Last night I went to The Saloon, the biggest meat market gay club in Minneapolis, to cover a story for a campus magazine.
Last year The Saloon installed a shower near the dance floor where professional dancers let water sluice down their bodies while strippin’ nekkid for tips. When I walked into the club with my friend, Michael, we were immediately greeted by the sight of four dozen guys standing around the shower as a dancer pulled his pud to the steady rhythm of the music pumping off the dance floor.
Huh, I thought, isn’t this interesting? Four dozen grown men standing around watching this guy showering and wanking. What an interesting sociological phenomenon. The whole thing was sort of like a train wreck: you know you’re not supposed to look or really want to see, but you look anyway and you sort of do want to see.
The magazine hired me to profile one of the male dancers, Flip (that’s his stripper name, anyway), who worked it in the shower, standing on his hands and splaying his legs, sliding off his sleek black thong mid-air after a patron slipped him a twenty. Flip was, by far, the audience favorite.
I have the sit-down interview with Flip tomorrow, which I think will be really voyeuristically interesting. I mean, what's it like to be a stripper? What does it feel like, how much do you make? And how does one become a stripper in the first place, anyway?
