A male writer bares all for one (terrifying) night only
The blood in my neck was pumping so hard I could almost hear it. The four espressos I’d downed backstage had done their job, dehydrating the muscles in my arms, abs and chest so that they bulged. I was glistening with nervous sweat, baby oil and Brasso-coloured fake tan that smelt like dog biscuits and every student nightclub you’ve ever been to. I could hear the blood over the din of 500 women chanting in unison,“Off! Off! Off!” I could even hear it over the pulsing, tacky intro to R Kelly’s Cookie, a song I’d heard and rehearsed to almost every day for the past month. The beat kicked in. It was now or never. Jeans slung dangerously low on my scarily shiny abdomen, a bandana pulled over the bottom part of my face, I strode up the steps.“You own that stage,” my stripping Mr Miyagi had counselled.
Still, I was half-naked in front of a club full of women who’d paid to see the UK’s most famous male dancers get their kit off. The only thing I ‘owned’ at that point was a pair of very, very sweaty palms. Like a lion scouting its prey (OK, like a toddler lost in a supermarket looking for its parent), I scanned the body-conned, pinksashed crowd for a woman I could lift. The one in the front row? Her dress was too short. The woman on the stool to my right? Way too lairy.
Finally, I saw one – a petite blonde in row three. I wiped the sweat from my brow, adjusted my backwards cap and strode over. “Come with me.” I tried to sound assertive. Her friends whooped as I led her through the crowd.“I’ve never done anything like this before!” she giggled. Funnily enough, I was thinking the same thing.
FIRST-DAY NERVES
One month before that fateful night, I was in front of my laptop, where I belong. See, I’m not a male stripper. I’m a pasty writer who hasn’t danced since his sixth-form prom. But I’d been set a challenge: join and train with the Dreamboys, the UK’s premier male stripper group. Infiltrate their famous bus (not seen it? You’re not spending enough time on the A23), and perform with them live on stage. Find out who they are, what makes them tick, and how it really feels to be objectified for money five nights a week. Is it all champagne problems, clenching £50 notes between two chiselled arse cheeks and sex on tap?
We first meet in a sleek basement gym on London’s bustling City Road one rainy afternoon. I’d already made
up my mind: I wasn’t going to like them. Swaggering out of the changing rooms, one of them stops to catcall a passing girl.“I think I’m in love with you,” yells Lotan. He’s got a thick blacked-out wrist tattoo and a curly mop of well-groomed hair. I imagine girls would call him handsome and, in fact, quite frequently do. He saunters over to the weights rack and grabs a gigantic 22kg dumbbell in each hand. Scattered on different benches are Luke and Ritchie, heaving and groaning as they sculpt their almost cartoon-like physiques.
“So what’s it like, the stripper life?” I pipe up, trying to sound casual, like I’m asking them about the weather. “A lot of our pals think it’s the best job in the world,” Lotan says. “Well, is it?” I ask. “We basically get paid to spend time with our mates,” he tells me. And sleep with loads of women, right? He goes back to his bicep curls.
After a solid two hours in the gym, we sit swigging warm beers and eating burritos at a dingy little bar round the corner. They crack open bottles and talk about routines, nights out and the legendary Black Stallion, the 49-year-old finale of their show whose time in the business is as lengthy as his… “Well, you’ll see what we mean,” says Lotan.
Luke, 28, has a PhD and wants to be a chef. Sitting next to him is Shane, 29, ‘The Kid’ on account of the fact that he’s just joined the group.“I was a plumber before this,” he tells me. “Then my friend who was doing it got me involved. The first six months were crazy – I loved it, I craved it. I wanted to be up on stage all the time. It would be hard to give it up and go back to doing something normal now. It’s just such a rush.”
But despite ‘the rush,’ there is also a flipside to life as a male stripper. “Once, I saw a woman get on stage and grab a dancer’s naked penis and try to put it in her mouth,” says Shane. “The doormen got her out pretty quickly, but can you imagine if something like that happened in a female strip club?” STRIPPER SCHOOL
Let’s get the Magic Mike analogies out of the way now. If this were a movie, lead dancer and choreographer Jordan would be its protagonist. I meet him a week later at For Your Eyes Only, the club where the Dreamboys rehearse their now-famous routines. The ‘Mike’ in this scenario is a 32-year-old former backing dancer for Rita Ora. He oozes cool, surveying the 360° stage in the middle of the empty venue through aviators (even though we’re indoors). I ask what group dance I’m going to be shoehorned into, and he lets out a wry smile. “Oh, no,” he says. “I’ve got something special planned for you.”
“Something special” turns out to be a starring role in what is normally Jordan’s own one-man routine – a seductive number to R Kelly’s Cookie, which contains lyrics so filthy we couldn’t print them here. Jordan’s choreography will involve me pulling a girl out of the crowd, leading her onto the stage and simulating, through dance, the best sex she’ll ever have in her life. I ask the question I’ve wanted to ask since I got this assignment: “Yeah, but will I have to get my bits out on stage?” He laughs. “The Dreamboys barely ever take anything more than their tops off [Stallion aside, obviously] – it’s all about the power of suggestion,” comes Jordan’s sultry reply. I’ve got exactly one month to learn this power. To learn to dance, sculpt a body worthy of the ticket price (£56 a night for the ‘gold package’), and to not make a total tit of myself in front of the 500-strong crowd. “On that stage, it’s only you and her,” Jordan says. Eye contact is crucial, as is showing off the ‘V’ at the bottom of the abdomen (“the girls go mad for it”). Don’t spank too hard, and for God’s sake, go easy on the baby oil. Finally, he looks me up and down: “You’re gonna have to shave your chest.”
I look at my notepad. It reads: ‘Light spanking, baby oil, bare chest.’ “They’re like animals,” Lotan says of the audiences who flock to see them all around the country. Being groped every week is just part of the job.“It can be tiring, but what can you do?” Jordan says. “They’ve come to see a show. So, in a way, how they act is justified. Some grab a bit hard, and scratch and cut you with their nails, but it’s the one place they’re allowed to act like that.”
Plus, the guys are not exactly angels themselves.“I know strippers who
“Don’t spank too hard and go easy on the baby oil”
“You can be the most faithful man, but you still do what you do”
go home with a different girl every night,” chips in Shane. One of them even tells me that he spent one summer sleeping with a different girl after every show for 12 weeks straight.
Is it hard to keep a relationship going as a Dreamboy? “When I first started, I had a girlfriend, and had to play down how crazy the women act,” Shane says.“When she did find out, she couldn’t handle it – it ended the relationship. You can be the most faithful man in the world, but you still go out every night and do what you do,” he says, matter-of-factly.
“You see women naked in the crowd, you see women touching themselves…” Jordan says.“I danced with a chick on stage at her hen do once… two days later, she broke off her engagement. She wouldn’t stop messaging me. Let’s just say the opportunity is there, all of the time.”
“I’ve had women come to the show on their hen do, take off their engagement rings and say,‘Go through me and all of my bridesmaids at the hotel tonight and we’ll never talk about it again,’” Lotan says, smiling at the memory.
The real problem, it seems, is when the adoration spills into their everyday lives. “You get Snapchats, message requests, naked selfies over Facebook,” Jordan says.“They see you as an object.”
“Yeah,” Shane agrees. “They don’t even say hi.”
THE MAIN EVENT
Two weeks in, I’d ditched the beers and hit the gym – I’d been told to ‘eat clean,’ but left to my own devices other than that. I’d spent two days in dance rehearsals, giving up two Saturdays trying to simulate climbing a pole with a stranger’s legs wrapped around my waist. Slowly but surely, something like abs started to poke through where my paunch had been. Jordan was happy with his protégé.“Ninety per cent of the girls won’t know a thing,” he says. “They’ll just think you’re the new guy.”
A fortnight later, it’s the moment of truth. As I arrive to dance that night, my body doublecoated with fake tan and hairless as a Christmas turkey, I worry what the other 10% are going to think.
I’m one of the first in the changing room, and the smell of fake tan is overpowering. Next to the door there’s a rack of fireman’s costumes, complete with Velcro strips for quick removal on stage. On one table lies what looks like a handyman’s toolbox, but the only thing inside is a dauntinglooking penis pump – I later find out it belongs to the elusive Black Stallion.
“The actual pump itself doesn’t hurt,” another dancer I haven’t met before tells me later on as he pumps up his own piece.“It just gives you a semi – but it’s a weird feeling, inflating your dick like a balloon to the point where it feels like it’s going to burst.” What does hurt, he says, are the rubber bands you tie around the base of the penis to hold the blood in – they have to cut them off with scissors
afterwards. He tells me a horror story about a stripper he knew who tried to cut them off with sweat in his eyes, and ended up in hospital.
The dancers start to arrive, going through their pre-show routine while the crowd wafts in from the club floor. Luke is doing tricep dips between two chairs, making blood flow into his muscles so they appear bigger on stage; Jordan is shaving stray hairs from his chest before slathering himself in lotion.
Then the show begins and everything speeds up. Those espressos kick in. Jordan is wishing me luck; I’m telling the girl from row three to come with me. The lights are dimming, the women are screaming and I’m back where we started, sweaty-palmed and twitchingly nervous with the shrieks of 500 women threatening to burst my eardrums. Then the song I’ve heard 1,000 times kicks in, the lights flare, and I’m shaking no longer.
The next two minutes happen in what feels like fast forward. I sit my girl down in the chair, circle the pole a little too fast and tilt her chin backwards. The music drops and I drop with it, grabbing my crotch and humping the air as Jordan does the same. I knee-slide across the floor, burning off another layer of skin in the process. I whip my shirt off and throw it into the crowd; I straddle the chair with one leg over her shoulder, grinding my hips into her face. The audience adore me, I can feel it, feel their chanting. They want me.
Before I know it, my companion is straddling me, and I’m ready for my finishing move – my straddled ascent to the top of the pole. Except I can’t do it – I stupidly ignored Jordan’s advice, and my hands are slick with baby oil. I try a half-hearted jump up the pole with a disappointed girl still wrapped around my waist, but end up sliding limply down and ending in a crumpled and apologetic tangle on the floor.
The crowd still cheers, and I halfstride, half-run off stage. The Black Stallion is shaking my hand.“I watched it all from the side,” he says. “It takes a lot of balls to do what you just did.”
As the blood drains from my head, I realise that it’s all over – four weeks’ work for two minutes’ stage time. Shane told me about the rush, but he didn’t tell me what comes after – the need for another fix. I’m not a Dreamboy now – I’m just a normal guy.
Finally, it starts to make sense: the thrill of constant adulation, the feeling that every woman has their eyes on you – and the disappointment when they don’t. As I return to that stage for one last bow, bathed in the shouts of adoring women, my mind flashes back to that gym session a month ago when I first met the Dreamboys: Lotan had flexed his muscles and declared his love for a girl – but he was just an ordinary lad, it wasn’t a Saturday night, she wasn’t in his audience, and she hadn’t even turned her head.
The Dreamboys perform every week at venues around the country – visit Dreamboys.co.uk for tickets