me. A cry for help I could not ignore. I had to stop this nightmare of treatment where Vice interrogated us in the nude, where a young sailor I knew named Sid, was put into a coma by an angry cop who knelt on his chest, slammed his face into the sidewalk, for testifying about police practices he witnessed NEAR where I worked. I picked up the young woman and together we went to the police station where I filed a complaint with Internal Affairs. Lt. Ginn, close to retirement, sustained my charges and the City paid the frightened dancer a “get lost” settlement.
I have always said that the police made a mistake falsely arresting me as they did. I read their made-up police report about me, and wondered how many other people had been subjected to false reports, false arrests. I was educated. I could write. I could research. And I had not been afraid to speak in public since the nuns sent me to San Diego as an 11 year old to a large CATHOLIC conference, where hand-picked, I read what I had written in class. I had moved past the confusion of being a young woman, raised to respect authority, and traumatized along the way. I was nobody’s victim. It was 1984.
I jumped from academia to activism. I was back, spending the 80s into the 90s, with a determined focus, speaking up for women who danced and were abused by corrupt cops. I met with the City Council, the City Manager, Internal Affairs and the Police Review Board. I held interviews with TV, radio and newspaper reporters who listened to me. I believe this public exposure kept me safe.
Alright, so let’s dig a little deeper into the story – has it been an easy path overall and if not, what were the challenges you’ve had to overcome?
I learned about courage in those years, when I seemed to be the lone voice in the adult business who spoke up about the sexual abuse of women by a gang of cops. One can be afraid and still act. Courage does not mean being fearless. Courage is when you take action, even when afraid. The bad cops acted with impunity. The SDPD protected its own. The Blue Code of silence.
My fear of reprisal, which occurred, was always replaced with fight. Whenever my internal pit bull was poked. I would come out, flexed and fierce, my jaws like steel, to fight. Ballet-trained, maybe I could not dance comfortably to Three Dog Night, yet I had the stubbornness (just ask my mother) of a pit bull to dig up the bone of abuse, not bury it in a backyard dung heap. I ended up not just being a stripper, I became a stripper activist. In 1984, I returned voluntarily from San Diego State University to this borderline world as an outspoken, passionate advocate against the treatment of women who stripped, this marginalized group, enduring false arrests, selective enforcement, sexual predation by cops, falsification of evidence and the societal prejudice, which allowed all the above to take place. The corrupt police of those decades relied on the correlation between marginalization, disenfranchisement and societal indifference and prejudice to do what they did to us.
As happened to the sub-cultural strippers, those men, corrupted by power, were able to mistreat any citizen grouped into the “wrong” demographic, the “wrong” zip code, the “wrong” job and to justify their behavior and to misinform the public with lies, greed for power and predatory lust. And sadly, abuse of power persisted because of a society bred to look the other way, to disbelieve, to blame the victim, and to maintain the status quo.Mistreatment of people in our town was rampant. We were geiger counters to the criminal element who wore badges, who were meant to protect and to serve. I filed complaints with Internal Affairs. Yet these men I reported were not curtailed, like the cop who retaliated by threatening my witnesses. He continued on the force. Eventually, this cop abused the wrong woman. She was not a stripper. She was a single mother, a hard-working waitress, with a disabled child. Her son had Down’s Syndrome. The City had to pay her 353,000 in damages. If only, they had listened to me. And there were other cops I reported who ended up in the news as criminals, unrelated to us.
We were a stigmatized group of women and the perfect prey. How did we survive? When no one listened to us, we listened to ourselves and kept detailed journals. Maybe no one cared, yet writing became self-care for the strippers in those years. As a writer with the instincts of an archivist, I preserved the past in boxes of audiotapes, video recordings, documents, media reports. These archives, including the strippers’ long-ago writings, became evidence for Stripper Energy: Fighting Back From the Fringes, a six-part video podcast, about my life and theirs. For this dynamic series, KPBS Beth Accomando and her team, each won a Southwest Emmy for Journalistic Enterprises, while KPBS received a 1st place National Award for Visual Storytelling from the Public Media Journalists Association, as well as San Diego’s own Journalism award for Multimedia. (Pics)
Thanks for sharing that. So, maybe next you can tell us a bit more about your work?
People who binge-watched the KPBS six-episode story, call me a Badass. I didn’t know I was a badass. I was a fighter, leaping from initial fear into a primordial lizard brain response, to strike back, my tail hitting hard against the predator who saw me as prey. What gave me the strength to stand up and speak up in protest as I have done, came from the healing power of pen and paper, from the quiet moments of replenishment, from the written word. I was always writing, and archiving the past, as writers do. I was an archivist, which sounds a whole lot better than “hoarder!” I kept pen and paper on hand like band aids on the wounds of the life I had chosen.
As a child, I could do nothing about what I witnessed happening to my profoundly disabled Uncle Fred, except to suitcase the memories, not having the words. Yet, for the “grown” me, a whole different story. As an adult, I would write DESPERATE PRAYERS OF JACKRABBITS AND SCHOOLGIRLS, addressing the strawberry pickers with bent backs, whom I watched sadly along the bus route to San Luis Rey Academy. As an adult, I would write TUG BOATING WITH UNCLE FRED, a nonfiction story, describing the attack on my uncle, who was left bloodied, and what I did about it when the sheriff and deputies did nothing. During a time when seniors had little support or rights. I took care of the situation myself, just as I was doing for the strippers. As an adult, I would submit LENORA to Pulpsmith, winning the NYC Madeline Sadin award for a female poet. My poetry, about the adult nightlife in San Diego, was published along with the likes of the prolific Bukowski and Ferlinghetti. IT GOT TOUGH and GOPHER NED appeared in Slipstream, a NY literary press, still alive today, as is my Golden Corpse company and its artists who collaboratively create productions rich with spoken word, dance, drama and live jazz. As Golden Corpse (GC), we present autobiographical dance dramedy, such as CENSORED HEART about theater censorship, BONES ABIDE about GC actress Patti Coburn’s grandmother who survived the Armenian Genocide and NO REGRETS about the one night in 1968 when the Left Bank was raided. Its subsequent protest against false arrests led to the opening of the legendary Les Girls.
For over half a century, I kept creating, finding nooks and crannies, in the ongoing construction of my daily life, where I could take time to go into a safer place of poetry with its beat, melody and movement. An eye opener, I had found San Diego to be a blend of chaos, corruption and covert coverups. Never a victim or silent bystander, I returned to the magic of my childhood tools for self-care. For me, poetry soothed and stabilized. As a nine year old, I discovered my grandfather’s book of poetry classics, written in other centuries, impactful, heart-affecting. I was in love and stuck bits of paper so that I could return to my favorites, a book I still have today. I didn’t understand some of the poems, yet I was already captivated by the melody behind the words. I was always able to stay connected to my true self through art, even when the external world was treating me, dismissively, disrespectfully, and traumatically. During the heated battle of the ’80s, when the corrupt subsection of police were the criminals, not us, I presented my performance poetry mix of interpretive, ballet-influenced dance, American Sign Language and spoken word at colleges and art galleries.
Being a stripper in San Diego was rough. I was not the only one who was coerced into sex, who traded her body for police protection. The stories of how we got there are disturbing. My show, Journey of Memorie, Act 3, recounts one dancer’s rape by a vice officer in Presidio Park. Yet I survived through the healing power of creative expression. I took those early years of nightmares and constant vigilance at work and brought them to print, to protest, and eventually to the stage. I realized that the way I could stay balanced in spirit and productive as a human being, not a human doing, was as a director, scriptwriter and poet. ART made sense to me. I went from wearing boas to battling the bastions of entrenched prejudice in our town to the brighter beams of creative expression. (Pics)
Currently, we are in rehearsal for our 12th unique production, SIMMER, premiering May 2026, during the San Diego International Fringe Festival. Based on 1972 San Diego, we explore the struggles of the metaphoric, disenfranchised immigrants, who live in the horsetail reeds of the SD river banks, to the Mob, who controlled downtown’s porn shops, and to the nuns, who sprang from my upbringing; these amazing women, who molded my future adult, with a passion to fight back and to stay true to my values.
Let’s talk about our city – what do you love? What do you not love?
I like the diversity of San Diego. Rich in history, ancestry, and neighborhoods. Beautiful in terrain, weather, and landmarks. I appreciate the change from last century to now where more people can thrive in areas once restricted to the Good Ol’ Boys, a white male population. I don’t like the fight, the slow advances in police review boards. For decades, the police policed themselves. The problematic officers of the ’70s became the heads of Internal Affairs in the ‘80s.
As Kate Yavendetti, a respected San Diego attorney and activist, recently said to me (and way better than I ever could): “I think the good is the overwhelming support of the people of SD for police accountability (75% for Measure B) and the not so good is the continued stonewalling of the police and the fact that the SDPD doesn’t have to accept any (oversight agency) recommendations which have no authority to discipline. Aside from good and bad in SD related to police, I see more demands for accountability across the board – such as the outcry about ADUs, demand for better practices to help unhoused people, etc.” I am so grateful for San Diego people like Yavendetti who worked the front lines, attended the marches, and who continue to remain visible today.
Contact Info:
- Website: https://www.lesgirlstheater.com
- Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/denialtoredemption/ and https://www.facebook.com/notasilentbystander/
- Youtube: https://www.kpbs.org/podcasts/stripper-energy/
