All I Could Bare: My Life in the Strip Clubs of Gay Washington, (6 page)

After the 'Peake success, other gay bars—like Dolly's and the Fraternity House—began featuring naked guys shaking and showing off their wares. But perhaps the gay strip club with the most interesting history, one that speaks to D.C.'s often peculiar pairing of sex and politics—red lights with red tape—was the Lone Star Steakhouse.

Opened as a Texas-style steak house in 1955, the Lone Star, which sat across the street from the FBI's mammoth, compound-like headquarters, had transformed into a female go-go bar by the late 1970s, when it was seized by the U.S. Department of Justice because the owner was convicted of embezzlement. This left the task of running a nudie bar to a bunch of blue-suited bureaucrats, who in the interest of public stewardship had to ensure that the bar was profitable. This arrangement lasted for a couple of years, until increased public scrutiny forced the government to sell the club.

The new owner, a former elementary school teacher, decided that the best way to maximize his profits was to keep the nubile young women stripping during the day to cater to all the straight guys who commuted daily from the suburbs, but to add nude guys dancing at night to lure in the gay crowd. The Lone Star enjoyed a successful run until 1986.

In the 1980s, the gay strip club scene started becoming concentrated around O Street in southeast Washington. This area—part ghetto, part industrial wasteland—had become a safe haven for all different sorts of gay sexual establishments since the late 1970s. The businesses set up shop in this neighborhood—nearly forgotten by most Washingtonians even though it was only blocks from most of the major national landmarks—as a way to escape police harassment and public scrutiny.

"It became an out-of-sight, out-of-mind kind of thing," explained Kameny. "It was our piece of Washington."

For a time, the gay bars, movie houses, and bathhouses within this few-block radius were nearly devoid of public services. When it snowed, owners got together to plow the streets themselves; and for security, a group of gay ex-marines, calling themselves GEMS, joined together to patrol the streets with a German shepherd in tow. But conditions improved for the businesses when Marion Barry, a liberal black civil rights activist, became mayor in 1978 on the strength of a platform that, among other things, promised to put an end to raids on gay bars.

The area thrived. In 1984, O Street's first gay strip club, La Cage Aux Follies, opened, followed four years later by Secrets. These new clubs resided on the same block as the Follies, the gay movie house that already featured nude dancers on weekends. These three establishments together on the same block turned O Street into the city's gay strip club epicenter; and because D.C. still had one of the nation's most permissive policies regarding nudity, it became, by extension, the gay strip club capital of the country.

Yet what was ultimately most significant about the clubs was not their close proximity or the nudity itself; rather, the lack of government intrusion, due to Barry's mandate, allowed the clubs to develop their own set of rules about what was and wasn't permissible. It soon became par for the course that a stripper could play with his dick while dancing and that a customer could touch the dancer in any place the dancer allowed. This made for deeply intimate exchanges.

As I sat in the library reading about this history, I marveled at the way all these elements had to be put into play just so I could go out and see some hot guy show his prick. What seemed like a trivial flash of flesh was deeply connected to an array of social and cultural shifts, political gains and losses, personal acts of whimsy and courage, and a whole lot of grace and chance. I was itching to call Seth and tell him about all of this, but I figured I had already played my "Indulge Me" card for the day. So instead, I left the library early and went to the offices of the local gay newspaper, the
Washington Blade,
to place a Valentine's Day wish for my hardworking, very understanding guy. Using the title of one of our favorite Janet Jackson songs, the wish read: "To Seth... 'Because of Love/ "

7

In spring 1994,1 finished the first draft of my master's thesis, which focused on how strippers and customers made sense of their experiences at the clubs. One of the things I tried to establish was the connection between what went on in the strip clubs and the things that were important within gay culture generally. I tried to explain how a guy's ass is revered within gay culture much the way a woman's breasts are treated like twin deities by straight guys. Or as I wrote in my most practiced academese: "Before discussing how the anus operates as a site of desire within the context of the clubs,... I think it is important to briefly problematize the relationship between the anus or anal sex and gay sex in general since they are often assumed to be one and the same."

To make my point, I cited examples of butt love from throughout gay culture. I quoted from the "Sonnet du Trou du Cul" (Sonnet on the Asshole) by those nineteenth-century fudge packing French poets Paul Verlaine and Arthur Rimbaud: "
Obscur et fronce comme un oeillet violet . . . Ma bouche s'accoupla souvent a sa ventouse"
(Crumpled like a carnation, mauve and dim ... My mouth mates often with this breathing hole). I also referenced gay porn videos like
Butt Busters
and
Rear Window.

But by far the most controversial thing I did in the thesis—though it seemed like a good idea at the time—was to include an appendix with photocopies of pictures from gay porn magazines featuring models doing a full bent-over ass-cheek spread. I thought the photos helped drive my argument home. However, when I met with one of my committee members—a bearded, bespectacled gentleman who was like the Platonic ideal of what a professor should be—he told me that the thesis, pics and all, had caused some problems for him when he in fact drove it home.

Apparently, he'd left it on his kitchen table one day. His wife was straightening up and stumbled upon it. She decided, perhaps, that it looked interesting, and browsed through it, becoming shocked, however, when she came across the booty gallery in the back. As the professor told me what happened, I imagined his stunned better half rapidly turning the pages and the butt cheeks flying by in moving succession like cartoon characters in a flip book.

"I'm soooo sorry," I said as I felt my whole body go hot and crimson.

"Oh, it's nothing, really," he responded with a wave of his hand. "Just a little awkward for a moment.

Still, I was never sure if he'd completely gotten over having Xerox copies of spread-eagled ass strewn across the same place where he took his morning muesli.

I graduated with my master's degree in May 1994 after turning in the final version of my thesis, "Desire and Dollar Bills: An Ethnography of a Gay Male Striptease Club in Washington, D.C." I had never felt such a sense of accomplishment, and my life seemed more complete than ever before. The thesis dedication read: "To Seth ... for everything."

It was a great moment for both of us, since Seth graduated at the same time. Emboldened by the success, we both decided to go for our Ph.D.'s, which entailed new responsibilities. I taught my own class, "Introduction to American Studies," and I had to come up with a topic for my Ph.D. dissertation, which needed to be longer and more ambitious than my thesis. I knew I wanted to continue studying the clubs, but I didn't know how I could make my study sufficiently different from the thesis.

That is, until one day I was hanging out with Nico at the Follies (not to be confused with La Cage Aux Follies). Unlike the strip clubs, which operated at night, the Follies was a twenty-four-hour porn theater with a dark, maze-like backroom. It featured dancers on weekends with five shows a day: noon, 3:00
PM
, 6:00
PM
, 9:00
PM
, and midnight. On Sundays, the theater served a free buffet-style dinner following the 6
PM
show. The dancers would finish their set, quickly get dressed, and then race to a kitchen next door to grab big aluminum foil trays of food, usually

of the beef Stroganoff or spaghetti and meatballs variety. Then the dancers would come back and set up the buffet for the customers.

On this particular day, I was sitting with Nico after he and the other dancers had just finished with the buffet. We were in the theater's electric blue
Miami Vice-
like lobby.
Dr. Quinn, Medicine Woman
played on the overhead TV.

"If you're so interested in stripping," Nico asked, "why don't you try it yourself?"

The question startled me. My mouth dried up and I didn't know what to say.

"I don't really think it's my thing."

"Your thing? So what is your thing, coming in here and asking everybody nosy-ass questions?"

"That's for school."

"Oh, please. You use that school excuse every time you don't want to own up to why you're really here all the time."

"OK, fine. I like hanging out here. I like looking at naked guys. Sue me."

"I think you want to try it but you're chickenshit."

A customer standing near the red gumball machines glanced over.

"I'm not chickenshit. I've just never thought about it."

"Now you've gone from chickenshit to bullshit."

"I just don't think it would be the right thing for me to do."

"Oh, so you think you're better than everybody else?"

"I didn't say that."

"You're so full of it. You say stripping is this cool thing and that's why you want to write about it for school, but apparently it's not cool enough for someone like
you
to try."

"Maybe I will try it one day."

"Then that'll be the first day you've been real since you've been here," he said, and then turned his attention back to the frontier adventures of Jane Seymour.

I got up and walked toward the concession machines in front of the bathroom. Something about them always made me smile. I think it was the way the soda machine didn't say "Coke" or "Pepsi" but just "Cold Drinks." And the automated coffee machine was one of those pre-Starbucks contraptions that pissed brown fluid into a Dixie cup and offered options for "Extra Strong," "Extra Light," and "Extra Sugar."

I didn't know why I couldn't admit to anyone that I really did want to try stripping. The simple answer was just that I was scared. Scared about whether or not I could do it. Scared about what it would mean to do it. But I definitely didn't want the other dancers, many of whom I'd known for years now, to think that I felt I was better than they were.

The truth was that stripping had long called out to me. It offered something different from my grad school grind of dealing with students, grading papers, and sitting through seemingly endless seminars. It also felt like something I needed to do, a rite of passage of sorts. Since I'm too old to be a Gen-Xer, I've often thought of myself as Generation M, for Madonna. Throughout the eighties and nineties, the Material Girl made it acceptable to brazenly use your sexuality to get what you desired, to writhe around in your underwear on your way to the top. In fact, if you weren't able to use your looks and sexuality to get ahead, it was like you were the physical equivalent of dumb. My friends and I were constantly evaluating ourselves on our looks. "Am I hot or not?" was the new "Why was I born?"

But this issue of attractiveness went deeper for me. See, for as long as I could remember, as far back as elementary school, I've felt older guys watching me, hungrily—making eye contact as I walked through the mall holding hands with my grandmother, or gazing down as they stood beside me at a men's room urinal. These looks both frightened and fascinated me, and I grew to expect them in such a way that I became anxious both when I got the looks and when I didn't.

These feelings followed me into my teens. Sometimes when I caught an older guy staring at me, I'd wonder if I was doing something that was causing it, if I was sending a signal that I didn't know about. Once I went to the movies with my dad, who was then divorced from my mom. This was one of our few days together and I was pretty excited about it. We were running late so he stood in the popcorn line while I went to get seats. I walked in the theater and it was so dark I could barely see, but it wasn't very crowded, I grabbed two seats on the aisle toward the middle.

The previews started and I was watching intently when I felt someone sit down next to me. I assumed it was my dad but when I looked over, I saw it was an older white guy in a tweed coat and a hat. This freaked me out, but I wasn't sure what to do. The man next to me didn't say anything, but I could hear him breathing in long wheezes. Finally I saw my dad, hands full of popcorn and drinks, looking for me in the dark. He went all the way to the front of the theater and then turned around. I got up from my seat and moved away from the wheezing man into the aisle. I was relieved to see my father, but as he moved closer, I could tell he was pissed.

"Who were you sitting with," he asked way too loudly in the quiet theater. "Do you know that man?"

"No," I said, trying to keep my voice down. "He just sat next to me."

"What do you mean, he just sat next to you? Why did you
let
him?"

"I didn't. He just sat there."

I couldn't believe that my dad thought I would let some weird old guy sit next to me like that. But at the same time I wondered, why
did
the old guy sit next to me? What made him think he could?

Stirring up this kind of desire in creepy old men made me feel profoundly undesirable, as if I was as creepy as they were. It didn't help that like many young gay men, I suffered through junior high and high school—the pube-sprouting years—without ever having someone I was attracted to become attracted to me. Sure, it didn't help that at one point I'd put on the "faggot fifteen," that extra layer of pudge that many gay teens acquire in order to put the whole issue of sexuality on pause. But even when I lost the weight, on a diet of pizza and menthol cigarettes, I still couldn't catch the eyes of the straight jocks, nerd boys, and rock-climbing guys that I nursed crushes on. This made me feel, at my core, that no one I liked would ever like me. It was impossible, like an apple falling upward from a tree. And this feeling stayed with me even after I fell in love with Seth and he told me how attractive I was over and over again. On one level, I believed him, but on a deeper level, I kept expecting his feelings to pass. It was like he was under some kind of spell, and one day he would surely wake up.