Joe Holyoake’s bizarre evening with The Dreamboys.
“Are we here ironically or not?” one of our number asked. It’s a question that pervades our very being as millennial, London wankers. But it felt particularly apt to ask it while sat on foldaway chairs in a garish, carpeted nightclub as we waited for tonight’s male strip troupe, Dreamboys, to come out on stage and unveil themselves before us. We had all bought tickets for my boyfriend’s birthday, but truthfully, I think we were all genuinely excited for the show. There’s something very kitsch about male stripping, absent of that tragic air of desperation that surrounds lapdancing and the like. I envisioned an evening in the company of out-of-town mums, aunties, sisters, and other wry gay men. All of us whooping on glistening adonises with a glass of rosé in our grasp.
Well, we slightly overestimated the amount of gay men that were going to be there. You could count the others on two hands, sparingly sprinkled throughout like croutons in a viscous soup of lashed-up women. There was even one straight man opposite us who looked like he’d been dragged along by his wife. He spent the majority of the show slowly tearing the label off his Carlsberg bottle as it dawned on him that he probably wasn’t going to make it home for the second half of Match of The Day.
The evening kicked off with a shit buffet. It does feel a slightly cheap blow to criticise the food offering at a strip show. After all, you wouldn’t go into The Ivy and complain afterwards that the waiters weren’t built like greased up 1980’s wrestlers.
But, at the same time, I don’t think I have been so underwhelmed by a buffet before. And I’ve been to a Toby Carvery. Do you remember that Channel 4 TV program You Are What You Eat? In which ‘Dr’ Gillian McKeith accumulated all of the contestant’s food they would normally eat in a week on one greying trestle table. She would then present it to the horrified participant, who in turn would say something like ‘wow, I didn’t realise I ate so many scotch eggs!’. Well, that was this buffet looked like. A banal blanket of beige, comprised of plain pasta, once-tepid samosas, and what I am 99% sure were ham and rice sandwiches.
Still, as I said, no-one’s coming for the food. No, we were all here, ironically or not, for the Dreamboys! Before they took to the stage, a drag queen waltzed out to warm the crowd up, which I believe is now legally required for all gatherings over 20 people in London under the Soiree and Party Act of 2013. She invited all the hens up on stage, proceeded by all the birthday girls. After they had left the stage, the anticipation in the air was palpable. The crowd, bar that one straight man, was baying for cock.
And here they were, nameless and with beautifully inflated bodies like Action Man on the front of Men’s Health magazine. We should probably start off with the positives. Some of the show did have the aforementioned high camp value. Performers coming out in sailor uniforms, three-piece suits, and disco attire, tearing off items of clothes like a Buck’s Fizz tribute band.
But unfortunately, that’s all I can really say in its favour. I can’t deny that the majority of them were pretty dreamy, but others looked a bit more Requiem-For-A-Dreamboys, lacking that necessary cheeky glint in their eyes that ensured that their dragging of women up on stage didn’t look like a Crimewatch reconstruction. Plus, there wasn’t a whole lot of effort with routines or showmanship. I know the lack of choreography is a pretty gay complaint to make for a show that essentially delivered what was promised when the first penis was revealed, but, apart from one gymnast, the lack of any sort of variety meant that the two hours that the boys were on stage started to drag.
That’s before we got to any of the downright odd or genuinely uncomfortable elements of the evening. For a start, in most of the stripping routines, one of the Dreamboys would tear off his clothes, but tease the audience by protecting his goods with a flag. This needn’t be unusual in itself, but the fact it was always a Union Jack flag or a St George Cross was a little distracting. It gave the final reveal a slight Britain First edge. British dick for British Hen Dos!
Then, there were the audience participation segments, in which lucky ladies were pulled out of the audience and rabidly danced on by the buff boys. This was all fine until the bondage gear came out. Now obviously I get the whole Fifty Shades franchise, but when one woman was blindfolded and bent over a chair, before one of the more dead-eyed Dreamboys pulled out a whip, the whole situation felt more like a public flogging rather than resembling anything vaguely erotic. An even more disturbing section came during the big finale when The Black Stallion (yes, I know) again blindfolded a girl, pulled out a dildo, and forced the unwitting participant to take it in her mouth, obviously unaware that it was a prosthetic. It has been quite difficult to try and forget the look of unease on her face as she tried to bat it away.
Lest it be for a gay man to dictate what women should and should not get turned on by, but the recurrent humiliation and forceful control made the Dreamboys quite an unsavoury evening to endure; at times less Full Monty and more Full Metal Jacket. Despite the almost exclusively female audience, it was still the Dreamboys who held control in the room, in a way that has never been the case with gender-reversed strip shows. It was a little bit sad to witness women who had come to the show as a final fluster before they got married, and yet here they were, subjected to the whims and grips of the Dreamboys. Surely they should have had the chance to hold the power, much as men do with women strippers and table dancers. Like, would it have been too much to ask for the women to have blindfolded and whipped the Dreamboys instead?
I can almost hear it now. This is another case of Generation Snowflake picking apart and finding offence in yet another innocuous occurrence. After all, the crowd of women from all over the country didn’t seem to mind the more malignantly malicious parts. But when you go to a show called Dreamboys and leave feeling disenchanted, perhaps it just isn’t for you. We came expecting tongue-in-cheek campery, perhaps some whipped cream and a pleather posing pouch. Instead, we witnessed the borderline sexual assault of a lass on a hen do.
An hour later, we were in a gay pub in Hackney, dancing to disco played by a DJ dragged up as Beyoncé’s pregnancy announcement photo. Back to where we belong; a place in which discomfort never overshadows irony.
for more info go to www.dreamboys.co.uk
