One year ago today, we wrote this:

Not to fear L.A., male erotic dancing is a booming industry. According to Overture (a Yahoo! Company), there were 18,195 searches for “los angeles male stripper,” or any variation thereof, in the month of January 2006. And that doesn’t include Google statistics.

Apparently male dancing in Los Angeles takes priority over The Dodgers, jobs, hospitals, attorneys, real estate and regular strippers. If you need one, Bachelorette.com has the how-to guide on hiring that includes one important tip on finding one: “forget the internet.”

January 2007 showed an even stronger growth in the industry with 21,657 Yahoo searches. "I don't think the figures are shocking," Johnny A., president of one of the largest male stripping agencies, Latin Connection, Inc., told LAist in an e-mail. "As long as you have people get married, you are going to have bachelorette parties, thus strippers! Now, we did see some growth in other areas: the birthday parties, the Girls Night Out parties, the baby showers, divorces, house warming, etc.

"In a way, some of the dancers we have become more like celebrities than strippers here in Southern California and have made getting strippers in Los Angeles more of a family entertainment than it is an adult one!"

Keyword searches for male strippers in Los Angeles take priority over apartment searching (20,804), traffic (20642), the Lakers (18,960), the LA Galaxy in the wake of David Beckham (17,286), LAX (16,330), weather (10,462), the Dodgers (10,459), attorneys (9,707), plain old strippers (9,217), county jail (6,463), LA public library (5694) and shopping in los angeles (5,676).

Photo by Lindsey Spirit via Flickr