Sex Club & Leather Bar Fail

I had never been to a strip bar that had backrooms for the patrons to play – with each other.  But this strip club that I went to doubled as a sex club.  I got there before midnight, before the cover charge doubled.  Greeting two shirtless bartenders on the main floor, I grabbed a beer and wandered as the club began to fill.  On the main floor, I found there were backrooms meant just for the strippers and their clients.  On the second floor was another bar, impromptu go-go dancing stages, and a backroom for the patrons to get it on together.

Upstairs, a stripper was working a small, raised area, barely a stage at all.  He was a college type, but unremarkable looking, and he worked the stage unremarkably.  He eventually dropped his pants, revealing a flaccid, unamused cock.  After his song was over, another dancer took his place.  This man was in his mid-twenties, hot, and very hairy – a major plus for me.  You so rarely see a hairy stripper.  His bubble butt was very furry and I wondered if he realized that he was very appealing to an underserved market (hirsute lovers).

The club began to fill up, both upstairs and down.  But not a single soul ventured into the backrooms.  I know this because I did venture forth and found them empty.  I watched as men furtively watched the strippers, as if they weren’t supposed to enjoy it or appreciate it too openly.  There was a reticence in the air, a holding back.  A conservatism that felt dangerously contagious.

I stayed for about an hour, but the place began to thin of people before last call was even anywhere near.  And so I swallowed the remainder of my beer and went next door to a leather bar.

Being a Saturday night, the place was busy, on both floors.  I bought a beer and bypassing the backroom, I headed upstairs where I discovered that an S&M show was in progress.  Shackled to and facing the far wall was Mr. Leather.  He was being flogged by a stout woman in glasses.  She and he were trading jokes as she flogged him, light banter that had nothing to do with the flogging per se.  After she was through with Mr. Leather, she looked out at those paying attention in the crowd and invited someone to have a go at being flogged.  A young guy waved his hand to have a shot at it.  He removed his shirt and giggled while his friends encouraged him.  The mistress joked around with him while flogging him and they had a grand old time.  When it was over, the young man jumped up and down, clapping his hands and saying that S&M was really neat.

The display of sadomasochism was missing two vital elements – a sadist and a masochist.  What I saw was a pastiche of S&M, not the real thing.  It was akin to buying a jacket in a bargain-basement store, knowing that it descended from high fashion but watered down many times over.  I wanted to see and sense danger, not the recreation of danger.  I saw the Disneyland version of what should have been transgressive.

I went downstairs, hunting for men who wanted the real deal.  I headed into the back room.  But before I had made three or four steps in, the smell of shit hit me like a brick.  Someone back there had had an accident while presumably being fucked.  Bracing myself against the smell, I noticed that the pervasive scent of excrement was not stopping the full crowd back there.  The place was jammed.  Overpowered by the smell, though, I had to leave.  I left the bar entirely, feeling that tonight I’d been abandoned by the sex gods.  Not every night is going to be a winner.  The trick is to accept this and know when it’s time to go.  But you know that you’ll return, and that when you do, the sex gods might be on your side and give you the transcendent gay bar experience that you seek.  You will return to the hunt, you will return to the night, and it will be resplendent.

Self Love

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Magic Mike: The Movie

Spoiler Alert!  In this blog entry, I discuss the movie “Magic Mike”, the film about the lives of a group of strippers based on actor Channing Tatum’s real life experiences.  I’m going to be discussing the end of the film, so if you haven’t seen it and want to, read this blog entry after – and let me know if you agree with my analysis.

For my birthday in July, my sister offered to take me to a movie, and we mutually, enthusiastically agreed upon “Magic Mike”, the movie based on actor/stud Channing Tatum’s real life experiences as a stripper.  I made my sister buy the tickets herself.  Believe it or not, I was afraid that the pimply-faced teen working the ticket counter would laugh at a late thirty-something man coming to ogle Channing Tatum in his stripper movie. 

I liked it – up until the ending, that is.  You see, we’re shown that being a straight stripper is a wild ride.  Money in spades and adoring audiences of women.  But in the mix are some shady characters and the temptation of drugs.  And for our hero Channing Tatum, the wild ride comes to an end when he realizes that the stripper life is a dead-end street. He makes the “right” choice to leave stripping and take up with a “good” girl (read: boring, plain-jane, and button-down).  She is the film’s moral compass, and the film ends up being a morality tale.  Like many a Hollywood film, it at first glorifies the fast-life, then swoops down to make us numb-nuts in the audience remember that we will pay for the error of our ways unless we do the “right” (read: Judeo-Christian) thing.

And it worked on me – for a while.  I went home and thought, Why can’t I meet a gorgeous Channing Tatum look-alike stripper who leaves it all to be with me, so that we can live happily ever after in a house with a white-picket fence?  Then I got to thinking about the real Channing Tatum.  Is he, in life, the morally reborn guy that he becomes in the movie?  By the end of the movie, Channing’s character feels de-sexed.  Does Channing really have a secret kink?  Do he and his wife swing?

To avoid a complete moralization, Matthew McConaughey’s character is given a moment to shine wherein his character shows self-pride by giving a bombastic performance.  But McConaughey’s character is kept one dimensional throughout the movie, thus making it hard for the audience to relate to this odd duck who seems actually proud of his life choices.

Tell me:  what’s more naive?  To believe in the fairy tale that the movie leaves you with as Channing goes with the good girl and leaves all that stripping behind?  Or that you can be a stripper, and feel fulfilled and good about yourself.  Just recently, I read in the local gay magazine that a stripper in my city died recently.  The story skirted around the manner in which he had died, but made note that the bar where he worked and his family wished people to make donations in his name to a suicide hotline.  You don’t have to work in the adult industry to be pushed to suicide, but I can’t help but wonder if we as a society push the adult-industry workers to it when we devalue, degrade, and denigrate them.

How about this novel idea?  Could it be that, as my sister once told me, that no matter which choice you make, there will be consequences.  Will Channing’s character and his “good” girl always lie in a bed of roses, or will there be times when his character secretly misses the excitement of performing?  Is it possible that stripping is indeed fraught with pitfalls, but that they can be avoided?  Because we collectively tell people in adult entertainment that it’s a slippery slope, does it become a self-fulfilling prophecy?  Much like when you treat someone like they’re stupid, they will act stupid?

 Life is never black and white, and the pat, moralistic tone from “Magic Mike” offers no insights into life, which is a messy, contradictory experience.  It still appears that the last thing we want to do is to tell someone that they can be sexually expressive and healthy at the same time.  The only condoned type of sexual expression gets put in a very small narrow box.   I beg to differ.

The Strip Club

Here in the Village, we gay men are served by no less than 4 male strip clubs.  This blog is entitled Hunting for Sex, and at a strip club, it’s more like shooting fish in a barrel.  Sex gods everywhere, all contained under one roof.  Up until this week, I’d always gone to strip clubs by myself – to observe and give my attention fully to the experience and to how it made me feel.  Narcissistically, I want to look as good as I possibly can when I go to a strip club.  This means wearing a tank, to show off the muscles, as if to say that I could almost, possibly, if we stretched it, be a stripper myself.  And sometimes I can even pull it off.  There have been a few occasions where I’ve been cruised by the other customers, and even asked if I work there.  For someone else, being mistaken for a stripper would be embarrassing.  For me, the kindest thing you could say.  The other compliment comes when a stripper asks if you’d like a private dance in the back, and when you decline politely, they stick around and chat anyway.  And some of the chats I’ve had with strippers have been amazing, wherein they seemed comfortable to tell me tidbits about their work, whether they were really gay or straight, and some of their own sexual turns ons.  Were they being this open hoping that it would convince me to go for a lap dance, or did they just feel like chatting?  Probably the former, I wish the latter, and in the end, I will never know.

But Jason, didn’t you ever go for a lap dance, you ask?  I sure as hell did!  A handful of times.  But at $20 a song, it’s cost prohibitive, and there are limits to how far you can go.  Lick their pits, feel their chest, touch the cock, but no sucking.  And awkward moments can ensue.  My very first time, I zeroed in on who I thought was the hottest stripper in the bar – muscled, tattooed, shirtless (as they all are).  He came my way, I made sure our eyes connected so he could sense my desire, he did, and asked if I’d like a dance.  Hell yeah, and off we went.  But walking behind him towards the lap-dance area, it already felt false.  This was about my desire and his wallet.  Paying for it already felt like a mood killer and we hadn’t even started.  He was friendly and led me into a booth and closed the curtain.  I sat down and he began to dance suggestively, and encouraged me to touch his torso.  My hands moved up to his nipples which I grabbed and squeezed lightly and he winced.  I let go and he explained he’d just had surgery on his nipples and they were still tender.  What kind of surgery? I asked.  He replied that he had felt his nipples were too large and had had them reduced.  I bit my tongue, since the truth is, I actually prefer large nipples on a man.  To each his own.

But just this week, I went to a strip club with three others.  My sister, newly single, wanted to go for the first time, and so we went on a ladies night, along with my sister’s best friend (who had been on numerous occasions), and my gay friend Don (who’d also never been).

Here’s how things on the stage go:  The stripper comes out, dances and undresses a bit, teasing the crowd, then leaves the stage.  Five minutes later he returns, but with a full hard-on.  And to this, my sister said: “Is that it?  It’s so tame.  But I like the music.”  And tame it is.  But it’s all relative.  In 1950, it would be shocking no doubt, but now, when you can go to a bath house and watch a roomful of guys fisting each other, a mere hard-on by a bored looking, yet gorgeous, man doesn’t pack a lot of punch.  A camera videotaped what was happening on stage and was broadcast in real time on screens around the club, and it appeared that the dancers were watching themselves rather than connecting with the crowd.  My sister’s friend gave my neophyte buddy Don a play-by-play:  “Now he’s going to twirl around the pole three times...now he’s going to lift his arm above his head....now he’s going to slowly caress his crotch...”  She was right everytime.  It was a routine that they all had down, without deviation from said routine.  And Don and I were underserved.  We generally like our men hairy – pits, chest, face, and for me, even the pubes.  But dammit, these men were waxed within an inch of their lives.  Don, never one to keep his mouth shut, would alternately say, at full volume, “This is boring,” followed five minutes later with “God, I need to get laid!”  At first this frustrated me.  I thought, which one is it Don, do you like what you see or don’t you?  Because in spite of it all, I was transfixed.  “Earth to Jason,” I would hear my friends say.  I felt they were missing the one reason why strip clubs exist.

Strip clubs are where you go to worship the beauty of the human male.

These are men who will have surgery on their nipples to look perfect for you.  Beauty is a powerful thing.  The face of Helen of Troy launched a thousand ships.  But I couldn’t help but feel second-class amongst all that beauty.  I could never compete with these gods.  I could never have one of these gods, and if I could, would I even know what to do with him?  Like my friend Don, I vacillated between loving every man who stepped onto the stage, and resenting that he was not really within reach.  Loving his beauty, and wishing it were my own.

On this particular night, the strippers uncharacteristically chatted amongst themselves more than they seemed to chat with the patrons.  My only personal moment with a stripper happened on the way to the bathroom.  The men’s room door was adjacent to the door to the strippers’ backstage area, and as I passed, a stripper exited from backstage with a loud belch.  He then saw me and uttered a quick “Excuse me...”

I wonder if Helen of Troy also burped on occasion?