All I Could Bare: My Life in the Strip Clubs of Gay Washington, (5 page)

Dave's other outlet was going to X-rated movie houses. He even told his wife about his penchant for porn and she said that it didn't bother her. He developed a routine: On Monday evenings after he ate dinner with his wife and helped with the dishes, he'd jump in the car and go to one of the many porn theaters that used to light up downtown D.C. He'd go only to the ones showing straight films, because he was scared to be spotted going to a gay movie house. He even avoided the theaters that showed both straight and gay films.

On those nights when it took him longer than usual to leave, his wife would sometimes ask, "Aren't you going to the movies?"

"Are you sure you don't mind?"

"No, go ahead," she'd say.

After parking and before going in the theater, Dave would pop his trunk and take out a nylon windbreaker that he always kept in there. He'd then go in the theater, find a seat away from everyone else, and spread his thin jacket over his lap. He'd watch the straight couples having sex on the screen and jerk off for as long as he could without cumming. It was his reward for being a good husband throughout the week. "That was the way I compensated," he said.

This was how he passed the years as the seventies turned into the eighties. But his whole life changed one night in 1989 when his wife said that she was leaving him to be with another man. The marriage that he'd sacrificed his sexual desires for was over.

This was just the first tumbling rock of what would become an avalanche of problems. His mother, who'd been living alone in Louisiana since his father passed, took a fall and wound up bedridden, requiring round-the-clock care. Some real estate he'd inherited took a 90 percent dip in value, and at work Dave lost a promotion to a close friend. Compounding this, a trip to the doctor revealed that his pancreas was malfunctioning, a particularly disturbing development since his father died of pancreatic cancer.

Dave remembered this as the lowest point in his life. "I started going through some pretty bad depression," he said. "I was having a lot of suicidal thoughts. It was a really bad period and as a result I just totally reexamined ray life and made a lot of changes. I came to the conclusion that as much as possible, I would try to enjoy every single day."

By the time I met Dave, he was divorced and had been coming to the strip clubs for several years. "I'm closeted almost everywhere else," he said, quickly adding, "I hope."

"Do you ever think about totally coming out?" I asked him one night over another watery Coke.

"If I were younger, I think I probably would come out. There are times when I'm really tempted to come out, at least with some friends. I've always been a very open person about my life and it's difficult to keep part of it hidden. But then I think it would be uncomfortable, especially with guys at work that I've been friends with for twenty years. All of a sudden, they're going to feel uncomfortable going into the bathroom and taking a leak beside me. I think, "Why go through that?'"

"Have you told your ex-wife you're gay?"

"No. I know it's kind of ridiculous because she was the one who left me. But I always land of felt like if she knew I was into the gay scene, it would invalidate the twenty-one years that we were together."

"Are you happier now?" I asked.

But before he could answer, Peter came over and knelt in front of us. Dave put a folded wad of dollars into Peter’s white sport sock, and then took some lube from the other sock and dabbed it on Peter's slowly growing cock.

"Much appreciated," Peter said.

6

On a chilly morning in early February, Seth dropped me off on the corner of Ninth and G streets, NW, right outside the mammoth Martin Luther King Jr. Memorial Library downtown. I logged a lot of time there, studying up on the history of gay life in D.C. and how the strip clubs fit in. Seth, on the other hand, spent his days doing temp work at various offices around town. Although the two of us were in graduate school and receiving some financial aid, we couldn't afford for both of us not to work. So, since Seth was the one with typing skills, he was the one with the day job. (Metaphorically speaking, Seth brought home the bacon; I spent all day researching the history of pork products.) It didn't seem fair, and I sometimes felt uncomfortable about it. But I figured that in long-term relationships these sort of imbalances work themselves out.

"Learn something for me," Seth said, before giving me a hug and then heading off in our wildly unreliable and quite dinged-up Acura, a hand-me-down gift from my mother. He soon disappeared in the thick of morning traffic.

I went inside and strategically scoped out a desk that was in an aromatic safe zone, away from some of the more fragrant homeless people who liked to congregate at the library and spend all day thumbing through back issues of
Jet.
I pulled out my books and articles and got to work, trying to treat this as much like a job as I imagined Seth had to do with his temp assignments.

As I continued studying the clubs, I was learning that they were just another part of the surprisingly rich gay history of the city, which was designed with its unique four-part structure (NW, NE, SW, SE) by French-born Pierre L'Enfant, a man alternately described as "affected," "of artistic and fragile temperament," and "sensitive in style and dress"—all possible codes for "queer as fuck."

In the 1800s, when the nation was at war with itself, poet Walt Whitman, known for rhapsodizing about "We two boys together clinging / One the other never leaving," came to town to care for injured federal soldiers. He tended wounds and spoon-fed ice cream to the young enlisted men, many of whom were tasting it for the very first time. One evening in the city, a nearly fifty-year-old Walt met Irish immigrant Peter Doyle, who was more than twenty years his junior, on a horse carriage going from the Navy Yard to Georgetown. They fell for each other instantly. "I put my hand on his knee; we understood," Walt wrote.

Soon Walt was calling Peter "the youth who loves me and whom I love," and they were spending days walking the Capitol grounds and nights at the bar in Georgetown's Union Hotel, "content, happy in being together, speaking little, perhaps not a word."

Around the same time that Walt was in town, there were published accounts of black men and white men having sex in Lafayette Square, "under the shadows of the White House," according to one writer. There was another article from the 1800s that chronicled an annual "Negro" drag ball, an "orgy of lascivious debauchery," as one writer put it, which found its participants "dressed in womanly attire, short sleeves, low-necked dresses and the usual ball-room decorations and ornaments of women, feathered and rib boned head-dresses, garters, frills, flowers, [and] ruffles." But by far the most eye-catching element of the evening was a guy who stood butt naked on a pedestal with his "phallic member . . . decorated by a ribbon." According to Dr. Charles Hughes, who wrote about this phenomenon for a medical journal, this cross-dressing bacchanal brought together "cooks, barbers, waiters and other employees of Washington families, some even higher in the social scale—some even being employed as subordinates in the Government departments."

As I read about this, I wondered if I would've been one of the "Negroes" at this party—or would I have been too scared to go, living a life of celibacy in the servants' quarters of some white family's house? I called Seth at work to get his opinion. I usually tried not to bother him at one of his temp jobs, but this question was pressing on me. I went to the library's bank of pay phones and placed a call.

"Hey, um, sorry to bother you. And this might seem a little off-the-wall. You're not in the middle of anything, are you?"

"I have to get some photocopying done for a meeting. But what's up?"

"Oh, nothing. I shouldn't bother you now."

"No, what is it? Is something wrong?"

"Well, no. Um, I'm just asking, hypothetically speaking, if I'd been living in the eighteen hundreds, do you think I would've had the nerve to either have sex with guys in Lafayette Square or go to a drag ball?"

There was a long pause. I could hear the buzz and hum of office machines in the background.

"Hello?" I asked.

"Yeah, I'm not sure I understand."

"See, I just read that in the late eighteen hundreds guys used to have sex in Lafayette Square, near the White House, and they'd also go to these drag balls where the centerpiece decoration was some guy with a ribbon around his"—I quickly scanned the phone booth area to make sure I wasn't talking too loudly—"cock. I just wondered if you thought I would've had the nerve to go to these things, or would I have been too scared to go?"

"I'm not sure. It sounds land of risky for you."

"What do you mean? I go to the strip clubs all the time."

"Yeah, but you go to watch. These things sound like something you have to
do.
Besides, going to a legitimate nightclub today is not the same as hooking up in the park or going to some kind of underground drag ball in the eighteen hundreds. But can we talk about this more later? I really have to get these copies done."

"OK," I said, deflated My own boyfriend didn't think I had the hypothetical balls to have sex in the park or go to a drag ball in the eighteen hundreds. Was I that much of a wimp? I packed up my stuff and took a lunch break.

When I returned, still smarting over my lack of a nineteenth-century sex life, I decided to jump ahead to World War II, when thousands of gay men flocked to the city from small towns in order to serve their country or find what locals called "a good government job." They hung out at food joints like Johnnie's in Southeast, the Cozy Corner near Howard University, and the Chicken Hut on L Street. Years later, filmmaker John Waters described the Hut as filled with "gay men in fluffy sweaters who cruised each other by calling table-to-table on phones provided by the bar."

Hanging out in restaurants was all the rage then because, following Prohibition, Congress—which regulates all of D.C.'s laws—made it so that only restaurants were eligible for liquor licenses. Therefore, for several decades, every place serving cocktails in the nation's capital had to have a fully equipped kitchen on the premises.

But little of this bothered those Greatest Generation types who arrived in D.C. during the war and congregated in these spots after work and on weekends. For many of them, it was an emancipating dream, to freely connect for the very first time with other guys who liked guys.

This sense of freedom was short-lived, however, due to the Cold War paranoia of the 1950s. Gays, thought to be especially vulnerable to blackmail threats, were branded as security risks and banned from federal employment. Hundreds of gay men and women lost their good government jobs.

Frank Kameny was one of them. The product of a middle-class Jewish family from New York, Frank came to D.C. in the mid-fifties after earning a Ph.D. in astronomy from Harvard. He taught for a year at Georgetown and then landed a cushy civil service job with the U.S. Army Map Service. But after an arrest in Lafayette Park, the same cruising area that had been popular since the 1800s, he lost his job and was banned from future government employment. But instead of simply accepting this turn of fate, Kameny sued the government, picketed in front of the White House, and tried to take his case before the Supreme Court. The experience transformed him into an activist. He founded a local gay rights group in the 1960s that drew inspiration from the Black Power movement. Where Stokely Carmichael proclaimed, "Black is beautiful," Kameny led the call "Gay is good."

Kameny's slogan, while tame by today's standards, reflected the radicalism of the age. In 1968, a year that saw much of the U Street corridor—once the pride of black D.C.—burn in the uprisings following Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.'s assassination, another, lesser-known protest took place at a gay club in southeast Washington called Plus One.

Plus One was the city's first gay-owned club to allow same-sex dancing, and because of this, it often attracted the attention of police officers, who would show up and try to scare away those standing in the long lines to get in the club. But on this particular evening, Kameny remembered, "The police pulled up and expected everyone to go run to the bushes and hide. But nobody moved, so they advanced down the street, and still nobody moved. They regrouped and got more cars and more police, and advanced down the street again, but still nobody moved. So the police just got in their cars and went home." This standoff took place one year before the riot at New York's Stonewall Inn, the event credited with birthing the modern lesbian and gay rights movement.

As the 1960s raged into the 1970s, politics increasingly went alongside the pursuit of pleasure. Gay men were no longer willing to keep their desires secret. The late sixties saw the Regency, located in the heart of downtown, become the city's first gay bathhouse; and in 1975, just blocks away, the city got its first gay strip club, the Chesapeake House.

The way this came about was rather haphazard. Owner John Rock planned the place to be a cozy piano bar, but one night on a whim he offered two sailors stationed in the area $50 to strip down and dance for his patrons. They took him up on the offer and suddenly this squat brick building, steps away from the National Portrait Gallery, became not only D.C.'s first gay strip club but one of the nation's first gay establishments to legally allow guys to bare all. Ironically, the city's otherwise restrictive liquor laws allowed fully nude dancing.

The 'Peake, as it was called by regulars, became nationally renowned, drawing a slew of visitors, including—according to local lore—Truman Capote, Tennessee Williams, and Rock Hudson. Over the years, the 'Peake developed a reputation for being a place where, as one customer put it, "older financiers met younger entrepreneurs." In 1980 it made national headlines when Maryland's conservative Republican congressman Robert Bauman, a married father of four and close friend of Ronald Reagan, was arrested for having sex with one of the club's dancers.