Former stripper Prayed to See Club Erotica Closed

Macon, Georgia- Many people had hoped Cafe Erotica would close, but for seven years one of its former dancers prayed for it.

Rachel Simms, who danced there for nearly four years in the late '90s, is today a happily married Christian and church volunteer. She was among the people who watched the "We Bare All" sign come down in Friday's "grand closing ceremony."

Her story was much like that of many other dancers she knew. She was a single mom with a daughter to look after, she says. Simms had $3 to her name when she first walked through the doors of the 24-hour strip-club/restaurant in 1996.

She was living in Milledgeville when her neighbor, who danced nude at Cafe Erotica, had car trouble and asked Simms to give her a ride to work. Rather than making the drive back home and returning, she waited for her friend to finish her shift at the club off Interstate 75 at Exit 146.

"One thing led to another and I ended up working there," she said.

She doesn't really remember the first time she danced, but she vividly remembers the drive home.

"I regurgitated all the way home from Warner Robins to Milledgeville," she said in an unflinchingly frank interview in the coffee shop at her church Wednesday. "I'm sure I'm not the only one who had that experience."

She's not proud of what she did, Simms said, but she talks about it because she wants people - the women who dance in such clubs or are thinking about it, and the men who go to the clubs - to know the dark side of what some consider to be only harmless fun.

And that side, as she tells it, is very dark.

She was 26 when she started dancing, and she makes it clear that she was not an otherwise innocent girl lured by the money. She did drugs, had multiple sexual partners and abortions. Her innocence, she said, ended at 14 when an older man - not a family member, she stipulated - sexually assaulted her.

That began a downward spiral that eventually led her to the doors of Cafe Erotica, and from there things got worse, she says. From the time she was 14 until she was 31, she tried to commit suicide several times.

Although the reasons may vary for other dancers and the people who go there, she said, the story is much the same.

"To become that person who would ever step through the doors of a club like that, whether you are a customer or employee, to get to that point where that's OK, something has already clicked," she said. "For me, I was sexually abused as a child."

While it may appear to customers that dancers are having fun, that's not the case, Simms said.

"No matter what many of them might say, the truth is they are miserable," she said. "It's not glamorous. It's degrading and it's hurtful."

After 3 years at Cafe Erotica, she moved up to dancing at larger strip clubs in Atlanta, one of which had more than 300 dancers. The money varied widely. Some nights she might take home $50, other nights it could be thousands. Dancers called it "stupid money."

"It was just stupid how they would hand you over all that money," she said of the customers.

After about a year at the Atlanta clubs, she said, she became burned out and decided to try to "go legitimate." She got rid of all her stripper clothes because she feared the money would lure her back.

She tried working regular jobs but it was tough when she was getting paid just a fraction of what she had been making by taking her clothes off and gyrating to music. She lost several jobs and was working in a bar in Macon when she ran into a longtime friend, who is now her husband.

He had recently become a Christian. His father had told him to pray for a wife, and when he did, he had a vision of Simms, although they had rarely seen each other lately. But they happened to meet and started dating.

She was uneasy when he first pulled out a Bible, but later, she says, she had a dream.

"It was a gift from God and a revelation that he was real and it was true," she said.

When she woke up, she started reading the Bible.

But there was a big problem.

"I had a huge desire to go to church, but I had all this guilt over who I was," she said softly. "I had done things that are unspeakable."

She finally did go to church and found that she was accepted, although it took a while before she was able to talk about her past. She had even kept her secret from her family.

The key thing she learned, she said, is that while becoming a Christian doesn't make what she did OK, her soul was redeemed. That's why she's not afraid to talk about her previous life, she said, because now she has a new one, and she wants others to learn from her mistakes.

"The more I talk about where I was and where I am now and who I am becoming, the more free I feel," she said. "It's like the secrets were holding me bound."

Her transformation was not a complete turnaround in the beginning. She continued to struggle with addiction, but gradually she overcame it and today, she said, she does not miss anything she gave up from her former life.

Two weeks ago, she stood in the pulpit of her church, Harvest Cathedral on Rocky Creek Road in Macon, and told her story to the congregation and a television audience. When she finished, 10 people answered the call to come up to the altar.

Simms found out later that a former Cafe Erotica dancer was at church that day, a woman who was having the same feelings of guilt that she had in her early days as a Christian.

"We are very proud that she has the courage to be this transparent and tell this story," said Gail Metcalf, a staff pastor at Harvest Cathedral. "We are not proud of her past, and she's not proud of it, but we are proud that she overcame it. This is a real hard story, but she has turned around into a real person who cares. Rachel is one of my best volunteers. She is always willing to go take food to somebody or go see an elderly person and keep the nursery."

Metcalf pointed out that the church's slogan, "Real people with a real message," was once misprinted as "Real people with a real mess."

That had a certain truth to it also, she said, for many members other than Simms.

"We do have a lot of people who have messes in there," she said. "To me, Rachel really does embody that and what this church is all about."

Simms said she does not look down on strippers or the customers of such establishments, nor does she hold any bitterness. She says she prayed for Cafe Erotica owner Jerry Sullivan until his death in 2006, which set in motion the events that led to the sale of the club to developers who plan to raze it and put up a retail center in the location.

"Those people who do that, God doesn't hate them," Simms said. "He doesn't want us to do that to ourselves. He put in our hearts what's right and wrong, and most of us know it deep down inside."

So what would she tell a struggling single mom today faced with the alternative of working at McDonald's for minimum wage or at a strip club making hundreds or thousands of dollars every week?

"Had I known then what I know now, I would know that I could trust God to take care of me," she said. "It's so simple, even churches complicate this very simple truth, when we turn to him he will take care us."

And what would she tell men who go to strip clubs and believe it's just a harmless diversion?

"I would pray for them, and I would look at them and say 'Deep down in your hearts, you know that's not true.' "