It's a sweltering July afternoon in Tampa, Florida, and a small crowd of men are cooling off in the most notorious watering hole in the South, the Mons Venus. A tiny one-story building wedged between fast-food restaurants on busy Dale Mabry Highway, the Mons is known for its exotic dancers (and convenient proximity to Raymond James Stadium, home of the Tampa Bay Buccaneers). But the star attraction is the 68-year-old dude with wire-frame glasses and a long gray ponytail talking on the phone in the back: Joe Redner.

As part of his campaign, he offered free admission to his strip club for anyone with an "I Voted" sticker. Redner is the multimillionaire owner of the Mons and self-described "father of the nude lap dance." But after waging years of tireless (and colorful) campaigns on behalf of civil rights, he's achieved the unlikeliest title of all: political folk hero. In a state known for its conservative politics and dogged war against obscenity, the fact that a strip-club owner on the Gulf Coast has become a hero is no small feat. As Lawrence Walters, a prominent First Amendment attorney in Florida, puts it, "he's the Larry Flynt of Tampa."

Last April, Redner stunned detractors by winning enough votes for a Tampa City Council runoff against a retired schoolteacher. As part of his campaign, he offered free admission to his strip club for anyone with an "I Voted" sticker. Redner, a Democrat and patron of local causes from public parks to children's hospitals, lost the race but won the hearts of locals. Now he has begun his next campaign, for county commissioner in Tampa's Hillsborough County, District 6. "People assume that if you're an adult-business owner, you're not a good person. And that's just the opposite," he says, in his slight southern accent. "Most politicians are not good people, and I think I'm absolutely a good person."

Redner had to overcome obstacles from the start. After moving to Tampa from New Jersey with his mother and brother at age six, he grew up in a single-parent home with little to call his own. "We never had the things other people had," he says. While his mother waited tables and put herself through nursing school, Redner struggled in school, due to poor self-esteem and concentration skills, and dropped out in 10th grade. He floated through odd jobs around town, from working at a carnival to a canning factory, but says the varied work schooled him in street smarts. "Wisdom comes from experience," he says.

Redner was wise enough to recognize a business opportunity when he saw one. By the early 1970s, in his mid-20s, Redner was managing a local strip club when he heard of a Supreme Court ruling that nudity constituted free speech. All-nude strip clubs were nonexistent at the time, despite the sexual revolution in the air. "Since the beginning of time, people have danced to express themselves," Redner says, "so the ballet is speech, dancing around a campfire is speech. I figured these nude dancers were speaking, and if the Supreme Court meant what they said, this was protected by the First Amendment." It wasn't just a political statement—it was a way to make money. "I knew if I had a place that offered this, people would come," he says.