The first woman I ever fell in love with was a Burlesque dancer in New Orleans. By day, she supplied drag queens with the most transformative wigs she could dream up, and the most fantastical makeup products ever known to dispense of mundane-existence altogether and bring out the mythical creature in everyone. I don’t know if she ever knew that my crush was a crush, but her shop in the French Quarter opened shortly after my dad and I had moved back to New Orleans when I was 13, and I spent every moment I could there, looking at wigs and gazing at her. Eventually I wrote her a story, because that’s still the best mode of offering I’ve got, and in her immensely vindicating gratitude she let me pick out any lipstick I wanted from the shop and I went home with Urban Decay’s “Gash.” (There was nothing more heart-stoppingly glamorous, back then).
I cycled through shame and inviguration once that crush was accompanied by the full-fledged hormones of sixteen, and when, on my next trip back home, she told me that she would be dancing in a Burlesque show — I can’t remember now if this was One-Eyed Jack’s or our dearly departed Shim-Sham club — I thought my *those kinds of dreams* had come true. Then I found out that her husband had put the kobosh on nude-but-for-g-string-and-pasties for his wife, and I threw all manner of crass, private tantrums. “You see it every night!” I cried out ever-so-tastefully to my fellow queer friends. “Let the REST OF US at least LOOK!”
She was such an effective tortch singer, though, that by the time the curtain rose on her act, even I wasn’t complaining: fine for her to shimmer in something relatively wearable-on-the-street while enchanting us with a voice that was as mesmerizing as any tassles. But what made these pre-Katrina Burlesque shows unforgettable in New Orleans wasn’t just the beautiful women connecting with a mass of hypnotized strangers through fluid movements and careful, teasing display: it was the jazz. The live jazz. We can have a seperate conversation about why there are so many more male jazz musicians than female ones, but for right now, lets appreciate the fact that no musician wants to look down at sheet music during a Burlesque show. They were on their game, and that made the event.
I was scandalized to learn, as I got older, that not everyone knew about the integral relationship of Jazz to Burlesque. I was mystified by the notion that it was even possible to create any sort of real or notable allure by stripping to recorded music, and it still gets me, if I’m honest, which these days I strive harder than ever to be. It takes a lot to put together an effective strip routine, however hard (um) or easy your crowd may be, and the more talented people you have doing something [a]live right in front of you, the better.
But we all know what world we’re in, and by the time I was 22 and picked up Diablo Cody’s Candy Girl: a Year in the Life of an Unlikely Stripper, I was ready to accept that if you make money stripping in our modern world, there is likely no jazz band accompanying you. I picked up this book because, at that time, I was considering becoming a stripper: I had begun to experience unprecedented comfort in my skin and figured there was no more effective form of visible-disability activism than that, and I still believe this, more or less, though I’m not the first person to come up with the name Disabili-tease for an all-disabled-women Burlesque troupe. (Diablo Cody, by the way, was not a screenwriter in 2006 when I picked up this book as my manual. When Juno came out I thought, “oh wow, a movie written by that hilarious stripper!”)
I’m not sure, at 22, what I had envisioned stripping to be, but I was usefully dishearted by what I read in Cody’s witty, engaging, and relentlessly honest memoir. It was both funny and dispiriting to understand how truly dumb a lot of dudes let themselves be in the presence of a beautiful woman, but it was fascinating to see how so many of Cody’s more theatrical and even cartoonish personas seemed to do the trick. “Guys like this?” I kept thinking. But I gradually came to find that I was missing the point. On paper, sex work is about giving an audience what they “like,” but in reality, that word doesn’t mean what it means when you’re not paying for it. Desire takes on a whole other texture when someone is performing it as a service for pay: it can be a very real connection (or not), but whatever it is, it’s not like the everyday world. In the everyday world, you can’t just slip someone a few dollar bills and expect to see more of their body. Strip clubs, like gyms, are seperate planets from the one we’re spinning on right now.
I might sound like I find all this very romantic, and to an extent I do, but capitalism is an unwelcome blade through it all and I was disheartened to learn that, starting out, strippers often have a sum of money they have to make before they themselves are allowed to keep their earnings. I would have told you, during that wild summer in 2006, that I didn’t have any of my youthful inferiority complex left in me, but the stark reality was that it all came roaring back when I envisioned this obligation. What if I couldn’t make that money back, I thought. What if I wasn’t wanted enough to actually do what I had signed up to do.
I’m not sure how much this self-doubt had to do with disability. By that time, I had seen enough Burlesque dancers to know who I didn’t look like, and even though I’d managed to walk into a divey punk club for a Suicide Girls (NSFW) Burlesque show and make out with a beautiful woman I never saw again, her eyes immediately shot to my friend when that epic and unexpected kiss was over. Everyone’s eyes were always shooting to my friends, and I don’t blame them, I’ve always rolled with hot friends, but capitalism will suddenly have you measuring your worth by how hot strangers find you in comparison to everyone around, and that—well that’s gross.
My cousin used to work at a Korean kareoke bar in Chicago, and is assertive and adventurous enough that even when her boss warned that she would be unable to slap costumers, she took the job. This was not sex work, for all that the place had a seedy reputation: she simply glammed up to the nines every night, a favorite past time of hers anyway, and if groups of businessmen who wanted to let loose chose her for their drink-server and bottle-opener and charming-conversationalist, she would oblige. She was often chosen, but not every night, and she didn’t care one way or the other, because she was not emotionally or even superficially invested in what these guys thought. “There are these girls that get so sad if they’re not picked!” she told me once. “Or they get all jealous or mad if you are. It’s so weird! I have to remind them, these guys aren’t even hot! We don’t like them!”
Depending on where a person is on the self-confidence spectrum, a stranger sending the message that they can take or leave you can irrationally sting. Back in my devout New Age days, I did a lot of ecstatic dance (spiritualized term for “move literally however”) which, for me, was a solo endeavor, in a room with the mirrors covered, and it was for women only. One night, I tried out their mixed-gender improvised contact dance where close, pressing contact was expected, and it was vulnerable and uncomfortable in ways I could not have predicted.
As someone who’s notoriously attracted to a lot of people, it’s laughably notable if I don’t find myself drawn to anyone in a room, but this was that room: I am not attracted to anyone here. Even so. When the one guy, too bland-looking to even attempt to describe here, picked me up and did that close-together contact thing with me for several minutes on end only to gracefully roll away to do the same thing with somebody else, I felt jealous. Abandoned. And in this practice, we were all fully clothed.
That was a dance studio, not a stage, and no one there had implicitly paid for the privledge of staring at me. But I still felt like I had failed in some way, and like my body had failed in some way. Despite the fact that the whole point at an event like this was to make contact with a wide array of people, I couldn’t shake the feeling that someone more alluring could’ve kept him with me. And, like those customers at my cousin’s former place of work, the guy wasn’t even hot, I didn’t even like him.
Diablo Cody’s memoir draws to a close the moment she has an emotional breakdown. I haven’t read that book since slurping up the hardcover first edition all those years ago so I may be fuzzy on the details, but from what I remember, no single factor parcipitated this sudden mascara-tear-stained understanding that she could not could not could not do it anymore. She was in a stable relationship with her then-boyfriend and enjoying her life, and after a career in tech she’d been amused and steadily entertained by this unforeseen chain of events in which Amateur Night on a whim became a living. I concluded, after reading that book, that I didn’t have stripper ambitions after all.
But they never really left. I signed up to be a nude model for my University’s drawing classes, and it’s my loss and possibly the loss of many talented art students that by the time they called me back, my dad had died suddenly and I was no longer in the mood to pose naked for strangers. It would take a while for public exposure of my body to sound like fun again, but by the time I got to Seattle in 2014, it did.
I did a performance piece at a Co-Op with a stage in Capital Hill for an event called the Sex Positive Story Slam, which was basically The Moth but about sex. This particular story involved a brutal description of my childhood surgery and how it came to affect my relationship with sexuality, so as I was relating these vulnerable details I strategically unbuttoned my purposely not-at-all-sexy-looking green plaid shirt from REI, under which I was wearing a showy red bra, and by the time I got to that I could feel the audience silently asking, “You’re…you’re not taking that off, are you?” But of course I did.
They didn’t gasp, exactly. They were silent, and they remained silent, and I spent the night deciding they must’ve hated me and fuck Seattle. Then a couple weeks went by and the Seattle Erotic Art Festival was taking applications, one of which would be a showcase of Sex Positive Story Slam favorites. “Everyone is talking about how they want to see your piece again,” my friend, the host and organizer, told me nonchalantly as though I already knew this.
“Wait, they are?” I was shocked.
“Yes! Remember [a very pretty girl who pointedly did not speak to me and made no eye contact with me afterwards, even when, fully clothed, I tried to]? She especially loved it.”
“What?”
And this, my friends, is why I left Seattle: that shit ain’t love! But at a distance, I can respect that all those reserved audience members thought they were showing me respect, by giving me space, because they’re American West Coasters who value space, but I don’t: I’m a committed claustrophile.
It’s starting to sound appealing again, the whole stripping idea, likely because I’ve been objectified unappealingly in so many different ways since those yeats that doing it on purpose as a result of my own personal agency has healing potential. But you can’t control your audience, and I don’t know if living out that “your 30’s are when you finally don’t give a fuck!” trope extends to me being able to withstand a heckler, should their be a heckler. There’s also the recorded music concession, and while I’ve definitely put years of thought into a chosen song, I feel like giving in to the non-jazz way would be a betrayal to my heritage.
As I think about that some more, I’ll leave you with a surprising exchange that took place shortly after my father’s death, when my stripping ambitions were steadfastly behind me and I was living in Austin, hanging out at the Spider House Cafe, a bohemian padadise with a dreamy patio that is sadly no longer with us. A friendly encounter with a blond dude more than willing to share his pitcher of beer turned into a 3 hour conversation during which he said to me, “You’re gonna laugh, but…” he looked down, the way people do when they want to retract their decision to make this statement, but, having already started it, they know they can’t. “I used to want to be a stripper.”
“Yeah?” I said brightly. “So did I!”
It felt good to know I wasn’t alone, and even better to know that you can’t tell by apparences who entertains these thoughts and who doesn’t. Going back to Salome, it just might compete with the world’s oldest profession for the world’s oldest profession, but there are no promised temples on Amateur Night.
Still. Maybe I can do this for myself, without caring what anyone else thinks (or doesn’t bother to think). I’m not sure. It’s hardly the most pressing set of ideas I’m reconfiguring right now, but it’s probably the most fun one, and if there’s one thing taking your clothes off should be — whatever the circumstance: audience, one other person, alone — it’s enjoyable. Once that part’s certain? You’re free.