All
I Could Bare: My Life in the Strip Clubs of Gay Washington,
D.C. by
Craig Seymour
Published by Atria
Review by Tom Cardamone
Also new to the nonfiction shelves is All I
Could Bare: My Life in the Strip Clubs of Gay Washington, D.C. The
author is an academician, so I dipped into this memoir fearing
lead prose and exasperating theory, but instead I found a very
available world; Craig Seymour takes the reader to the now-demolished
gayborhood of Washington’s seedy nightlife and exposes
all, his cock, his soul, the roots of his fascination with stripping
and porn and prostitution, all with a very 90’s vibe, smartly
interweaving quotes from the R&B he stripped to while revealing
a gay city overlooked by a queer culture Manhattan-obsessed and
San Francisco-ensconced.
An insurmountable issue with the text is that, honestly, stripping
is just not as transgressive as Seymour insists. And in overstating
his case, believing that his time as a stripper sets him apart
from others, affording him a special, unknowable quality deflates
the reader’s interest. Seymour writes of a fellow stripper
not wanting to use the bathroom in front of the patrons; in giving
this guy a ride so he can take a dump at a nearby nightclub,
the author tries to pump the scene with a heady, conspiratorial
energy. Waiting in the car, watching clubbers queue up, he observes:
these guys weren’t spending their night standing on platforms,
swapping stories with their straight-boy coworkers, and hustling
older guys for cash. Their worst worry of the night would be
farting with a lover in bed later, not shitting on stage. Yet
somehow I was glad that I was where I was instead of where they
were. I didn’t know why, but I wouldn’t have wanted
it any other way.
Uh, yeah. And seriously, his slight brushes with porn and prostitution
don’t even equal some homos’ wilder Memorial Day
weekends. So the best thing here is Washington, D.C. He tells
the story of the city only intermittently, but when he does the
book comes alive. The brief mention of a forgotten gay scandal
in the Reagan Whitehouse titillates, as does the description
of the blighted but thriving-in-its-own-right Washington seventies
scene, loaded with dark bars and bathhouses, self-policed by
a band of gay ex-marines with German shepherds. All destroyed
by rezoning and recently replaced by a new baseball stadium.
The author entered this rarified world of stripping as a client
in search of thesis material and left a full-fledged participant.
But the reader gains very little, less than the johns who squeezed
his junk and put dollars in his socks; some memoirs reveal too
much while others are subtly disingenuous, but unique is the
book that reveals everything and warrants nothing more than a
blasé shrug.
Buy All
I Could Bare by Craig Seymour
Click HERE
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Tom Cardamone is the author of the erotic fantasy
novel, The
Werewolves Of Central Park. His short stories have appeared
in several anthologies and publications; you can read more of
his work at his website, www.pumpkinteeth.net.
