HOOK: E-zine By, For, and About Men in the Sex Industry

From the late 1980s to 1995, NYC’s now defunct Show Palace—barring Sally’s II and the ever revolving door of isolated gay nights at various pansexual nightclubs—was one of the few places where black and Latino guys could get regular employment as burlesque dancers. The Palace should not to be confused with the still thriving Show World, a dizzyingly heterosexual peep booth and burlesque joint that nonetheless still hosts the occasional male-to-female transgender.

Nor is the Palace to be confused with the Gaiety Theatre—an almost all-white, and now so, so Eastern European boy-filled all-male, all naked, burlesque and porno movie house. You could get the Palace and the Gaiety confused as they were both Midtown Manhattan, dirty Times Square attractions during the pre-Rudy Giuliani days when First Amendment rights where not deliriously trounced upon in the name of gentrification. You had to walk up several flights of stairs to get to the good stuff at both the Gaiety and the Palace and both were famous for showcasing lots and lots of fully erect, fully naked guys. The main difference—besides the racial segregation—between the Gaiety and the Palace is that the Palace is now closed for all kinds of trumped up violations. But the Gaiety, like San Francisco’s Nob Hill, still goes strong. Though a visit to the Gaiety will no longer include the delights of open masturbation and the touching of the dancers’ genitals for larger tips, the theatre is a living relic of the days when it seemed no one had to argue about the perils of barebacking.

I should know this history. I was one of the Show Palace’s off-and-on dancers in the era just before it closed. It was in fact the only way that I survived living in a city where, by the end of the 1980s, rents even in Flatbush and Brooklyn were ungodly and single males were (and still are) frowned upon for public assistance unless they are covered with lesions and gasping for breath. And even then, you’ll wait seven years for a Section 8 subsidized apartment. Truly, the reality of any sexworker’s life—and burlesque dancing is sexwork—comes down to a very real need for money. Drugs, addiction—including sex addiction—may fuel the work, but I still know of no long-term sexworkers who just didn’t need the money to both survive and, yes, thrive. I am still suspicious of those guys who came from middle-to-upper class backgrounds who get into “the business” for “the fun” or to work out vestiges of their sexuality. They don’t last long simply because they have parachutes to catch them. Me—I had nothing. I have never been good at having sex, I abhor butt-fucking. I am obsessed with being clean due to a childhood in dirty foster homes and homeless shelters. Escorting, fucking, sucking and who knows what else for pay, was not for me. So I stripped and, if you are reasonably fit and thin and are not bulgingly muscular, naked stripping is what you did.

Naked stripping used to revolve around the drama of keeping an erection and allowing customers to believe the fantasy that you were excited. At an all-male, all-white strip bar called The Atlantis in Baltimore (where I live now), it’s rare to see erections or even see dancers actually trying to creating a fantasy. But then again, the Atlantis—with its often absent, and racist owner, John Rock, and its near-empty weekday nights—has always been a lost, underwater world.

But I could dance (I love strippers who have good moves but who don’t over do it), and I was blessed with a fat dick. However, I was also blighted with deformities of my scrotum so I rarely opened my legs. I danced around like I was in a BET video, and showed the world my genitals. With sometimes over fifteen dancers working at a time, it was easy to just do your own peculiar thing. My thing was moving very slowly in circular pathways and occasionally touching my unnervingly erect penis; but too much touching and I would cum. I started dancing at the Palace when I was underage—seventeen in fact. Imagine the hormonal onslaught!

In the old days, the Palace—open 24 hours and 7 days a week—was directly owned and managed by Tray. I think it opened in 1980. Headliners often were booked—the usual up and coming white porn star. Yet, when I was there, when it was blacker, more run-down, and the Nigerian (or was it Cameroon?) bouncer sometimes verbally terrorized dancers on the 3rd shift after 2 AM, it was almost like it was on administrative autopilot. It was a ghost ship, a low-frequency pleasure house that showed everything. It had a live sex room (which I never visited because, even for most dancers, it cost too much to enter), a room with a big screen for screening a skin flick where the guys in the audience openly masturbated and sometimes played with each other, a lounge with a canteen with snacks, and the burlesque theatre.

The theatre was a study in the social drama of sex: Mirrors adorned the back of the stage. In my time, the stage was shaped like a rectangular horseshoe. The stage flanked the back center of the room and cum-blinkered chairs filled the space on the sides and the front of the stage. Once someone had one of those flashlights that allow you to see in the darkest of places. When I shined it around, the white stains of jizz trailed over the chairs in such profusion that I ran to the bathroom to hurl. Imagine years and years and years of cum. When you danced and moved around the horseshoe stage, your body was reflected from several angles in the mirrors. Looking at you was like looking through bee’s eyes: you were multiply magnified. This was a true gay voyeur’s delight.

I encouraged audience members who I visited in their seats to masturbate. I saw no reason for them not to, and the sexual energy kept me erect. But I only went to gentlemen in their seats that would tip me. At $30, the nightly rate was so low—if it came at all—that you had to hustle hard for tips. I never turned 5-minute tricks in the back corner: butting in someone’s mouth, cum shots, hand jobs, those sorts of things. But, I made tips by honestly and kindly approaching everyone, letting their hands graze over my body, touching myself, and showering them with the affection that I so greatly wanted and could so greatly give. I never discriminated: I found it tragic when a dancer talked about a fat man, or an old man, or a man that was too sexually obvious (beating his meat and even playing, right there in the theatre, with his ass). From the age of 17 on, I considered such a place a political right: customers had a right to find their pleasure within ever-elastic management-stipulated limits. This was NYC, baby, before Giuliani!

It was also my right to find employment as a stripper. That’s why I so detested the joints that all-but-banned black, or darker skinned guys on the usual grounds because they would siphon off money from their business. Admittedly, gay sexual landscapes are woefully segregated and few whites question such segregation (though I seem to hear blacks, Asians, and Latinos questioning it all the time). Yet, it must also be said that diverse dancers, in fact, attract more paying people, and not just more diverse people. An integrated joint is just better for business.

I continued dancing in the ghetto of NYC burlesque houses until I accepted the fact that there were things there that the Palace didn’t show: an ethic of gentleness, kindness, good touch, and cleanliness; though it showed pleasure, the continuing wonder of debauchery, and youthful black and Latin male beauty (with the occasional white male beauty of headliners or drop-in dancers), it did not show me how to improve my capacity to love. In fact, the more I worked there and at other burlesque houses on the east coast, the more I learned to reject love. Once I began saving money beyond my immediate needs for college, I stopped all together, and became a massage therapist. But that’s another story.