Tiny Shorts, Big Dollars

Dozens of well-dressed men at The Saloon dance club stand in a semi-circle around a glass-encased shower elevated a few feet off the ground, effectively turning the shower into a stage. Thunderous dance music pounds off the nearby dance floor, but none of the men look like they’ll be moving to the dance floor any time soon.

The dim lights explode to life, bathing the shower in light. The water sprays. An emcee babbles on about the show, but the men don’t seem to be listening. They’re waiting for the next performer.

It’s 1 a.m. on a school night and the next performer, University of Minnesota freshman Chris Jackson, is ready to take center stage.

“Here’s Flip!” the emcee yells into the microphone.

Jackson, whose stripper name is Flip, appears from a curtain behind the shower stage clad in a pair of tiny black shorts. He walks to the beat of the dance music and steps into the shower. Water sluices over Jackson’s well-tanned, well-muscled body. His blond hair slicks to his head as water streams down his body. His hips begin to move rhythmically to the music. Jackson smiles. His hands wander over the flat planes of his body.

Jackson has the audience’s full attention.

Suddenly Jackson, a long-time gymnast, flips onto his hands in the shower, his legs straight up in the air. The audience cheers. Jackson begins doing handstand pushups under the stream of pouring water, earning him more whoops from the crowd.

A dozen men approach the shower, sliding well-worn bills through a slot in the shower. When a twenty-dollar bill slips through the slot Jackson again flips onto his hands. With one hand he slowly slides off his black shorts to reveal a black thong underneath.

Jackson’s fingers slip under the strap of the thong and, in one smooth movement, he slides the thong off his tan, muscular legs.

Jackson is naked, still standing on his hands. The audience applauds. The lights go dark and the show is over. The dance music is still pounding.

The student behind the thong

The next day, clad in a hoodie sweatshirt and jeans and curled up on a brown sofa in his dorm, Jackson explains how he became a male stripper.

“Well, it was one of those things I used to joke about with my friends,” Jackson says. “Then I came here to Minneapolis [from California] and I didn’t know there was a male dance company here. I had a couple people approach me at a club saying, ‘Hey, you should be a dancer.’ I was just like, ‘Fine, I’ll give it a try.’”

Interviewing for a job as a male stripper with JDE Studios, much like other exotic dancing companies, is a little different than interviewing for most jobs, Jackson explains.

“He had me take my shirt off and then he goes, ‘Okay, try this on.’ And he holds up a thong.” Jackson laughs. “I’m like, ‘You mean over my pants?’ And he was like ‘No.’” With no changing room in sight, Jackson dropped his pants and his modesty and tried on the thong for size.

But when the subject turns to how much money Jackson makes nightly, his modesty returns.

“It’s not usually a good thing to say what you walk away with,” Jackson says. With further probing Jackson admits he never leaves with less than a hundred dollars and regularly makes it into the $200-a-night range, and sometimes more, between base pay and tips.

“I have a blast every time I dance,” he says. “I wouldn’t still be doing it if I didn’t have fun.”

Jackson sheepishly admits he enjoys the attention he gets from both male and female patrons while he’s performing. “I think it’s the attention and the fact that I have fun being somebody I’m not.”

While dancing as Flip on bar tops, in showers, or talking to patrons, Jackson says he’s more witty, outgoing, and confident. The confidence he feels as Flip has leaked over into his “regular life,” Jackson reports.

“It’s weird because now my friends know me as Flip,” he says.

While his friends may know him as Flip, his family does not. They have no idea that he is a male stripper, Jackson says, or that he’s not one hundred percent heterosexual.

“It would kill them,” Jackson says, who sees himself an anomaly in his conservative Christian family.

But Jackson says he has no regrets about stripping. In fact, he explains, there may even be some advantages.

“Most people’s worst nightmare is to be standing naked in front of a room of people,” Jackson says, laughing. “I guess I don’t have to worry about that one.”

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This story appeared in a local magazine on Wednesday, May 6, 2005.

Josh H. can be reached at joshcentral@hotmail.com.