by Nick Molloy
Incidentally, whilst I was talking to Diamond White the drag queen performing on stage was trying to get volunteers to perform in the amateur strip after I had been on. He wasn’t getting any takers and came out with the line ‘come on – nobody is going to be as bad as Arson’
Everywhere I performed the executioner on the gay scene it seemed to go down very well. On more than one occasion after performing it, I was approached by men who said ‘that’s the most interesting/innovative/original show I’ve seen since Uniboy’.
Uniboy was clearly a new stripper who had appeared during my stay abroad. Everywhere I went on the gay scene, I kept hearing about how great he was and I kept getting compared to him. Finally we met one night at a hen show. Uniboy was tall, over six foot, but lacked a traditional strippers build. In fact he as quite slim, normal even. He was young (early twenties) and handsome. As I was to see later he also possessed a very large stripper’s weapon – the one between his legs. Uniboy was openly gay and had a much older boyfriend (now husband). Before, you start thinking it, let me say it – NO, he isn’t with him for the money they are very much in love with each other. That night I had my first contact with another stripper that wasn’t about bravado, ego, machismo or one-up-manship. Soon Uniboy and his husband invited me around for dinner one night (they can cook I can’t) and my first stripper friendship was born.
Uniboy also has that rare stripper quality – a full brain rather than just a collection of cells. In fact he was a straight A student at school. He has his issues like most performers, is sometimes more than a little insecure, but has his feet planted where most have floated away into the clouds. His long held ambition is to make it as an actor and stripping has always been a sort of theatrical performance stepping stone for him.
To this day, apart from Uniboy I have only made two other friends who are strippers. I was booked on a hen show one night in Birmingham with a guy called Stimulation X. He too lacked all of the unpleasant stripper qualities. We had a good laugh that night about the over-the-top antics of all of the other strippers we had worked with along the way.
Again, Stimulation doesn’t fit the stereotype. In fact he is now a granddad ! He is in his mid-forties, trains hard in the gym and fully enjoys the stripping lifestyle. He once lamented to me about how he used to work in a factory for 40 hours every week, for not a lot of money. He now accurately points out that he can earn the same for a lot less hours and whole load more fun. Stimulation X has very thick skin and cares little for what other people say about him. That is, he lacks the insecurity of a typical stripper. In fact, he even appeared on the Trisha show with his niece. They were paid to act out a scene whereby his niece had a go at him for being too old to be a stripper (for those who haven’t yet realized – yes many of those shows are fake).
Petrol is another one. He’s actually the same age as me, but has been stripping for 17 years (since he was 17). He started when the business was at its height and has watched the steady decline from within. Petrol is a real non-conformist and has a tendency to ignite occasionally. He doesn’t suffer fools, has no ego problems and is well grounded.
Along the way I have met a couple of other strippers who I have got along with ok, but a friendship hasn’t formed, but I wouldn’t categorize them with the rest. However, the number is very small. In nearly six years since I started, I have only made three stripper friends.
It wasn’t too long before I began to broaden out my array of costumes and acts. Some strippers have only one act, one costume and have performed the same show for over 20 years. At the other extreme, Uniboy (who enjoys dressing up in various outfits) has about a dozen different shows with accompanying outfits. I have taken a middle ground. The executioner, whilst popular on the gay scene, didn’t cut it on the hen nights so I needed back up. I resurrected the boxer from the canvas, giving the act a complete overhaul. Some further tweaks along the way meant that it was getting complemented in a similar way to the executioner, but crucially this time, the act was unisex. I could perform it for either audience.
Clark Kent/Superman was next, originally devised for the hen scene, but it proved to be more popular with the guys ! A lot of the subtleties and nuances just seemed to go over the heads of the girls. Whereas the guys got it and had a higher level of appreciation for the comedic ‘theatre’ I was trying to engender.
Most strippers have one of the three ‘girly’ routines and I was determined to avoid them like the plague for that very reason. However, I kept getting queries from the website where I would be asked specifically to supply either a policeman, a fireman or the Officer & Gentleman (white naval uniform). It therefore made good economic sense to acquire the outfits. The naval uniform was easily acquired on Camden market, the others proved more difficult. My sister is a police officer, but refused point blank to help me acquire any old uniforms that were being thrown out. Apparently, I could be arrested for impersonating a police officer and rightly so in her view. She pumped up her face considerably when I told her I would just pay some one to ‘acquire’ the uniform for me. As it was, I was talking to a gay policeman one night after a show and he directed me to a shop in the east end where they sell police issue uniforms under the counter. As for the fireman, I paid another policeman to ‘acquire’ the uniform for me.
The fireman thing still mystifies me to this day. It has to be the unsexiest outfit anyone could ever wear. Yet, the girls go crazy for it. My friend Russell is a real fireman and he can’t understand it either. We met one chilly morning at 7am at Heathrow airport. Russell also drives a fire engine limousine. That is, a fire engine that has been especially converted to carry passengers. Some bloke with more money than sense had hired the fire engine to pick up his girlfriend from Heathrow and I had been hired to pose as one of the fireman drivers. Actually, I was hired as the stripper, and had to surprise her on the right cue. I was serving champagne one minute and then taking my clothes off the next, all in the back of a moving fire engine. The guy that had hired us all found it hilarious and I think he could justify paying all the money given the amount of laughter it produced for him.
Russell still talks about it today as one of the most outrageous things he has ever seen. Everytime I see him, he is usually telling somebody else about how we met. About how there was ‘shock and horror on the fireman’s faces as some bloke got naked in the back of the engine and waved his cock around…..We dropped him off at the station with nothing on. The commuters queuing in suits looked terrified’
I have worked with Russell again a couple of times since as he regularly picks up hen parties and transports them to their chosen destination. He probably has as many sex tales to tell as a typical stripper ! The girls all want to bed a fireman. Now, both Russell and I don’t get it at all. However, having interrogated several girls on this matter, the fantasy would appear to be that the fireman rescues the damsel in distress from the burning building, throws her over his shoulder, kicks his way through the burning beams, bursts through a second storey window (she is still over the shoulder), has a perfect landing onto the concrete, throws down the said damsel and shags her senseless on the grass outside. She then bears his children, he protects her forevermore and supports her on his fireman’s wage. At this point Russell was choking most alarmingly on his own innards and nearly crashed the fire engine !
Russell told me that the question he nearly always gets asked is ‘do you still rescue cats from trees’ ? Obviously, he tells them what they want to hear, but the reality is that in this ridiculously politically correct jobsworth led society we now live in, health and safety regulations usually prevent them from doing it. Once the owner is quietly led away, they turn the hose on it ! He also tells me that girls often perk up in casual conversation when they hear what he does for a living. He was even talking to a girl in a call center who wanted to meet him when she found out that he was a fireman. They exchanged e-mailed pictures of one another. The one he sent was me in a fireman’s outfit! Needless to say, nobody got that gi
rl in the end because he didn’t want me posing as him and he didn’t look like me ! It is a disturbing number of girls that buy into the fireman fantasy. In fact it borders on delusional.
Chapter 11 -Why Do We Do It ?
One of the things I am regularly accused off since I became a stripper is of wasting myself and my life. Apparently, I could be so much more. Whilst, I reject this out-of-hand, I simply don’t meet the expectations of most people.
There is a stereotype that all male strippers are dumb blondes who take lots of steroids. Because I don’t fit this profile, I in some way often astound and disappoint the accuser.
Furthermore, their version of ‘being so much more’, in reality usually means ‘be more like them’. This is the very thing I don’t want to be. I still occasionally sit up at night with a sudden jerk, cold sweat poring from me, awakened as I have from a nightmare where I am back in a regular job wearing a suit. We now live in a big brother watching slave nation society. Everybody has a number and people are forgetting their names. The toxins of rebellion have been denuded from people by the ever rigidifying conformity imposed on them by society’s rulers. Few people dare speak out of turn. The teeth in your mouth have long since become more important than the words that come out of them. Implement not question is the order of the day
The whole children and mortgage trap is openly encouraged by our rulers. Get a mortgage and have a child. Buy a car. Have another child, buy a bigger car and a bigger house to accommodate the new arrival. Get a bigger mortgage, increase your debt. This is all underpinned by the rule of ‘do as you are told at work’. Most people are only a few mortgage payments away from disaster. How could they possibly rebel ? They are trapped on a treadmill that can only get faster and more demanding in the shorter term. It takes a rat to win the rat race and I decided long ago that I wasn’t a rat. Why therefore, would I want to run like one in wheel ?
Perhaps understandably, when I point this out to my accusers it is not always best received. I guess the truth often hurts. In essence, my accusers usually envy my position. Occupying the role of male stripper produces more jealousy than you can possibly imagine. If looks could kill, I’d be dead a thousand times. When I am introduced to people in a non-stripping setting and they inevitably ask what I do for a living the response is generally one of two. The first is one of genuine interest and curiosity which leads to a dozen further questions. The second response is one of malice because those people would actually like to be me. The latter group, often make the error of assuming that they can talk down to me like I am in fact the dumb steroidal blond stereotype. These people don’t like it when they get my sermon about breaking out from being a drone and they can do it too if only they have the will to do so (usually said with smile). The more they attack my position, the more they usually reveal about the sadness and desperation of their own personal situation. Depending on how condescending their initial attack is, depends on how much of this I point out.
My family detest my choice of profession. They are far from alone in being unable to reconcile why I would choose to give up a six figure salary for a job where I constantly ‘humiliate’ myself for a fraction of the earnings. This isn’t even to mention the shame I have no doubt brought upon the family name.
They too are thinking strictly within the box that society has prescribed them. Many people ask themselves what is the meaning of life ? However, most people ask this question far too late. They begin to seriously probe in their 60s after they have wasted away their life, working all the hours in the week for an employer they hate, for just enough remuneration to pay their mortgage, bills and buy enough food to prevent them from starving. This is no life, but because most other people we know are experiencing the same pain, it somehow makes it more bearable.
Some seek solace in religion. The pain then becomes bearable because they believe we will all go to a better place after we die. This in my view, is a false reality that enables those people to live out their daily lives (and if it works good luck to them). Their belief system, or faith, is like an aspirin that takes away the pain of their daily existence. I am convinced that when I die there is nothing. Therefore, the purpose of life is to maximize my happiness. If I don’t do this within my finite lifetime then I have wasted an opportunity.
Economists theorize that happiness can be measured by something called utils. The individual with the most utils gained is the happiest person. I subscribe to this theory. Life isn’t quite as simple as a mathematical formula because the utils we seek are not tangible. However, it is very important to pinpoint exactly what gives us utils. Money is definitely a key factor. If I had sufficient money to live out the rest of my life in relative comfort I would never work again. I’d probably be off adventuring in various parts of the world in between keeping the company of people I like.
In the same way that the guy who said ‘it’s the taking part that counts’ (not the winning) was a loser, the guy who said money can’t buy happiness was severely misguided. It may not be able to buy complete and total utility but it does buy an enormous amount of utils. Essentially I am a stripper because the lifestyle brings about a high degree of utility. However, I couldn’t afford that lifestyle if it didn’t pay at all. I may have been earning a six figure income at the age of 24, but, the penalty associated with that reward was a very util low lifestyle. My financial reward for stripping is low, but my lifestyle is very util rich. I was fortunate enough to pay off my mortgage before I was 30. This was the by product of a util low existence. However, the sacrifice was definitely worth it. I now need very little finance to live out a high util existence.
Money should not necessarily buy material goods. Its key facilitator should be the purchase of TIME (read utility). Most people seem to have failed in their understanding of this basic principle. Too many are working all hours to generate finance to buy bigger and better material goods, which in turn, inflate their egos and self esteem in a pointless competition with their peers. I too have previously been a rat in this pointless race, but, thankfully have long since jumped from the train.
Too often I seem to meet millionaires who have acquired vast funds (either from inheritance or hard work) but don’t know how to convert this into utility. I never know whether to feel contempt or pity for them. If I had to go and do something I hated just so I could eat I would feel very frustrated and angry. I feel envious at those that don’t have to do this because they get a leg up in life, usually from friends or family. If I no longer had to work to eat/live you wouldn’t see me for the dust ! I would be off gallivanting around the world visiting and exploring lots of places of interest amidst performing a range of other util high activities. I certainly wouldn’t be at home moping around whinging or getting bored. Anybody who has sufficient money to see out the rest of their days and not work – yet is still unsure how to live out a fulfilled existence – needs help of some sort (psychotherapy ?)
Stripping is my admittedly temporary answer to this conundrum. Whilst my financial situation may be comfortable and more affable than many, it is hardly complete. I still need an income in order to eat and live. This generally means working for a living and this is therefore a drain on my utility score. I have pondered this long and hard and I have scoured various sources. It appears there are very few ‘jobs’ out there that I would actually want to do for any length of time without the thought of slitting my wrists coming to the fore on a regular basis. I have worked for myself before and that was just as hard as being employed, so that was no great solution. There are lots of jobs I’m sure that I would enjoy or could do for a short time and then retire. However, these are not readily accessible. Jobs working in investment banking or venture capital are not readily accessible by doing an internet search. Furthermore, if my experience is anything to go by, wearing the correct school tie goes a long way in those sectors.
Jobs that offer utility rather than finance are virtually non-existent. If you are going to be paid badly you don’t want stress and h
ow many jobs can offer you that ?
My ideal job from as far back as I can remember was to be a professional athlete. I use the word athlete in a broad generic sense here. At first I wanted to be a professional footballer and when that dream evaporated a professional boxer. With that opportunity denied I turned to track & field and eventually powerlifting. At each turn I was denied for different reasons. My parents moved me away from my home and I never played football again. My mum wouldn’t let me box. On the track I lacked the genetics to be the very best. Despite winning a national title in powerlifting there was no money to be made.