I’m a Stripper; Of Course I’m Not Surprised by Trump 2.0

Money Talks and Money Feels at the Club

The morning after the election, my regular messages me.

“Very depressing day.”

I didn’t work the night before, because I wasn’t in the mood to manage any real-time election emotions of mostly intoxicated, mostly middle-aged men. Reason and experience told me the strip club is probably one of the only spaces where election coverage wouldn’t be playing on the TV, where people would pretend it was just any other day. People go to the strip club to forget—losing their money or their minds to sudden layoffs, protracted illness, grief, death, divorce. When the nail salon blares Fox News I want to chuck my platform sandals at the TV, so I’m not judging the need for escapist retreat. But I wonder about its cost. Doctors inject themselves with ketamine in their cars, marvel at their heated steering wheels. In the United States it is socially acceptable in some circles to openly hate the unhoused whose drug use happens on city streets, pathologizing their will rather than recognizing the protection private luxury, and public power, offers to those who can afford it. In any event, I wasn’t risking the possibility of being paid in men’s financial feelings about the election. My rage at the world was a job hazard. My body was a liability. Is a liability.

Heightened attunement to human vulnerabilities feels vital to this work. Cajoling insecurities, anticipating subterranean desires, compensates for social awkwardness. My own, that of customers. The intensities of my senses and emotions overwhelm me but help me connect. What compels me toward people, also leads to my withdrawal. To adhere to, rend apart. In Li-Young Lee’s “The Cleaving” (an expansive reimagining of the all-encompassing Whitmanian I/eye), the poem’s speaker wonders:

Was it me in the other I loved
when I loved another?
The butcher sees me eye this delicacy.
With a finger, he picks it
out of the skull-cradle
and offers it to me.
I take it gingerly between my fingers
and suck it down.
I eat my man.

My nervous system is built for this work. I learned as a child how to remain alert for subtle shifts that might indicate imminent danger. At the club, as an instinct of self-protection, I wield the Freudian cliché of stiletto as phallic weapon. Obviously a man invented the term penis envy. Dicks and feet are two tired, over-hyped organs. Revered, practical, but a little funny looking, if you ask me. I adore a polite request to massage my feet. But since most dances revolve around the former organ, I remind grabby men I could balance on one leg and stretch tension between spike and penetrated flesh. Here, I can flirt in threats. It is one of the only places I feel so emboldened in the presence of men. I admit that when they fork over money for fleeting moments of my own design, I feel powerful. Like the poem’s speaker, “I eat my man.”

Or I feel nothing.

I respond, “I’m numb. I was planning to work tonight but I don’t know if I can deal.” Any gloating might incite me.

Election season tends to amplify obnoxious political conversations with MAGA hat wearers, the ones spouting slogans like “Your body, my choice. Forever.” But for women, femmes, and nonbinary people, none of this rhetoric is new. It’s the weather. A strip club is a social thermometer.

Avoiding men who get off on a false sense of victimized superiority reminds me of that arcade game where a solo player maneuvers frogs across the freeway, likely where the 710 meets the 405—an endless procession of big rigs hauling cargo from the port of Long Beach, massive wheels splattering nervous systems. Capitalism’s conduits and casualties. Frog hops can’t be measured in miles per hour, but this is the fault of the frogs, not the cars, and never the transportation system itself—freeways razing entire communities, preserving penitentiaries. The frog is bound to lose the game of being forced to outpace capitalism’s coerced urgency, engineered crisis. Its stakes? Survival.

He agrees to come meet me. “Strength in numbers,” he writes.

I don’t normally communicate with my regulars when I’m not at work, but he has earned my trust. He is not the kind of man who slides into my DMs, bartering for my body.

My regular pays me for what I’m offering: limited access to my time. I can enjoy his company because he respects the constraints around mine. He is not chasing a delusional fantasy of making me his girlfriend. He is stronger than me. I chase delusional fantasies of emotionally unavailable people making me theirs. My therapist would say I am reinforcing my belief that I’m only worthy of love’s scraps. She’s not wrong. Belief becomes reality if you believe it hard enough.

My regular doesn’t turn rape into a punchline or talking point. He is not the customer who out of fucking nowhere tells me that women need to sleep with guns under their pillows so men don’t rape them. Who asks if I have one. The way he says rape gets stuck in my throat, like a suppressed cough in a library or at a funeral. My eyes water. The DJ calls me to the stage before I can respond. I perform, so I don’t have to.

***

That Wednesday night I slowly maneuver into a parking space marked “showgirls only,” careful to avoid the paths of stray cats who congregate outside the club, which abuts a junk yard. When two of the cats have kittens, I bring in Costo-sized cases of wet food. As expensive as it is nutritious, meaning very. The manager who hired me expresses genuine excitement, which further endears me to him. Because the club as a rule rejects heavily tattooed girls I also can’t help but feel a bit indebted to him. For an instant I see this tender little boy inside him, soft and sincere. We bond over our devotion to these kitties. Then and only then does he relax his world-weary grimace into a smile. I notice a palpable shift in his eyes, a new warmth I feel entrusted to hold, to protect.

I desperately need to not know his politics, because I already know. Working in an industry where I regularly interact with people from all walks of life and across the gamut of political leanings has instilled a guilty feeling when I secretly hope, because I’m tired, to remain unaware of anyone’s rotten stance against COVID being real or the right of people to exist. When I bring bowls for the cats to eat out of, so their whiskers don’t scrape against hot pavement, the hiring manager grumbles about (and I quote) “those bums” stealing shit. “Those bums” like he knows, like I know, them all. His apparent contempt for the unhoused, not the structural conditions producing housing insecurity, might confirm rumors he’s a Trumper. I want to give him the benefit of the doubt, ignore inconvenient intuition.

I flip down the sun visor and check my red lipstick in the mirror. The problem with red lipstick is that if you overline your lips whatsoever, sexy vixen quickly turns to scary clown. I use my long oval nail, manicured and fortified with four coats of black gel polish, to remove extra red from my already exaggerated cupid’s bow. I set the lipstick so it doesn’t stain men’s shirts.

In the dressing room I immediately regret forgetting my headphones, lest I overhear conversations that grate on my nerves. Perpetually late, I’m always forgetting something. One of two dancers who I think may be close to me in age, but inexplicably refuses to acknowledge my existence, asks a dancer in her early 20s if she voted. The rude dancer’s BBL balances gravity over bony thighs.

“No, I didn’t.” She shrugs. “I feel like what’s the point.”

I get it, because, well, history. Facts and information. I sure as hell don’t place faith in the state. And I claim no moral high ground in admitting I vote. Instead, I feel a bit sheepish, conflicted, but I want to own the contradictions of living in this world even as we seek to refuse its terms. Years of organizing have taught me that tactics to reduce harm now, if committed to a long-term vision, can be part of a collectively determined strategy to dismantle the state’s claim to legitimate violence and rebuild the world anew. My point is there is no perfect route to move through this mess. But you have to keep moving.

“Yeah...” The dancer’s voice trails off. I glimpse her smug look in the mirror. She totally voted for Trump. I didn’t say there aren’t wrong ways. She continues, “Did you work last night?”

“No, I heard it was dead though.”

“Yeah, same.” Her vocal chords start straining against her words, sexy grumble to valley girl. “But I think Trump winning will be a good thing for us. You know, with the election, people are happy that they’ll be doing better financially.”

Raising the minimum wage was on the ballot this year. Whether or not she’s including Californians who make minimum wage in a state with an impossibly high cost of living, or the Orange County voters who opposed the measure, her opinion seems to rest on the faulty premise and promise of trickle-down economics. Strip club clientele includes working-class men who are by and large polite and respectful. But the club is ruled by whales, shorthand for handsy rich guys who tip in bands not dollars, reserve bottle sections, feel most entitled to our bodies. It’s not easy making money flow where men assume they are owed everything for free.

At the current rate we earn $16 an hour, paid out to us at the end of each night. For a five-and-a-half-hour shift, this translates to roughly $85, which is sort of like a partial reimbursement for our house fee—what we pay to work despite being W-2 employees, which in theory should offer benefits but in practice means we’re independent contractors who can’t claim our business expenses. The house fee starts at $100 if you clock in before opening at 3pm, increases in $20 increments by the hour even on day shift, and can be as high as $220, depending on the night of the week.

For those unfamiliar with this payment structure, the house fee, sometimes called a stage fee, is the amount of money we are required to make for the club before we take home our dance earnings. We keep our stage money and customer tips, but we’re also expected to tip out 20% to the DJ and manager, plus the dance tracker, bouncer, and door guy. It’s not impossible, after a really slow shift, to leave in the red. A higher minimum wage could be a small victory for workers, one less dollar in the pockets of those who profit from our labor. In theory, anyway. The club could just raise its house fee. Yet another Pyrrhic victory.

“I’m hopeful that Trump can help this country,” she concludes as her tomb-shaped acrylics flash open and tap against the door, which swings shut behind her in a sticky swell of Victoria’s Secret body spray. I really wish I had brought my headphones.

Feelings are powerful. On the campaign trail Trump promised to eliminate taxes on tips. This nod to economic populism comes at a grave cost: racism, mass deportation, misogyny, tax cuts for corporations and the rich people who run them. Nevermind Trump’s appointment of Tom Homan as “Border Czar.” Or of Marco Rubio as Secretary of State, Mike Huckabee as Ambassador to Israel, Kristi Noem as Homeland Security Secretary, John Ratcliffe as CIA Director, Pete Hegseth as Defense Secretary. The political spectacle amid ongoing genocide amasses an endless catalogue of horrors. The very rich and very powerful only answer to money and power. Capitalism’s catch-22 is a deadlock by design, in perpetual crisis, dealing in symbols, masking coercion behind a forced hand, a choice between lesser evils.

I fuss with the tiny buckles on a new pair of shiny black Pleasers with thick ankle cuffs that make me feel like a Dominatrix. The eight inches of added height complements my dommy mommy vibe. I scrutinize the placement of a matching latex micro bikini in the mirror, adjust a new pair of fishnets I’ve painstakingly made footless so my pretty pink pedicure peeps out of my sandals.

I fine-tune the imaginary horizontal line connecting my nipples, scooping tits skyward. Like the dancer who is maybe around my age, I try to defy gravity. Women’s bodies are apples on a windowless ledge, little globes men reach for, feeling for bruises they’ll just eat around.

***

After I clock in, I plop myself down on the barstool next to my regular. Suddenly I hate the texture of my fishnets, peel them off under the bar, not caring if they snag. I twirl my hair, lean in and whisper-yell over the music what I overheard in the dressing room.

“This is the problem!” He throws his hands in the air, turns his knees toward mine, bare and bruised, offers to buy me a drink. I stir up pineapple sediment with my straw, consider the impossible squaring of economics and ethics, its indivisible remainders.

The strip club is not an aberration to the norm; it is a distilled expression of it. Despite being hired as entertainers, strippers often get treated like crooks. We are framed as dishonorable and dishonest, for asking to be compensated for the work we got hired to do. How quintessentially capitalist of this impertinent assumption. Strip clubs are capitalism’s barest expression and its mistress, its secret playground for perverse fantasies invariably sutured to power. Men drunk on it, or enacting revenge fantasies, feeling robbed of their birthright. Power. Property. Not prowess.

Greed drives desire. The system reproduces itself illicitly while upholding the sanctity of its official containers of control. Wash your hands after touching money. Everyone knows it’s dirty. If you need more cash, you have to pay a stiff surcharge. Money making money off money. Pay to play or else. The rich hoard wealth. The aspirational rich gain compensatory social capital for identifying with the ruling class, and pay a steep price for the false comforts of tenuous belonging. It’s a tabula rasa for and of conquest, a blank check absent any signature. Without forgeries of memory you’ve sacrificed life for a meaningless piece of paper, a violent illusion. Strip clubs suffer when the amount of people who make a living wage shrinks, no matter how much that diminution makes the rich richer. Strip clubs have been suffering.

***

Leading up to the election, I observed that country club Republicans, fiscal conservatives, classical liberals, moderate Democrats, LARPing libertarians, whatever, did not love Trump. Sure, I saw droves of MAGA hat wearers worshipping at his altar. But I knew Trump would win not because of the people who love him. I knew Trump would win because of the people who don’t and voted for him anyway.

A week before the election, I see Marc, a club regular with whom I have a friendly relationship. I will sit with him if and only if he’s alone and I’ve exhausted all other options, as he will at least modestly compensate me for conversation as he grips a glass of Chardonnay, waiting for his favorite dancer. She rocks the retro pin-up vibe I love, is one of the few Black women working at the club, a blaring indication of the industry’s rampant racism. The fetishistic hypersexualization of non-white women is itself, of course, deeply racist. It is also, practically speaking, in tension with club hiring practices. Simply put, limited inclusion of tokenized women of color is both racist and bad for business. Many customers crave “variety” (i.e., actual diversity), but club owners try to delimit their patronage, too.

Marc has the weathered, flushed face of a day-drinking boomer. I’m relieved he hasn’t asked for another VIP dance, during which I avoided meeting his hungry gaze, piercing blue eyes set deep under unkempt eyebrows. An avid fan of Pink Floyd, King Crimson, and other psychedelic and prog rock bands I grew up with, his music tastes overlap with those of my dad, a deeply unsettling comparison despite their different backgrounds. My dad grew up poor in the South and cared more about protesting the Vietnam War, getting high, and making art than making money. He’d be as out of place in Orange County as I am. Like my father, Marc has some questionable hot takes on social issues, generally speaking. I would go so far as to say this is not uncommon for white men of their generation. However, both men unambiguously despise Trump’s grotesque rise to power. Unlike my father, though, Marc voted for Trump. He voted with his bank statements in mind. With his bank statements tugging at his heartstrings.

Financial feelings, the conflicted rationales hiding self-interest, are of course not historically new, and straddle party lines. As one emotional expression of political myopia, fiscal conservatism is shorthand, colloquially speaking, for a person who self-identifies as socially progressive but economically austere. For example, Bill Clinton dismantled “welfare as we know it” and slashed funds for public housing (while dramatically increasing spending on police and prisons). Clinton also signed into law neoliberalism’s darling, NAFTA, not to mention the devastating 1994 Crime Bill, and the list goes on. But he also paid lip service to the systematically abandoned groups his policies disproportionately impacted. This peddling of increased representation and defanged nods to social justice as an acceptable substitute for concerted action to dismantle the existent system and rebuild the world anew, unmoors material realities from people’s desires for those realities. Half-truths or outright lies reach epic proportions to resolve the cognitive dissonance of how economics cannot be disarticulated from the social world that invented them. Yet, here we are.

Attempts to separate social justice from economic policy obscure the inextricability of what Martin Luther King, Jr. identified as three linked threats to life itself: racism, militarism, and capitalism. Dr. King called for radical structural change, but that part got left out of history lessons, before the subject was banned from schools altogether. Fiscal conservatism is a paradox that says as much about the pitfalls of representational politics as it does the triumphs of neoliberal policy.

Rhetoric need not reflect reality. Feelings become facts through belief. Soundbites stick to skin like superglue, binding incongruent ideas like Frankenstein’s monster: “I’m not a bigot, but.” “I don’t hate immigrants, but.” “I don’t support Trump, but.” These days, it’s all about but(t)s and bottom lines. A customer tells me:

“I don’t hate all women. I mean obviously, I’m here.” He looks around with raised hands, then leans forward conspiratorially. “But they have a power. And I’m not for it.”

Working at a strip club you see the underbelly of mundane desire. As soon as you hear someone rate or describe people as a body, an empty synecdoche referring to nothing—hands, legs, ass, tits, pussies—run. We are entertainers, the highly skilled yet grossly devalued work that keeps the whole operation afloat. Yet we must continually explain to customers that we are offering a service, not hanging out. We fulfill and defy our femme duty of worshipping at the altar of man, shapeshifting to satisfy sexual tastes. We are desired as objects, as vessels for suppressed feeling, as sexy outlines, as puppets projected onto walls. Here, we get paid for that labor.

Compulsory heterosexuality is not only mandated by loud misogynists but embraced by trad wives and hordes of white women lamenting feminism’s irreparable damage to the sanctity of gender roles. Putting aside the violence limning their hallowed institutions, such a lament implicitly rests on a patriarchal assumption that men’s responsibilities lie with their property, reinforcing caregiving and emotional labor as women’s work. This false choice, between masculine responsibility and feminine care, prevents people from accessing their full humanity.

A culture of collective care is apparently so unimaginable that women would rather return to the old models of chivalry. Mainstream single-issue feminism, whether Dworkin-quoting or Girl Boss™ celebrating, cannot grapple with nuanced discussions of the business of traditional marriage and adult entertainment. It often takes aim at the wrong target: women’s individual choices, not a structural analysis of patriarchy, much less its intersection with racial capitalism. Not the unchecked power that protects an unlivable status quo rooted in the soulless destruction of human life for profit.

Sex workers literalize the idea of workers as commodities, as exchanged objects. So can you really blame us for wanting to eat the rich, a reversal of threat like Megan Fox campily cannibalizing men in Jennifer’s Body? While the cult classic may undermine its potent central metaphor with a self-conscious spectacle of postmodern irony, it captures how women get caught in the cultural slide between vixen and vampire, a narrative as old as Eve eating the apple. Strippers also deal in the ironies of this double bind, appropriating the virgin/whore dichotomy to exact a kind of reparations while brilliantly deflecting the reactionary fervor to the perceived threat of balanced scales. It is a dangerous game, this slippage between object and subject, consumed and consumer. Someone is bound to get hurt. The state’s scales of justice remain static, immovable.

To be sure, many people who voted for Trump categorically hate all social groups believed to threaten hegemony, or their bank accounts, or the construct of binary gender. But others rhetorically reject such hatred while nonetheless supporting policies that perpetuate the American individualist myth of a zero-sum game. Those pesky problem children sucking on the teat of power, stealing milk. People love having money and hate people who need it just to survive.

Scapegoating the relatively powerless protects the powerful. The glorification of violence and bigotry is easy to spot and so to blame for the real-life horror story plot that it obscures—that misogyny, racism, classism, compulsory heterosexuality, transphobia, ableism, exists everywhere. Rape culture exists everywhere. I’ve seen it at the strip club, but also felt its impact in more covert and dangerous ways at the public research university I resigned from this year—partly in protest of my department’s silencing and slut-shaming of survivors, and partly due to how the institution mishandled my not unrelated experiences of sexism, bullying, and sexual assault. Rape culture has directly affected, at times nearly broken, me in college and grad school, in community organizing spaces, in my most intimate relationships.

Lately, it tethers my body to an invisible tangle. On days I don’t work at the club, I seldom leave my apartment. I feel stuck in my self-isolation, despite understanding it as a trauma response, one that isn’t healthy. My doctor informs me I’ve developed a Vitamin D deficiency. (I hate that I hear the smart-ass retort, “You just need some D," right now. I hate that I hear the voice of the man who said it. It was supposed to be a joke. It turned out to be a threat.) Everything has a price. In exchange for safety, I’ve shut out the sun.

I like being alone. I’m not sure I like the idea of being alone forever, or dying alone. I’m not sure if it’s the being alone part or the dying part that makes me uneasy. Sometimes, in my solitary life this past year, I feel envious of friends with lovers or partners or children or close-knit families. I wonder what it feels like to be constantly surrounded by love, in a literal sense. I wonder what is wrong with me for not knowing that feeling. I fear I will never know that feeling.

Though I’m constantly surrounded by people at the club, it can be lonely work, attending to the voids of strangers. Some nights, I genuinely enjoy myself. I like going on stage, and working with some truly delightful people, and having bizarre conversations with customers. Small talk I hate. Maybe because I’m terrible at it, any small talk for me is a telltale sign to leave because it rarely ends in a dance. Lucky for me, my weirdness works here. I banter with some customers and connect with others. People fascinate me. I like hearing stories, studying social dynamics, learning secrets I won’t tell but don’t keep. Memory’s ephemera. Flirting can be fun. Men line my mind, take me out of it.

Other nights I feel supernatural. Can you see me, hovering, disembodied, feeding you my parts? I tell you to get your fill. I don’t have to tell you to leave.

***

After my regular goes home, I meet a sweet woman with a soft voice and impeccable style. We talk tattoos. In her quiet self-expression I see a smolder. She brims with bicurious shy girl energy on the brink of expansion. She’s a bartender from San Diego celebrating her boyfriend’s birthday. He’s sporting a silk Hawaiian shirt and a man bun, a vintage hipster bro with a sly Jude Law-like sexiness I immediately distrust. She wants to buy him a dance. I keep advocating for a double. She declines, placing neatly folded bills in his slick hands.

Alone together for the first time, his drunkenness becomes more apparent to me. He can’t lean on his girlfriend. He tells me, repeatedly, “she wants to lick pussy.” My gaydar tells me she just wants to kiss a girl Katy Perry style, but I don’t care to argue. I say nothing. It is his birthday, after all. He invites me, repeatedly, to the Airbnb he plans to rent for his threesome fantasy. I say nothing.

He is not a gentleman. My eyes water. I stand up, change my position so my back is facing him. I say nothing.

My thighs burn from the exertion of avoidance. My eyes unseeing, hands steadied above his knees. I think of how close my eight-inch heel came to his checkered canvas Vans. I hate witnessing a side of him I’m sure his girlfriend hasn’t seen. Yet. I feel at once glad she hasn’t seen it and guilty for keeping this knowledge from her. My face flushes with wet hot shame when she asks about the dance. My protective impulse propels me toward, catches me between, honesty and deflection. I’m grateful for the red lights, bright distractions, as I melt into the floor.

The boyfriend spills his drink everywhere, knowing someone else will clean it up. His comfort rests on the course of history. It tends to be women who run for the napkins, blotting up people’s messes.

***

Later that night I split my right-hand middle finger nail in half during a stage set for which I receive no compensation, despite cashless statues nonchalantly staring at my ass or other asses on their phones. Eyes rolling, I bust through the dressing room door behind the DJ booth. If I rip off the split top half, the tender skin of my nail bed will be too exposed, too painful to touch. So I rummage around my bag for superglue, paint it on like nail polish. I blow air absently onto the place where real skin meets a part of me now held together through artifice. I file down superglue, so men won’t detect injury when I press my palms to their chests.

In Virginia, the same thing happened to my big toe, except sharp marble severed the entire nail. After sterilizing the wound, I prop up my left foot and reattach the nail, to the horror of every stripper in the dressing room, except Roxie, a Richmond legend and resident badass who asks if she can take pics for her stripper zine. Of course she makes zines, I think. I say I’d be honored.

When the superglue bond weakens enough to release, I discover another fully formed, albeit bruised, nail has grown beneath the decoy. I paint my new nail midnight blue to hide the evidence of wounding. I know what I’m doing. My body is a magic trick.

***

I fill in little bubbles with black ink. I squint, sigh, stray. To stay in the lines I have to focus really hard. I feel annoyed with myself; I hate how I struggle with the simplest of tasks. Especially ones with no room for creativity, error, or ambivalence. After much effort, the completed ballot maps my scantron dance around deadly machinery, my clandestine confession.

I feel in my body an almost primordial rage against everything Trump stands for, stands in for, the atrocities at once massive, global, intimate, personal.

It is beyond obvious that politicians won’t save this country; they won’t even take a stand against genocide. The political establishment serves empire. Politicians service empire. People hate what they fear but they also love what they fear: death. A drive not back into the womb but toward the aftermath of its annihilation. A trauma felt in the body, the body politic, so deep its only language loads bullets, aims, shoots, misses, pierces its own feet.

Binaries like Eros/Thanatos, creation/destruction, birth/death represent false dualities. Life wants more life. Death wants more death. The system’s suicide mission can’t be stopped with the empty platitudes of liberals, virtue signaling their political apathy. Despite the pantomime of progressive hand-wringing, the puppeteers pull the strings, and the death machine lurches forward. Shadows are starkest in direct sun.

While the left is guilty of false equivalences between different forms of oppression that cannot be analogized because they’re co-articulated, the right is guilty of conflating critical thinking with state violence—then preferring it, the violence. Post-election, conservatives are celebrating the end of what they refer to as an era of “emotional terrorism.” According to the right, even the military is too woke now. They presumably prefer fascist rule to uncomfy feelings, gun triggers to trigger warnings.

Liberals love to feel good about feeling bad, performatively aligning with social movements while curtailing possibilities for freedom by fighting for incorporation as opposed to transformation. It seems to me people also feel bad about feeling good or wanting to feel good. So they barter lives for a signed check, pretending it’s not underwritten by violence—or justifying the fact that it is.

And many more people refuse the terms of this bargain, instead plotting and planning, studying social movement histories, organizing capacious networks of mutual aid, and strengthening the social relationships that make dreaming otherwise possible. Li-Young Lee’s speaker considers the body in vulnerable positions of prayer, of intimate embrace, of one’s responsibility to life in the face of death:

The noise the body makes
when the body meets
the soul over the soul’s ocean and penumbra
is the old sound of up-and-down, in-and-out,
a lump of muscle chug-chugging blood
into the ear; a lover’s
heart-shaped tongue;
flesh rocking flesh until flesh comes;
the butcher working
at his block and blade to marry their shapes
by violence and time;
an engine crossing,
re-crossing salt water, hauling
immigrants and the junk
of the poor. These
are the faces I love [...] 

***

That post-election work shift, I didn’t have the heart to tell the pretty bartender her boyfriend ignored my explicit boundaries, pinching my nipples so hard I involuntarily cried out in pain; I was too ashamed that I didn’t stop the dance immediately afterward. The truth is that trauma can get trapped in couch crevices, clenched by a fist, flung with a word, cracked like a rib. It plays on a loop with a bad signal. Trauma can be weaponized against us, or by us. It can motivate us. Can isolate, freeze, or silence us.

Even so, shared vulnerability is the only way I know to forge deep, and deeply transformative, connections—to resurrect something we understood about how to live before we were taught that our birth was a constitutive severing of oceanic feeling, an originary loss of the gestational union of womb and child, and thus a death of the mother, now a whore, the so-called Other, a psychoanalytic schema and a rite of passage, a divine right to rule over the course of death and the dying.

Complex and contradictory, strip club dynamics are a microcosm of the social order and its grossly differential valuation of life, not an aberrational outlier. And for every five men trying to plant their faces between my butt cheeks, there is another man who might not always agree with me, but at least respects me enough to listen. Clubs can be classrooms, have taught me things about people and politics that academic silos don’t touch. After all, strippers—and sex workers more generally—are often experts at listening.

While by no means monolithic, sex workers learn idiosyncratic languages, read subtle cues, without words: a spectral syntax to make sense of the body’s grammar.

We search for ghosts—the soft spaces that open, give. From there, we might find relief, release, step back into the sun, build something unexpected, imagine life in all its messiness and possibility beyond the walls of dimly lit, neatly contained illusion.

♡♡♡