The changeroom at Remington’s Men of Steel, Toronto’s only all-male fully-nude licensed strip club, was underground, down a spiralling black stairwell and past a door marked “Staff Only.”

This was the building’s unfinished basement: exposed support beams, piles of scrap lumber, naked fluorescent lights, nested buckets, puddles that would never drain into the concrete floor. A freestanding bank of lockers was pushed into a corner. A mirror leaned against the lockers. I stood alone in front of the mirror in the spring of 2010: a skinny twenty-year-old daubing drugstore concealer on his chin acne, rubbing his fingers over the patches he had missed while shaving. Not a sight that filled me with confidence. I needed a second opinion.

Just beside the “Staff Only” door at the bottom of the stairwell was the public bathroom. Here, the floor and walls were black lacquer, and the lighting was warm and dim. In this mirror, I was a different story. My pale, blemished skin now glowed golden. My eyes were shadowy beneath my brows, inscrutable. The overhead light dappled my lean musculature, making me seem fuller, more powerful. I was a pale column of flesh emerging from inky shadows.

I had seen an ad in Fab Magazine putting out a call for new dancers, promising weekly earnings of up to $1,000. The idea of that much money was intoxicating—I had recently been fired from two restaurant jobs in quick succession. But more than that, I wanted to be naked on that stage, touching my body, serving myself up for strangers in the dark. I had always been a strict rule-follower, snobbish and a bit prissy. Now I wanted to break the rules. I remember my dad warning me when I was a teenager: “No one likes a prude.”

When I showed up for the amateur night tryouts, I was the only amateur in attendance. Two songs, no full nudity. Afterwards, the manager said, “Sure, you can come back and dance for us.” He said I would need to buy myself a burlesque license from the City of Toronto, which would cost me $300, and I would need to come up with a stripper name.

I have always been a powerful secret-keeper, as many latent homosexuals learn to be. My sexuality was a secret I kept even from myself through most of my adolescence. Here’s a secret I have kept from my dad for more than fifteen years: in the spring of 2010, I told him I owed money for rent, which was true. I asked for an emergency loan of $300, which he gave me. But instead of spending it on rent, I spent it on my license. My rent was still owing. I would need to earn the money back.

And so, here I was.

Another dancer came into the bathroom, perhaps to check himself out in the beautiful mirror. His name was Ash. Ash was long and wiry with eyes like a street dog. He asked, “Is it your first night?” with genuine warmth. I said it was. He held out his hand. There was a white pill in his palm. “Take this!” he said.

I told Ash no. He pressed me cheerfully, but still I refused. His face then grew hard. His friendliness dissolved. He never spoke to me again.

Before I set foot in Remington’s, I had set some boundaries for myself. I wrote them in a diary I have since lost. One was that I wouldn’t have sex with a client. Another was that I wouldn’t do drugs. Alongside these rules, both of which I would eventually break, I had written a few paragraphs of anguished introspection, trying to make sense of what I was about to do, to reconcile my erotic compulsion with the higher sort of person I was used to being. Maybe, I wrote in my diary, I could be a kind of angel. I’ll shine my light in a den of iniquity, and everyone will be better for having met me.

So I left Ash in the bathroom and climbed the spiralling staircase, as angelically as I could manage, to start my first shift, to shine my light and earn back my $300. The DJ asked me if I’d come up with a stripper name. I said that I had: Christian. “That’s a good one,” he said.

The DJ welcomed Christian to the stage, and I performed my set. Sets on the mainstage were three songs long, and the typical structure was this: during the first song, you take off your shirt; during the second, your pants come off; during the third, you get your dick out.

Maybe I thought getting naked onstage would transform me, from good to naughty, from prudish to worldly. Maybe the anticipation of that transformation was what I found so erotic. In the end, hooking my thumbs under the elastic waistband of my briefs and pushing them down was easy. If there was a transformation, it didn’t feel like much at all.

***

Later that night, a guy in his forties wearing a Maple Leafs jersey took me to a private room. Dancers could make some tips during their mainstage shows, but the private rooms were where we made our real money. It was a bank of eight curtained-off vestibules, each the size of an H&M dressing room with a bench to sit on. Red bulbs lit the entire area. Officially, there was no physical contact allowed between dancers and clients in these rooms; a sign on the wall said so. But no one was checking what went on behind these curtains. It was just the dancer, the client, and the bench under the red light. The cost was twenty dollars per song, payable by the client directly to the dancer.

Leafs guy didn’t want much of anything physical in the private room, as it turned out. There were two types of clients at Remington’s, broadly speaking. The first type just wanted to get up close to some male flesh, for the pure carnal thrill of it—I considered this the healthier of the two types. The second type never seemed to care much about touching; they just wanted someone to talk to, to rent a boyfriend for a short time. They seemed, to me, sad and broken. In the six months I spent dancing at Remington’s, I made most of my money from this second type of man.

I took off my shirt and gyrated for Leafs guy a little, but soon he patted the bench, and I sat next to him. He talked to me about work, his siblings, the Leafs. He was hammered. A melancholy drunk. The music kept playing, and I counted the songs in my head.

When the fifteenth song played, I interrupted him. “I just want to let you know that this is song fifteen. That’s three hundred.” It was a mixture of profes-sional courtesy and pity that compelled me to say it. He didn’t hear me at first, or pretended not to. I repeated myself, trying to sound warm and firm.

His face crumpled in slow motion. He leaned away from me, brows knitted and mouth slack. “But we were just talking,” he said.

The manager had prepared me for clients who refused to pay. He said it doesn’t happen often, but when it does, you just go straight to security, and they settle it for you.

For a few moments, I stayed with Leafs guy, gently insistent. I told him that’s how it worked; he needed to pay. He reeled and said nothing. I told him I was going to get security, and I did.

It was unfair, really, to call security on this man. He posed no flight risk, and no physical threat—he could barely stand—but the dark look of grief in his eyes was horrible to me. He seemed to have been deconstructed at the cellular level by my betrayal. He could no longer speak. I explained the situation to the security guard, who didn’t question it. Without raising his voice, the guard told Leafs guy to produce the money. With his eyes on me, mouth still slack, brow still knitted in anguish, Leafs guy pulled the bills out of his wallet, handed them to the guard, and left the bar, swaying.

***

Not an angel, then, and shining no light. I was there to listen to lonely men, and let them touch me if they wanted, and to keep count of the songs. The angel fantasy faded quickly—hadn’t I known it was ridiculous when I wrote it? Still, I held onto a feeling that I didn’t belong to this world, but rather floated above it. Whenever I wanted, I would fly away and not return.

As the months passed, I built up a roster of regulars.

Wyatt—I’ve changed his name, of course, and everyone else’s—only wanted to lick my armpits and suck my dick for the span of exactly twenty songs, once a week. I never had to remind him how many songs had passed. As the twentieth song ended, he rose, thanked me, and handed over four hundred dollars. Wyatt discovered my real name when a review for a play I was in appeared in an alt-weekly, with an accompanying photo. He preferred my stripper name, though. You seem more like a Christian, he told me.

Dr. Ben lived in Egypt, but every couple of months, he visited Toronto for a week and spent every night flooding Remington’s with seemingly inexhaustible stacks of cash. “Get ready,” another dancer told me the first time he visited that spring. “You’re his type.” Dr. Ben was eager to get me into his hotel room with Mikel, another athletic white boy. He peeled twenty-dollar bill after twenty-dollar bill off of his stack, pressing them into my hand, promising more, more, if only I’d say yes. I knew he would want sex in the hotel, and I was still holding fast to the rules I had written in my diary. I told him no.

Evan was in love with me. If I mentioned a snack I was craving, he would produce it the next time I saw him. He started asking me to dinner outside the club. He told me he saw a future between us and that he wouldn’t have a problem if I continued to be a stripper while being his lover. I didn’t become his lover, but I didn’t push him away, either. Finally, he insisted that he should be allowed to kiss me. When I refused, he threatened to kill himself. I said that was the stupidest thing I had ever heard. I didn’t see him anymore after that.

Leafs guy never came back.

I never got particularly close with the other dancers. One night in the summer, Ash pointed his finger at me from across a circle of mingling dancers and clients. “I don’t like this guy,” he said to someone. “I don’t trust him.”

I didn’t tell anyone outside the club where I was working. When my dad asked me during that time what I was doing for money, I told him I was a barback at someplace seedy downtown. I was evasive when he pressed for details, but evasion was something I had taught him to expect from me, so it probably didn’t arouse suspicion. I still haven’t told my dad about Remington’s. I always thought a time would come when it made sense to do it. I imagine that’s coming up soon. When August came, I told management that I was starting school in a new city, and I’d be ending my time at the club. I asked for my license back. Management kept all the license cards bearing our faces and real names in a filing cabinet in the back office. Two weeks after my last shift, I came back to the bar to pick mine up.

They said I was welcome to come back on my summer break, and I said maybe. With my card in hand, I stood at the top of the staircase and turned back to the dark club one last time. The people on the floor were mostly silhouettes, illuminated intermittently by strobes and roving coloured lights. I made out Wyatt sitting at the far end of the bar. He saw me and straightened up in his stool. He raised his hand to wave, but I turned and left without saying goodbye. I flew away.