Viva Las Vegas

Liv Osthus is an American writer, activist, musician, stripper, and former candidate for Mayor of Portland, Oregon. Having performed for more than twenty-five years under the stage name Viva Las Vegas, she has written two books about her experiences on stage, in addition to writing for outlets including The Village Voice and The New York Times Magazine.

Described as the "Diva of the Demimonde" by Geek Love author Katherine Dunn, she has been dubbed the most literate and most famous stripper in Portland, Oregon. Willamette Week described her as a "renaissance woman who's authored memoirs, sings punk and French medieval music alike, and has beaten breast cancer to perform into her 40s". Her cultural influence in the city extends to inspiring a feature-length documentary, Thank You for Supporting the Arts, and a one act opera, Viva's Holiday.

A member of the Democratic Party and the Democratic Socialists of America, Osthus was a candidate in the 2024 Portland, Oregon mayoral election, finishing in fifth place out of twenty candidates.

Early life and education Osthus was born in Sioux Falls, South Dakota to Mark and Christine Osthus in 1975. Her father was a Lutheran pastor.

Osthus received a degree in cultural anthropology from Williams College. These excursions led her to learn conversational Indonesian and Swahili language, in addition to her knowledge of French and German.

Dancing

Osthus' first experience inside a strip club was during a collegiate spring break, and she has spoken at length about her initial surprise at discovering both the artistry of the performances and the intimacy between performers and audience. "The actual human connection was different from so much theater and art I'd seen ... in college, where it tends to be really intellectual," she recalled. Even when starting out, she never remembers feeling the strip club was somehow different from any other stage. After decades of performances in venues of every size across the globe, she's defined three guiding principles – "connection is paramount, sex work is important ... and stripping is art!" "What she loves most about stripping," acclaimed arts website Hyperallergic wrote, "is its celebration of the body, that sex itself is a delight."

She has been accused of romanticizing the industry as a stripper pollyanna relentlessly shilling only the most positive aspects of the profession.

At the same time, she did recognize the larger societal implications when first climbing on stage in 1997 as a penniless young writer trailing an awful breakup.

In 2008, Osthus was diagnosed with breast cancer at age 33. One week before her diagnosis, Osthus had performed The Rollng Stones "Dontcha" at Portland strip club Mary's Club, which she had planned to be her last performance before retiring from stripping. Dr. Nathalie Johnson, a surgeon and former dancer who'd spent a season with the Alvin Ailey company before focusing upon medicine, conducted surgery to remove her left breast on September 28.

Osthus has stated that dancing forced her to confront newly awakened insecurities and said that nurses often recommend other cancer patients visit her at Mary's. "I felt so distant from my body after that initial mastectomy. Then, back on stage, no one noticed." One of their debates took place at the offices of local alternative newspaper Willamette Week, which published an edited version of their discourse with her picture on that issue's cover page. From 1998 to 2001 Osthus combined zine-inspired backstage coverage of various touring acts with sex worker gossip and political commentary.

In 2001, Osthus moved to New York City, where her stories appeared in The New York Times Magazine and The Village Voice, but returned to Portland shortly after the September 11 attacks. Over the next few years, she tended bar at a number of bars across Portland.

As she would later explain in a magazine feature detailing her experiences entitled "The Last Days of My Left Breast", plans for a return to New York and MFA program were necessarily shelved following her battle with cancer.

"The Last Days of My Left Breast" would appear the following year under the "Apocrypha" section of Osthus' second book Gospel According to Viva Las Vegas. Published in conjunction with the second printing of Magic Gardens, the collection assembled dozens of interviews and articles she'd penned for Exotic magazine around the turn of the aughts.

In recent years, Osthus has lectured on aesthetics for a Portland State University philosophy course. At the 2017 PUGSfest celebration of ideas, she led discussions titled "Art, Women's Bodies + the Revolution" and "Strip Stages: Spaces of Resistance, Healing, and Power."

In 2015, Osthus told Willamette Week that she "used to make lots of money writing, and now that's more or less dried up". The Portland Mercury acknowledged faults with uncertain pacing and stilted voiceovers but thought the film brought out the best of its star.

In the winter of 2022, the producers reached an agreement with Cinema Libre, who released the film for DVD and video on demand distribution and approved a premiere at Portland's Hollywood Theatre, with an after party held at Mary's Club. The aggressively-sexualized take on classic punk played some high-profile shows and released a pair of albums: The I Need Sex Sessions (2004) and Want You! (2005).

Following Coco Cobra's extended hiatus, Osthus briefly led classic country troupe the Lesser Saints where she covered favorite tunes from American stalwarts like Johnny Cash and Emmylou Harris. They performed their first show at Mary's with 25 of the club's entertainers accompanying on handbell.

Although 'bergerette' is itself a type of chanson, Osthus has said that aspect was merely coincidental since the trio intended their name to play upon the traditional Christmas carol "Nous Etions Trois Bergerettes" ("We Were Three Shepherdesses") as well as the rather more profane role that European folk tales of the Middle Ages thrust upon the shepherdess – "the lusty, earthy, heroine of Renaissance smut lore". In 2013, alongside The Gnash and Vodka Wilson Overdrive, they contributed a capella track "Dona Nobis Doughnut" to a split seven-inch 45 RPM record on the Voodoo Doughnut label. Ennemi du Sommeil, a sophomore album with liner notes by legendary rock critic Richard Meltzer, was self-released in 2015.

Opera

According to Osthus', the first she remembers hearing about an opera drawn from her life was during a Mary's shift from 2012 when an apparent acolyte approached clutching her memoir. He'd suffered through a remarkably similar story at about the same age, unleashing bitter conflict within the household by attempting to improve communication, and he believed the simple narrative contained the elements necessary for a meaningful work of musical theater.

The resulting one-act, four-character, $20K-budgeted opera Viva's Holiday ran for one week at the Star Theater in December 2015 with a libretto co-written by Osthus and Corbell set to Corbell's music.

While trying to enlist other small companies in the piece, Corbell oversaw the opera's return to the stage the following year. Soprano Helen Funston played Viva during both productions. Corbell, meanwhile, excitedly told Oregon Public Broadcasting his hopes to join the ranks of those regular holiday shows and have our annual Portland stripper opera!"

Critical response

In the foreword to Osthus' second book, Jim Goad explained Osthus' rarefied role as a bridge or translator between the more academically oriented proponents of Portland's burgeoning sex industry and the dancers themselves. As Viva, she has been called an international touring advocate for strippers' rights.

Although Osthus' father disapproves of her chosen profession, she views him as a clear inspiration nonetheless and insists at the end of the day, their jobs aren't all that different. "I'm following in his footsteps as a preacher," she told Willamette Week about her stagework at Mary's Club. "Growing up, I saw how much hope he could give [and] I like to think I'm doing the same."