At Johnny’s, men are both the patrons and dancers.
And at Club 825. And The Boardwalk. And Moby Dick. As host of the country’s third-largest homosexual population, South Florida is also home to a vibrant gay strip club industry.
“There isn’t that much difference between the gay and heterosexual side of the business,” says Johnny Moses, the dean of local gay strip bar owners. “On both sides of the fence, sex is the oldest profession in the world.”
The biggest difference is that gay clubs don’t make nearly as much money as their hetero counterparts.
On average, a gay strip bar grosses $10,000 a week in revenues during the high season, the same as a downscale nude bar on a bad week, say Moses and others familiar with the business.
Unlike heterosexual strip bars, gay clubs usually don’t have a cover charge. They rely heavily on liquor sales _ although they don’t bump up prices like other nude bars.
A $1.50 draft beer and an occasional $1 tip to a stripper is all it takes to watch all-male revues.
In the highly competitive business of gay bars, the “house boys” are just one additional feature to gain the edge, an extra aimed at luring in some of the estimated 305,000 gay men in South Florida.
“There are 30 gay bars in Fort Lauderdale alone,” Moses says. “The competition is pretty fierce. So, as a bar owner, you need to come up with something unique.”
South Florida boasts eight gay strip bars, four in the Miami area and four in the Fort Lauderdale area. Each employs 10 to 20 dancers who take home an average $100 a night in tips.
These bars usually fill a well-defined niche. At 825, on Sunrise Boulevard in Fort Lauderdale, the dancers are beefy, weightlifter types. At The Boardwalk on Collins Avenue in North Miami Beach, they are young, thin, hairless and dainty. Johnny’s, in Fort Lauderdale, is somewhere in between.
Tony, 23, has performed at several gay strip clubs in the past two years. He once worked as a stevedore at Port Everglades but quit to take up his current job. Stripping, he said, is easier.
“At the port, I once worked 36 hours in a row for $9 an hour,” he said. “Now, I work five hours a night, and I get $500 a week easy.”
Johnny’s is divided into two parts. On one side is a “hustler” bar with pool tables, where men can drink a beer or chat with a half dozen male prostitutes who frequent the place. On the other side, in a cramped, dark room, house boys strip on a small stage.
After getting dressed behind a screen, a dancer takes the stage, usually in character: a neatly pressed sailor in Navy whites, a thong-wearing beach bum or a beefy cowboy sporting a half-gallon hat.
On the hypnotic riffs of techno music, he dances suggestively, not unlike his female counterparts in straight clubs, but with a major difference _ he can’t take it all off.
“They’ve got to leave on their G-strings,” says Jim Sherman, a divorced father of eight who manages Johnny’s performers. “Nobody shows his package in my bar. No, sir! That’s illegal.”
By law, in most parts of South Florida, strippers cannot display their genitals. Although females are generally allowed to strip naked, they aren’t supposed to part their legs. Men, on the other hand, must keep on a G-string.
“It’s absurd,” says Moses, who was raised in a strict Southern Baptist family. “And discriminatory. The cops will write us up if one of my boys happens to pull his G-string backward a little bit.”
Although there are no friction dances and table dances in gay strip bars, there is a lot of touching. House boys get tips while dancing on stage, but when their act is finished, they work the room. They glide from patron to patron _ usually older men and a few transvestites _ allowing them to feel their usually rippled chests and arms for $1 or $5 tips. During this ritual, they must keep their pants or shorts on. Some, however, will get an extra dollar by allowing a customer to peek inside their waistbands.
“In gay strip bars, good muscle tone is the dancer’s most important asset,” says Sherman, who sports a Marine-type crew haircut. “But no private dances here. That’s too dangerous. This is a respectable place.”
Strippers, Moses says, saved his business. When he first opened Johnny’s, he only served liquor. But five years ago, the bar started losing money. He was about to shut it down but tried one last-ditch effort: He brought in exotic dancers. Since he didn’t have to pay them _ like their female colleagues, male strippers work only for tips _ all he had to do was build a stage.
“Business picked up by 50 percent within the first week,” he said. “I didn’t like it because I prefer leaving things to the imagination. But without that gimmick, we’d not be in business.”
