All I Could Bare: My Life in the Strip Clubs of Gay Washington, (3 page)

"I really wanted it, so I stayed up until the record store opened at ten. Then I bought it, came home and played it, and went to sleep."

"You stayed up all night for it? That's insane."

"Yeah, well, I really wanted it. I'm just kinda like that about things."

"I see. Well, do you want to come over anyway and see if my CD sounds any different than yours?"

I didn't respond. Was this what it sounded like when someone was asking to have sex with you? I thought it might be. And I wasn't against having sex. I wanted it. It was about time.

"Uh, why don't you come over here? I mean, if you want."

"Cool. I'll be there after work."

That night, we had sex for the first time, following Seth's "You seem tense. Would you like a massage?" setup. Two weeks later, he moved into my one-room apartment.

Fast forward a couple of years, and we were still dating and happily living together. We'd finished college and had both decided to enter graduate programs at the University of Maryland—Seth in comparative literature, me in American studies. I felt like I was really becoming a grown-up, with my long-term relationship and my new career path to become an academic. Things were changing fast.

The one constant in all of this was that I continued to go to La Cage a couple of times a month, and even ventured out to the neighboring strip clubs Secrets and Wet.

"I just like them," I tried to explain to Seth once, while putting on my coat to go. "I like the atmosphere. It's fun and relaxing after a long week at school."

"Whatever makes you happy," he said from the bed, before returning to his book.

The truth was that I was happy about all the good things in my life like Seth and school, but I also felt that things were getting a little safe and predictable. The strip clubs excited me and gave me something to look forward to.

"Are you sure you don't mind if I go out?" I said from the door.

"No, I don't mind," he answered, not looking up from his book.

A couple of months later, I came up with the perfect reason for continuing to go to the clubs. I needed a topic for my master's thesis, something that I could study in an in-depth way for an extended period of time, and I immediately thought of writing about the strip clubs.

"So, I have this idea for my thesis," I said to my adviser, Dr. Sheri Parks, the only black professor in my department.

"OK," she said from behind the desk in her office.

"Well, it's a little offbeat and it has to do with gay culture and stuff."

"So, what is it?"

"Well, I was thinking of doing something about these gay strip clubs in D.C. They've been around for a while. They're sort of like local institutions. And I figured that maybe I could interview the strippers about why they work there and the customers about why they go and stuff like that."

She thought about it for a moment.

"It's racy but it sounds like a good idea. It will certainly make your work stand out," she said enthusiastically. "Go for it."

I was thrilled. I started going out a couple of times a week in the name of research. I came armed with a notebook, a tape recorder, and a wad of dollar bills for tips. My goal was to get at why the dancers decided to strip and how they felt about their work. My methodology was ethnography, which involved both interviewing and what's called participant observation, the process of studying something that you're also a part of. This particularly suited my needs, since I was already somewhat of a regular at the clubs. I couldn't suddenly pretend I was Jacques Cousteau snorkeling by a new species of fish.

The first person I asked to interview was a La Cage dancer named Jake, a tall, chiseled brunette whom everyone called "the Guess Model." I approached Jake first because he was one of the most popular dancers, and I figured I might as well go for broke. I don't remember exactly how I asked him. All I know is that after about a minute of stammering, sweating, and heart palpitations, I heard him say, "Yes."

"Really, you'll talk to me," I yelled giddily as 2 In A Room's acid-laced hip-house anthem "Wiggle It" blared in the background: "Wiggle it just a little bit /I wanna see you wiggle it just a little bit / as it grooves!"

"Sure," he said, naked, from atop the bar, his dangling dong about an inch from my nose. "Just wait until my set is over and we'll talk."

As I waited for Jake to get off the bar, I watched another dancer—a young redhead—who was bent over with his ass spread inches away from a customer's face. The customer, an older man with glasses and a comb-over, took his fingers and gently rubbed them between the dancer's butt cheeks. Then, when the dancer moved away, the man put his fingers to his nose, breathed deeply, and smiled. It still amazed me to see stuff like this play out in public.

Shortly thereafter, Jake finished his set and walked into the dressing room. My mind raced, wondering if there was a trapdoor back there or something. He'd disappear; I wouldn't get my interview; and I'd never graduate from the masters program. But just before I completely descended down my mental spiral of doom, he reemerged shirtless in a pair of jeans. To me, he looked a bit like John Travolta in
Saturday Night Fever,
if Travolta's character, Tony Manero, had spent as much time in a tanning bed as he did on the dance floor.

We began talking and Jake told me the story of how he got started. He used to work at a construction site where he was always teased for being a pretty boy. Finally he decided to make the pretty boy thing work for him. A friend brought him to La Cage, and Jake soon started making upward of $300 a night. He cut back on his construction work and now spent most days sleeping in while his buddies were toiling in the sun. He sometimes couldn't believe how much money he made just for standing around naked and letting old guys get touchy-feely.

"One night I was about to call in sick," he told me, "but I came in anyway and walked out with six hundred dollars."

"So I guess it was worth coming in?"

"Hell yeah."

There were so many questions that I had for him, all of which were written in a steno notepad I carried with me.

"How do you decide how long to stay with each customer?" I asked.

"Say if he's a regular and I know him really well, I'll sit there and talk to him for a few minutes. But if I don't know him, I'll just squat down for a short time and then pat him on his back and say, 'I've got to go, buddy.' The goal is to get him to tip again. That's called workin' them.' I've had guys give up twenty dollars in dollar bills. I've had guys give me fifties. This one guy, he gave me two hundred-dollar bills just for dancing."

"Wow," I responded. "So, hey, do you mind if I ask you a sort of personal question?"

"Shoot."

"If a customer asks if you're straight or gay, what do you tell him?"

"Bi. I mean, I'm straight. But I'll say I'm bi because the customers like to think there's a chance. And in a way I am bi because there's no way I could get up on the bar like that and let hundreds of men touch me if I wasn't. I mean, it's a sexual act because people are stroking me. It's not oral or anal, but still it's sexual. So, basically, I guess I'm bisexual, although I've never done it with a guy and don't think I would."

This was my introduction to how complex the idea of sexual identity could be at the clubs.

I interviewed Jake off and on for a couple of weeks and he introduced me to some of his coworkers, including a black dancer named Nico, who I also asked for an interview. To describe Nico, let's say you'd take Blair Underwood's head and transplant it on an NFL linebacker's body.

"I want to ask you some questions before I agree to this interview," Nico said as we sat at a table in the corner of the bar.

"Don't worry," I responded. "I'm not using real names or anything."

"Now that wasn't even what I was going to ask you. Do you put words in the mouth of everybody you interview?"

"Sorry."

He rolled his eyes in a way that immediately told me he was gay.

"What I was going to say is, do the people at your school already know what you're doing for your project?"

"Yeah. It's cool."

"Do they know you're gay?"

"How do
you
know I'm gay?"

"Oh, please. You spend more time here than the roaches, and that can't all be for school."

"OK, fine. I'm gay."

"And your school doesn't mind you writing about gay stuff?"

"Nope. Not yet at least."

"All right. I just don't want you to get in any trouble."

"Don't worry. I can handle myself."

He rolled his eyes again.

Nico got started after one of the managers spotted him at a nightclub dancing with his shirt off. "Well, I'm a dancer first and foremost, and when I go out to regular nightclubs, I always dance with my shirt off anyway. And when spandex was popular, I was always dancing in spandex, and that's just one step away from being naked."

He enjoyed it for a while—the freedom, the quick dough. But before long Nico was frustrated by the job because the other dancers, or as he put it, "any ole scraggly white boy," pulled in more tips than he did.

"Even that little dirty motherfucker who wears those dingy, dirty, disgusting socks is making more than me," Nico griped, arching a finger toward another dancer. "He hasn't washed those socks for weeks. Then he goes sliding along the bar in those putrid things. Oh my God! Those socks are gray. The lights hit them and—oh, they are disgusting."

"Why do you think that is?"

"You're asking me why that dirty motherfucker doesn't wash his socks?"

"No," I said, shaking my head. "Why do you think he's making more money?"

"Well, obviously I have this deep tan here," he said pointing to his arm, the color of a Hershey bar. "And I feel that's the reason why they make more money. I'm not what most of the clientele is looking for.

"Watch me on my next set," he continued. "All of the other dancers can go around the bar and they might get a tip from a person who won't even acknowledge me. won't even look up. I mean, it's fucked up when someone ignores you like that. It hurts. It's almost like they're telling you, 'You don't look good enough to be naked,' and I'm not havin' it.

"Sometimes," he went on, "when I'm on the bar, people pull their money closer. There was this one white drag queen who came in here and pulled her purse closer to her. I'm like, °What, am I gonna run, take your money or your bag, run back in the dressing room, get dressed, and then run out the door? What is a naked man gonna steal from you, huh?"'

"There must be some customers who like black guys."

"Well, either they want them real light-skinned like you or you get the ones who call themselves living dangerously and they're looking for a real roughneck. But unbeknownst to them, I'm not a roughneck. I don't want my nipples twisted and bitten and pinched and all that freaky shit. I like to be gentle like everybody else. I may look like a roughneck, but I'm not one, and I'm not trying to become one."

"Why do you keep working here if it's so bad?"

"Well, I really don't like this job. But the money is still good. You get forty dollars base pay just for showing up, and you can't beat the schedule. If I go out of town tomorrow and don't come back for the next year, I don't have to tell them anything. And then, when I get back, I just dance. No big deal."

I glanced at the questions on my steno pad.

"You know what I've always wanted to know? When you're out there and the customers are jerking you off, how do you keep from cumming?"

"Usually," he deadpanned, "you just look at one of them."

4

One night I was at La Cage struggling to make my watery glass of Coke last so that I wouldn't have to put out $5 for another one. It got expensive going to clubs all the time on a grad student stipend, and it would be hard to explain to Seth that we could eat only ramen for the next month because I'd spent all of our money on tips and overpriced drinks.

The bar wasn't very crowded. There were plenty of empty stools, so I was a little surprised when a guy came over and sat right next to me. I recognized him immediately. He was another regular, routinely making the rounds of all the local strip clubs. I'd noticed him before because he was a sort of rock star among the customers, frequently surrounded by the cutest dancers at the bar or sometimes tucked in a shadowy corner with just one dancer. They'd be sitting closely together, exchanging hushed words, their faces nearly touching.

His popularity was a bit odd because he wasn't the coolest-looking guy in the world. He was probably in his late fifties, yet he had the gawky gait of a teenager after his first major growth spurt. His face was a small round bulb punctuated by wide eyes and a protruding nose, capped by a gray Romanesque crown of hair.

"Do you mind if I sit here?" he asked.

I gave him a "free country" shrug of the shoulders and went back to carefully tensing my cheek muscles so that I was taking the smallest possible sips of Coke.

"Listen," he continued, "I don't want to intrude on your personal space, but if you want somebody to talk to, you're welcome to join me."

I found this strange, since he had already taken the stool to my right. Wasn't he technically joining
me?

"But," he said, "if you prefer to be alone, that's fine, too."

Thanks for telling me it's OK to be as I was, I thought. After all this time going to strip clubs by myself, I had developed a kind of protective coating when it came to the advances of other customers. I knew all the lines, which basically amounted to numerous drunken variations on "Are you a dancer? You should be." It wasn't that I minded some casual bar flirting, but I found that if I started talking to these guys, either they wouldn't leave me alone or they would do something else to make me regret ever opening the conversational portal.