At the point where Greenwood, Ballard, and Blue Ridge converge on Northwest 85th Street and 15th Avenue Northwest, across the street from QFC and its cohort Safeway, sits the humble establishment of Centerfolds. Centerfolds is a male strip club for women. Few people know of its existence; few people know that such a club exists anywhere. ("Do women really like that kind of thing?") Indeed, it is the only male strip club exclusively for women in the entire Northwest. Coming up on its 10-year anniversary, Centerfolds has been in business since August, 1991.

Within its shack-like walls, Centerfolds, open Thursday through Saturday from 8:00 p.m. to 2:30 a.m., is alive with highly buffed men who perform nude dancing and acrobatic fundamentals on a T-shaped stage, and ladies who cinch dollar bills in their sweaty palms and cheer when the boys get it just right. Unlike traditional (female) strip clubs, there are no desperate men at Centerfolds, overweight on their bar stools, trying to work out their dark wants and their faltering lives. No, the dank smell of semen is pleasantly absent from Centerfolds, even though the testosterone is not.

The boys in the place are dancing, striking poses normally associated with sex-industry women: slapping their own butts, bending over, sticking their asses in the air, pulling down their panties part way so the head of an occasional erect penis peeks out of a G-string. The clientele taking all of this in are women, mostly attractive women in their early 20s, who are quite comfortable flipping the roles of the strip club inside out, calling the boys "sweetie" and "honey" and slapping dollar bills into the strippers' man-panties.

Each man is dressed in a particular fantasy--cowboy, doctor, gangster, hula guy. After watching one young birthday girl briefly embrace a dancer, I asked what she liked about the men. "Their stomachs!" she responded. Yes, I said, but do you get distracted by their outfits? She laughed. "What were they wearing again?"

On my first trip to the club, I walked into a riotous scene of leering, loud women with flushed faces. In the front row, four women hooted and hollered their way through very physical lap dances. Beautiful men squatted on top of them, rubbing their bare-chested bodies up and down the women's chests, and performing a kind of dry cunnilingus, tongues erect in lapping position.

Not much time elapsed before I was being significantly hit on and fondled (the stripper rubbed his hands along my arms and all the way down my legs), until I said yes to a lap dance. Much more shy than the girls around me, I closed my eyes and shoved a couple of bucks in the stripper's panties. His triangular chest and advanced washboard stomach rippled an inch in front of my face. He got on his knees, grabbed my thighs, and thrust me forward. He fit his body snug between my legs. Then he rubbed his body on mine from my crotch to my breasts. I thought, "Is this guy gonna fuck me?"

Then I thought, "Isn't this illegal?"

Seattle Municipal Code Chapter 6.270 states, "No employee or entertainer shall perform acts of or acts which simulate: Sexual intercourse, masturbation, sodomy, bestiality, oral copulation, flagellation, or any sexual acts which are prohibited by law [or] the touching, caressing or fondling of the breasts, buttocks or genitals." The only reason my buttocks weren't rubbed was because I was sitting on them. Centerfold's management did not address our questions about dancer conduct.

My old roommate, a former stripper, used to spend hundreds of dollars paying off tickets to the city for performing lap dances that weren't even in the same realm of suggestiveness as what I experienced at Centerfolds.

The Stranger did a public records request for all incidents in the past year where erotic dancers were fined or cited for violating strip club guidelines. There were more than 70 offenses at female strip clubs for vice, prostitution, and adult entertainment-related crimes like "illegal touching," "nudity," and "caressing/fondling self." For example, Déjà Vu Showgirls on Denny Way racked up 28 violations, and Rick's on Lake City Way Northeast got 35 dings. Big surprise: The cops didn't find any problems at Centerfolds--the only male strip club in Seattle. The lone police incident at this club involved a drunken man shoving a bouncer after being told he was too sloshed to enter. (By the way, men aren't even allowed in.)

While the scene at Centerfolds subverts the dominant sexist adult-entertainment-industry motif (women as the workhorses of eroticism in our culture), it also raises questions about possible sexism in law enforcement. Clearly, in this city, female dancers get ticketed, fined, and arrested, and ultimately gain criminal records for their stripping behavior. Judging from the results of our records request, male dancers were not ticketed in the last year.

Ironically, the women who went to Centerfolds in the last year may have benefited from a sexist situation. As police reports indicate, no stings have taken place in the last year, so Centerfolds may have acted as a sort of oasis of lewd behavior for the customers.

The Seattle Police Department has 184 female officers on the force, none of whom, judging from police reports, have made any busts at Centerfolds in the last year. Indeed, if undercover cops had gone to Centerfolds on any of the four nights I attended, they would have been caressed and fondled. They would have had to resist the deliciousness of the situation, take the call of duty, and like their noble fellow male officers staking out Déjà Vu, cite the dancers. Sadly, it seems as though the women on this city's proud police force haven't had the opportunity to sit in Centerfolds for a couple of hours, waiting for one of the boys to slap his own ass. Officer Pam St. John says, "[The Seattle Police Department] has done stings there before. We don't receive as many complaints from the male strip clubs. Or maybe when the officers were there, nothing happened."

My favorite dancer (everyone has a favorite after attending a few times) was a man in uniform. He finessed his way across stage as the Top Gun theme song overwhelmed the room. It took him at least four songs to get down to his drawers (well, his G-string). Without his pants, he fucked the air until the whole room began to screech with glee. With all of his muscles exposed now, he leapt onto the pole upside down and hung there, suspended for what seemed like forever. There is nothing funnier than the sight of a grown man filling the air like that, hanging on for his dear life and smiling. The room giggled, but as the stripper remained hanging, we all started to take note of the glistening sweat on his shadowy shape, the muscles and their intent on being strong, and the utter masculinity of being able to prop oneself up like that. Thank god that's not illegal.

Lauren Walsh contributed to this report.