Sabrina Jade joined a strip club in Brighton because she had no money.
She finished her first week with roughly as much cash as she’d started with, plus a fairly significant realisation about who she was attracted to.
She’d moved from Bournemouth for university and run out of funds fast.
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Stripping looked like the quickest fix available.
“I thought I would join a strip club and make loads of money, but in my first week I was like, ‘So, I’m not making loads of money, and I also think I might be gay.'”
The 28-year-old says the question had simply never come up before.
“When I was growing up, I just thought I was straight because everyone was straight.
I had no boyfriend for ages and just had really close best friend after really close best friend.”
Then she started working shifts surrounded by other dancers.
“We were all flirting. We might do a double dance and girls would flirt with me.
I couldn’t even act. I would go into a panic and think, ‘What does this mean?'”
A vibrator, a diner and a 6am finish
The other women at the club took it entirely in their stride.
One told her the feeling was mutual.
Another decided the immediate priority was shopping.
“Another friend said, ‘You need to know what a vibrator is, let’s go to Ann Summers together.’
The club finished at 6am, so we went to an all-night diner until Ann Summers opened and then she helped me pick out a vibrator.”
“It was all so normal, which made it so easy for me. It wasn’t until much later that I realised my lifestyle might seem quite peculiar to other people.”
Her dad’s response was ‘Yeah, fair’
Her parents had already found out about the stripping, which meant the second conversation landed on softer ground.
“They found out I was a stripper before they found out I was bi, so they had that to deal with first.
Then I told them I thought I liked girls and my dad was just like, ‘Yeah, fair,’ and my mum was like, ‘Yeah, fair,’ too.”
When she brought a girlfriend home, the verdict was warmer still.
“They were like, ‘She’s amazing.’ I think they had almost had enough of hearing about shy boy after shy boy.”
The DM that landed while she was sofa surfing
Then the pandemic shut the clubs and Sabrina lost her income overnight.
She was moving between friends’ sofas when Babestation messaged her on Instagram.
“I remember texting my dad and saying, ‘Babestation has messaged me, but this is your era, what if your friends see me?’ He said, ‘I do not care, princess. Whatever makes you happy and gives you back some stability.'”
She credits the platform work with steadying everything that followed.
By her account it brought stable wages, control over her own timetable, and enough slack in her week to put proper effort into competitions and activism.
Lap dances, pop music and a room built for women
Sabrina now works exclusively at gay and women-focused strip nights, and has launched a pole show that puts strippers and LGBTQIA+ performers on the same bill.
Whether women would actually want lap dances was, she admits, an open question.
“We weren’t sure whether women would want a lap dance, but, as it turns out, they definitely do.
It just needs to be a place that’s meant for them, where they can hear girlie pop music and there’s lots of enthusiastic consent.”
“The atmosphere is completely different to a traditional male-focused strip club.”
Sabrina, who is pansexual and says she connects to brains and personalities first, thinks the appeal is mostly about feeling unwatched.
“When I step into a queer space, it doesn’t matter, you can use whatever pronouns you want and kiss whoever you want.
These spaces that the queer community creates are like massive parties, but they are also safe-space parties.”
Why It Matters
There’s a pattern here that runs well beyond one dancer in Brighton.
Platform income is increasingly the thing that funds the passion project rather than the passion project funding itself.
Sabrina’s queer strip nights and pole show exist because camming gave her predictable money and a schedule she controls, which is exactly the trade creators keep making across every corner of the industry: take the stable, unglamorous revenue stream, then spend the freedom it buys on the work you actually care about.
Queer and women-focused club nights have expanded across UK cities since 2020, at the same time as a wave of club-floor performers shifted onto subscription and cam platforms after venue closures wiped out shift work.
What Sabrina does next depends on whether the pole show scales past one-off nights into something with a regular audience.
She isn’t framing it as a business plan.
“My general life purpose is trying to show that all these things aren’t scary, queer people aren’t scary and I’m not scary.”
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