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Gentlemen's Club CHRIS BUCK — BOOKS GENTLEMEN’S CLUB PARTNERS OF EXOTIC DANCERS (SPRING 2021) Known for his uneasy portraits of celebrities, Chris Buck was looking for a subject that continued his exploration of strength and vulnerability, and found it in the partners of exotic dancers. The result is Buck’s most surprising and compelling work: forty interviews and photo sittings across North America with people in committed relationships with strip club dancers. Author and former dancer Lily Burana has written the foreword to Gentlemen’s Club. DETAILS By turns raffish, gallant, sly and touchingly vulnerable, this is a wonderful band of gentlemen—even if some of them aren’t, strictly speaking, men—and this book is a Photographer/Author: Chris Buck reminder of basic humanity in a seemingly inhuman time. Foreword: Lily Burana — Mary Gaitskill, author of This is Pleasure Design: Alex Camlin Format: Hardcover 7.625 x 10.25 inches Chris Buck’s pictures give us strange attractors, weaknesses in human psychic energy fields, blocked 90 color photographs emotions, yearnings for radicality, the normalcy of sexual fantasies, need, the romance of desire, and 256 pages, 40 interviews efflorescent tattered love. Publisher: Norman Stuart Publishing — Jerry Saltz, Pulitzer Prize winning art critic, New York Magazine Release Date: Spring 2021 Chris Buck has taken a widely photographed subject and made it wholly his own. His interviews with dancers’ partners are incisive and powerful, but it is his accompanying photographs that reveal this world in all of its gorgeous complexity: darkness and levity, uncertainty and hope, bravado and vulnerability. — Karen Abbott, New York Times bestselling author of The Ghosts of Eden Park GENTLEMEN’S CLUB CHRIS BUCK FOREWORD by Lily Burana The private life of a stripper is one of the enduring mysteries in the public consciousness. While the cultural investment in seeing strippers only at surface level is part of the reason for this, it is also because strippers instinctively know the risk of oversharing. The less customers know about you, the less likely they are to, say, show up in your neighborhood looking for you, or comb the internet for additional personal details that may cause you embarrassment. There is the risk of exposure, or actual danger. Also, being circumspect about one’s personal life is just good business. Strippers are professional fantasy fodder, scrims upon which customers project their wishes and their whims. Knowing, for instance, that you have a hardworking girlfriend or husband at home waiting for you may harsh the customer’s buzz and cut into your moneymaking potential. Figuring out the line between what’s public and what’s private is one of stripping’s great challenges. Stripper partnerships are complicated by factors that often remain unspoken: the intense emotional and physical labor of the dancer’s job, and profound social stigma. It would be lovely if the job were such a lark that a dancer came home from every shift elated, turned on, and feeling carefree; the world of neon and sweaty spandex just melting away as she flings herself into her partner’s arms. Yes, there are good nights where the job seems almost too easy but mostly, it’s a grind, a race home to dump the tips out of the dance bag, change into sweats, scrape off your makeup, and talk shit about your cheap customers and the klepto dancer who keeps trying to steal your thigh-highs. A dancer’s personal space is constantly invaded at work, and that leaves her emotionally drained after a particularly trying day. She craves quiet, and perhaps needs to insulate herself. That has an impact on a couple. Still, love is love, and it manages to soften our hearts and stoke our hopes of finding someone with whom to share this crazy, unpredictable life. Even the most steely-eyed dancer longs for a soft place to fall. But finding a relationship is not as easy as wanting one. I need someone to accept every facet of who I am, at home, at work, and in the eyes of a judgmental society. Who has the welcoming heart and tough hide to meet those requirements? When she finds a special someone (or a few special someones), how do they shape their lives together? Another one of the great challenges of stripping, or having been a stripper, is the overwhelming number of men who believe they are entitled to your time (to say nothing of your energy and emotional resources). I guarantee you, the last email I am likely to respond to positively is a cold pitch from a man who thinks he is a photographer, seeking help with a book about strippers. Men (and women) who are outside the business and think the demimonde of stripping would make an exotic subject for an art project are a dime a dozen. I’m rolling my eyes just thinking about it. Spare me your walk on the wild side, normie. But Chris Buck was different. Chris’s email to me was neither fawning nor creepy. No hubris or hard sell. Just a basic introduction, saying he was at work on this project, and would I consider helping out with a foreword? He included a link to his other photographic work, and rather than hitting the “delete” button, I clicked the link instead. “My God,” I thought. “This guy is good.” I was impressed, but still unconvinced. I agreed to meet him in person at the Museum of Modern Art in New York. GENTLEMEN’S CLUB CHRIS BUCK I waited, silently chanting, “Please don’t be a weirdo. Please don’t be a weirdo.” Minutes later, he came galumphing through the lobby, weaving his way through clusters of tourists, his messenger bag slung across his body. We headed to the outdoor sculpture garden, where I sat on the steps and flipped through his portfolio of the work in progress. If the photos grabbed me, the words sold me. I was hooked. I’ve seen many books about stripping— from old-time documentary photos taken backstage in vaudeville and burlesque theaters to more recent autobiographical documentary works by strippers, lap dancers and peep show girls like Cammi Toloui, Erika Langley, and Juliana Beasley. Here, I was seeing something different, his lens turned not toward the workers themselves, but to the partners with whom they’ve chosen to create their domestic lives. Their extant emotional homes. Their hearts. What I loved, beyond the surprising scope of his photographic skill, was his obvious commitment to diversity, to letting strippers and their partners shape their own stories. He showed not just a wide range of relationship types, but also a broad emotional range—from the tender to the downright goofy to the bashful to the besotted and proud. I felt a flush of recognition: Yes, I thought; these photos and interviews are the real thing. These are people I recognize. Intimate, imperfect, and totally present. The photos aren’t stagey and glossy like Helmut Newton or David La Chapelle (whose work I love, but let’s be frank—life off the stage is not so spangly and slick), nor were they Diane Arbus-style gritty realism that bordered on the macabre. Expertly composed—but with a casual accessibility—they looked, well…homey. What he draws from his subjects is raw and as close to behind-the-scenes realness as I’ve ever seen in a project assembled by an outsider. I can only describe his rendering of this world as vibrant tenderness. One of the ways that strippers are obscured in the public view is that we are stereotyped as people of limited capacity for intimacy and relationships. This book is a gorgeous, complex, and refreshing refutation of every assumption loaded into that stilted line of thinking. In that way, it is subversive. And I like that. But I also like that it is simply beautiful, and sincere, and true. GENTLEMEN’S CLUB CHRIS BUCK SELECT IMAGES Giovanna & Sarah Talonn Jerrod & Gabriella Brian GENTLEMEN’S CLUB CHRIS BUCK SELECT IMAGES Seth & Emily Chris Joseph Petr GENTLEMEN’S CLUB CHRIS BUCK SAMPLE INTERVIEW — David & Celeste, Oakland CA I met with David and Celeste for coffee the day before I photographed them, and we got on well right away. They were fun and adventurous. We did the interview at their apt, and much of it felt like an education on the theory of polyamory, rather than the story behind their crackling romance. Nevertheless, their self-awareness and charm came through. The photography had them more in their element. We did multiple setups with different approaches, all of which they embraced. We even did some kinbaku (Japanese ritual bondage) photos at the end, just for fun. When did you find out that she danced? Celeste: Right after he told me he loved me. David: That’s true. Celeste: But he said it anyway. I didn’t want it to be like, “By the way, you’re in love with a stripper. Surprise!” David: We’d been together a month and a half, maybe two months, and what was interesting was, I’d come out of an eight-year relationship that was not particularly healthy. I spent a lot of my time attempting to fit her framework and try and make her happy. When Celeste and I met, I’d actually been studying, just talking to people in the Bay Area about poly relationships, and just trying to understand different ways where I could find something that fit me better. Something that didn’t have all the jealousy and these other things that I’d seen. When she told you she danced, what’d you say? David: I think what I said was, “So.” Celeste: That’s pretty much it.
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