Dancing in a virtual reality strip club may not make a living, but it's been a COVID-safe joy for dancers who can't perform in real-life clubs.

A typical night of performing in-person drag takes 19-year-old Lena Diamond hours of prep. She first spends an hour and a half applying makeup, which involves drawing on sharp brows, gluing on feathered lashes, and packing blush across her cheeks. Then she dons a voluminous teal, magenta, or bubblegum pink wig, setting the false hairline with glue for a more natural finish. Once her hair and face are done, Lena pads her hips, laces herself into a corset for an exaggerated hourglass figure, and shimmies into her outfit. The drive to the clubs she performs in can take anywhere from 30 minutes to an hour. Upon arriving, she spends another hour checking in and waiting her turn for the stage. She may use the waiting time to adjust her makeup, cinch her corset even tighter, or glue on a set of fake nails.

Getting ready to perform at the virtual strip club TrippyWRLD ENT takes just a few minutes, as Lena demonstrated in a viral September TikTok that received more than 3.7 million views.

The club — and the world it occupies — exists in the virtual reality game VRChat, an online playground in which users can design spaces, customize their avatars, and interact with other users. The game launched in 2017, and amid social distancing during the last 18 months, has become a popular platform for COVID-safe socializing.

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Most nights, Lena prepares for a show by putting on her headset and hopping into a Discord call. Her VR avatar is an extension of her drag persona; Lena goes by the name "Diamond" on stage in real life and in VR. Like her real-life drag persona, Lena's VR avatar has doll-like lashes, vivid eyeshadow, and thick teal hair pulled into pigtails. Unlike performing as her real-life counterpart, performing in VR is physically more comfortable.

"It's like getting into drag, but super easy, because I don't have to. I don't have to lace my corset so tight that I'm like, getting the taste of last week's dinner," Lena explained in a call with Mashable, noting that her avatars are designed to look "exactly like" her real-life self in drag. "In VRChat, normal physics don't even apply, if you want. There are moments where I'm literally flying around the stage."

Lena, who is a trans woman, began doing drag at the age of 16. She loves performing as a playful caricature of herself; her repertoire includes "standard drag moves" like death drops as well as jumping into splits off of a mini dog staircase.

When clubs and venues shuttered in early 2020 to prevent the spread of COVID-19, "all performing stopped." Lena still experimented with makeup for new drag looks and streamed a digital drag show on Twitch, but it wasn't remotely close to the rush of performing in front of an audience. Like many others who were isolated during the height of the pandemic, she found solace in a vibrant online community. Buying an Oculus Quest 2 and playing VRChat, where she met many of her close friends, "basically changed" her life.

In August of this year, a friend in Lena's VRChat circles asked if she was interested in dancing for a virtual strip club. The friend, known online as Mustachio, introduced Lena to Trippy, who "owns" TrippyWRLD ENT, and CallMeSway, who acts as the club's head dancer. Lena auditioned as Diamond, using an avatar customized to look like her real-life drag persona.

"It's basically run almost exactly like a real-life strip club," Lena continued. "You do an audition on stage during normal club hours, and see how people react, and the head dancer was like, 'You got some good reviews!'"

To prepare for a night at TrippyWRLD ENT, Lena puts on her Oculus headset and body tracking kit, which animates her avatar's hands, arms, and torso. Then in VRChat, Lena selects the "world" that hosts the club. Once she's transported to the club's lobby, she and other dancers, club managers, and DJs attend a pre-show "briefing" to discuss music and make note of VIP guests — VRChat admins and the creators of the world occasionally attend shows and tip dancers with gift cards. When the club's doors "open" at 7 p.m., the team members mute themselves in-game and join a private Discord call, where they can make song requests or ask for breaks.

Performing as Diamond involves playing with the constraints of both the physical world and the virtual one. Though she doesn't have a pole in her room, Lena can "climb" the pole on TrippyWRLD ENT's stage using Playspace Mover, a program that allows users to quickly adjust their avatar's floor level. Playspace also fakes full body tracking by using the player's height to guess where their knees and hips are. Since her current set only tracks movement on the upper half of her body, Lena uses Playspace to add lower body movement, which she showed TikTok viewers in her "Megan knees" challenge.

During the reporting of this story, Lena purchased a full body tracking set. Playspace isn't perfect and can look awkward compared to seamless full body tracking, so until recently Lena's VR performing was limited to standing in one place. She compensated with exaggerated arm and torso movements, which she took from her experience as a drag performer. To add some pizazz to this self-described "white girl dancing," Lena would set Playspace to run or walk around the stage while dancing with her upper body.

Glitches do happen mid-performance, but Lena prefers them over slipping on stage in real life since the latter will inevitably end up "somewhere on social media, on some roast page, memed to death." The worst that can happen during a VRChat performance is freezing or crashing, but patrons are generally more supportive of mistakes than those of physical clubs.

"One time, I crashed on stage. I was like, mid-grind, oh god. It's me, grabbing the pole mid-grind, and it's just frozen there, and then I randomly disappeared," Lena recounted.

As in real-life strip clubs, clients can request lap dances or visit private rooms within the club with dancers. But unlike real strip clubs, VR clients are allowed to solicit sex. Dancers are usually tipped for sexual interactions, which is illegal in any real-life strip club. Because virtual reality sex is considered porn, which is legal, clients and dancers are allowed to directly engage in sexual activity — at least, as directly as a VR body tracking set allows.

Clients have to be at least 17 to enter the club, and at least 18 to request lap dances and visit private rooms. Dancers have to be at least 18 to perform. Lena said TrippyWRLD ENT operates on an "honor system" — verifying one's age is impossible without providing personal information to strangers online. If the club finds out that a client lied about their age, the client would not only be banned from the club itself, but also from the entire world server. And since VRChat users are often active in multiple circles, the lying client risks being blacklisted from clubs in other worlds as well.

The fact that the club's age minimum for dancing is 18, not 21, was a major draw for Lena when she began performing. Though Lena has had some experience performing in drag shows, few clubs will even consider letting someone under 21 audition. In real life, "a majority of clubs" have turned Lena down since she's still underaged. TrippyWRLD ENT and other clubs within VRChat don't serve alcohol (because it's, well, physically impossible) which means dancers like Lena can at least get the chance to perform.

"You don't have to be 21. You don't have to have a specific body type," Lena added. "You don't have to look a certain way because you can just change your avatar. The barrier for entry and the barrier for working is so much lower."

Another perk of working at a VR club: avoiding non-consensual interactions entirely. Lena appreciates that she doesn't have to worry about "grimy people," especially during the throes of an ongoing pandemic. Most women have experienced uncomfortable stares, touching, and heckling from strangers, and those unwanted interactions are even more prevalent during a performance. Better clubs will remove offenders from the venue. Unruly VR patrons receive an even icier punishment.

"If somebody is being really out of pocket, if someone is partying a little too hard...The block button!" Lena continued. "You can literally make somebody disappear right before your eyes, just by pressing the block button. It completely gets rid of their avatar."

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Unfortunately, making a living off of VR dancing is still a fantasy. Patrons can tip dancers on stage, for a lap dance, or for a private sexual encounter to show their appreciation. But much to the disappointment of Lena's TikTok views, the tips from VR stripping are nowhere near a living wage. In a follow-up video to her viral one, Lena warned viewers that VR stripping is "not a sustainable source of income," and that most of the dancers just do it for fun. Lena herself works full-time at a furniture store, and dances at TrippyWRLD ENT for the fun of it.

"You're shaking your ass for a real big bag. And that bag is only gonna be about this big," Lena's VR avatar explained in a TikTok, gesturing as if she was holding a small purse. "Actually, no. You might not even get this big."

Whether these erotic digital interactions have a place in sex work discussions is still a gray area online. Lena's viral TikTok about VR stripping received backlash from a small minority of real-life strippers who claimed their occupation was co-opted for online fun while actual clubs remained closed. It follows a year of mainstream creators flocking to explicit subscription sites like OnlyFans, which has saturated the sex work industry. A thread in Lena's comment section discussed whether VR stripping should even be considered "real" sex work. Although she may not make much, if any money from a night of dancing at TrippyWRLD ENT, Lena noted that VR stripping still involves "performing sexually provocative acts."

"The people who come to the club are like veterans of VRChat. [They've] been on VRChat all day, every day." Lena said, arguing that VRChat strippers aren't taking jobs or patrons away from real-life strippers. " That's already a much smaller community...If you're playing VRChat you're not going to a real strip club."

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Lena's also dealt with blatantly transphobic trolls since her TikTok went viral, but she takes it in stride. The reception to her videos about VR dancing are otherwise positive. She told Mashable that she's made even more friends in the game, and inspired a wave of VRChat players to try performing in a club. A few players started attending Lena's shows after seeing her on TikTok.

Once she turns 21 and can attend drag clubs more regularly, Lena plans on performing a routine that incorporates traditional real-life drag with her VR stripping experience. She wants to use a full-body tracker to choreograph a duet between her real-life drag persona and her VRChat avatar, so it appears that the two are dancing together.

"I get a lot of this one comment over and over again, and it's so fucking funny. It's verbatim, 'I've seen this episode of Black Mirror before,'" Lena said. It's a reference to the dystopian tech-driven Netflix series. "All y'all got to get with it or get lost, because this is the future, everybody."