We have often traveled with friends who look forward to sitting at a bar, looking up at boyish men who dance for their dollars.
I have never quite understood the allure. If, for instance, Montreal is the destination, why pay to see what can be had so readily for free? The boys who dance there may be handsome, but no more so than the one who while serve you coffee, or the one across the terrace from your kitchen or the ones you will encounter at any one of the fourteen bath houses within walking distance. Certainly no one has ever stuffed a dollar in the jock of one of these boys because of their dancing skills which consist of dodging drinks underfoot while maneuvering a washcloth to offer various glimpses of body parts not seen on the street. Again, in Montreal, those parts are frequently seen on the street.
So what’s the deal? In Fort Lauderdale, I went to The Boardwalk with two friends of a certain age who, having filled their pockets with singles, made frequent marches up to the stage to express their appreciation of the dancers who each got no more than five minutes to perform before taking their bows and threading their way through the crowd, offering private dances in the back room. I ended the evening wondering if each of those friends would have gone into the back room on the hand of a dancer if he had been alone and unobserved by friends with telephones that talk to other mutual friends. I also found their knowledge of the fact that many of those dancers are straight and married to be disconcerting. This is prostitution set to bad music.
Given my rather high-handed disdain for this type of entertainment, you’ll be surprised to learn that I had a grand time in NYC on Sunday evening at an event featuring a slew of naked boys dancing on bars. Before I get to the details, I’ll establish the reason for my satisfaction. These boys (and let’s assume they were all at least eighteen years old) were engaging, in every way imaginable and seemed to be enjoying themselves immensely. Unencumbered by jock straps, the only repository for dollars would have been their socks/boots, but they seemed more interested in snagging the admiration of the drinkers rather than their money, and that after all is what makes one of these boys worth looking at: the illusion that in a crowded room, he of the perfect young body only has eyes for you. They spun out their lines liberally, like spoiled fishermen casting about in a well-stocked lake. I doubt any of the fish went home without having received at least a few seconds of their undivided attention.
That brings me to the specifics. Twenty dollars got you through the door and up to an open bar between the hours of ten and eleven. The crowd sized itself up with satisfaction and the relieving realization that the downstairs dark area would not go to waste. We do not feel swindled, and the night has barely begun.
When the dancers emerge and mount the bar, I want to congratulate the producer of this event. These boys seem to have been picked at the exact moment of their finest flowering. They may never in their lives look this good again, and they almost seem to know it. Their skin glows under warm lighting. They are immediately comfortable with their postings, and were I a regular at other venues around town, I would probably recognize them and know that they are experienced beyond their years. I look for signs of drugs in their eyes but I do not find the usual edgy panic that always seems to fuel the East Side iterations of this type of event. They seem composed and eager to please. Their erections occur at a convincing pace, allowing the superb reversal in which the drinkers are made to feel like sex objects. So far, I am pleasantly on board with the evening, in the company of C, our houseguests and two favorite blogger friends whose descriptions of the evening I await.
Set free of not only the need for a jock strap but also the common boundaries of dancer behavior, these boys unleashed their personalities as well as their dicks, and obliterated any distance between their bodies and the patrons, squatting into open mouths and growing aroused by their own hands and by having sex with each other before an appreciative audience.
I liked a longhaired Hispanic with languid eyes, a wicked smile and a body that reminded me of the bronze Davids by Verrocchio and Donatello. At one point he stretched out on the bar with one knee bent, smiling benevolently at anyone who came forth to suck his dick.
This is the one feature of the event that I found distasteful. The dancers delivered too easy access to their genitals, and men got in line continuously to take a turn at sucking them. Some guys went from one line to the next as though they were at an all-you-can-eat buffet at a Las Vegas casino. The positioning of the dancers during this odd ritual reminded me of a meet-the-authors book-signing event at Barnes and Noble. The event producer would have done better to instruct the dancers to have contact with the patrons without suspending all movement. By granting stationary compliance with lines of eager mouths, each dancer became rather maternal, like a sow on its side, allowing its brood of piglets to feed rudely on its swollen teats.
Re-reading all of the above makes me suspect that any of you who were absent will probably wish you had been there to form your own impressions, and that those of you who invested your twenty bucks will question my exclusion of a description of what went on downstairs where a set of couches in the darkness broke many a fall. Another day perhaps.
