All I Could Bare: My Life in the Strip Clubs of Gay Washington, (16 page)

"What did you find out?" he asked, shuffling through some papers in his hand.

"Well, it's complicated," I said. "I guess a lot of people think that the whole scene is about horny old guys being worked over by a bunch of money-hungry hustlers. But I found out that it's often much more than that."

"And you're done with stripping now?"

"Yes," I said, and it technically wasn't a lie. True, I'd worked at the Follies just the previous weekend, but I didn't have any additional dates scheduled.

"You also wrote something about the 'social function' of stripping," he said in the way that someone might cry out, "What stinks?"

This made me nervous. I didn't want to blow getting the job.

"Um," I started, "what I meant is that the clubs serve the social function of bringing together diverse groups of men—openly gay, closeted, straight, young, old, black, white, et cetera—in ways that they wouldn't likely interact otherwise. And I guess that's partly why I find the whole scene interesting."

"I have to tell you," he said, finally looking up from his papers, "we're not at all interested here in the social function of stripping or anything else. We're trying to save lives."

"Of course," I said. "I understand that. Although I think that in order to reach people with any kind of message, you have to first understand where they're coming from."

"Oh, I understand where they're coming from. From my experience, most of them are prostitutes and drug addicts and the best thing we can do is try to stop them from spreading the virus."

"Well, that might be your experience, but it certainly isn't mine," I said, the tone of my voice noticeably shifting from "interview" to "irritated."

His comments surprised me. Contrary to what the administrator seemed to think, I never saw any dancers do drugs, although some weren't shy about sharing that they were on something or other. And as for me personally, I'd never so much as smoked pot. The then president of the

United States had been closer to a joint than I ever had. It wasn't a judgmental thing with me. (After all, you do lose some moral authority when you make most of your income standing around naked in sports socks.) Nor did I think my brain would go all greasy and sunny-side up like in those old "Brain on Drugs" commercials if I dared to try something. It was mostly just that I liked the things I put in my body to come with a brand name, whether it be Coca-Cola or Trojan. I wanted some corporate entity to be responsible in the event something went wrong. (This is also one of the reasons why I shy away from fresh fruits and vegetables.)

Plus, I was always one of those people who could get more than a little loopy from over-the-counter meds. Once I took an especially strong antihistamine and had an experience that seemed strikingly similar to how a friend once described his near-fatal overdose on the horse tranquilizer ketamine. For all these reasons—and not Nancy Reagan—I said no to drugs. So for him to intimate that every stripper was a drug addict was not only wrong, it was personally offensive.

Not only couldn't I believe that he was stereotyping strippers, I also was amazed that someone so ostensibly connected to the gay community could have such a small-minded view of this aspect of the culture. It made me realize that a person's attitude toward stripping and sex work was like a political affiliation. If you were on one side, you found it hard to believe how anyone could have an opposing point of view.

For a few moments, a tense silence hung in the air like the scent of a cheap air freshener: Peevishly Pine.

Finally, he said, "I guess we'll agree to disagree."

"I guess so," I said, just wanting to leave.

He shook my hand, thanked me for coming, and walked me to the door.

When I got home and Seth asked me about the interview, I told him about my confrontation with the administrator. "I'm pretty sure I didn't get the job," I said, "and frankly, after all the bullshit that guy said, I'm not sure if I even want it." I looked at Seth, who was standing over a steaming skillet at the stove. He didn't say anything, but his face was pulled so tight it was like he was trying to give himself a face-lift. Our relationship had become a pressure cooker with no steam valve.

18

A couple of days after my interview, however, things on the home front improved considerably when I got the somewhat surprising news that the job was mine. I could hardly believe this had happened after my tense meeting, but I didn't second-guess my luck. I needed the money and this job made it so that Seth and I would be comfortable even without my stripping income. I called the Follies manager and told him not to put me on the schedule again, but that he'd be seeing me all the time anyway since a big part of my job entailed passing out mini packs of condoms and lube at all the local strip bars, sex clubs, bathhouses, and porn theaters.

I was excited about the job and took it on with an earnest zeal that reminded me of my days as an elementary school patrol. The job proved ideal in many ways because it allowed me to maintain contact with all of my friends and associates at the clubs, even if they did brand me with the unfortunate moniker "Condom Boy."

I wasn't naive enough to think that passing out some free condoms was really going to change anybody's behavior if they were hell-bent on screwing without protection or, as it was becoming known, barebacking, but I was able to use my position to help out some of my friends from the clubs. I had a small budget for developing ads and other educational materials, so I hired a couple of dancers who were photographers and graphic designers to do some work for the program.

I was also able to help in other ways. One day Jay, the dancer I knew from Wet, dropped by the office to see if he could have a roll of condoms. He was on his way to L.A. to make his first porn flick, and the company, which was paying him only about a grand, told him that he had to provide his own penis protectors.

"How cheap can the porn industry be?" I asked Jay.

He laughed, but said that porn was something he'd always wanted to try, and of course, I could relate. But it was another reason why I was glad my porn career never got off the ground.

In addition to being paid to hang out in my old stomping grounds, the job also exposed me to aspects of the local gay sex scene that I wasn't familiar with. Almost every local sex establishment, from bathhouses to members-only parties, welcomed me and my free rubbers. If they ever got in trouble with the cops or community activists, they could use my presence as evidence that they were committed to

AIDS prevention. I was good PR and the job basically gave me the key to the sexual city.

One of my favorite places to visit was a sex party that took place every weekend in a downtown row house. It was fascinating to walk into this normal-looking house and suddenly be thrust into this sexual free-for-all where men were fucking all over the place in all sorts of different ways. In the basement there was a room with lockers where guys would check their clothes—all of their clothes—before proceeding to walk around completely naked with the exception of footwear. Most of the times they'd don sandals, slippers, or flip-flops, all of which made for a nudity-appropriate fashion statement. But occasionally I'd get the odd sight of a naked middle-aged man in nothing but polished black wingtips.

The club's clientele was so fascinating because it wasn't made up of the muscled gym bunnies that dominated so much of the gay scene. Many of these guys had bodies that sagged, jiggled, and poked out in all sorts of undesirable places. Yet they strutted around like Adonises. It was as if they'd transcended conventional ideals of attractiveness or beauty—all things that were obsessions at the strip clubs. They were there simply to fuck on one of the many mattresses that lined the floors of the upstairs bedrooms. Then they'd recover in the living room, where there was a TV and a bar stocked with soda, beer, chips, and liquor.

Being around all this sex gave me a lot of time to reflect on my own sex life—or rather, the relative paucity of it. Although I'd been a stripper and spent many hours being fondled and felt up by strangers, I had still slept with only one guy in my life—Seth. I was increasingly starting to see this as a problem, like maybe I was missing out on something. It wasn't that I wanted to break up. Things had been pretty good since I started having a positive impact on our bank balance again. But I wondered if I would look back and regret not experimenting with other people.

I began broaching the idea that maybe Seth and I could open up our relationship.

"It has nothing to do with my feelings toward you or about the relationship," I explained one night while we were driving home from our favorite Ethiopian restaurant. "But I don't want to someday resent you or even myself for not having had more experiences, you know. You were with other guys before me, but I've never been with anyone else. I think I want that experience. Can you understand that?"

"I mean, I understand," he said, his hand tightly gripped on the steering wheel, his eyes not leaving the road. "But in a way, I don't understand. If you've found the person that you want to be with, why does it matter that you haven't been with other people?"

"I don't know. I just think it does. Or I think that one day it might. I just don't want to have to live with regrets or to feel that I missed out on something."

"Everyone misses out on something. You can't always have it all."

"I'm not trying to have it all," I said, raising my voice a little more than I'd planned. "I'm trying to have something that I want or that I think I might want. And I'm just being upfront and honest about that. I don't want to break up, but I'm asking you to work with me on this."

"Whatever."

"No, you can't just say 'whatever.' How do you feel about this? You have to tell me how you feel."

"I
feel
like you're going to do what you want to do."

"So are you saying it's OK?"

"I don't want to break up, either."

A couple of months passed and we didn't really broach the subject again. I went about doing my job, hanging out and passing out my condoms. It seemed like sexual opportunities were all around me. Stripping had made me more comfortable with my own sexuality, and I longed to see where this newfound confidence could take me. I no longer felt anxious when people came on to me. I felt turned on, alive. I was dying to act upon those feelings, and one Sunday night at the Crew Club, a local bathhouse on the Fourteenth Street corridor where I used to watch the prostitutes strut up and down the block as a kid, I did.

I had been at the club for a couple of hours, had already passed out a number of condoms, and was just hanging out. It was always interesting watching what went on at the club, partly because of the way it was set up. Once you were buzzed in the door and handed a bath towel—it was a bathhouse, after all—you walked through a small mini gym with a bunch of Nautilus machines and some free weights. From there you went into the locker room area. Customers could rent lockers for their clothes or small private rooms—like coat closets with cots—which were located just beyond the public shower. There was also a living room area, where guys could watch TV and flip through magazines, as well as many dark corners and rooms where guys could get it on in semi-privacy. Seeing flocks of men—of all shapes, sizes, ages, and colors—move from area to area, always looking around for the next sexual opportunity, was not unlike watching hamsters—extremely
horny
hamsters—race through a maze.

Whenever I was at the bathhouse, I checked my clothes in a locker and walked around with a towel around my waist so I would blend in. This made the customers more comfortable talking to me about safer sex and the clinic's various services, because I wasn't perceived as an outsider.

On this particular night I spotted a guy I had seen around and always had a crush on. I never acted upon it because of my relationship. But now that I'd had that talk with Seth, things felt very different.

"So, you're passing out condoms tonight?" he asked. His name was Brent and he looked like Archie Andrews from the comics, except way hotter. He had freshly cut reddish brown hair and freckles that playfully dappled the skin that wasn't covered by his towel.

"Yep," I said, turning on the aw-shucks, boy-next-door flirt voice I used with customers. "Care to have one?"

"Sure," he said, slowly taking one from my hand.

"Now, are you sure you know how to use that thing? They can be dangerous in untrained hands."

"Yeah, I think I know what I'm doing. I'm really good at putting them on other people."

"Oh," I said, "so you're more of a receiver than a giver?"

"You could say that," he said, giving me a gleaming smile.

At this point, I was trying to think of anything to keep the conversation going.

"Hey," I continued, "would you say you're a guy who likes to try new things?"

"I guess so. Why?"

"Ever used one of these?" I asked, taking a palm-size plastic packet out of my condom bag.

"What is it?" he asked.

"Well, it's actually a condom that's made for women. You stick it, you know, inside. But a lot of guys are using them now because it's supposed to feel better."

"Why don't you show me how it works? I have a room down the hall."

"Um, sure," I said.

I followed him through the hallways filled with shirtless, towel-clad men, their eyes springing to life every time a new face passed by. We made it to his room, closed the door, dimmed the lights. We both dropped our towels, and my dick sprang to attention like something that should've come with a cartoonish
boiiiiing
sound.

"There's a special technique to putting it in," I said. "Why don't you bend over for me."

He leaned his body over the small cot in the room, spread