Somewhere in San Francisco tonight, women are very seductively taking off their clothes. We’re not talking about the Lusty Ladies or one of Larry Flynt’s Hustler “Honeys.” We’re talking about women who strip the old school way. We’re talking about burlesque.

Check out the entertainment calendar at Bruno’s, The Makeout Room or any number of other restaurants and clubs and it’s clear that burlesque, which had its heyday in the early half of the 1900s, is back. Local solo performers like Kitten on the Keys and troupes like the Cantankerous Lollies are consistently selling out venues. And The Velvet Hammer Burlesque Show from Los Angeles filled the Great American Music Hall in February with tickets going for $25 a pop.

“Burlesque is a fancy way of expressing yourself,” said Teresa Ellis in the understatement of the year (she’s better known by her stage name, Simone de la Getto). ”You can go to a strip club and it’s like, okay, now she’s naked, or you can go and see a girl take her clothes off and it’s all about how they take it off. It’s just more fun with burlesque.”

No one is a bigger proponent of burlesque than the performers themselves, many of whom naturally find the do-it-yourself aspect of their strip tease numbers empowering. Suzanne Ramsey, AKA Kitten on the Keys, has a little girl style to her act, often starting off in baby doll dresses and curled pigtails and ending up in pasties and ruffled panties. But she says there’s nothing belittling about her number. She plays her own songs, including a crowd favorite called “Grandma Sold My Panties On Ebay.” She also self-choreographs all her numbers and makes some of her own costumes by purchasing $3 bras and decorating them with spangles and ribbons until she looks like an “overdone birthday cake.”

“With the internet and television, there’s so much sexuality thrown in people’s faces these days. But you don’t really see women in charge of their sexuality,” said Ramsey. “With burlesque you have women making their own costumes, choreographing their own stuff and taking charge of their sexuality.” Burlesque also has a tradition of featuring curvaceous women, the kind of bodies that redefine T&A. “These big, beautiful, voluptuous women are so gosh darn sexy. It’s so refreshing,” she said.

Big and beautiful are two key ingredients for Heather MacAllister’s Big Bottom Burlesque troupe. MacAllister (stage name Ms. DeMeanor) said burlesque’s roots in the late 1800s – when stars like May Howard weighed more than 200 pounds – represents a time when women were “allowed to have bigger bodies than we’re allowed to have now.” She is currently working on adding aerial numbers, as they would have had back in the day, to her group’s act and is including more period costumes. The San Francisco troupe is one of the few who include lap dances in their act, mainly to give the dancers’ self-esteem a boost. “I think it’s important for women to shake their big butts in somebody’s face and get paid for it,” said MacAllister.

While MacAllister sees burlesque as an opportunity to display how sexy a larger woman can be, Ellis envisions her performances having the same effect for women of color. The Oakland dancer is a lesbian, a single mother and one of the few African-American women to have taken up the tassels. Even Ellis’ friends envision a burlesque dancer as a white woman, she said, despite the fact that burlesque was just as important to what was called “The Negro Vaudeville Circuit” as it was to other vaudevillian shows. She’s putting together a troupe for women of color, who are backed by an all black band and strip tease to all black music. “I guess what I’m doing is pretty revolutionary,” said Simone. “I twirl my pasties and dance with fire, but I’m also up there with a political message.”

Still other dancers have no message at all; they’re just in it for the love of performing. Jezebel, a “burly girl” with the Cantankerous Lollies, joined the group when she saw them perform in a cabaret act one night and “it just looked like so much fun.” The long-time performer sees burlesque as a more theatrical type of dance and says their costumes aren’t much more revealing than the high-cut skirts worn to do the tango. At the Exotic Erotic Ball last year, Jezebel said the strip teasers in her group actually came off like innocent kids compared to the other acts. The Lollies often perform with a live band, an opening comedian who gets the crowd churning with some real groaners, Gorilla X – a guy in a gorilla suit who has performed with No Doubt, and Rocky Roulette – a male burlesquer who does a pogo stick strip tease. Jezebel thinks the many varieties of burlesque are part of what keep people coming back for more.

“There’s the traditional bump and grind, take it all off. We tend to be more dance-centered. Some do tap and jazz. When you see a big revue there’s all kinds of entertainment,” Jezebel said. “I mean, on a Thursday night for seven or 10 bucks? There’s burlesque, a live band and a gorilla. What else could you ask for?”