Q Literature

All I Could Bare: My Life in the Strip Clubs of Gay Washington, D.C.
by Craig Seymour

Craig Seymour is exposed, past and present. As a University of Maryland graduate student, the metro Washington native entered the world of Southeast D.C.’s male-stripper venues. The premise was academic, at first interviewing patrons and strippers for the sake of his thesis. Moving on to doctoral work in American studies, he took things a step further, becoming a stripper himself.

Today, Seymour stands further exposed, this time in print, with the release of All I Could Bare: My Life in the Strip Clubs of Gay Washington, D.C. It’s a somewhat ballsy move for an academic, soon to relocate from his post at University of Massachusetts Dartmouth to a spot teaching journalism at Northern Illinois University. But if such a memoir — replete with cum shots, hand jobs and crotch biting — caused him any fear, it was all the more reason to do it. Conquering fear, after all, went hand in hand with entertaining his clients in nothing but socks and a smile.

”It really goes back to the message of the book, where I write about continually taking risks,” says Seymour, who has spent the last few years making the half-hour commute to UMass from Providence, R.I., in part because of what he says is a fantastic culture of male-strip bars in that city. ”As much as I like Providence, this was a great opportunity and I owed it to myself to take that other risk, to see what more might be out there for me.

”That’s why it’s really important. I’m leaving all my friends. I’m leaving this great place. But I felt it was something I had to do, or else I wasn’t even living up to the message of my own book.”

That message, learned in large part in Southeast, has not only helped Seymour in academia, but as a music journalist at Vibe, Entertainment Weekly and elsewhere, finding ways to get Mariah Carey, Luther Vandross and Janet Jackson to reveal themselves. Seymour also likely gleaned some of the message from his teenaged friendship with another local, Matt Drudge, remembered by Seymour for his laser-like focus.

I felt that I’d made a transformation as surely as Superman slipping out of a phone booth or Wonder Woman doing a sunburst spin. I was bare-ass in a room of paying strangers, a stripper. After years of wondering what it would be like, I had done it — faced a fear, defied expectation, embraced a taboo self. It was only the beginning….

All I Could Bare is the story of a mild-mannered graduate student who “took the road less clothed” — a decision that was life changing. Seymour embarked on his journey in the 1990s, when Washington, D.C.’s gay club scene was notoriously no-holds-barred, all the while trying to keep his newfound vocation a secret from his parents and maintain a relation-ship with his boyfriend, Seth. Along the way he met some unforgettable characters — the fifty-year-old divorcé who’s obsessed with a twenty-one-year-old dancer, the celebrated drag diva who hailed from a small town in rural Virginia, and the many straight guys who were “gay for pay.” Seymour gives us both the highs (money, adoration, camaraderie) and the lows (an ill-fated attempt at prostitution, a humiliating porn audition).

Ultimately coming clean about his secret identity, Seymour breaks through taboos and makes his way from booty-baring stripper to Ph.D.-bearing academic, taking a detour into celebrity journalism and memorably crossing paths with Janet Jackson, Mariah Carey, and Mary J. Blige along the way. Hilarious, insight-ful, and touching, All I Could Bare proves that sometimes the “wrong decision” can lead to the right place.