The online diary of a gay courtesan.

Dear Devon,

I was wondering… Is there anyone who should absolutely not dance? I mean, other than looks wise, is there something about a person that should be a red flag to not get into it? My sister is interested in dancing, but I think she lives too dangerously to be good at it.

- Big Brother

Dear Big Brother,

I can definitely appreciate why you would have trepidation. Aside from the fact that there are negative temptations, potentials for danger, and sharks in the dark waters, this is also your little sister. Perhaps she isn’t all that innocent, but you can’t help but be protective of her, right? It’s natural.

I am not going to dismiss your concerns (because of all the many reasons that should alarm you); however, more than the external influences, the primary fear I have is the part where you say your sister “lives too dangerously.” What does that mean? She rides bicycles without a helmet? Or, if that is the least of your worries, does she have a history of making choices that have put her in with people or practices that are beyond wreckless/careless and bordering/converging on self-destructive?

I can tell you this right now: People who go into adult entertainment because of desperation are walking down a dangerous road. I have said this before, but it bears repeating. People who go into any form of adult entertainment (dancing, videos, sex work, etc.) because of drug habits, alcohol abuse, a sense of hopelessness, suicidal tendencies, or any other form of severe life disruptions are placed at greater risk of making choices that put them directly in the way of harm. If your sister has a preponderance for being drunk or high, she should not go into exotic dancing. There are too many people who will take advantage of that. But I’m altruistic in this detail, perhaps. I know lots of dancers who drink and get high, and who have never been accosted… but still… the risk is so much greater.

Aside from people who would be coming to the career out of desparation, people who have severe self-esteem issues should be careful. If you get affrimation, it may help you (temporarily), but if you get rejection, it may further damage you. It’s probably 50-50 there. Personally, I wish that people of the stripper mentality wouldn’t go into exotic dancing, just because it makes everything more difficult for me. But strippers gotta eat too, I suppose.

Finally, and this is something you have to be truthful to yourself about, if you have any problems with being touched intimately, you should definitely not become an exotic dancer (or any other type of adult entertainer). People with a history of sexual violence or abuse being perpetrated on them should consider carefully whether or not they are emotionally and psychologically able to tolerate sexual touches. There are different types of touch, and you need to be realistic about what you can tolerate, and to what degree.

Devon,

What was it like when you first danced naked?

- C

Hello  C!

Well, there are different firsts. When I first danced in any state of undress at all (back in those innocent beginning days – HA!), I was standing backstage in a thong on the verge of throwing up. I heard them call my name, and for about three seconds I just stood there (remember: at that time I was still struggling with anorexia), fearing that people would boo, hiss, laugh, etc. After another short breath, I stepped out onto the stage, and got dizzy for about half a moment. But then it passed as I started moving: I fell into performance mode. And then it was fine.

Fast forward to Swinging Richards: That was my first experience with total nudity. Again, I was scared. But not to be naked. It was because the other dancers were so intimidating, not to mention that the manager is gruff. But again, I went into performance mode, and the cold sweat on my palms stopped distracting me. It was liberating, actually.

The next first was Secrets. Not only are you nude there, but you have to maintain an erection. I really had zero butterflies. By that point it was no longer a point of anxiety. Actually, I enjoy dancing at Secrets more than Swinging Richards. There’s something oddly satisfying about being able to play with yourself in front of people (which is absolutely not allowed on stage at Richards, at least not once your undies come off). By the end of the night I can’t stand touching my penis anymore. It’s numb.

Anyway, once you get past the initial trepidation, nudity is natural and has a healing effect (at least for me). Being completely “vulnerable” forces you to really know yourself (or to completely retreat behind walls… it’s a rather 50-50 chance you take). Beyond that, the only complaints I have about dancing nude at this point is when the damned clubs crank the A/C. It gets COLD!

I ate recently at a Greek restaurant in Atlanta called Taverna Plaka. It was an amazing experience, not only because of the food, but because of the process involved in eating it. I was reminded of how wonderful food can be, and the way it is celebrated at every meal in places like France and Italy. It really was wonderful. If you ever go, ask for Tatiana. She is sweet, and is very good at describing the food.

This was the first time I’d ever gotten to grind my own hummus. The chick peas, olive oil, lemon, herbs, and garlic were brought to me in a wooden mortar with a wooden pestel. The process of mashing it up and smelling the aromas comingling was so satisfying. And watching Tatiana set my flaming cheese on fire was fun. I’d forgotten how much I love interacting with food. Food is a treasure – it really is! As someone who has dealt with eating disorders, I cannot stress enough how important it is to not feel guilty about eating, to enjoy your food and appreciate it.

I had the lamb chops, and they were amazing. They were like marshmallows. They were soft and spongy, yet they had a good, meaty texture, and they wrapped around my teeth when I bit into them. And the dessert, Ek Mek, was just about the most decadent piece of heaven I’ve had in my mouth since Alan. (Whoops! That was dirty… but there you have it!)

So, why go on and on about a meal? Because it made me feel real joy. The tables were stable and sturdy, and there were signs posted all around that read “Dance At Your Own Risk.” People get drunk and dance on the table tops! This is what eating is supposed to be: Fun.

Too often in the United States were have a horrible relationship with our food. We either wolf it down while working (or thinking about anything other than the food), consume fake substitutions for food, eat it alone in our cars or some gray cubicle, and generally take it for granted. But food is the stuff of life, man! You are not only what you eat, you are how you eat!

Look at the Mediterranean peoples: They have low cancer rates, low obesity and obesity-related complications, long lives, and a tradition of forming life-long interpersonal relationships. They have a reputation for being friendly, loud, happy, passionate, and generous. How can you not be if you eat communally and dance on table tops to live music? These people live to eat, whereas in the United States we tend to eat to live.

I am feeling such a deep connection to my belly right now, and it is completely invigorating. So invigorating that I need to nap before I get ready to go to the club. I am not writing this blog as some kind of shameless plug for a restaurant that doesn’t even know I exist (although one of the waiters came to me and asked in broken English if I was Devon Hunter – how funny!). I’m writing this blog, because I was reminded that a passionate life is a beautiul one. I sincerely hope that you are doing what makes you happy in this life, and that you are sharing that wealth with as many people as possible. Life is a miracle - EAT!

The question has come up (not worded exactly this way, but pretty close), “How did you maintain a balance between staying small and getting bigger?” In other words, how do anorexia and Dysmorphia co-exist? Well, to be frank, they don’t balance, and they don’t co-exist. It’s like being pulled apart – I would actually feel that kind of shearing force in my brain. It was horrible, and looking back I don’t know why I held onto that turmoil so long.

Ups and Downs

Constant fretting was a part of my life because of these two situations both vying for my attention. I desparately wanted to put on lean muscle, but every time I inched up even two-tenths of a pound on my digital scale, I would figure out which meals I could skip “to make up for it.” It doesn’t make any sense. I knew it didn’t, even when I was in the middle of that terrible dichotomy. I wanted the look of muscle without the numerical “score” of my weight going up (I suppose it’s a game, like Hearts, where the fewer points you have, the better?). At any rate, it was a dizzying, confusing, and frustrating teetering act.

And it had other repercussions, other than my body composition. I am already prone to mood swings; however, when you do not eat properly your body systems get out of kilter. All of them. Including your hormones. One hormone in particular, serotonin, is in your gut. This hormone affects mood. If you do not eat properly this hormone gets out of balance, and then your moods get out of balance too. So, my eating disorder also escalated my emotional stress. I’ve been blessed to never have had any major injuries – I can presume only that taking vitamins protected me from difficiency disorders, because my teeth, bones, hair, skin, connective tissues, and all other systems seem fine to this day. If I’d not been at least taking vitamins, I could very well be falling apart already. That happened to my friend Cheryl. She was anorexic for 18 years, never took supplements, and now her teeth, bones, and joints are a wreck.

Janet Jackson + Chris Evans = hot mess

One day I was looking in the mirror for the 497th time that day, and a flash of insight caught me off guard: I was trying to blend two people, whom I looked nothing like, together into one body. Although it hurts my feelings a little when people remind me of this, I am not, in fact, a beautiful Black woman. Also, although I am a White man, I do not look anything like Chris Evans. I don’t understand exactly what amalgamation I was trying for, but recreating myself as a collage of these two was definitely not working well. I look back on this moment, and I realize that it was the instance where I almost pulled myself out of this vortex by myself. But something happened immediately afterwards that distracted me from this little thunder bolt of logic…

Stupid boy

I was with the only guy I had a long term relationship with during college. He was a pudgy little dude with crazy brown hair, and I thought he was absolutely marvelous. When he poked my belly and said, “Getting a little soft around the center, huh?” I took him seriously. It didn’t occur to me that he was being facetious. Over the next few weeks I dropped from 120 pounds to 110. I started passing out in dance class. It was scary. The pic of me that I just posted where I weighed 125 pounds is bad enough – at my worst I weighed 15 pounds less than in that picture. You could see my spine and hip bones. And I thought I was staggeringly beautiful (for a few moments each day between long bouts of self-loathing).

Whether it’s his “fault” for upsetting me, or my “fault” for being so sensitive, or no one’s “fault” at all, that “soft around the center” comment was the driving force behind my eating habits for the next eight years. The effect of the comment lasted years longer than the relationship with Shane.

Emotional instability and therapy

One of the long-term side effects of this “balance” between being small and getting big is that my moods shift very easily and quickly. I feed off the moods of others without realizing it, until after the change has already happened. Also, if I get hungry, I get mean. If I’m ever randomly rude to you just say, “Bitch, do you need a doughnut?” I probably do need to eat something, but a doughnut won’t be my first choice (although the humor will make me smile). My rages would get out of control particularly when I felt people were being mean to me without provocation.

I finally went to a therapist while I was at UCLA. I went because of an incident during my African drumming class. One of the other students (who never attended class, and didn’t know the rhythms) told me I was defiling the drums with my “White hands,” and proceded to push me away from the instrument while grabbing for the mallet in my hand. Well, I was already feeling angry about something else. She tipped me over the edge, and I vented all over her in front of about 100 drummers and dancers. It didn’t help that she was Black, and that everyone knew I was from South Carolina. It immediately became a race issue to them without me ever intending it. They didn’t know what I was already contending with, so on the outside, without any insight into me, I understand why they would assume that. It hurt my feelings they would jump to that conclusion, but it does make sense. I was forced to enter “anger management” classes.

I’m glad. It gave me the opportunity to finally address some of my demons. From that point forward I started improving. But it still took a few years after I completed that therapy to finally let go of my desire to have Janet’s waist and Chris’s chest.

“Better” days

Everything started improving consistently and quickly after I left my last boyfriend in October, 2006. You want to know what finally forced me to let go of alot of my obsessive compulsions? Exhaustion. Pure and simple. I’d been working seven part time jobs to support myself and Scott. When I found out he’d cheated on me with about 30 people while I was out working day and night, and that he was opening credit cards in my name (as well as hiding the bills, maxing them out, and then not making payments), I finally had to work so much that there simply wasn’t time to worry about what I looked like. It didn’t matter if I made the bed or washed the dishes. It didn’t matter if my books were alphabetized by subject/author/title. Suddenly avoiding bankruptcy mattered a whole lot more.

During the months after I left Scott I simply got out of the habit of worrying about my appearance so much. I had a whole new catastrophe to work on (and on a dark level the martyr in me loved the torture). Nearing two-and-a-half years later, I’ve become completely financially independent again, with my credit score being even better than before Scott’s interference. And ironically my eating disorder gave way to fiscal survival. It seems that all I needed was a crisis severe enough to completely distract me from calories.

So, the eating disorder is gone. Done. Good riddance. There are still some traces of the Dysmorphia, in that I can’t see how I’m shaped when I look at myself in a mirror. I see only a flat shape with muddled undulations on the surface. Only in pictures, which are removed from the same space-time as my viewing of myself, can I see me. I need the removal of “now.” By looking back a few moments into the past at how I looked then, I see my curves and proporations. But even then I still don’t trust that 10 seconds later the same holds true. This is getting better as I (slowly) mature.

I look forward to the day, not when my see-saw is balanced, but when I decide I’m no longer interested in the ride.

Hello everyone! Wow. I took an entire week off from posting – a few of you have emailed to make sure I’m okay. Yes, all is well – I was on the road alot last week, and wasn’t able to post in that time. But I’m back now, and I have a few ideas up my sleeve.

Tomorrow I will have a posting about Swinging Richards (a good one, don’t worry!), but before I address it, I want to go through the process of explaining better how I got to this point (in terms of what I will tell you later about Swinging Richards).

People remark with some frequency about the level of fitness I have, and sometimes they will even acknowledge how difficult it is to achieve/maintain; however, for the most part I find that people think there is some magic/science that gives me some advantage that they will never have. This is simply not true: For people without metabolic disorders and other health scenarios that preclude fitness, I would venture to say that the lion’s share of people can achieve their goals to whatever measure they are willing to invest in doing so.

I have been working out (not necessarily properly) since I was 15 years old. To quote “Hamlet 2:” “It doesn’t matter how much talent we lack, as long as we have enthusiasm!” I was spinning my wheels for the most part. What you simply must embrace in your fitness adventure is that DIET IS 70% OF SUCCESS. Exercise is 20% and rest is 10% of success. If you do not eat properly, you simply will not achieve visible (and in some cases, practical) gains. While I was anorexic I was doing nothing but putting myself at risk of injury.

So, the results I have achieved are not only recent, but lately they are also sudden. This has been a very long journey (with no end in sight just yet), so what I want this entry to do is bring attention to a fact that most patrons don’t always appreciate, but which most adult entertainers struggle with constantly: Achieving and/or maintaining the look demanded by our profession requires us to have a job to have a job. Fitness, and the various means people use to attain it (or the semblance of it), is an enormous undertaking. When people use the metaphor “carved in stone,” they are right: It is a slow, painstaking process. The rock evolves slowly into the statue, the landscape erodes over eons.

I’m not going to go back to when I was 15. For one, I don’t have digital copies of the pics to do so, and for two, I have experienced enough changes since 2005 to make the point that even three years is sometimes only just barely enough time to get results. I say this not to discourage people on their fitness journey, but to emphasize that patience, consistency, and discipline are the means by which you gain advanced results.

In November, 2006 I was still at the beginning of my total recovery from anorexia. I still weighed only 125 pounds or so, but I wasn’t obsessed with mirrors and calories anymore. I was very lean and cut, but I just couldn’t add any mass. I was still working out too frequently with the same body parts, and not eating anywhere near enough (though more than I had been). This is a picture (click to enlarge) from a theater production I was involved in at the time. You can see that I’m thin and strong, but rather shapeless and out of proportion in some ways. This is a very honest look at how Dysmorphic Disorder (there, I finally said it!) brings a warped sense of priority to some parts of the body, while ignoring others.

By February, 2007 I was trying to gain weight. The problem is that I was doing the workouts by Cathe Freidrich, which (in the series of workouts I was using for the most part) focus on very, very high numbers of reps. You cannot gain muscle if you do high reps with high weight for a long period of time (the muscles don’t get enough of a chance to heal and build). Tone = high reps, low weight. Mass = low weight, high reps. Athletic training = a wide VARIETY of challenges. Match this with the fact that I was living off of protein bars and shakes, and you have a recipe for disaster. I went to the hospital four times in 2007 because of exhaustion, malnutrition, dehydration, and infections. I have never been sick so much or so often as when I was living off of whey protein products. You must have a balanced diet. In addition to illness, I gained fat, not just muscle. By November, 2007 I was up to 165 pounds, but I was sick, lethargic, and hurting. My body frame does not comfortably support that much non-lean weight.

In 2008 I finally started getting on track with what would become the various programs that helped me begin to achieve my fitness goals. January-March, 2008 I improved my diet (with immediate improvements to my health) and went to see a personal trainer. She helped me bring balance to my workouts, and her sessions were so demanding that I had no choice but to eat properly. However, I was still eating too much sugar (in the form of fruit), and although I was getting stronger, I wasn’t getting leaner. The lighting in this picture is flattering – but if you look closely around my abdomen, you will see that I still have a girdle of sorts around my lower abs.

April-June, 2008 I did P90X religiously. It is a fantastic program for those who are already at an intermediate level or higher, in terms of fitness. I saw all sorts of incredible gains in strength and definition. I leaned back down, and I went from doing 10 sets of 20 push-ups and 7 pull-ups to 10 sets of 30-32 push-ups and 18-22 pull-ups. However, there is something you need to know about P90X: Its philosophy is that you need constant variety. That means you also need variety away from P90X. July-September, 2008 I did P90X again, but only sporadically. It was beginning to hurt me. All the calisthenics was creating repetitive injuries. Remember, you need rest, so that you can rebuild. I hit a plateau around September, and that’s when I finally had to go to the gym (something I had always, up to that point, loathed and feared, because of the over-machismo horseshit I’ve always experienced in them).

The new variety of exercises immediately began paying off. October-December, 2008 I was able to allow my body to heal from the P90X, which although amazing, is far, far too intense to maintain without variety for more than 90 days. If you are going to do P90X I would suggest doing it for a rotation, then going away from it for a rotation. By taking a break from the calisthenics and moving to heavier freeweights and machines, I was able to work muscles from angles new to my body. I had never used gyms before with any consistency, because I find them dirty and intimidating places where rude people socialize too much and workout too little. I also was always afraid that people looking at me were thinking, “Who is that little turd, and why is he bothering?” What I find now is that when people watch me, I get the impression it’s because they’re interested in what I’m doing. Switching to the gym allowed me to fill out some more, and to continue improving my body composition (lean mass to fat ratio).

January, 2009 has been pretty low-key. I’ve needed to rest, and I’ve not been allowing guilt to bother me (too much) about taking my time getting back to it after the holidays. However, I’m about to start going back to my trainer again. I’ve done a rotation at the gym by myself, but the exercises weren’t as complicated as what I need to shock my system. I’ll go see Carrie again, because she’s brilliant at plyometric training. When I saw her last year, I was working out only with her. This time I’ll see her, but still go to the gym as well. What has surprised me is that recently, although my working out and caloric intake are both DOWN, I have had a growth spurt and filled out anyway. That’s the power of rest. The pic to the left was taken January 23, 2009. The one on the right was taken January 25, 2009. I hope you will understand now why I said in various posts recently that my pics on this site no longer look like me.

Going forward I think I can finally say that after well over 10 years of working out, I am getting to the point where I am looking the way I’ve always wanted to. I eat what I want, when I want: The anorexia is completely gone. I don’t even have the inkling anymore of thinking that not eating is okay. I’m proud that I’ve done all of this without steroids. I’m still working through the process of being able to look at myself and see me as I am, but I do feel more confident and relaxed in the presence of the Swinging Richards gods. Which brings me back around to why I wrote this long entry: I have some good news to share with you tomorrow.