College prof regales with tales of stripping in the freewheeling ’90s

MADE ENDS MEAT: Seymour, the dick-dancing scholar.

“All I Could Bare: My Life in the Strip Clubs of Gay D.C.,” by Craig Seymour. (Atria Books, June 2008). 256 pp., $23.

In one of life’s more amusing paradoxes, the gay strip clubs that used to exist in our nation’s capital were some of the most permissive in the country. (Sadly, they were torn down in 2006 to make way for a new baseball stadium.) Strippers could dance naked and wantonly display erections, while customers could brazenly do just about anything they wanted with the dancers for the price of a few dollars.

Just how did they get away with this?

“You have to remember that the mayor [Marion Barry] was on crack most of the time,” deadpans Craig Seymour, whose memoir chronicles his fascination with strippers and stripping, both as a graduate student doing ethnographic research on the dancers, and his time as a stripper in these same clubs. Somehow both bawdy and sweetly nostalgic at the same time, “All I Could Bare” tells of “a journey I felt compelled to take — the road less clothed …” and how one man learned to embrace his sexuality by one of the more direct means possible. And just think — it all started by cupping the balls of porn legend/stripper Joey Stefano’s balls!

Empowered by this encounter with “the guy who made me feel it was OK to have — and even possibly enjoy — gay sex, butt-fucking especially,” Seymour cached his passion for strip clubs as research for his graduate thesis paper, “Desire and Dollar Bills: An Ethnography of a Gay Male Striptease Club in Washington, D.C.” Seymour’s then-boyfriend Seth regarded these sojourns with detached amusement, but wasn’t quite as tolerant when Seymour wanted to experience things from the other side of the stage. Still, the extra money from generous tips came in very handy, and so things continued.

Among his fellow strippers, Seymour found a number of interesting souls. Many dropped out of and came back into the scene with astonishing rapidity. A buff, dark-skinned young black man bitterly complained how even the skankiest white boys made far more in tips than he did, while another stripper’s constant physique postings bespoke of a desperate need for acknowledgment and approval of any kind.

As for the customers, Seymour recalls them with varying degrees of fondness or shudders. “It was easy to think of [them] as just dirty old men, but many … had led lives that had been full of secrets and compromise,” he writes.

Certainly there were a number of freaks, creeps and eccentrics, but the majority were mostly harmless and even sweet in their own way — like the man who loved getting slapped on the forehead by Seymour’s dick.

And a frequent patron named Dave initially serves as the author’s knowledgeable guide within this demimonde. After decades of living an unhappy life as a married straight man, Dave had essentially said, “fuck it” and indulged his long-suppressed desires.

But like all good times, this party came to an end. Marion Barry’s fall from grace ended years of government non-intrusion within the gay strip clubs, and strict rules of conduct were suddenly enforced. Almost overnight, these clubs “went from a relaxed, good-time free-for-all to a strict kindergarten class with pricey drinks and a cover charge.”

The last portion of this memoir focuses on Seymour’s transition from stripper to journalist to author and professor. Much of it is rather extraneous, but he readily credits his days — well actually, nights — of stripping for “the ease I had asking celebrities extremely personal questions, especially those having to do with sex and relationships.” After all, he observes, “when someone is playing with your dick in public, it’s not only potentially awkward for you, the one being played with, it can also be weird for the person doing the playing, because he is exposing his desires so nakedly in front of other people.”




This article appeared in the Dallas Voice print edition July 18, 2008.