All I Could Bare: My Life in the Strip Clubs of Gay Washington, (23 page)

We made our way down the soon-to-be-gone block, past the Glory Hole and the Follies. I kept waiting for some feeling to overtake me, but it didn't come. Nothing felt as meaningful as it should. I wasn't even sad. Instead I was a little tipsy and curious about the boys in the new club.

From the outside, Heat didn't look that different from the old La Cage, but once I stepped inside, it was a whole 'nother story. Entering Heat was like being dropped in the middle of a porn pajama party. The old club had been gutted so that it was now just one big wide open space like the rec room basement of somebody's parents' house in the eighties. There was one large wooden bar and a makeshift stage that stood about a foot off the floor. All around were dancers, at least twenty of them.

They seemed so different from the guys I used to work with. As a whole, they looked much younger, like many couldn't even legally order a drink at the bar they were dancing on top of, and they also represented a more diverse mix of races than I'd ever seen at a D.C. strip club: black, white, Asian, Latino, and indeterminate. I would've fit in at a place like this. But the most noticeable difference was their attitude. In my day, we tried to make stripping seem like a chore even when we were having a good time. It was very "Look what I have to do to make a buck." But these guys were openly having fun, shaking to the tribal club music pounding from the speakers and talking animatedly to one another and the customers.

As soon as I sat down at the bar, a skinny tan white dancer in bright blue briefs walked over to me.

"I'm Stevie," he said, offering his hand.

"Hey, I'm Craig."

"First time here?"

"The first time since it's been Heat, yeah."

"What do you think?"

"It's kind of wild, but I like it," I said, using my finger to trace a path down his chest to his smooth belly button. "What do you do when you're not here?"

"I'm a grad student at Catholic University."

By this point in my life, I'd come to realize that far from being an anomaly—the grad student stripper—I was practically a cliché. I'd since met so many other guys, and women, who put themselves through school by taking off their clothes.

"Well, here's a donation to the college fund," I said, placing three bucks into his waistband.

"Thanks," he said, moving so close to me that I could feel the heat of his body.

"How long have you been dancing here?"

"About three months."

"Do you like it?"

"I
love
it. Although I never thought I was the type of guy who'd do something like this, you know?"

This was another thing I'd come to realize: almost no one thinks that he is the type of person who would become a stripper. This is partly because we all want to think of ourselves as starting out innocent. But it's also because the very idea of what a stripper
is
exists only in our minds. It's a fantasy. That's the point.

"I used to be really fat," he continued, "and I used to hate the way I looked. But working here has been really good for me. It's the first time I've felt hot."

"Really?" I said, as this dancer basically confirmed all that I now believed about what made me and so many other people want to try stripping, that this desire had less to do with some exhibitionistic impulse than with basic needs that everyone experiences to some degree—to be desired, to feel beautiful, to belong.

"Hey, do you want to do a private?" he asked.

"You guys have private rooms here?"

"Yeah, back there," he said, gesturing to a curtained-off area I hadn't noticed before.

"Maybe later," I said.

"Then I'll be back," Stevie said, before walking away.

"Hey," I said to Fred, who was sitting next to me, "have you ever done a private?"

"All the time. I'm about to get one now," he said, pointing to a spiky-haired twink across the room.

”What happens back there?"

"Depends on the dancer. But things can get pretty wild. I'll give you a full report when I get back."

I nodded, and Fred got up to walk over to the cute punky boy he was looking at. They exchanged some words and then disappeared behind the black curtain.

After Fred left, a young black dancer with a shock of dyed blond hair came up to me.

"Are you having fun?" he asked.

"Sure. You?"

"I'm having a great time," he said, as he put an arm around my shoulder.

"I see."

"That's my goal, to have as much fun as possible."

"Really?"

"Yeah, my sister died last year, and she was like my

mother. And I spent so much time being depressed. But finally I was just like, 'You need to snap the fuck out of it,' you know. So I started working here and I dyed my hair and it's all good."

"What's your name?"

He flashed me a broad white smile. "Mysterious," he said.

We talked for about ten minutes more as he detailed precisely how his sister died, the combination of hair dyes necessary to get his hair to look like it did, and almost everything he did that day from the moment he woke up hearing Mariah Carey's comeback anthem 'We Belong Together" playing on the radio. "I love that song so I knew it was going to be a great day," he explained.

Like the other dancer, Mysterious asked me if I wanted a private and I declined again. But I tipped him and he gave me a tight hug before walking away.

Fred came back with a huge grin on his face. Something looked different about him.

'Where's your eye patch?"

"I took it off," he said, moving close to my ear. "It gets in the way of giving a good blow job."

'Wow. I guess you got your money's worth."

"You could say that," he said, climbing back on his seat. I looked for his spiky-haired guy in the crowd, but saw he was already going behind the curtain with somebody else.

"So what are you going to do with the clubs closing?" I asked Fred. "Where are you going to go?"

He frowned. "Me and some of the other regulars have been talking about it. Some have decided that they are just going to do the escort thing. The only thing about that is you're just sitting home by yourself. The clubs give you someplace to go. But I know this one guy—he's retired— who moved to Florida because he likes one of the clubs down there. And I have another friend who moved to Thailand several years ago after they stopped letting customers touch here. He loves it over there. He used to only like white boys, but he says that after you've been there a while, you barely notice they're Asian."

I wasn't sure what to say to that.

"But," he continued, "I've decided that I'm going to stay put. My health isn't great. I'm on dialysis and my eye is all messed up. I can't really go anywhere. But I am going to miss it. Actually, I don't really know what I'm going to do."

While Fred was talking, I spotted a cute curly-haired blond dancer looking at me from across the club. I smiled, he smiled back, and I motioned for him to come over. Fred said something about going to the restroom as I watched the dancer walk toward me. He was tall, with a long, lean body, and he was wearing tightie whities with calf-high white sport socks that had multicolored rings around the top.

"Hey," he said.

"How's it goin'?"

"Good. I've never seen you here before."

"I've never been here before."

We exchanged names—he was Cody, a performing arts

student from Philly. He and another dancer drove down each weekend to work at Heat.

"I guess it lets you put your dance training to good use, huh?"

"You could say that."

"So what's your favorite Broadway show?"

He thought for a moment. "I guess I'd have to say
God-spell.
We did it in high school."

"I'm more of a
Jesus Christ Superstar
guy myself. Judas and Mary Magdalene have some really good songs."

"Yeah, I'm not that into Andrew Lloyd Webber."

"Fair enough. Hey, if I get a private, will you sing for me?"

"What? Are you serious?"

"Yep. I'll totally get a private, but you have to sing me a song."

"What song?"

"Hey, I don't tell a pro what to sing. Whatever you want."

He agreed to my terms and we went over to the back, where a guy took $50 from me and let us behind the curtain into a dark little room with a black leather sofa. I fell back on the sofa as Cody took off his briefs. He then faced me and sat on my lap with his legs straddling me on both sides. He moved his face close to mine.

"So, do you still want to hear me sing, or do you just want to make out?"

"Well, you're totally shorting me. But we can make out if you want. .."

He pressed his lips to mine, shutting me up in a way that I thought was rude for a second. But only a second. We stayed kissing like this for our entire fifteen-minute time together, as my hands rubbed his back from the nape of his neck to the curve of his bare butt. It wasn't quite sex, but it was sweet, and the best fifty bucks I'd spent in a while. When our time was up, the guy who took the money knocked on the door.

"I guess we have to say good-bye," I said.

"It looks like it."

"I'd say, 'See you later,' but the club is closing in a week or so."

"I know. It sucks."

"Are you going to be dancing anywhere else?"

"I don't really know yet."

"Well, if I ever see you again, you totally owe me a song. Deal?"

"Deal," he said, giving me a hug and one last peck.

I walked from behind the curtain back into the club. It looked pretty empty because it was getting late. Fred seemed to have left and there didn't seem to be any reason to hang around. For a moment, I thought about going back to Secrets one last time, but I decided to leave with the memory of Cody fresh in my head.

I hopped in a cab, and as it pulled away, turning the corner onto South Capitol Street, I looked out of the back window and realized that this was the last time I'd ever see the block as it was. "The last time," I thought, each word feeling heavy, like a boulder.

I imagined that someday families will drive down here on their way to the baseball stadium, and some clean-cut dad will remark how much nicer and safer this area is now that they've cleaned it up. He won't mention all the stripping, porn, and freaky gay bathhouse stuff, but that's what he'll be thinking as he glances in the rearview mirror at his fresh-faced brood. But I know that this wasn't just some wasteland for loners and losers; for many of us, it was where we were most alive.

"So how do you feel?" Seth asked when I called him the next day.

"I don't know," I told him. "I really can't put a finger on it."

It wasn't until a few days later when I was driving through Providence, flipping the radio dial, when a Madonna song came on that summed up how I felt: "This Used to Be My Playground."

24

The first weekend of April 2006 was the last one for the O Street clubs. (Wet got a temporary exemption because it sat a few blocks away, but it closed due to stadium-related development within the year.) Heat issued its last call on Saturday, and the Follies and Secrets/Ziegfield's said good-bye the following night.

According to reports and friends, the vibe at Secrets was sadder than when I was there a couple of weeks earlier. Strippers complained about losing their jobs, and others wondered if they'd ever find another place where they could feel so free. "It's a place where people would come to let go of all their hang-ups and just be who they are," one person told a reporter. "They would discuss deep personal things that they normally kept to themselves, that they don't want anybody to know, to the person sitting next to them at the bar."

Over on the Ziegfield's side of the club, Ella Fitzgerald, in her final show, wiped her eyes and joked about her recent hip problems, telling the packed crowd that she might be making her next public appearance walking with a cane or rolling in a wheelchair. At about 2:30
AM
, the lights went down and Ella performed her last number, "The Party's Over," moving her immaculately painted lips to the words: "They've burst your pretty balloon / And taken the moon away /.. . Now you must wake up / All dreams must end."

Morning came a few hours later and found the streets empty. Another chapter of D.C.'s strange gay history had come to a close.

The next morning, Ella, who had a day job as a hairdresser, left her house to get the
Washington Post,
which had done a big story on the closing of the clubs. "I went down to CVS and got like twenty copies," she later told me. "And there was my picture on the front of the Style section. And I just kind of lost it right there by the trash can outside the door. I lost it for about fifteen minutes. I was like, 'Oh my God, it's over. It's gone.' But then I came home, showered, shaved, went downtown, started cutting hair, kept it off my mind, came home that night, read the article, had one more little cry, and then paid it no more mind."

(But even one year after the closing, Ella hadn't completely moved on, especially when it came to the dancers. "I'm still dating one." She laughed. "But he's married now with two kids.")

As for me, I spent much of that last weekend getting drunk in Providence in a sort of inebriated tribute to my past. The funny thing about it is that more than ten years had passed since I started stripping and I still wasn't any closer to having simple answers about why I decided to strip and what the whole experience meant. Whenever someone asked me about it, I wanted to don a solemn expression and break into my take on the
Rent
theme: "One million five hundred seventy-six thousand eight hundred minutes . . . / How do you measure three years in the nude . . . / In hard-ons, in dollars, in dick bites, in porn aud-i-tions."

The thing that made the experience so hard to pin down is that stripping didn't get me any closer to understanding the stuff that I hoped it would. I still haven't figured out why I have this need to see if guys find me attractive, even though their desire often unnerves me as much as it excites me. But at least now I've realized that whatever power I gain from the simple fact that someone wants to have sex with me is too limited and fleeting to be of much use because it has so little to do with me and who I really am. It's all about what I represent to them and how being with me will make them feel about themselves. Whatever they're willing to give up for the chance of sex—whether it's an abundance of flattery or dollar bills stuffed in socks-has to do with their hunger, not my worth. It's nothing I should invest in or stake my value upon.