N.J. bar: Which way will it go-go?

Debates in zoning and planning board meetings often revolve around how tall a back yard fence will be or how much coverage shrubbery will provide, but a current debate over the future of a Camden County go-go bar may someday involve the coverage of another back yard.

"I think this is going to boil down to what a naked buttock is," said city attorney John Kearney. "If a girl is wearing a thong, is it a naked buttock?"

The women dancing at Cheerleaders Gentleman's Club in Gloucester City will continue wearing their bikinis today because the venue is still a fully licensed bar. According to a promotional flier on the club's Web site, though, the location will become a BYOB when the clock strikes midnight on Feb. 17 and city officials are concerned that clothes could be shed because of it.

The change comes after years of legal battles with the state's Division of Alcoholic Beverage Control, which revoked the club's liquor license after a drunk patron killed a local couple in April 2000, minutes after leaving the club and driving the wrong way on Route 130. Cheerleaders gave up the challenge and chose the BYOB route because of "monumental" fines and penalties the ABC was demanding, their attorney, Jeffrey Baron, said.

The city zoning office, however, believed that the loss of a liquor license could be considered a change in "use," one that could violate a city ordinance banning go-go bars that don't have liquor licenses. Cheerleaders asked for an interpretation on the ruling, Baron said, but the matter was tabled during a packed planning and zoning board hearing last month and won't be heard again until Feb. 17, the same day Cheerleaders says they'll be a BYOB.

"The meeting was packed with cheerleaders," said Anthony Costa, solicitor for the zoning and planning board.

Baron said that the property has been a gentlemen's club, under different names, for decades and that its use is legally grandfathered regardless of the liquor license because it predates the ordinance.

"We're not expanding the use of the club;, we're reducing it," he said. "It's my view, that they cannot stop them from doing go-go."

The real issue, Baron believes, is that the city is worried that Cheerleaders will try to reduce the amount of clothing its dancers wear now that it doesn't have a liquor license. That's not the club's intention, he said, at least not yet.

"They continually asked us about our intentions to go nude or partially nude. We reserved the right to come back to them, to expand the use to go nude," he said. "Or we could go to court."

In neighboring Mount Ephraim, city fathers lost a First Amendment battle with the Fantasy Showbar in 1981 over live nude dancing in a case that was heard by the U.S Supreme Court.

Kearney said the administration is concerned about Cheerleaders, which sits near a redevelopment zone, but will "let the process play out" before it gets into definitions of nudity.

"For now, they said the women will be dressed as they were previously," he said.

Cheerleaders, on bustling Route 130, is far from the city's downtown area, Baron said, where a go-go bar once sat a block from the city's Catholic high school.

"There used to be a bar on every corner in Gloucester and most of them had go-go," he said. "Cheerleaders is the last one standing."