Joe Redner, Tampa strip club owner and free-speech litigant, dies at 86

Joe Redner, the Tampa strip club owner whose decades of courtroom and City Hall fights made him one of the city's best-known public figures, has died at 86, his family confirmed, Creative Loafing Tampa reported Saturday. The Tampa Bay Times also reported his death.

His daughter, Joy Lynn Redner, announced his death on Facebook Friday night. "Joe Redner passed away this morning. He died peacefully in his sleep," she wrote, according to Creative Loafing.

From odd jobs to Mons Venus

Originally from New Jersey, Redner moved to Tampa at 8 and attended Chamberlain High School, though he never graduated. Before running clubs he poured terrazzo floors, sold furniture at Levitz and worked as a traveling carnie, Creative Loafing reported.

He got his start managing the Deep South, a 1970s go-go bar then at Hillsborough and Rome avenues, and opened the Night Gallery on Hillsborough in 1976. Mons Venus, which he opened in 1981, became his flagship. He sold the club in 2025 to 2001 Odyssey but kept the land and served as the business's landlord.

Fights over speech, protest and politics

Redner was often in court and in controversy: fighting to allow fully nude dancing in Tampa clubs, rallying against "protest zones" that politicians used to move dissenters away from public appearances, and advocating for medical marijuana rights and LGBTQ Pride events. The Times called him a legal scholar and political provocateur as well as a medical marijuana advocate.

He also ran for multiple local offices and famously clashed with Bob Buckhorn, then a Tampa City Council member and now a candidate for mayor, over the "six foot rule," which for a time kept strippers and customers six feet apart.

"You need people like him to make the process work," Luke Lirot, Redner's First Amendment attorney, told Creative Loafing, adding that when one person stands up, "Government is less inclined to be abusive of people's rights than they would be otherwise."

Asked once by the paper about his constant legal battles, Redner said: "I'm happy fighting, I feel like I'm accomplishing something for society."