Columnist Susan Snyder: Hackett engenders attention

Friday, Feb. 18, 2005 | 5:04 a.m.

Susan Snyder's column appears Mondays, Tuesdays, Thursday and Sundays. Reach her at snyder@lasvegassun.com or (702) 259-4082.

WEEKEND EDITION

February 19 - 20, 2005

Former Las Vegas stripper Andrea Hackett may be Ivy League-bound.

The former exotic dancer who sought to unionize the trade as executive director of the Las Vegas Dancers Alliance just lost a lawsuit seeking $600,000 from Deja Vu Showgirls. The club, she says, fired her after published reports revealed she had undergone a sex change operation to become a woman.

But the efforts that rankled strip-club owners may take Hackett to Dartmouth College as one of its Visionaries in Residence. The New Hampshire school's Center for Women and Gender program explores societal roles and struggles related to gender.

"It's not a final decision, but she is being considered," Wade Meyer, Dartmouth's program outreach coordinator, said Thursday. "We're looking for people who are doing work and promoting their vision of a more gender-equitable world."

They learned of Hackett from an article reprinted in the book "Best Sex Writing of 2004," Meyer said.

"It's surreal," Hackett said of a possible three-day gig at the 236-year-old school. "The only time I ever saw Dartmouth, I was in a kayak, on LSD and going across the Connecticut River listening to Melanie tapes."

This is a woman who burned her textbooks in high school. She's not joking.

"I consider myself somewhat of a gender professional," she said. "Trying to organize the dancers here, well, some of the hurdles we came up against were almost unimaginable."

Even the dancers balked.

"Dancer apathy is destroying the industry," Hackett said. "You can talk to them until you're blue in the face. And they agree with you until they actually have to do something. Then, forget it."

In 2003, Hackett was 49, making about $70,000 a year and living in a house in Summerlin overlooking a golf course. But her American dream vaporized in that year when her boss discovered her past as a man.

Hackett filed a gender discrimination lawsuit that U.S. District Court Judge James Mahan dismissed Feb. 11. She now is headed for the 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals in San Francisco.

The problem is the way her career ended, she said, not the fact that it's over.

"I'm over 50, and I think women over 50 ought to find other employment, no matter how good you look," Hackett said.

She recently was fired from her job at an employment agency because she said she refused to carry out an act she thought discriminatory. Details will be in the lawsuit, she said.

Hackett is writing an autobiography and started a printer cartridge and toner distribution company. When Meyer asked for her fee, Hackett didn't know what to say. She's still amazed by the inquiry.

Ivy League scholars see her work worthy of consideration, she said, while her own city makes its mark selling erotica and ignores her.

"I've been fired from six jobs in Las Vegas and had to start a new business under a pseudo-name," Hackett said. "Here I'm living in a very conservative town where I can't work for anybody."

If the Dartmouth deal happens, however, the stripper-turned-rhetorician sees opportunity on the horizon.

"God knows, if I can do this," she said. "But if I can, maybe I'll contact Harvard and say, 'When was the last time you had a stripper at the podium?'"