All I Could Bare: My Life in the Strip Clubs of Gay Washington, by Craig Seymour Read Free Book Online

University, and the Chicken Hut on L Street. Years later, filmmaker John Waters described the Hut as filled with "gay men in fluffy sweaters who cruised each other by calling table-to-table on phones provided by the bar."
    Hanging out in restaurants was all the rage then because, following Prohibition, Congress—which regulates all of D.C.'s laws—made it so that only restaurants were eligible for liquor licenses. Therefore, for several decades, every place serving cocktails in the nation's capital had to have a fully equipped kitchen on the premises.
    But little of this bothered those Greatest Generation types who arrived in D.C. during the war and congregated in these spots after work and on weekends. For many of them, it was an emancipating dream, to freely connect for the very first time with other guys who liked guys.
    This sense of freedom was short-lived, however, due to the Cold War paranoia of the 1950s. Gays, thought to be especially vulnerable to blackmail threats, were branded as security risks and banned from federal employment. Hundreds of gay men and women lost their good government jobs.
    Frank Kameny was one of them. The product of a middle-class Jewish family from New York, Frank came to D.C. in the mid-fifties after earning a Ph.D. in astronomy from Harvard. He taught for a year at Georgetown and then landed a cushy civil service job with the U.S. Army Map Service. But after an arrest in Lafayette Park, the same cruising area that had been popular since the 1800s, he lost his job and was banned from future government employment. But instead of simply accepting this turn of fate, Kameny sued the government, picketed in front of the White House, and tried to take his case before the Supreme Court. The experience transformed him into an activist. He founded a local gay rights group in the 1960s that drew inspiration from the Black Power movement. Where Stokely Carmichael proclaimed, "Black is beautiful," Kameny led the call "Gay is good."
    Kameny's slogan, while tame by today's standards, reflected the radicalism of the age. In 1968, a year that saw much of the U Street corridor—once the pride of black D.C.—burn in the uprisings following Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.'s assassination, another, lesser-known protest took place at a gay club in southeast Washington called Plus One.
    Plus One was the city's first gay-owned club to allow same-sex dancing, and because of this, it often attracted the attention of police officers, who would show up and try to scare away those standing in the long lines to get in the club. But on this particular evening, Kameny remembered, "The police pulled up and expected everyone to go run to the bushes and hide. But nobody moved, so they advanced down the street, and still nobody moved. They regrouped and got more cars and more police, and advanced down the street again, but still nobody moved. So the police just got in their cars and went home." This standoff took place one year before the riot at New York's Stonewall Inn, the event credited with birthing the modern lesbian and gay rights movement.
    As the 1960s raged into the 1970s, politics increasingly went alongside the pursuit of pleasure. Gay men were no longer willing to keep their desires secret. The late sixties saw the Regency, located in the heart of downtown, become the city's first gay bathhouse; and in 1975, just blocks away, the city got its first gay strip club, the Chesapeake House.
    The way this came about was rather haphazard. Owner John Rock planned the place to be a cozy piano bar, but one night on a whim he offered two sailors stationed in the area $50 to strip down and dance for his patrons. They took him up on the offer and suddenly this squat brick building, steps away from the National Portrait Gallery, became not only D.C.'s first gay strip club but one of the nation's first gay establishments to legally allow guys to bare all. Ironically, the city's otherwise restrictive liquor laws allowed fully nude