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All I Could Bare – Book Review
By Lindsey | July 9, 2008
All I Could Bare: My Life in the Strip Clubs of Gay Washington, D.C.
Craig Seymour
Atria
256 pages
$26.99
Who said you couldn’t strip your way to an M.A.? Craig Seymour uses stripping as the topic for his master’s thesis, experiencing the scene in Washington, D.C., and examining how it changed him—for the better—in All I Could Bare.
Seymour’s love affair with strip clubs surfaced shortly after he ventured out to one to see a special appearance by his favourite gay porn star, Joey Stefano. Soon, the timid Seymour was at the strip club on a regular basis.
Citing that he was happy with his life and his boyfriend, he rationalized that things were getting too soft and predictable. Going to the strip club was something different, and something for him to look forward to. Later, Seymour decided to do his master’s thesis on strip clubs as an excuse for going to them so often.
He interviewed the strippers about why they worked there, and the customers about why they went. Included in his memoir are snippets of his interviews and a history of the gay scene in Washington, D.C. At the time, Washington was the only place in America where a dancer could be completely nude on stage and have the customers touch them any way the dancer allowed. Strip club regulations are not so lax nowadays.
Eventually, Seymour took the plunge into actually stripping after one of the male strippers, Nico, accused him of thinking he was better than the dancers.
Seymour soon discovered that the stripping world was much more complex than he first assumed. Seymour examines racial dynamics in the stripping world, his toffee-coloured skin making it difficult for patrons to determine his ethnicity. He admits this worked to his advantage since he could be whatever his customers wanted him to be.
Most interesting in this book is a tale of Seymour’s relationship with conservative Internet pundit Mike Drudge of the Drudge Report. Seymour remains vague about the nature of his relationship with Drudge, except to mention their mutual obsession with The Young and the Restless.
Different types of intimacy are examined in All I Could Bare, especially the intimacy between customer and stripper. Stripping is generally thought of as cold, but this is definitely not the case for Seymour. Because of the touching and the fact that customers confided their problems and desires to the strippers, stripping became more of a warm physical relationship.
Seymour takes us from his stripping jobs to his gig as a writer, where he uses snippets of interviews he conducted with Mariah Carey, Mary J. Blige, and Janet Jackson to show the reader more about himself. More than anything, All I Could Bare is a story of risks, and if Seymour never took the risk of becoming a stripper, he may not have become a writer, either.
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