GO-GO dancers have been fixtures in gay bars and clubs for many years, but male stripping only began to develop in the 1970's. It was then that the Sexual Revolution was washing over society, and the male body was being used to sell products in advertising just as women's bodies had been for decades. It was also the era of the early gay liberation movement, and the male body was becoming an object for erotic entertainment.

The first clubs to feature all-male strip shows were the Gaiety and the Show Palace in New York, as well as others in Chicago, San Francisco, and Washington, D.C. Today, male strippers seem to be everywhere--in big cities and small towns, in the ultra-hip bars of South Beach along with grungy neighborhood establishments in big cities and faceless venues along suburban strips. Current laws regulating this type of live performance are remarkably similar around the United States, the major commonality being that complete nudity and the sale of alcohol are not permitted in the same place at the same time, with Washington, D.C., strangely enough, the major exception. (The laws in Canada are different, as alcohol is permitted to coexist with full nudity.)

The first strip show I ever saw, which was years ago at a club in a seedier but more exciting Times Square, made me want to know who the strippers really were and how they got themselves to do this type of work, where they came from and what they hoped for in life. These questions lingered for some time before I began a study that took me to countless bars and clubs in seven cities. In due course I interviewed more than 150 male strippers, most of whom were actively stripping and a few who had retired. Most of the interviews were face-to-face sessions that lasted around three hours; but some dancers generously sat for up to seven hours of interviewing. In the end, there were no short answers to my questions, nor any one story leading up to their careers as strippers. What follows is a brief overview of the results.

WHO STRIPS?

I found that every dancer comes to this work in a different way; each has a unique background, a distinctive mindset, and varying expectations. Strippers come from many backgrounds. I interviewed men with advanced degrees-including one Ph.D.- and some who only managed to finish high school. Many had completed college and a number of the dancers held responsible positions, including some as teachers. Others were marginally employed. Almost all held another job in addition to stripping. The jobs were both menial and high-level, and were as various as the dancers themselves, from Carl, a middle school teacher, to Jamie, who worked in a music store, to Grant, who was a researcher at NYU.

Most of them come from solid middle-class or working-class families. "My father is a university professor and my mother also has a Ph.D. and teaches at a local college," Wei Han, a dancer...