Burlesque Hall of Fame to Close

By Scott Roeben, on May 05 2025
4 min read 5 comments
Las Vegas Things to Do in Las Vegas

The Burlesque Hall of Fame in Las Vegas has announced it will close on July 20, 2025. Insert “tits up” joke here.

The nonprofit mecca for tassel and sequin fans, originally named Exotic World, opened in Las Vegas in 2006 and landed in its current location, in the Arts District, in 2018.

The reasons for the closure features the requisite drama, so we hope you’re up for some bare-all coverage of this deflating news.

The 2010 movie “Burlesque” has a 37% rating on Rotten Tomatoes. We blame F1.

A little background to set the stage.

The Burlesque Hall of Fame (BHoF) is “dedicated to preserving, celebrating, and inspiring the art of burlesque.”

Burlesque is the “art of the tease.” Simply, put, burlesque is a slower and less arousing form of stripping.

The museum originated from the personal collection of striptease artist Jennie Lee, who began amassing burlesque memorabilia during her career. After her passing, fellow performer Dixie Evans continued Lee’s mission, transforming the collection into a museum initially situated in Helendale, California.

When the Burlesque Hall of Fame moved to Vegas in 2006, it was located in the Emergency Arts building in downtown’s Fremont East district. The building also housed the beloved Beat Coffeehouse. Now, it’s Eureka restaurant.

The Burlesque Hall of Fame is officially an educational organization with exhibits featuring costumes, props, photographs and other memorabilia that chronicle the history and evolution of burlesque.

Humor has always played a big part in burlesque, so we approve. Bonus: Boobies.

The museum is perhaps best known for its annual Burlesque Hall of Fame Weekender, a four-day convention that includes classes, museum tours, “pin-up safaris” and successive nights of showcases.

The Burlesque Hall of Fame announced its closure via social media.

The announcement gets a little political, so if you’re easily triggered by “opinions,” gird.

The BHoF announcement states: “After much discussion, the board and leadership at BHoF have decided to indefinitely suspend the museum’s operation, effective July 20, 2025. While the museum generates revenue, it generally costs more to operate than it earns, and we have relied on the Weekender to make up the difference. But the Weekender has still not returned to pre-pandemic numbers and Trump administration policies make it unlikely that it will for some while. Additionally, we are still recovering from the effects of the pandemic, and these further financial impacts have created a storm that we cannot weather.”

The pandemic ended years ago, but fine. The museum goes on to attribute its decline in business to a drop in visitation.

The statement continues: “Recent economic and political events have impacted the Burlesque Hall of Fame deeply. Our city’s visitation is down 10% over last year, with international travel especially hard-hit. Museum attendance has plummeted along with the drop in tourism. Meanwhile, funders we’ve relied on are struggling as federal funding is withdrawn. And Weekender ticket sales are slow as recession looms and international visitors make the difficult but entirely reasonable decision not to risk a U.S. border crossing.”

Yeah, so burlesque people are drama queens. Shocker.

That 10% number is a little fudged. Visitation did drop 7.8% year-over-year in March 2025. That’s a significant decrease, but was a reaction to the administration’s dumbassery and trade war. Businesses, nonprofit or not, don’t make long term decisions based upon short term, cherry-picked, and very fluid, data. (The overall visitation trend is flat or slightly down.)

We’ll say it, business at the Burlesque Hall of Fame has sagged.

Granted, there’s a lot of uncertainty out there at the moment. Shuttering seems an overreaction to the immediate concerns, so we’re pretty sure the museum is using the cover of the current chaos as an excuse to close following an ongoing struggle to stay afloat. It’s definitely about demand, probably about funding and the associated marketing challenges.

Keeping it real: Donald Trump didn’t kill burlesque, porn did.

In better news, the BHoF isn’t going out of business.

The museum clarified that here: “To be clear, the Burlesque Hall of Fame as a whole is not going out of business. We are putting the most expensive part of our operation on hiatus in order to protect the collection, the Weekender, and our community.”

The BHoF says over the next several years the BHoF Weekender will continue, the museum’s collection will be kept safe, local shows and the museum’s School of Striptease will continue to happen, the museum will develop online and travelling exhibitions, the organization will “focus on developing a new long-term fundraising plan, including a capital campaign to build up funds to re-open the museum when more stable economic and political conditions emerge.”

Basically, the show will go on, it will just be stripped down to its core mission and hopefully the BHoF can find a way to reopen again in the future.

Burlesque is a dying art form, but remnants can still be found in Las Vegas. Miss Behave’s “Mavericks” at Plaza features burlesque and Dita Von Teese performs at Voltaire at Venetian. There’s also “Zombie Burlesque” at Planet Hollywood and “X Burlesque” at Flamingo, along with the just-opened “Empire Strips Back: A Burlesque Parody” at Rio. The line between traditional burlesque and topless revues is a little fuzzy, but Las Vegas has T&A galore. There are lots of other burlesque shows around town, too. We would share some of those, but that would involved “research” and “effort,” so that’s not happening. Isn’t digging up photos from our 2018 visit to the museum enough?

We haven’t been to the Burlesque Hall of Fame, but it’s always seemed a good fit for Las Vegas and we’re sorry to hear it’s gone bust.

Do you know this blog at all?