Hi!
Hello! I finished reading City of Night by John Rechy a few days ago and I’m still thinking about it a lot. I picked it up at a tube station book exchange because the cover intrigued me, and I love tattered and cheap old paperbacks from the 1960’s.
I also liked that the font was tiny and the pages crammed full of words, because I hate this trend in modern publishing of making very large books with only about three very large words on each page. It makes me feel like I’m reading a book aimed at children. Apologies if you enjoy that format. I guess you’re just wrong.
Anyway - City of Night was published in the early 60’s and it’s a mostly autobiographical novel about travelling around various American cities as a lost and restless male escort. It took me a while to finish it because the prose feels very frantic but it’s also very rich; you want to race through the sentences but there’s always going to be something catching your eye, forcing you to slow back down.
I’ve since read a few interviews with Rechy and it turns out he started out as a poet before writing books, which explains a lot. His writing style is quite peculiar and so are the characters he writes about. It is, at heart, a very gay male book, but it’s mostly about outcasts and the people and lives hidden in the margins of cities.
There’s some sex in it but, as often, the sex is usually about everything else. I’d love to write about it more but unfortunately I find it impossible to write about books I’ve really loved, so instead I’ll just say that I think you should read it. It’s beautiful and quite penetrating, and I reckon it’s going to stay with me for a long time. That is all.
A quick note
Hello to paying subscribers specifically! Thanks again for supporting my work and apologies for not replying if you left a little note alongside your subscription. For some reason the usually neat Substack UI is really rubbish when it comes to replying to those so I’ve not been able to do it.
It is extremely not personal and I have read all of them and they were very nice. Thank you! Sorry!
An interlude
A column
If there is one thing to know about me, it is that I have looked at a lot of butts over the past five years. I have, since 2019, seen more butts than most people will see in a lifetime. There’s been dozens of them; hundreds, probably. I lost count a long time ago.
In my defence, I never set out to look at all these butts. They just inserted themselves into my life, gradually at first, then all at once. In fact, my early pole dancing classes were a mostly butt-free zone. As a beginner, you only need to wear reasonably short shorts and a vest. Most of what you learn involves spinning around the pole, and you can wear clothes while you’re doing that.
While walking around the studio after those first few classes, you will probably encounter women wearing very small pants and miniscule bras and you will think: whatever they’re doing over there is none of my business. I’m not even able to climb up the pole yet, I don’t want to know what goes on in those more advanced classes.
Gradually, though, you will end up going to class and getting tired of rolling up your shorts so you can actually try and sit on the pole. You will be annoyed by your t-shirt, which you keep having to tuck into your bra when practising your cradle spin. One day you will go online or to a shop, and you will buy some sports pants and a sports bra, and you won’t even really think about it. It will feel natural.
After all, there is a reason why pole dancers wear very few clothes. The pole is slippery and many of the moves require you to grip to it. Your hands will do a lot of the work, of course, but they cannot do everything. As you start learning trickier moves, you will need to rely on the inside of your knees, your soft but firm inner thighs, the side of your waist below the ribcage but above the hips, the usually tense muscles that sit on top of your shoulders, and every other bit of skin you can think of.
It’s a hierarchy you can spot in any pole dancing studio; the fewer clothes someone is wearing, the more advanced they are likely to be. I always try to mention this to friends who look like they may want to try pole but clearly find it too daunting. No-one is expecting you to turn up to your first class wearing a thong. No-one would judge you for doing it, but it really wouldn’t be necessary.
I usually also make the point about grip, and the need for bare skin to be in contact with the pole, but I sometimes worry that it is a betrayal. Sure, pole dancers aren’t wearing skimpy outfits solely because the sport comes from strip clubs, where women are expected to wear skimpy outfits. That doesn’t mean there isn’t a chicken and egg situation at play.
Pole dancing was invented by strippers and sex workers, and those women wore little when working, so they developed a number of moves one can only do when mostly nude. Merely saying “oh it’s about contact points, nothing more” wouldn’t do those women justice. I do understand the impulse, though; when people ask me what exercise I do, I sometimes go “I, er…” while I try to think about how to answer that question.
Not everyone will like it if a woman admits to being a pole dancer, and some people will like it too much. You’ve got to have some options ready - some justifications, and a narrative. I usually explain that I did a lot of trapeze as a teenager, and fundamentally just enjoy being upside down, and twisted like a pretzel. I usually say that some women take classes in tall heels where they learn to writhe on and around the floor, but I don’t take those. What I do on the pole is closer to acrobatics and circus than it is to stripping.
These explanations are factually correct, but they still don’t tell the full story. I started pole dancing in 2019, in the midst of what I can now definitively call the worst dry spell of my twenties. I won’t go into the details but it is fair to say that I really wasn’t getting any, and it was making me miserable. I didn’t decide to walk into the pole studio as a direct result of this, but do think the timing was more than mere coincidence.
Pole dancing was never going to get me laid, but it allowed me to reconnect with a part of myself that my involuntary celibacy had made me lose. Here was an opportunity to have a lot of my flesh on show and to choose to move sensually, in front of other people. I was craving human touch but instead settled on the feeling of gradually warmer chrome against my skin. I moved rhythmically, followed the music, felt acutely aware of the fact that I was living inside a body - a feeling I thought I’d lost. It made me feel very alive.
I ended up meeting someone some months later and, though we didn’t last, I am yet to experience a drought as severe as the one I went through in 2019. Again, it doesn’t feel coincidental that I have since ended up moving more towards the sport side of pole, and away from sensual choreography. The latter will always hold a special place in my heart, though, as it helped me reconnect with a side of myself I felt I couldn’t access at the time, but I am done with it for now.
Instead, what I have become is strong. It is, it turns out, my favourite thing to be. I can go upside down on the pole with very little effort, and no momentum. I can bend myself in all sorts of shapes, and just hang out there for a while. I can hang from my knees, my thighs, my hands, and several other body parts. As of a few weeks ago, I can now climb up the pole like a monkey, using only my hands and the sole of my feet. It is, on some primal level, immensely satisfying.
There is also something child-like about it all which I can’t help but find gleeful. Of course I could just lift weights, if physical strength was my only goal. Instead, what I get to do once a week is to watch someone do something amazing and seemingly gravity-defying, and to then spend half an hour trying to recreate it. You see a cool thing and then you learn to do the cool thing and at the end, if you’re lucky, you get to do the cool thing yourself. It’s like being seven and having a friend find a great tree at the back of the park by your house and show you how to climb to the top of it, every single week.
This is why I decided to take it to the next level recently, and why I am writing this today. As of last Sunday, I am now a fully qualified beginner’s pole dancing instructor. Soon, I will be the one showing people the cool thing, and telling them how they, too, can do the cool thing. It makes me happier than you can imagine. Still, it took me a little while to decide to write about it. I’ve spent so much time leading this double life; I was worried about what would happen when I came clean.
It’s just all those butts, you know? You can explain that you love something and it makes you feel good and it makes you feel strong, but if people know that you get your butt out once or twice a week around other people who’ve got their butts out, they’re likely to get weird.
It really is a shame, because doing pole dancing is very entertaining, and so is watching it. I follow a lot of dancers on Instagram and sometimes it makes me feel like a bit of a pervert, and that’s just great fun. Who doesn’t want to hurriedly scroll past a video of a woman doing the splits in a tiny bikini when sitting on a crowded train? I couldn’t tell you how many times that’s happened to me. I have no regrets. Pole dancing is great. Butts are great. Marie out.
I've started to really respect people who do pole dancing, and I try not to be sneering and judgemental, because hey: it's a perfectly valid form of exercise, and it takes effort and practice to do! I must admit that, since hitting my 40s, I need to do something about my physical health. The problem is, as a super skinny person, so there's not much of an incentive. Then I started going to the gym....just half-hour sessions on an exercise bike and a rowing machine. And I actually started to feel better! It was the little things: going for long walks without feeling sore afterwards; carrying shopping back from the supermarket; squatting down to retrieve saucepans from the kitchen cupboard. To my disappointment and horror, regular exercise made those everyday things a little more comfortable, and the old feeling of being weak and wobbly came back when I stopped going. I'll never be a serious gym goer - I suspect that my body type is "hobbit on hunger strike" no matter what I do or don't do - but there's a lot to be said for finding some form of regular physical exercise that's fun, or at least bearable. I'm sure that our older selves will thank us for it.