Club Hot Rods has a show that will open your eyes.
Just behind a metal scrap yard in the part of town where addresses are stenciled on gray cinderblock storage buildings, you’ll find Club Hot Rods, the logo for which features a white silhouette of a stud popping out of a rainbow, his penis gold and ridiculously long, looking like a frog’s tongue that’s about to snap your face. Open just a few months now and very hush-hush, it’s the town’s only all-nude male revue, and like all true gems it’s hidden for a reason.
Admission is $20, even if you’re auditioning for amateur night—held every Thursday. You push aside heavy elephant-ear curtains to reveal carpet that’s a stoner’s confection of day-glo confetti sprinkled against a lagoon of inky blackness, festively illuminated by searing black light. A meaty-sweet aroma that suggests pure ass fills the air. On the way to the main dance floor, billowing curtains of indeterminate color demarcate dark rooms. They part just enough to reveal two dining-room chairs facing a plush bed, perhaps, with overstuffed polyester comforter bulging at the seams, the view from which, when lying on one’s back, is a bare wood trellis in lattice pattern begging for ivy.
Hod Rods specializes in cute little twinks shaking their tails in skimpy undies. Two of them dressed in the same gray hot pants never left each other’s sides, almost constantly whispering in each other’s ears when not dancing together lethargically, last Thursday night, when I was there to support a friend of a friend—Hella Hot, a trained ballet dancer who looks like the boy from Blue Lagoon—who was auditioning.
It’s the same premise as pretty much any other strip club: get onstage for a couple of songs, do the humpback wiggle or whatever your special move is and go hustle for lap dances. But there are two major, major bonuses here. For one, there are no pushy cocktail waitresses, just a laid-back juice and soda bar that feels like a high school concession stand; and for two, many of the boys use the opportunity to produce their own mini theatrical stage shows.
Usually it’s all construction boots and thongs in these kinds of clubs—or so I’m told. Here you get Gabriel, an elfin boy liquidly working the floor in motions that seem half balletic and half yoga teacher, in wings and a leather halo doing a fallen angel bit, or in glamorous pirate boots and glowing glittery mask doing a Phantom of the Opera routine. Or Ronin, a bronzed bull in beachy whites, performing capoeira, a dynamic but controlled combination of fight and dance moves African slaves started in the streets of Brazil. And these guys get unashamedly nasty—they’ll take dollar tips in the anus.
Other acts you might catch involve Speed Racer, Grease, Zorro and Frank Sinatra, but the showstopper of the night I went was Leoric, who came wheeled out on a dolly dressed as Hannibal Lecter, face mask and orange jumpsuit and straitjacket and all. He glared intensely at the audience—which was mostly male, with a few straggling ladies who seemed mostly there for the camp factor, judging from the respectful distance they gave the employees—then worked his way out of the jacket. After his big escape he gave each of us in the front row a good hateful stare that said, I want to gobble you, then shot a hand through the crotch of his jumpsuit and tore it off to reveal a black studded leather harness and teensy patent leather g-string pouch.
How this is sexy probably does not compute to many brains. But that’s the beauty of Hot Rods: It’s a huge space dedicated to an extremely bizarre, localized, prurient, self-referential culture and phenomenon. To the right kind of person, it’s a raunchy little slice of heaven.