All I Could Bare: My Life in the Strip Clubs of Gay Washington, D.C.

A frank, funny, and inspiring memoir about how stripping helped a college professor discover his true self.

I felt that I'd made a transformation as surely as Superman slipping out of a phone booth or Wonder Woman doing a sunburst spin. I was bare-ass in a room of paying strangers: a stripper. After years of wondering what it would be like, I had done it - faced a fear, defied expectation, embraced a taboo self. It was only the beginning....

All I Could Bare is the story of a mild-mannered graduate student who "took the road less clothed". Seymour embarked on his journey in the 1990s, when Washington, D.C.'s gay club scene was notoriously no-holds-barred, all the while trying to keep his newfound vocation a secret from his parents and maintain a relationship with his boyfriend, Seth. Along the way he met some unforgettable characters - the 50-year-old divorcé who's obsessed with a 21-year-old dancer, the celebrated drag diva who hailed from a small town in rural Virginia, and the many straight guys who were "gay for pay". Seymour gives us both the highs (money, adoration, camaraderie) and the lows (an ill-fated attempt at prostitution, a humiliating porn audition).

Ultimately coming clean about his secret identity, Seymour breaks through taboos and makes his way from booty-baring stripper to PhD-bearing academic, taking a detour into celebrity journalism and memorably crossing paths with Janet Jackson, Mariah Carey, and Mary J. Blige along the way. Hilarious, insightful, and touching, All I Could Bare proves that sometimes the "wrong decision" can lead to the right place.

©2008 Craig Seymour (P)2012 Craig Seymour