I’m a Stripper. My Boyfriend Saw Me Through the Eyes of a Customer.

I was 24 when I started stripping. A friend and I were sipping tea on the couch, two young idealists in Berlin discussing how we needed money. From there, things went surprisingly fast, as they tend to do in this industry. My friend saw an ad on Craigslist, and not long after we found ourselves staggering half-naked down a smoky, strip-club hallway in high platform heels.

Now that I have six years of experience, my perception of the industry has become more nuanced than it was during that teatime chat. What hasn’t changed are the questions I am routinely asked as a stripper, most commonly: “Do you have a boyfriend? What does he say about your job?”

In whatever variation this question is asked (“Is it possible to find a boyfriend with this job?” “Isn’t your boyfriend jealous?”), it always assumes a boyfriend. The possibility of me being attracted to women is rarely mentioned.

Strip clubs are still bound to traditional gender norms, at least in my experience. The expression of nonconforming gender is not welcome, and a jarring transphobia soaks the clubs’ smelly, champagne-stained carpets. Female-presenting strippers are expected to perform hyper-femininity while male customers exhibit hyper-masculinity through expressions of machismo and financial power, whether real or staged.

In this context, heterosexuality is taken for granted. Yet what I realized throughout the years is that the strip club is not a parallel universe; it’s more a mirror of society, amplified by bright lights. And so was my first relationship with a straight man as a stripper.

When I first met the man who would become my boyfriend, I told him about my job and my bisexuality and he claimed to be cool about both. He called himself a feminist. He told me he found it “cool to date a stripper.” It was when our relationship became official that the problems started, and he began expressing displeasure with my career choice. I had seen this happen to so many of my colleagues, yet unlike my colleagues’ partners, my man called himself a feminist.

Subscribe to The Times to read as many articles as you like.