All I Could Bare: My Life in the Strip Clubs of Gay Washington, Read Online Free PDF Page B

example of how, the longer I hung out at the clubs, the more complicated I thought the whole idea of sexuality was. It was easy to think of the customers as just dirty old men, but many, like Dave, had led lives that had been full of secrets and compromise. That made their time at the clubs seem less like a hedonistic indulgence and more like a taste of hard-won freedom.
    Dave first figured out he was attracted to other guys while growing up on a Louisiana farm in the 1940s. At age nine, he developed a crush on an older cousin. "He was such a hot-looking, well-built guy, and when it came to sports, you name it, and he did it—boxing, football, wrestling, everything," Dave told me. "He was everything I wasn't but wanted to be."
    Sometimes this cousin, an endearing show-off, would jerk off around Dave, but Dave never joined in, which he still regrets. "Now I kick myself because he was one gorgeous guy," Dave said. "But I was going to Catholic school at the time, and I had a lot of moral dilemmas in terms of religion."
    Instead, Dave found other outlets for his desires. One day he went to Montgomery Ward to buy a Bike jock strap because his cousin always wore one. As he held it in the store, he could barely contain his excitement. "I was so aroused," he said, "I was surprised I didn't cum in my shorts."
    He took the jock strap home and stashed it in a seldom-used drawer. It was like a talisman of sexual energy. Sometimes he wore it outside the house just for a thrill. "When I went to a school dance or something, I would put it on because guys used to talk about how they needed to wear jock straps so they wouldn't get hard-ons," he recalled.
    "Well, dancing with girls normally didn't make me pop a boner, but I wore that jock strap just the same. To this day, jock straps make me aroused."
    Wearing the jock strap also made him more comfortable with his burgeoning sexuality. Where he once feared that playing with himself would put him on the fast track to hell, his new motto became "God gave it to you; it's for you to use." He and some other cousins who lived nearby started retreating to various corners of the family farm, masturbating and helping one another get off. ,We all jerked off together from the time we were, maybe, eleven or twelve," Dave remembered.
    A couple of years later, Dave was shopping in the city closest to his farm. He was flipping through some comic books at the City Newsstand when his eyes came upon a handful of digests featuring cover images of shiny, oiled young men flexing their muscles and wearing little more than jock strap-like bits of cloth. He bought one of the magazines and brought it home, hiding it in the drawer next to his jock strap. Although the magazine said it was dedicated to health, fitness, and the well-developed male physique, Dave said that he "always had a feeling that they were appealing to somebody who likes guys."
    Dave would flip through the magazines imagining himself with the models in the pictures. He would also try to see if he could catch any glimpses of the private parts that the posing straps were trying to hide. "I remember once I could see the head of a guy's penis," he said. "The picture was very dark, but, man, did I jerk off to that thing."
    Despite his strong feelings, Dave didn't think he had the option of acting on them. This was in the early fifties, when homosexuality was considered a mental illness and acting on it was a crime. "I just didn't see how I could be a part of that lifestyle," Dave said.
    Dave fooled around with one guy in college, but after that he focused exclusively on women, concerning himself more with their pleasure than his own. "I always wanted to make a woman cum," he explained, "and if she couldn't reach an orgasm, I mean, that was just totally frustrating to me because I wanted to please her."
    To satisfy his own urges, Dave headed to movie theaters that showed nudist films. "These movies were always taken at nudist camps," Dave remembered, "and