Tampa, Florida- It’s a sweltering July afternoon in Tampa, Florida, and a small crowd of men are cooling off in the most notorious watering hole in the South, the Mons Venus.

A tiny one-story building wedged between fast-food restaurants on busy Dale Mabry Highway, the Mons is known for its exotic dancers (and convenient proximity to Raymond James Stadium, home of the Tampa Bay Buccaneers). But the star attraction is the 68-year-old dude with wire-frame glasses and a long gray ponytail talking on the phone in the back: Joe Redner.

As part of his campaign, he offered free admission to his strip club for anyone with an “I Voted” sticker.

Redner is the multimillionaire owner of the Mons and self described “father of the nude lap dance.” But after waging years of tireless (and colorful) campaigns on behalf of civil rights, he’s achieved the unlikeliest title of all: political folk hero.

In a state known for its conservative politics and dogged war against obscenity, the fact that a strip-club owner on the Gulf Coast has become a hero is no small feat. As Lawrence Walters, a prominent First Amendment attorney in Florida, puts it, “he’s the Larry Flynt of Tampa.”

Last April, Redner stunned detractors by winning enough votes for a Tampa City Council runoff against a retired schoolteacher. As part of his campaign, he offered free admission to his strip club for anyone with an “I Voted” sticker. Redner, a Democrat and patron of local causes from public parks to children’s hospitals, lost the race but won the hearts of locals. Now he has begun his next campaign, for county commissioner in Tampa’s Hillsborough County, District 6. “People assume that if you’re an adult-business owner, you’re not a good person. And that’s just the opposite,” he says, in his slight southern accent. “Most politicians are not good people, and I think I’m absolutely a good person.”

Redner had to overcome obstacles from the start. After moving to Tampa from New Jersey with his mother and brother at age six, he grew up in a single-parent home with little to call his own. “We never had the things other people had,” he says. While his mother waited tables and put herself through nursing school, Redner struggled in school, due to poor self-esteem and concentration skills, and dropped out in 10th grade. He floated through odd jobs around town, from working at a carnival to a canning factory, but says the varied work schooled him in street smarts. “Wisdom comes from experience,” he says.

Redner was wise enough to recognize a business opportunity when he saw one. By the early 1970s, in his mid-20s, Redner was managing a local strip club when he heard of a Supreme Court ruling that nudity constituted free speech. All-nude strip clubs were nonexistent at the time, despite the sexual revolution in the air. “Since the beginning of time, people have danced to express themselves,” Redner says, “so the ballet is speech, dancing around a campfire is speech. I figured these nude dancers were speaking, and if the Supreme Court meant what they said, this was protected by the First Amendment.” It wasn’t just a political statement—it was a way to make money. “I knew if I had a place that offered this, people would come,” he says.

Bolstered by the court ruling, Redner decided the time was right to open the town’s first all-nude club, the Night Gallery, in an old tavern in a sketchy part of the city, in 1976. Six years later, he put down $5,000 on a Dale Mabry bar called the Huddle (owned by a Chicago Bear) and reopened it as the Mons. Redner says all he had to do was put up a “Nude Dancing” sign to market the place. “I made my nut in the first month,” he says. Today, Redner puts his net worth at $25 million, and says the Mons makes $3 million in profit each year. Tedd Webb, news-radio host on 970 WFLA in Tampa, calls Redner “one of the smartest businessmen in the area’s history.” Webb adds, “Joe has always tried to show people he’s more than a nude-club impresario. He’s beholden to nobody, and he’s got a feel for what people want.”

The smarts, Webb and others believe, comes from Redner’s belief in the power of his customers—and himself—to take a stand. When the city passed an ordinance in 1999 requiring Mons entertainers to dance six feet from patrons, he organized a massive protest of strippers and customers, culminating with dozens of dancers testifying in court. Redner won and became an instant antihero, moving on to champion other First Amendment causes.

Redner now hosts a popular radio show, Voice of Freedom, on the public-access Tampa Bay Community Network. “Anyone who cares about the First Amendment is grateful to Joe, whether they agree with his business practices or not,” says Louise Thompson, executive director of the network.

Redner’s tenacity is widely known. Attorney Luke Lirot recalls the time Redner spent thousands suing the local government for not paying a $5 tab for bottled water that investigators drank while visiting his club. “I have that check right up now on my wall in a frame,” Lirot says, “Joe will dedicate vast resources to protection of fundamental rights when someone [else] will just pay a $500 fine.”

One of Redner’s favorite targets is Ronda Storms, a Hillsborough County commissioner who fought to eliminate funding for Planned Parenthood and tried to mandate sterilization for sex offenders. She succeeded in having her county adopt a policy of “abstaining from acknowledging, promoting, or participating in any recognition or events for gay pride at any time,” and she battled against having gay and lesbian student clubs in high schools.

In December 2005, Redner fought back by suing the county commissioners for discrimination—and shocked his supporters by coming out as gay. Storms accused Redner of turning her cause into “a circus,” and questioned his sincerity. But now even local clergy are coming to Redner’s defense. Bishop Randy White, leader of Without Walls International Church, has said that Redner has “a heart for the people” and considers him “a great, great man and person of integrity.” (White did not return calls for this story.)

Now that he’s become renowned for his crusades, Redner hopes his latest campaign this fall finally delivers his ultimate dream: a seat in politics. But he’s not giving up on his businesses anytime soon. He has plans to build a hotel along with offices and a 1,400-car parking garage. He paid $1.5 million for a Taco Bell near his strip club and is working to transform the spot into a Spanish restaurant. This fall, he’ll be opening his own brewery, Cigar City Brewing, named for the town’s famous cigar industry.

“Almost everything that makes a successful business person is common sense,” he says, “especially in fields they have no expertise in. And most of the time what I’m doing is going against the common perception, the way things are perceived to be by [the] majority.”