Beauty in Black: Is Delinda’s Dolls and Dudes a Real Strip Club?

The Netflix soap opera show’ Beauty in Black’ revolves around the stories of two ambitious women from different walks of life whose worlds somehow collide in unexpected ways. One of the protagonists, Kimmie, is a stripper who is desperate to find a way to pay off the debt on her head and leave Delinda’s Dolls and Dudes for good. Her beneficiary, Jules, works for the filthy rich Bellarie family, who have recently found themselves in hot water with their hair care company, which is worth millions of dollars. Somehow, fortune shines down on Kimmie when she and her colleague, Angel, end up on the radar of Horace, Mallory’s father-in-law. Thus, the patriarch’s covert plot regarding the family will and the company shares might just buy Kimmie her exit ticket from Jules’ unforgiving strip club. The character’s narrative as a stripper underlines the darker side of the sex work industry. As a result, Delinda’s club proves to be an essential world-building tool whose origins remain worth exploring.

Delinda’s Dolls and Dudes is a Fictional Club That Highlights a Dark Reality

‘Beauty in Black’ charts a fictitious story that delves into the juxtaposing realities that exist on two ends of a socioeconomic spectrum—yet still sports the common denominator of a criminal underworld. The dynamic narrative setting allows for a treasure trove of interesting characters with riveting and varied plotlines. Nonetheless, as these storylines lean heavily on dramatic roots, they inevitably end up retaining a basis in fiction, originating from Tyler Perry’s creativity. As such, Delinda’s Dolls and Dudes, an instrumental establishment that dictates the course of Kimmie’s narrative in many ways, also remains a work of fiction. The club doesn’t exist off-screen and was likely only brought to life for the show at the Tyler Perry Studios in Atlanta, Georgia, where most of the filming occurred.

Even so, despite the lack of a direct real-life counterpart, Delinda’s Dolls and Dudes reflects a sinister side of the sex work industry through its on-screen portrayal. In the show, the club functions on a business model wherein Jules and his team trick young men and women by trapping them in legal trouble. Consequently, after backing them into an impossible corner, they hold the accumulated debt over their head to exploit them in the industry. Unfortunately, this isn’t entirely detached from reality.

In 2023, Three Cuban nationals—Rasiel Gutierrez Moreno, Hendry Jimenez Milanes, and Rafael Mendoza Labrada—received sentences for sex trafficking and other crimes. Reportedly, they were involved in a scheme that brought women from Cuba to the United States and then forced them to work at strip clubs in Houston by imposing high smuggling debts on them. As such, the concept of successful clubs forcing vulnerable people into sex work through assumed debt evidently holds off-screen authenticity. Still, it’s unlikely that ‘Beauty in Black’ mines information from this real-life Houston case in the creation of Delinda’s Dolls and Dudes. Ultimately, the latter continues to be an entirely fictitious element created in service of the plot for the similarly fictionalized show.