Joe Redner

Joe Redner died peacefully in his sleep on the morning of Friday 16 October 2026, aged 86. His daughter Joy Lynn Redner announced the death on his Facebook page at about 10pm that evening, writing that he had passed away that morning, and WFLA and other Tampa Bay outlets reported it the next day. The place and cause of death were not made public. He had survived stage 4 lung cancer diagnosed in 2011.

Tributes on social media called him a Tampa legend and one of the city's most determined defenders of free speech. Funeral or memorial arrangements had not been announced at the time of writing.

Joseph R. Redner was born in New Jersey in 1940; Wikipedia gives only the year, and public court records give his date of birth as 2 July 1940, which matches every age reported for him during his life. When he was eight his parents divorced, and his mother moved him and his older brother to Tampa, Florida. She worked as a waitress at a drugstore, and he sold newspapers on a street corner. He later recalled noticing segregated water fountains on arriving from New Jersey, an injustice he said he never understood.

He played football well enough to be recruited by the coach at Chamberlain High School, but quit, and he dropped out of school early in his sophomore year. From then until his early thirties he worked what he called "existence jobs": stock boy, carnival worker, terrazzo floor layer, inspector at the Continental Can factory, furniture salesman at Levitz and carpenter. He later earned his high school equivalency diploma while serving time in jail over a zoning dispute.

Redner's carpentry work for the co-owner of the Deep South, a go-go bar on Hillsborough Avenue, led to a job managing it. In 1975 the Supreme Court struck down a Jacksonville ordinance banning nudity at drive-in cinemas in Erznoznik v. City of Jacksonville, and Redner concluded that nude dancing could be protected expression as well. "Dance is speech," he later said.

In 1976 he and a bail bondsman partner opened the Night Gallery, Tampa's first all-nude club. Police raided it almost daily, and the St. Petersburg Times reported that Redner was arrested 36 times that year. He opened the Tanga Lounge in 1977 and, in the early 1980s, bought the former Huddle Lounge at 2040 North Dale Mabry Highway and reopened it as the Mons Venus. Because Tampa law barred alcohol in full-nude clubs, it sold only soft drinks. The club became nationally known, appearing in songs and on national television, and Redner became known as the father of the nude lap dance.

His clubs brought him into decades of conflict with the Tampa City Council, Hillsborough County and other local governments over zoning, licensing and conduct rules. He spent years studying law in the Hillsborough County Law Library and won damages in several suits, including 250,000 dollars from Hillsborough County over a zoning law found unconstitutional and a 500,000 dollar jury award over a club in Citrus County. Some Mons Venus cases reached the Supreme Court and became case law. In 1999 Tampa passed an ordinance requiring dancers to stay six feet from customers; Redner openly defied it, and after many arrests a county judge ruled it unconstitutional in 2001. In 2005 a jury awarded him more than seven million dollars after the Florida Department of Transportation took one of his properties by eminent domain, finding that its best use as an adult club made it worth more than the state had offered.

Redner was also convicted of a felony after a 1983 cocaine arrest and received probation; his civil rights were restored in 1994. In May 2025 he sold the Mons Venus business to Don Kleinhans, owner of the 2001 Odyssey club across the street, keeping the land and acting as landlord.

Redner married twice and had four children; both marriages ended in divorce. His son Joey Redner founded Cigar City Brewing in Tampa in 2009 with his father's investment, and his daughter Joy Lynn Redner announced his death. In 2012 he had 11 grandchildren.

After his 1983 conviction he gave up drinking and hard drugs, took up daily exercise and became a vegetarian, later a raw vegan. Despite a fortune put at several million dollars, he lived in a small two-room house. He was an outspoken atheist and described himself as a progressive.

From 1990 he co-hosted a weekly public access call-in programme on First Amendment issues with his lawyer Luke Lirot. He was arrested in 2002 for protesting outside the approved zone at a rally for President George W. Bush and challenged such protest zones in federal court. In 2002 he turned a vacant lot in West Tampa into Voice of Freedom park. In 2005 he sued Hillsborough County after commissioners banned the county from recognising gay pride events, and in the case he stated that he was gay, which he had never said publicly before.

He ran for public office nine times, for Tampa City Council, the Hillsborough County Commission and the state legislature, and lost every race. In 2006 a Republican pundit threw a chair at him during a debate on a television talk show, and in 2007 he reached a city council runoff, taking 44 percent of the vote.

In 2011 he was diagnosed with stage 4 lung cancer that had spread to his spine. After treatment at Moffitt Cancer Center the cancer went into remission. His doctor recommended juicing raw marijuana, a method Florida's 2016 medical marijuana amendment did not allow, so he sued the Department of Health for the right to grow his own. A Leon County judge ruled in his favour in April 2018, but the 1st District Court of Appeal reversed the decision in 2019.

Redner is remembered as one of the most prominent and most divisive figures in modern Tampa. To critics he was a symbol of the city's adult entertainment trade; to supporters he was a self-taught legal fighter whose decades of lawsuits tested how far governments could regulate expression, property and private conduct. His cases over nude dancing, zoning, eminent domain, protest zones, gay pride recognition and home-grown medical marijuana kept him in the headlines for fifty years. The Mons Venus, which he opened in the early 1980s, still operates on North Dale Mabry Highway under new owners.