I didn’t always frequent tanning salons, shave my bikini zone, and wear four layers of underwear on the job. But then I wasn’t always a stripper.
Confessions of a Male Stripper
There’s something exhilarating about women seeing me as a sex object. Stencil THREE FEET-NO DIVING on my forehead and call me shallow, but it’s fun to be lusted after.
Why strip? In a nutshell, The Full Monty. I was bothered by the extraordinary lengths to which the film went to establish the characters’ financial desperation. As if the only acceptable reason a man might consider stripping is because there are absolutely no other jobs available for hundreds of miles. Bollocks! He might want to strip just for the rush of it.
Late one evening after I’d seen the movie, I stood naked before a full-length mirror, tabulating my assets and liabilities. In the minus column: the rhythm of Al Gore, the physical grace of a freshly birthed elk, and a physique that seemed to scream “Chipwich,” not
“Chippendales.” In the plus column: a total and utter lack of shame.
I hit the gym nightly and guzzled a witches’ brew of nutritional supplements. My kitchen cupboard became a chemistry set stocked with various powders and pills. In a month my metamorphosis was complete, and I had become reacquainted with abdominal muscles I hadn’t seen since the Reagan administration.
I needed body photos, so I took my camera to Gold’s Gym and asked some guy to shoot me flexing. He agreed and started focusing. Not wanting to appear vain, I said, “These are for a job application. I’ve decided to become a stripper.” Suddenly everything changed. He handed back the camera, holding it with all the affection one might afford a decomposing rat. The battle lines were being drawn. I was being shunned by my fellow man.
After bronzing my flesh at the electric beach, I was ready to approach the only heterosexual male strip club in the D.C. area: the Hangar Club. “I would like to apply to be a male performer,” I said to the world-weary hostess, realizing too late the-word male was extraneous. She looked at my photos and gave me an application. A few days later Nick, the owner, called and invited me in for an interview.
Nick Simonetta, an avuncular middle-aged gentleman bearing an uncanny resemblance to Al from Happy Days, is not the kind of guy you’d picture running a strip joint. I wanted to cinch the deal, so I dropped trou and showed Nick my new bod. His assessment: “Your ankles are too narrow. You’ll need ankle warmers to hide them, and split-sole jazz shoes.” Who am I, Jennifer Beals?
He explained that all his strippers have a shtick. There’s the cowboy, the construction worker, the muscle man, and so on. We settled on tuxedo stripper for me. For my opening song I went with a James Bond motif and chose Duran Duran’s “A View to a Kill.”
Nick invited me to check out the show that Saturday night. After watching the ladies get hot and bothered, I realized that women have a healthier attitude toward stripping than men. You don’t have to wonder what women are thinking while they watch. When guys watch women strip, they get this odd, glassy-eyed stare, almost like they’re wondering, “Would her head fit on the top shelf of my refrigerator?”
I was surprised to learn that the cardinal rule of female stripping (don’t squeeze the Charmin) does not apply to male performers. When the guys work the crowd for tips, the sea of hands they navigate is like a gigantic human car wash.
Next I visited a used-tux store. Luckily, tucked away amid the robin’s-egg-blue abominations, they had a standard black tuxedo in my size. I bought it and took it to my favorite Korean tailor to have the inseams lined with Velcro so I could rip the pants off with a flourish. In stripper parlance, I needed “breakaway pants.” Mr. Kim had never been asked to do this before, and seemed puzzled. Our communication problem was resolved when I said, loudly and clearly, “I must be able to rip these pants off my body. I take my clothes off in front of women for money. I am a stripper.” An elderly woman picking up her quilt fled the shop in terror.
My final stop was the club’s seamstress to measure me for custom T-backs and slings, male equivalents of thongs and G-strings. The fitting was not nearly as risque as I’d imagined. Her checklist of measurements did not include penis girth, ball displacement, or ass-crack contour.
The following Sunday I had an audition with the troupe’s star and choreographer, Michael Casanova. Casanova (a nationally ranked gymnast before adopting his stage name and current career) is truly Lord of the Strip. His energetic dance style, gymnastic daredevilry, and unpredictability make him the crowd favorite. He’s as likely to break into the funky chicken as he is to back-flip into a split.
Casanova tried to teach me the tricks of the trade, but his terpsichorean techniques aren’t easily adopted by mere mortals. A Casanovism: “If I can’t think of what to do next, I just do a series of five back handsprings. By then I’ll have come up with something .” I peppered him with hygiene questions instead.
“About that chomping dollar bills out of women’s hands,” I began. “I’m no Howard Hughes when it comes to germs, but I’m not wild about using my mouth as a wallet.”
“If you don’t want to bite the bills, let the girls stuff ’em in your sling,” Casanova said.
“Sounds kinda iffy. You ever get a paper cut down there?” I fretted.
Then, trying to discern if there is another meaning to the expression “Put a sock in it,” I asked, “What about, you know, stuffing? Do any of the guys stuff?”
“Dangerous,” Casanova replied. “It’s great until the stuffing falls out in the middle of your act. I’ve seen it. You don’t want that to happen to you.” All I could do was shudder.
“The strap on my banana hammock broke, revealing … not a banana, but more of a baby carrot. My manhood was experiencing extreme stage fright.”
Casanova worked with me for hours on “A View to a Kill.” At the end of the day, it was time for my official audition. He rounded up all the waitresses and female strippers in the place. I was to perform for them. The fact that I was disrobing in front of a bunch of women I didn’t know was the last thing on my mind — I worried about not slipping on mineral-oil slicks, not tripping over the smoke machines, staying in the spotlights, making eye contact, and doing spins without losing my balance. To say that I didn’t exactly turn the girls on is an understatement. In fact, if you had had some gunpowder you needed kept in a cool, dry place, their panties would have been an ideal location.
Tammy began the critique with, “Sit down, this is going to take a while. For starters, your rhythm is way off. Can you even snap to the beat?” I couldn’t.
Another barmaid reminisced about the audition of a stripper named Paris. “God, he made me wet. He was built like a brick shithouse.”
“How would you describe me?” I asked. Judging from their expressions, whatever shithouse I resembled definitely wasn’t brick.
Desperate for validation, I asked if I was at least a better stripper than Chris Farley in his famous Saturday Night Live sketch. “At least he had energy and enthusiasm,” a lithe little minx observed, completing the annihilation of my ego.
While the girls continued dissecting my performance, I pulled Casanova aside to talk economics. He explained that a Saturday night at the club runs about seven hours, from seven to two, and pays about $250 in salary and tips on a good night. On the other hand, freelance strippers for bachelorette parties and such make $250 an hour. You don’t have to be Alan Greenspan to see that freelancing is the better deal.
So even though I wasn’t exactly finished goods, I bailed from the Hangar Club and resolved to become a freelance stripper. Except I had absolutely no idea how to get bookings. Then at a party I met Bridget, who was financing her college education by stripping and giving topless massages. After the party Bridget took me back to her place for a topless massage. Gratis. Then she hooked me up with her “pimp,” who got me my first stripping gig: a birthday party for a 24-year-old.
Now there is really no discreet way to walk up to an apartment when you’re wearing a tuxedo and carrying a boombox. The whole situation just screams, “Yo, stripper here!” Passersby correctly sized up the situation and threw. knowing glances my way.
I stood outside the door for a second, psyching myself up. I went in, and finally got to experience the thrill of taking off my clothes in front of a roomful of women for cash. The scariest thing was, it didn’t bother me one bit. It was a lot easier once I wasn’t worried about the Hangar Club’s Broadway-show-style fussing over production value and triple spins and jazz hands.
I discovered my own peculiar stripping style. I’m less of a dancer, more of a prancer. And I think I lack the gene governing undulation. But the gals, eyes transfixed on the package, don’t seem to mind. Plus, unlike in a strip club, they don’t have to shell out five bucks for a watered-down draft. I like audience participation. I gamboled about the room, doing something different with every girl. With one I did the tango, hopped in another’s lap for a brief rest, massaged the feet of the birthday girl, and coaxed one into rubbing mineral oil all over my body to the tune of Cathy Dennis’s “Touch Me.” I danced a Steve sandwich with two girls while a third pantomimed fellatio on me. I scooped one girl up and bopped her around the room. I gave piggy-back rides and did push-ups with girls straddling my back. They lapped whipped cream off my inner thigh and slurped body shots of tequila from my navel. It was bawdy and silly and more fun than a barrel of monkeys.
The only awkward period was the apres-strip. The women invited me to stay awhile. Why not, I figured. They seemed nice. I gathered my clothes and reassembled myself. Fully clad again, I discovered how tough it is to segue from stripper to party guest. They quickly realize they don’t really want to see me as a three-dimensional human being, and the feeling’s mutual. Get in, get out — that’s my motto now.
That first night I raked in $250 plus $60 in tips. I bought dinner with my ill-gotten gains and it occurred to me that I would, in effect, drop pants for food.
And so it goes, week after week. I do birthday parties, bachelorette parties, divorce parties, and girls-night-out parties. Every strip is different. Some girls go buck-wild. Others tremble with fear, saying over and over, “Ohmigod, what if my boyfriend finds out?”
Generally, the younger women are the most skittish. The older ones know what they want. “Do this. Do that. Bend over. Touch your toes. On your knees. Sit on my lap. Okay then.”
The best comment I’ve ever heard while stripping: A middle-aged woman deadpanned to her friend, “I’ve got to get my five-year-old into this. He loves dancing around in his underwear.”
I’ve made it a policy not to strip all the way — to stop at the G-string. Actually, my girlfriend made this policy. But I concurred. Leave something to the imagination, right? This worked fine until the night I was hired to strip for a house of sorority girls. When I arrived, every one of them was wearing a little black dress and they were already partying hard.
They had a formal later that evening and I was the warm-up act. The half-hour strip was rowdy and raucous.
By the time I reached the end, they were in a frenzy. They started chanting, “Take it off, take it off!” I smiled, shook my head, and bent over to pick up my strewn clothes. That’s when the hands started clawing at my flimsy hand-made G-string. “Take it off, take it off!” they yelled. Snap! The strap on my banana hammock broke, revealing … not a banana, but more of a baby carrot. My manhood was experiencing extreme stage fright and had shriveled to a size reminiscent of a seven-year-old’s. They stared at it and said in unison, “Oh, isn’t it cute?” Not what you want to hear. I gathered the shreds of both my clothing and my dignity.
As I dressed I witnessed the craziest thing. The whole escapade had got them so worked up, they all whipped out their cell phones and started speed-dialing boyfriends, ex-boyfriends, random guys, and told them, “I’m so horny. Get over here right now! You can’t make it? Your loss.” And they dialed the next guy. A whole bunch of guys have my sorry strip to thank for the bootie calls they got out of the blue that evening.
I still enjoy the strips, but my girlfriend, accustomed as she is to my bizarre enterprises, has grown suspicious. “Aren’t you about done with your little experiment?” she asks.
“Oh no. I think I’m on the verge of a breakthrough in my research on the effects of ecdysiastic stimuli on intoxicated females. A few more months should do it.”
I am not going to psychoanalyze myself here. That is for my friends, co-workers, and a cabal of excoriating ex-girlfriends to do behind my back. And I am certainly not going to suggest that my compulsion to obtain the approval of a roomful of women has anything to do with lingering emotional scars left by a particular belle rejecting my maladroit passes in elementary school. But there is something empowering and exhilarating about having a bunch of women see me as nothing but a sex object. I’m tired of being appreciated for my mind.
The only drawback is the diet-and-exercise regimen. It’s one thing to work out enough to look good in clothes. It’s a whole other thing to stay in stripping condition. There’s no place to hide excess flab when you’re standing in a G-string with a dozen women circling you, your every imperfection illuminated by 1,000 watts of halogen lighting (they always blaze the lights). As much fun as it is to be pawed by dewy-eyed, nubile young things, I miss french fries.
Turns out both sexes have issues with being professionally objectified, even if they understand they made this choice willingly. Having known many, many strippers for decades, we can tell you with absolute certainty that making such a vocation decision WILL have an impact on your psyche later in life. Doesn’t mean it can’t be fun. Doesn’t mean it will not be profitable. … Just try to keep those eyes open farther down the Life road too. … Hopefully all of you will reach sufficient age to someday empathize with the famous quote attributed to (among many others, honestly) Mae West: “If I had known I was going to live this long, I would have taken better care of myself.”
