Brent Jackson’s West Virginia strip club features an assortment of 150 naked women dancing patrons into a lustful frenzy, as Jackson rakes in cash dropped on food, drinks and entertainment.

A 30-year veteran of the strip club scene, Jackson plans to reopen the defunct strip club that operated as Gold & Silver Gentleman’s Club at 3121 Franklin Road in Roanoke, he said last month. This week, he said he doesn’t have an opening date and declined to talk further.

It was unclear Tuesday whether the project will be able to clear all municipal and other reviews to gain permission to open. The owner of the club property is raising objections.

If it opens, it would be the first strip club to put an adult entertainer on stage in the Roanoke area in some time.

When it was open, the Franklin Road club went by various names including Girls, Girls, Girls, Juicie's Exotic Cabaret and the Gold and Silver Private Club. Authorities fined the club for unlawful exposure in 1997. Some of its female exotic dancers sued management in a pay dispute in 2014. The enterprise updated its Facebook page in 2020 but hasn’t posted anything since. Restaurant inspectors from the Virginia Department of Health said the establishment was closed in May 2024, though only on a temporary basis.

Since Jackson approached the city in September, officials approved a new sign renaming the venue Lust Gentlemen’s Club. But last month, authorities discovered building renovations had begun without a permit and issued a code violation notice. This week, with work on hold, officials were still going over Jackson’s application for a commercial building and zoning permit that he submitted a few days after the citation.

He’d like to remodel the Franklin Road club site inside and out at a cost of $50,000, according to the application, with new paint, carpet, tile, roofing, fixtures and a 144-square-foot stage with a drink rail. 

Jackson described himself as a veteran of the adult entertainment industry in a 2023 interview published by On The Green Magazine, a Myrtle Beach, South Carolina, publication. He has a club in that city in addition to the one in West Virginia.

Interviews at businesses adjacent to Jackson’s proposed Roanoke club showed not everyone welcomes the plan, but whether members of the public will have a say in the review process was unclear Tuesday. It will depend on whether Jackson will need to obtain a type of permit called a special exception from the city Board of Zoning Appeals. That process would mandate a hearing to allow members of the public to comment on whether the proposal would mesh with the adjacent neighborhood and the city’s vision for itself, as written in its 2040 Comprehensive Plan, the city’s main land use guide.

A spokeswoman for city Zoning Administrator Philip Moore said,“it is possible that the establishment may need a special exception, but Zoning is still in the process of making this determination.”

The 2040 plan, which runs 77 pages, doesn’t mention strip clubs. Nor does it mention casinos, though Roanoke officials on Oct. 15 released a possible plan to establish one at the Berglund Center.

Striptease, and other forms of adult live entertainment, arose from the nude female burlesque performances of the late 1800s and flourished during the sexual revolution of the 1960s and 1970s. Venues expanded from major cities to suburbs and highway-close locations during the 1980s. Cable TV channels, DVD-formatted entertainment and websites that made adult entertainment widely available contributed to a downturn. The pandemic halted operations at some clubs.

But a number of clubs still operate in the region, the closest one to Roanoke being in Princeton, West Va. That state permits fully unclothed entertainment. Virginia does not. Virginia-style adult entertainment laws require dancers cover their private parts. Roanoke imposes additional restrictions, including that such establishments be at least 500 feet away from any school, day care center, church, park or homes.

There are other issues that could be on the table before it’s clear whether Roanoke will get a Lust.

The property owner owes the city $6,307 in real estate taxes, stormwater management fees and late fees, online records showed. Online records identify the owner as Robert C. Harbour, a Pensacola, Florida eye surgeon who grew up in Roanoke and whose brother Billy Harbour ran the club in the past.

Jackson identified himself on his building permit application as the property owner’s agent. But Deidre Glynn, a retired attorney working with Robert Harbour and who was reached through his medical practice, said Harbour denies any association with Jackson.

Harbour could not be reached. Glynn said she spoke to Harbour Tuesday. She said he knows nothing about the permit application, building renovation or the plan for a strip club

“I’ve never heard of the person before in my life,” Glynn quoted Harbour as saying about Jackson.

Striptease and drinking go together, in that many clubs serve alcohol. Southwest Virginia Investments Inc., the company that managed 3121 Franklin Road when adult entertainment was still offered, holds a license to serve beer, wine and mixed drinks at the Franklin Road address good through September 2026, according to the online records of the Virginia Alcoholic Beverage Control Authority. Lynn Perkins, Jackson’s wife, is president of Southwest Virginia Investments, according to company reports to the Virginia State Corporation Commission. 

Jackson and Perkins have had legal troubles in West Virginia, including a recent $1.1 million settlement over a traffic death attributed to a drunk driver who had been at a club that court papers show belonged to the couple.

That club, the Lust Gentlemen’s Club in Martinsburg, W. Va., is “NO ORDINARY STRIP CLUB," according to its website. It serves steak, barbecue, pizza and cocktails in a setting "where over 150 all-nude entertainers await to turn your dreams into reality." Patrons are prohibited from touching and taking pictures of the entertainers.

In March 2022, after a period of heavy drinking, a Covington man left the Martinsburg Lust, started his pickup and entered Interstate 81 traffic. A prosecutor said the vehicle was exceeding 90 mph when it struck the rear of another vehicle, which left the road and hit a tree, fatally injuring a 20-year-old West Virginia woman, according to a judicial decision and reporting by The Herald-Mail newspaper in Maryland.

Proceedings showed that the driver, who had also consumed alcohol at a boxing match before visiting Lust, had a blood-alcohol level that exceeded the limit, court papers said. An insurer paid $1 million to compensate the dead woman’s family and other occupants of the vehicle on behalf of Jackson, Perkins, the club and other defendants, according to court records filed Aug. 29 in Berkeley County Circuit Court in West Virginia. 

The woman’s father accused the defendants of negligence for allegedly serving the driver too much to drink, but the parties settled out of court without a trial.