All I Could Bare: My Life in the Strip Clubs of Gay Washington, (4 page)

One time, I was talking to this cute guy in his late thirties about work, his dogs, and the movies we both liked, when

all of a sudden he stopped mid-thought and said, "Wait a minute. You're not a hustler, are you? Because I'm not going to pay to have sex with you."

These kinds of experiences made me reluctant to talk to other customers. But since I had seen this guy around a lot
and
I was trying to make my Coke last, I said, "I'm Craig. What's your name?"

"Dave," he answered, shaking my hand. "I've seen you here and at the other clubs."

"Yeah." I nodded. "You seem to get around, too."

The bartender, a brown-haired guy in a sleeveless muscle shirt, passed by and took Dave's drink order, a gin and tonic. Then he disapprovingly eyed my drink, which was about three-fourths empty and had taken on the color of drain ditch water.

"You want another one of those?" the bartender asked.

"Uh .. . sure," I said, and I could almost feel my pockets getting lighter.

"You can put that on my tab," Dave said.

"Thanks. That's really nice."

"You're welcome."

"So what brings you out tonight, other than the obvious?" I said, gesturing toward a dancer walking our way.

"Well, I usually come out on Friday and Saturday nights. It's my reward for being good all week."

"What do you do?"

"I work for the federal government. I'm in management," he answered as the bartender returned with our drinks.

"Have you been coming out to the clubs for long?"

"Well, I used to be married. I was married for twenty-one years. But after the divorce . . . many years after the divorce, I started coming out. First, I went to the clubs in Baltimore. I was a little concerned about running into people I knew from the office or maybe even my ex-wife. But one day I got tired of making the thirty-minute drive."

"So, you obviously enjoyed yourself once you started coming here?"

"I was like a kid in a candy store. I hadn't touched a man in twenty-one years because I was in a monogamous straight relationship. After all that time having these desires and then all of a sudden it's available—I kind of went bonkers." He took a sip from his drink and then asked, "What about you?"

"Well, I'm actually here for school," I started, but I noticed his attention had drifted away. He was staring at a dancer who had just climbed onto the bar. I'd met the dancer before. His name was Matt. He was a nice guy but not my type at all. He had dark hair; he was older, probably in his late twenties; and unlike his shaved and naturally smooth coworkers, Matt sported a thin coat of shiny black hair over his tall, gym-hardened frame.

On this night, he was a vision of seeming contradictions, with thick, black-rimmed glasses, neatly combed hair, and black leather chaps that exposed both his butt and his dangling dick. He also held a leather riding crop in his hand, which made him come off like a naughty librarian who dished out kinky penalties for overdue books.

Matt looked at Dave and then he snapped his fingers, motioning for Dave to come over.

"Excuse me a moment," Dave said, getting up from his stool and walking toward where Matt was standing. There were people seated in front of Matt, but they had to scoot over to make room for Dave. As soon as Dave was in front of him, Matt kneeled down. Dave put a buck in one of Matt's socks and took a round mini tub of Elbow Grease from the other. He liberally applied the lube to Matt's dick and started working on it for several minutes, stretching and pulling, until it stood fully erect. The customers, who'd been pushed to the side, were now watching intently.

Once Dave helped li'l Matt reach his full growth potential, the other customers started to clap. "Thank you," Matt said to Dave as he stood up and stepped over toward his other admirers. Dave, all smiles, headed back my way. He sat down, grabbed a couple of cocktail napkins off the bar, and wiped his hands.

"That was fun," he said. "No matter where I am, Matt will pick me out and I have to go service him. Even if there are people lined up three and four deep at the bar, they have to clear a place for me. Matt will stand there until I take care of him because the hard-ons help him make money." Dave grinned proudly and continued, "Matt says that I should teach masturbation at the college level.

"He's a nice kid, but typical Generation X. He can't figure out what to do with himself," Dave said, taking another sip of gin and tonic. "So, what were you saying about school? I'm the type of person who can start a conversation, walk away, and then pick it up ten years later without missing a beat."

"Oh, I was just saying that I'm sorta here for school. I'm in grad school and I'm studying the clubs for my master's thesis."

"Really?"

"I know it sounds weird."

"The people at your school allow you to do that?"

"Yeah, it's all about understanding sexual subcultures, yadda yadda yadda. I'm interviewing a bunch of dancers about why they strip."

"What do they say?"

"Well, it's complicated. But most of them say they just do it for money."

"Yep, I've heard that, too. But let's face it, there are a lot of other ways to make money. You can do construction, hang drywall, or whatever. You don't have to take off your clothes for money and let guys play around with you."

"Yeah, I guess."

One of the things I'd noticed since starting my research is that so many people, even those who'd never stepped foot in a strip club, felt they knew exactly why people chose to strip, and these homegrown theories almost always contradicted what the strippers themselves had to say.

Dave said, "Now one of the things I've heard is, 'Where can I make this much money in so few hours and at the same time have people buy me drinks and I can drink on the job?'"

"You don't believe that?"

"I think money is part of it. But some of these guys are really narcissistic, really into themselves. So I think that exhibitionism is another big factor. But the really big reason is that a lot of these guys just need attention. A lot of them are starved for love and affection. Many I've talked to come from broken homes and they want that approval from you in the worst way."

"What makes you think that?"

"Well, an example is the way they'll come over and flex their muscles for you. It's like a little kid showing off for Daddy. I think I'm a father figure to some of them. There's this one guy, a cute kid, whose father was an abusive alcoholic who was in the military. It sounded like the dad probably beat him a lot. And here I am, this older guy who will listen to him and not be judgmental. You can tell it strikes a chord with him."

"And what do
you
get out of it?"

"I sometimes explain it to my other gay friends like this. Going to a regular gay bar is a lot like fishing. You have to spend four or five hours hoping that you're gonna get one fish that wants your hook. But by coming here, I can eliminate all of that. I know that there will be some hot young guys and I can stroke them. And stroking dicks is probably my favorite form of sex. I love doing it. There's nothing more satisfying to me than playing with another guy's dick. I really get a kick out of making another guy feel good. So by coming to the clubs, I'm guaranteed to be able to get what I'm looking for, and I can do it within a very narrow time frame."

"So, it's efficient?"

"Exactly."

5

After my first talk with Dave, I started running into him nearly every week. We'd sit next to each other and share observations on our favorite dancers. Dave was partial to Peter, a cherubic twenty-one-year-old former wrestler prone to earnestly spewing archaic phrases like "Thank you kindly" and "Much appreciated" every time he was tipped.

"He's such a sweet kid," Dave once said. "I love him to death. I still like that eighteen-to-twenty-four-year-old look, like a teenager just starting to become a man. That's where I'm sexually frozen in time."

As we got to know each other better, Dave slowly revealed to me how he'd gone from being this seemingly straight guy who was married for more than two decades to becoming a gay strip club regular. His story was just another example of how, the longer I hung out at the clubs, the more complicated I thought the whole idea of sexuality was. It was easy to think of the customers as just dirty old men, but many, like Dave, had led lives that had been full of secrets and compromise. That made their time at the clubs seem less like a hedonistic indulgence and more like a taste of hard-won freedom.

Dave first figured out he was attracted to other guys while growing up on a Louisiana farm in the 1940s. At age nine, he developed a crush on an older cousin. "He was such a hot-looking, well-built guy, and when it came to sports, you name it, and he did it—boxing, football, wrestling, everything," Dave told me. "He was everything I wasn't but wanted to be."

Sometimes this cousin, an endearing show-off, would jerk off around Dave, but Dave never joined in, which he still regrets. "Now I kick myself because he was one gorgeous guy," Dave said. "But I was going to Catholic school at the time, and I had a lot of moral dilemmas in terms of religion."

Instead, Dave found other outlets for his desires. One day he went to Montgomery Ward to buy a Bike jock strap because his cousin always wore one. As he held it in the store, he could barely contain his excitement. "I was so aroused," he said, "I was surprised I didn't cum in my shorts."

He took the jock strap home and stashed it in a seldom-used drawer. It was like a talisman of sexual energy. Sometimes he wore it outside the house just for a thrill. "When I went to a school dance or something, I would put it on because guys used to talk about how they needed to wear jock straps so they wouldn't get hard-ons," he recalled.

"Well, dancing with girls normally didn't make me pop a boner, but I wore that jock strap just the same. To this day, jock straps make me aroused."

Wearing the jock strap also made him more comfortable with his burgeoning sexuality. Where he once feared that playing with himself would put him on the fast track to hell, his new motto became "God gave it to you; it's for you to use." He and some other cousins who lived nearby started retreating to various corners of the family farm, masturbating and helping one another get off. ,We all jerked off together from the time we were, maybe, eleven or twelve," Dave remembered.

A couple of years later, Dave was shopping in the city closest to his farm. He was flipping through some comic books at the City Newsstand when his eyes came upon a handful of digests featuring cover images of shiny, oiled young men flexing their muscles and wearing little more than jock strap-like bits of cloth. He bought one of the magazines and brought it home, hiding it in the drawer next to his jock strap. Although the magazine said it was dedicated to health, fitness, and the well-developed male physique, Dave said that he "always had a feeling that they were appealing to somebody who likes guys."

Dave would flip through the magazines imagining himself with the models in the pictures. He would also try to see if he could catch any glimpses of the private parts that the posing straps were trying to hide. "I remember once I could see the head of a guy's penis," he said. "The picture was very dark, but, man, did I jerk off to that thing."

Despite his strong feelings, Dave didn't think he had the option of acting on them. This was in the early fifties, when homosexuality was considered a mental illness and acting on it was a crime. "I just didn't see how I could be a part of that lifestyle," Dave said.

Dave fooled around with one guy in college, but after that he focused exclusively on women, concerning himself more with their pleasure than his own. "I always wanted to make a woman cum," he explained, "and if she couldn't reach an orgasm, I mean, that was just totally frustrating to me because I wanted to please her."

To satisfy his own urges, Dave headed to movie theaters that showed nudist films. "These movies were always taken at nudist camps," Dave remembered, "and a lot of them centered around the volleyball court. I guess that gave them an excuse to show a lot of big boobs bouncing up and down. Unfortunately, they generally didn't have men frontal. They let you see the butts, but that was about it. I'd be thinking, 'Please, please, please let me see some pubic hair.'"

By this time, the mid-sixties, Dave was living in D.C. doing classified work for the military. He was on his own and away from Louisiana, but still no more able to act on his desires. "You could not be gay doing the work that I was doing," he told me. "I had top secret clearance. It was very likely that I was tailed on a regular basis. So during that whole period, there's no way I could have been gay. I would have been court-martialed."

Because of this, Dave continued dating women, and at thirty-one, he met the one who would become his wife. "Things started clicking," he remembered, "and the next thing you know, I'm getting married." Still, he had doubts about whether or not it was the right thing to do, given his feelings for men. "There was always this gnawing fear that I was gay and it was not going to work," he said. "But I just decided that this was a commitment I was making, and I realized that my life was not going to be perfect in the sense that there was always going to be something unfulfilled. But then I thought most people's lives are unfulfilled to some degree. It's just something you live with."

Dave married in 1970 and although he never cheated on his wife, he did find ways to satisfy his desires for men. Dave and his wife regularly took trips to Broadway to see the latest productions, and late at night, Dave would head out by himself to check out the live sex shows in Times Square. "The performers were usually young Puerto Ricans, a guy and a girl," he recalled. "I'd go and watch them screw their heads off. But I was really watching the guy. I didn't give a shit about the girl. The guys were usually hung like horses, and they'd be turning me on. So I always found little outlets for myself that didn't involve actual contact with another guy."