The Gaiety

I am reading "Don't Get Too Comfortable" by David Rakoff. It's a series of witty and snarky essays that I read here and there. I came across an essay the other night where Rakoff writes about his experience at Puppetry of the Penis, a show wherein men do obscene things with their penises by pulling them every which way, fashioning them into familiar images such as the Loch Ness monster. Rakoff's story reminded me of the trip I took to NYC when I graduated college. Some people backpack across Europe when they graduate college. But, I, on the other hand, had a week-long fag hag extravaganza in NYC, where I sampled gay night life with my good friend from high school, Jeffrey, and his posse...
Rakoff contrasts Puppetry with The Gaiety in NYC:

• "The drill was the same with each dancer: he came out wearing very little, danced quite badly- the strippers were largely, easily identifiably straight- and then went offstage while the very well-behaved audience waited. In a perfect world, he was supposed to come back onstage starkers and erect. In an evening of twelve or so dancers, Dan and I only saw one instance of tumescence. The boner got some polite clapping, like the entrance applause that greets an ingenue who has received good advance notices."

Technically, I should leave it at that, as I fear I cannot say it better myself. But I feel compelled to share my Gaiety experience with you, if for no other reason than I have nothing better about which to write.

Jeffrey and I were drunk, and it was late- probably about 4:00 in the morning. He convinced me we should go to The Gaiety, which he described as a male strip club. Although I'd been his hag for years, we went to separate colleges and did not have any time as legal drinkers together, so my experience on the gay bar scene was limited. These days I'd be suspicious if one of my gay friends said we were going to a 'male strip club.' At the tender age of 22 though, I pictured a roomful of drunken bachelorettes cheering wildly while burly men on the stage in cop uniforms (yum) danced seductively and accepted one dollar bills in their belts. And even though I knew were we going to a place called The Gaiety, I clung to the hope that it would measure up to my bachelorette party expectations.


I don't think I have to tell you this, but that's not what I saw when I got to The Gaiety. We walked up a brightly-lit dank hallway, its stairs covered in thinning, gray carpet. I handed $10 to a person (whose gender still remains a mystery to me) who sat in a little room behind a window. I thought it odd that it was so quiet behind the door we were instructed to enter. Where were all the screaming bachelorettes, I wondered. I got my answer when we entered the dark theatre. The bachelorettes were not at The Gaiety; they were smart enough not to spend their last days of single status at a place with a name that is a derivative of the word gay. In fact, there were only about 5 other people in the room with us, and none of them were women. They were men, and they were all dateless, which made it even more unsettling. The stage was empty, but as we awaited the arrival of the strippers, a huge movie screen came down from the ceiling to entertain us with hard-core gay porn to pass the time. Having never even seen straight porn, I was shocked, and clearly I did not want to be here. When I told Jeffrey I wanted to leave he argued that "we'd look funny" if we just up and left. As if a girl in a gay strip club didn't look funny to begin with...

Finally, the first stripper came out. Just as Mr. Rakoff said, he was clothed and he danced poorly. The best thing about it though was the song he danced to when he came out for Act I. It was "Sailing" by Christopher Cross. This is by far one of the worst songs of the 80s, and you've probably heard it in more than one elevator or dentist's office in your lifetime. True to Mr. Rakoff's account, the stripper left the stage mid-song. He returned a few minutes later completely naked, and he was considerably more aroused than when he left (unlike Mr. Rakoff's experience, the three strippers I saw achieved this result). This was where the polite golf-clap came in, and I found myself joining in on the applause in spite of the fact that I was still in shock from the point-of-entry porn during the prelude. The music was a much faster pace for Act II of this gentleman's routine so he was kind of bouncing around onstage stark naked. I would categorize this as 'bad naked' (kind of like coughing or sanding the floors naked), but the audience loved it, and they went up to the stage in droves with their dollar bills. The worst was when they would put the dollar bill on the ground and the stripper would reach down to grab it without bending his knees so the audience could see the goods very clearly. It was hilarious and horrifying all at once.

We didn't stay much longer, but we stayed long enough for me to learn that when a gay guy says he wants to go to a male strip club, there probably aren't going to be any screaming bachelorettes there.