When stripper Julia Query and her coworkers at a San Francisco peepshow decided to unionize in 1997, they encountered the standard obstacles: a lockout, a newly retained union-busting law firm, an employee fired as an example to others, and hardball tactics at the bargaining table. But they also had to contend with the press and the public, which often viewed their efforts as a joke and their profession with distaste. Live Nude Girls Unite!, a low-budget, low-tech documentary about their unionization struggle, faces the same uphill battle. Written and directed by Query and filmmaker Vicky Funari (Paulina), the film is brash, funny, and overtly feminist, but, like its subjects, it exploits sexuality and humor in ways that assume a supportive attitude from its audience. Unfortunately, it doesn't always earn that support. True, the sequences featuring nude unionists, gyrating and grinding for their customers, are narratively significant, going a long way toward establishing the performers' pride in their jobs. That's important on a number of levels, but the shots still smack of titillating gimmickry. Query and Funari draw on other gimmicks—cartoony illustrations, segments of Query doing stand-up comedy or examining herself through her own camera lens, home movies, contemporaneous media reports—but mostly, Live Nude Girls Unite! is a linear, no-frills documentary that helpfully serves up unionization as a do-it-yourself project and turns Query into a folk heroine. The managers of the Lusty Lady Theater are collectively demonized as Big Business at its sleaziest and its most faceless, their humanity kept under wraps while Query carefully establishes herself and her partners as individuals. Her indignation over her managers' excesses at times makes her seem irrationally strident, as when she accuses them of trying to "buy us off" by honestly addressing two of the unionists' foremost complaints. Her attempts to make the film into her personal story are sometimes in questionable taste; her decision to use a long-postponed confrontation with her feminist-activist mother as "a plot device" is morally iffy. Worse, the final result is just as artistically iffy, because by editing the results to highlight her mother's emotions, then cutting away to cover her own, Query both undermines the power of the moment and rewrites history in her own favor. The same can be said of Live Nude Girls Unite! in general. It's entertaining instead of evenhanded, which isn't necessarily bad. But its personal biases make it less than candid, no matter how much of its subjects it chooses to bare.