Who Needs Gay Bars? by Greggor Mattson;

Author:Greggor Mattson;
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Stanford University Press
Published: 2023-06-15T00:00:00+00:00

Chapter 27

Queering the Gay Strip Club

The Stag PDX

PORTLAND, OREGON

When The Stag PDX opened in 2015, it cheekily billed itself as “Portland’s premier male strip club,” a not-so-subtle dig at the thirty-year Silverado, the country’s oldest all-nude male strip club (in)famous in Portland. Often known by its airport identifier PDX, Portland is famous for its fifty-plus all-nude strip clubs, the product of a 1987 Oregon state Supreme Court decision that granted First Amendment protections to nude performances, making it home to the only legal all-nude revues west of the Rockies.1 It’s impossible to know how many gay strip clubs there are in the country: Many states prohibit full frontal nudity, others have a six-foot rule to separate dancers and viewers, while still others mandate tipping from hand to hand only. Portland permits full nudity and only prohibits patrons from touching dancers—but not the reverse. This is all part of life in this fast-growing Pacific Northwest city that is also thirty minutes from my childhood hometown of Camas, a beacon of cosmopolitanism to this small-town boy whose public high school graduating class was 140 people (Go Papermakers!).

Strip clubs are one kind of gay bar that cultivates “sexy community” through interactions between its dancers and patrons, for whom cash tips are a gateway to an erotic experience fraught with friction of both the metaphoric and the physical varieties.2 These dancers, like the go-go dancers who populate less risqué establishments, sinuously collect and transmit erotic energy from within the club.3 Gay strip clubs have struggled to adapt to changes among queer men who focus on consent and gender inclusivity, making The Stag PDX’s repeated resurrection a case study in queering the gay strip club.

There is something about having a muscled young man who is way out of your league look deeply into your eyes, take your hand with its outstretched bill, and guide it down his oiled torso to his substantial crotch barely restrained by insubstantial underwear. You know it’s all for the cash tip. And you don’t care. And when he comes around after his set, touches you on the leg in front of your friends, and leans forward and whispers into your ear, so close that his lips graze your lobe, “Do you want to see more?” you do, you really do. So when he takes you by a sweaty hand and guides you to the back, you go, because $20 seems a small price to pay to be admired by someone so into you. You’re not supposed to touch, but every dancer I’ve succumbed to has taken my hands and placed them on their body while straddling me with full friction. Sexy community can be had one on one.

The Stag moved to distinguish itself from its delightfully sleazy forebear through luxurious decor: tufted leather seating, raw wood, hunting lodge accessories, taxidermied antlers, filament bulbs suspended from nautical rope, and dark paisley wall treatments.4 The stage area boasted a pole and exercise equipment where dancers alternated between feats of strength and elegant moves; in the back were velvet-curtained booths for private dances.

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