All I Could Bare: My Life in the Strip Clubs of Gay Washington, (10 page)

One of the more surprising things about my time at Secrets was that I soon became one of the most popular dancers, consistently making more than $100 a night and pulling in my own flock of regulars. I cornered the market for racially ambiguous boys-next-door. The funny thing is that both of my parents are black—and you have to go
Roots-
in' back to my great-grandmother on my father's side to find a white person— but my toffee-colored skin makes my race hard for people to place. (When it later came to scheduling at one of the other clubs, I was the tragic mulatto of dick dancers—too brown for "Vanilla Shake Mondays," not brown enough for "Hot Chocolate Wednesdays.")

This ambiguity mostly worked to my advantage. Depending on the customer's taste, I could be a swarthy white ethnic, a charming mocha latte poster child for race mixing, a tan Filipino, or almost any variation of Latino.

The only problems generally arose when I told customers I was black. As one white guy once said to me before moving on to another dancer, "I liked you better when I thought you were Latino."

The racial dynamics of the clubs gave me mixed feelings. Sometimes I'd think, "What is a nice middle-class black boy like me doing showing off his dick for old white men? Is the Secrets stage just an updated auction block? Did Martin march in the streets and get shot down for this? Did Sister Rosa stay at the front of the bus so I could shake my ass in the back of the club?" It was a conundrum.

But despite these reservations, I knew I couldn't stop dancing. I didn't want to stop, and I figured that at heart, freedom was about having the choice to do whatever you wanted to do. I was convinced that there were still things I needed to learn about myself by stripping, and I was committed to seeing where this adventure would lead me.

Standing naked onstage at Secrets, I was within a dozen miles of all the landmarks of my life—the hospital where I was born, the concrete government block where my father worked, the campus where I taught and went to school, and the houses that both sets of grandparents bought back in the sixties, their own hard-won pieces of one of the most powerful cities in the world. Yet despite this physical proximity, it seemed like I was worlds away from how I started life, trying to desperately embody the phrase "young, gifted, and black" and come off smart and "articulate," as white folks would sometimes remark.

My Afro stood upright and rounded on my head, which I held up high as I sat in integrated elementary school classrooms representing the race. I knew all my black history facts, learned dutifully from constant practice with flash cards; gave school reports on George Washington Carver and Dr. Charles Drew; and could recite passages from Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.'s "I Have a Dream” speech when called upon at family functions to impress sididdy relatives. When people likened me to Michael Evans of
Good Times,
I would pump my fist in the air and say, "Right on!"

Perhaps because of these comparisons, I pursued acting, joining Howard University's Children's Theatre. I even won the lead role in
Rumple,
a black retelling of "Rumpelstiltskin." It was supposed to blow up like
The Wiz.
But
Rumple
failed to catch on and the world never got to hear me sing-rap about spinning straw into gold.

When I was in junior high, I became a regular on
The Sunshine Store,
a children's TV show on the local NBC affiliate. I played the friendly neighborhood black kid who came in the store and learned life lessons from the middle-aged white store owner. In that way, the premise was similar to
Different Strokes
or
Webster
except I didn't get adopted.

About a year after that, I became an anchor on a kids' TV magazine,
Newsbag.
The gig was mostly uneventful save for the time when an appearance by Brooke Shields, in town promoting some children's charity, coincided with me getting my first zit. It was a bright red number that wedged itself in the crevice around my right nostril, and it made me so self-conscious that I couldn't get up the nerve to ask Brooke what her
Blue Lagoon
costar Christopher Atkins was
really
like.

These kinds of thoughts made it increasingly hard for me to deny to myself that I was gay. There was no way around it—that poster of shirtless Soloflex model Scott Madsen was not on my wall to encourage me to exercise. But this truth made me angry. I couldn't risk letting my friends and family find out about me. I felt like I was walking around with a live grenade. If I accidentally dropped it, my whole world could explode.

This anger made me act out in all sorts of ways. By the time I was around fifteen, I had shed any pretense of being a model middle-class black lad. It was the
Cosby Show
era, and instead of trying to ape Theo Huxtable, with his corny high-top-fade-wearing self, I was shooting for Lisa Bonet, nude on the cover of
Rolling Stone
and fucking in chicken blood in
Angel Heart.
I bleached my hair, developed a two-pack-a-day Yves Saint Laurent menthol cigarette habit, and skipped almost as many classes as I attended. In high school, I might've been voted "Least Likely to Amount to Much of Anything"—that is, if I'd actually finished high school. I dropped out and worked full time as a telemarketer for Time-Life Books.

When I wasn't on the phone hawking the Old West series to retirees and shut-ins, I was hanging out with my friend Matthew, a cool-ass white boy who loved Afrika Bambaataa and Chaka Khan and had hip-hop lyrics written on his white Converse high-tops. Matthew and I were primarily obsessed with two things: music and
The Young and the Restless.
That's all we talked about as we walked around D.C. late at night or drove out to the Maryland suburbs where his mother worked behind the counter at 7-Eleven. Once, when Matthew went to L.A., he brought me back an ornament stolen from the
Young and the Restless
set.

For the most part, we didn't discuss a lot of personal stuff, but one time when we were talking about gay people, I told Matthew that I couldn't imagine kissing another guy. He looked me in the eyes and said, "Of course you can," recognizing something in me that I wasn't ready to acknowledge.

Not long afterward, I moved to New York City with Matthew and some friends and became a featured dancer on
Club MTV
, hosted by Downtown Julie Brown. It wasn't so much that I was a good dancer as that the casting people liked my look—hair dyed blond, black leather jacket, Doc Martens, and jeans. (Later I switched to a style that mostly consisted of Calvin Klein boxers worn over long johns, and one of the producers pulled me aside and asked if I wouldn't mind returning to my original style.) I liked being on the show because I thought it would launch me into the limelight. Fame would solve all my problems, because when you were famous you could do anything—dance in your underwear like Madonna, show your ass crack on an album sleeve like Prince, or most important, be gay like Boy George or the dude with the high-pitched voice from Bronski Beat.

At downtimes during taping, I imagined myself teaming with two other dancers and becoming the
Club MTV
version of Shalamar, the disco/R&B trio that sprang from the ranks of the
Soul Train
dancers. But the closest I got to that dream was staring up the back of ex-Shalamar member Jody Watley's hoop skirt as I danced behind her while she performed her hit "Looking for a New Love" on the show.

When I wasn't taping
Club MTV,
I was hanging out as a part of the touring entourage of an Italian club diva named Nocera, who had a smash with an airy freestyle number called "Summertime, Summertime." We'd make our way through clubs all over New York, Jersey, and Philly. Nocera and her dancers would perform, my friend would collect the cash payments from the club owners, and I would sit backstage and use spit to wipe the scuffs off my Doc Martens. After a few months of this, I got bored and restless. My life didn't seem to be going anywhere and I was pissed off about it.

I got in a fight with some of my roommates, threatened one of them with a steak knife (in a move that was
way
more drama queen than sadistic slasher, but still. . .), and was promptly and justifiably thrown out on my ass. With nowhere else to go, I returned home to my parents, who insisted that I take the G.E.D. and try to find a way to go to college. As I agreed to the arrangement, I started to visualize my dreams of having an exciting life swirling in the basin of a sink and then washing down the drain.

Matthew and I didn't talk much after that. He'd had his own falling-out with some of the roommates long before the knife incident, which caused him to flee the apartment and not tell anyone where he was going.

But about six months after I moved home, I unexpectedly received a handwritten note from Matthew in the mail. "If this letter gets to you somewhere in this burning world," he opened, "I have a feeling you can still relate." For five densely marked pages, Matthew revisited all of our favorite topics of conversation, telling me how he was awaiting a new Frankie Knuckles remix of Chaka Khan's "Ain't Nobody," going through a love/hate relationship with Whitney Houston's "One Moment in Time," and incensed over the direction of
The Young and the Restless.
("That show suffered so much during the writers' strike— will it ever rebound?") Later, he stated: "Writing this letter to you makes me happy. Whatever happened to us? I miss talking to you, but somehow I know what you're thinking or want to convince myself that I know."

At the end of the letter, he wrote: "213 area code soon. Call me." But I never did. Once I started on the long path of going to school, being a good boy, and doing what my parents wanted me to, I couldn't look back and reconnect with someone who I'd shared so many crazy obsessions and dreams with. Still, every time I entered a new situation, I always remembered something he'd told me: "Craig, people will like you wherever you go."

The next time I heard anything about Matthew was years later while flipping through
Vanity Fair.
According to an article in the magazine, he had indeed moved to L.A. and transformed himself into conservative internet pundit Matt Drudge.

12

As I continued dancing at Secrets, I generally was able to keep my stripping life separate from my personal life and my school life. Seth came in once to see me work, but he didn't stay long. He said it made him uncomfortable, but we didn't discuss it much more than that. Another time, one of my college friends, who had since moved out of town, came into the bar. He knew I'd written about strippers for my master's thesis, but he had no idea that I'd started dancing.

When I saw him, I was kneeling on one of the platforms, my dick still hard from my last customer. He walked up to me, and for a moment I wondered if he was going to touch my dick, which—in the logic of the clubs—would've been weird because he was a friend, not a stranger. But instead he said, "Boy, you really know how to throw yourself into your research," and we both laughed.

By far the weirdest encounter I had with someone I knew, though, happened one Saturday night when I was onstage dancing—or to be more accurate, rapidly swaying—to one of my favorite songs, the club remix of Mariah Carey's "Fantasy."

I was really into it, getting lost in the lyrics ("seems so real but it's a fantasy... it's such a sweet fantasy') and wagging my cock from side to side to the beat, when I looked toward the door and spotted this guy, Doug, who was once in a graduate African-American history seminar with me. We made eye contact and he nervously looked away and raced to the drag side of the club.

"Oh, shit," I thought. I didn't even know this guy was gay and I wondered if he was going to spread what I did around school. My adviser was still the only person at the university who knew I danced, and while I didn't live in constant fear of exposure, as it might be portrayed in the Lifetime made-for-TV movie version of my life, I was anxious about what would happen if word really got out. I knew my adviser could protect me only so much. Even though stripping was legal, I knew that wouldn't count for much if I was up against conservative media pundits, overreacting parents, and nervous university officials. And because stripping and other forms of sex work are so controversial, I doubted that any gay or African-American organization would come to my aid if I got in hot water.

After my set finished, I got dressed and went to look for Doug in the audience for the drag show, but I couldn't find him. I wanted to gauge his reaction. I looked for him the whole night but never saw him.

When I got home, I emailed him: "Hey—were you at Secrets tonight by any chance?" I thought a coy approach was best.

The next morning, he answered: "Yeah, I thought that was you."

"Yep," I responded. "I've been working there this summer, doing ethnographic research for my dissertation. You should've said hi."

"Yeah, well, I wasn't sure it was you."

I figured he was lying about this. After all, I had seen the shock and recognition on his face, but I let it go. It didn't sound like he planned on outing me.

"No prob," I typed.

Aside from these encounters, I never saw anyone else I knew from school at Secrets. That was another reason why I liked working there. I didn't even consider dancing anywhere else until one day Danny came back into the kitchen/dressing room and said he needed to talk to me and another of the club's most popular dancers, Mikey, a twenty-one-year-old white bodybuilder who started stripping after he dropped out of college. "It just wasn't for me," Mikey explained.

Like many of the other boys who paraded their dangling and stiffened wares around the club, Mikey maintained he was straight, but he was unrestrained about his love for the job. He dug the schedule and he especially loved the money. "When I started, I was four thousand dollars in debt," he once told me. "Within three months, I had no debt, beaucoup new clothes and new jewelry, and I was on my way to putting a down payment on a new car."