Is the emergence of 'boylesque', a male version of burlesque, empowering for men or simple exploitation?

• Captain Anchor, aka Ciaran O'Neill

Pretty In Pink and Pretty Vacant. This cloistered area, smelling of sweat, expectation and warm chardonnay, is cluttered with costumes and props including two large, scallop-shaped feather fans. A stage manager shouts: "Twenty minutes till doors, gentlemen!"

Two young men stand in front of a mirror applying make-up in a dim light; one, a performer called Captain Anchor, has silver glitter on his nipples. The other, wearing just a spangly jock-strap, toned and rangy as a racehorse, brushes bronzer across the four stars tattooed on his right hip.

"I wish I could just get into a bath and come out this colour," sighs Tom DeLish.

"I wish I was born this way," says Captain Anchor, channelling Lady Gaga.

The occasion is historic in its own campy, vampy way. The Summer Holiday Boylesque Revue is the first ever burlesque show in Scotland devoted entirely to male acts, albeit hosted by the female performer Dolly Tartan. Burlesque, or neo-burlesque as it is sometimes described, is a scene that has been growing steadily in this country since Club Noir began in Glasgow in 2004. Now, however, it can rightfully be described as a phenomenon.

Club Noir is officially the world's biggest burlesque club, attracting around 2,000 people to its monthly nights, and several other smaller events, such as this one, take place each month. This year's Edinburgh Festival includes a dedicated cabaret strand featuring many burlesque performers.

Rooted in the satirical music hall of the Victorian era, and taking in the influence of American exotic dancers of the 1930s such as Gypsy Rose Lee, burlesque has come to be almost synonymous with striptease. Its performers, however, may also be musicians, singers, hoofers, magicians, fire-eaters, jugglers, comics, mimes and so on. The stripteasers have, so far, tended to be women, the most famous contemporary acts being Dita Von Teese and Immodesty Blaize. That is now changing, but the men – often called boylesquers – remain a tiny minority.

"You could count on two hands the numbers of boylesque performers in Scotland," says Captain Anchor. A 29-year-old Irishman living in Edinburgh, his real name is Ciaran O'Neill. "Shall I name them all? There's me, Tom DeLish, Dickie Clifford, I Kenny Believe It, Buck Fast, Impressive Johnson, Sparky Strange, Cherry Loco. God, not even ten." He laughs. "That makes me quite special, really, doesn't it?" O'Neill is a communications graduate. He is dressed as a sailor and tonight will sing New York, New York while stripping down to his stars-and-stripes smalls, ending his spot with a pale flash of bum. This sight is greeted by shrill female – and some male – screams in which can be detected notes of lust and amusement.

O'Neill started off performing in Dublin, singing Copacabana and the like between the drag acts at The George, the city's largest gay pub. Captain Anchor was created when he moved to Scotland in 2008. "For a good year or so I was just doing cabaret and then I guess I did a routine where I did striptease and it just grew from there," he recalls. "I never came over here thinking, 'Oh yes, I'll definitely be a performer who takes his clothes off.'"

So why does he do it? "Striptease appeals to my rebellious side. And I feel like I come alive on stage. It's about alter egos, about creating this larger-than-life, almost cartoonish character. The whole reason I wanted to be a performer was to make people feel something. I'm not concerned whether that's amusing them or turning them on. When you really get down to it, that's the most interesting thing about burlesque – whether people go to the shows for entertainment or a cheap thrill."

Indeed. Burlesque performers tend to think of what they are doing as art. Often, they intellectualise it. And it isn't really commercial. No one in Scotland is doing this as their main means of earning money. "You can make a living out of this," says Cherry Loco, perhaps Scotland's best known male burlesque performer, "if you are willing to live on a diet of Evian, cigarettes and glitter."

The intentions of the performers may be pure, but they can't control the motivations of whoever walks through the club door. Those who come to leer couldn't care less if the showgirl whose flesh they are ogling has a PhD in Camille Paglia and the ethics of pornography. For the boylesquers, this issue tends to be slightly different as they are usually the only male performer on a bill that is otherwise female.

"I've done shows where half the audience have walked out," says Cherry Loco, a flamboyant and androgynous presence on stage. "Guys who don't want to see something different. But that's interesting in itself. I like that what I'm doing is making people have a reaction. I'd much rather perform to a lairy bunch of guys than to a quiet, polite audience. At least then I'm able to feed off some kind of emotion."

It's important not to overstate the hostile reaction. Burlesque audiences tend to be supportive and participatory. The whoops and wolf-whistles are declarations of admiration and empathy. Sometimes there are more performers in the crowd than on the bill. Going to burlesque shows, especially those in the sweatbox venues, feels rather like what one imagines would have been the experience of attending gigs in the early days of punk; in fact, Sid Vicious and Iggy Pop could be regarded as proto-boylesquers in some ways. There is a real DIY ambience about burlesque. The barrier between crowd and stage is permeable. It definitely seems as if there is something going on.

Two weeks ago, at Monster-A-Go-Go, a new burlesque night in the Glasgow bar Nice 'n' Sleazy, Tom DeLish performed as part of a bill on which he was the only male stripteaser. In the cramped blood-red basement, to the sounds of hard rock, a plump girl in a corset strolled around with black duct tape criss-crossing her nipples like the treasure maps of yore. A performer called Midnight Monroe removed her widow's veil and swigged from a bottle of wine to which she had glued a plastic severed hand; at the conclusion of her act, she walked off stage and into the audience, returning to her seat and putting on a cardigan.

Tom DeLish topped the bill. He performed to a version of Big Spender, striking poses and throwing shapes, all pelvic thrust and defiant eyes. He tore off his waistcoat and trousers. He looked golden beneath the lights. He shook up a bottle of what purported to be champagne, but was in fact M&S lambrusco, and let it fizz and foam all over his body. He exited to hollered approval and prolonged applause which died down only slightly as he returned to put down a towel.

"Boylesque is brilliant," says Kirsty Whyte, 21, who runs Monster-A-G-Go and performs as Roxy Stardust. "It's a step forward because it changes so many people's views of burlesque. People who thought it was about objectifying women see that there are men doing this and it really alters their opinion.

"People now see it more as an art form. It just shows how far we've come."

Off stage, out of character, in the dressing room of the Classic Grand, Tom DeLish is no vino-drenched sexpot. His real name is Tom Carlin and he is a rather sweet young man of 21, a Paisley buddy, very tall and lanky, wearing flesh- coloured hot pants covered in costume jewellery bought from Primark and a gold necklace bearing the word 'Single'. Had Hen Broon hung out at Studio 54 he might have looked rather like Tom DeLish.

He is studying musical theatre at Motherwell College and has been a boylesquer for around six months, having won a competition to perform at Club Noir's Christmas show last year. "My mum and dad and sister came to see me at the O2 Academy," he recalls. "I did my routine to Peggy Lee's Why Don't You Do Right?, which starts off with me wearing a boiler suit.

The idea is that I've run out of money and the only way I can earn it is

to dance and strip.

"Then I find money in my crotch and fling it at the audience. My family were very proud."

It was not to be his last appearance at Club Noir. "I did another routine as a comedy gimp. My mum asked to come along to that one, but I told her it wouldn't be a good idea."

The audience at the Classic Grand seem a mixed bunch. Mostly young. Mostly female. Some gothy looking couples. A party of hen nightish girls. A sprinkling of gay men.

Jocelyn Feasby, 18, saw Tom DeLish perform last month and has come along tonight for more. "Any girl can do burlesque, but this takes a special guy," she says. "I can't think of anything to add to that other than, 'Ooft!'"

"I think more gentlemen should be doing this," says Jane Faye, 23, from Paisley. "You're so used to seeing ladies stripping. To me, it's the other side of feminism. And it's always good to see men taking their clothes off, which I think is probably the view of most of the women here."

Faye's partner, Dave Talbot, a 36-year-old American, has been so impressed by the performances that he's considering becoming a boylesquer himself. "The reason I came was to see if guys could be as sexy as women. It's inspiring to me that I could be a sexy person. It's kind of empowering. I'm not into guys, but damn!"

So is boylesque simply the male version of female burlesque? For Tom DeLish, the two are the same. "I don't see a difference between the male and female performers. All I see on stage is gorgeous people in amazing costumes putting on an entertaining show. I'm gay myself, but I tend to fancy the girls on stage better. It's the costumes, the diamonds and corsets. It's hard for a guy to make a shirt and trousers look flashy."

Other performers, however, regard boylesque as a distinct genre, a shoot emerging from a very different seed. "Some of the guys actually hate the term boylesque," says Chris Davey who performs as British Heart and is a co-founder of the Brighton Institute of Boylesque, which teaches the form. "They are adult male performers and they think the word 'boy' suggests pederasts. Personally, I see it as part of a very rich European and American history of making awkward, humorous and subversive performance art."

For Davey, boylesque has its roots in people such as Eugene Sandow, the Prussian bodybuilder who would invite spectators backstage to feel his near- naked body, and Sebastian Droste, who danced in a loincloth with Anita Berber in the Weimar-era Berlin cabaret. The word 'boylesque' seems to have been coined in the 1970s by the Las Vegas drag queen Kenny Kerr. Its usage within the neo-burlesque scene goes back to the mid-1990s and the New York performer Tigger.

There is a feeling that male striptease, as opposed to old-fashioned male stripping in which performers go completely naked, is an idea whose time has come. At London Burlesque Week in April, 11 boylesquers, among them Captain Anchor and British Heart, performed a sold-out show.

"People keep telling me I'm a very rare breed," says Tom DeLish. "Well, we're multiplying like rabbits. The new frontier for burlesque is changing all the time. I was on the internet the other day and somebody was talking about burlesque, boylesque and brolesque. Burlesque is girls.

Boylesque is boys being very feminine. And brolesque is men doing manly burlesque – not very elegant, very rough and tumble, not feminine at all."

But is the emergence of boylesque, or whatever you want to call it, really something to celebrate? There are those who would argue that burlesque is simply sexual exploitation by and for the middle classes. If so, then isn't the fact that men are now doing it too lamentable rather than laudable? "I'll put my hands up to being middle class. But exploitation?

Not with the act I do," says Chris Young, 37, who, as Dickie Clifford, performs a striptease that involves comedy ventriloquism with an inflatable sex doll. He is also a LibDem activist who stood against Nicola Sturgeon in Govan, and some years ago won The Weakest Link.

"I'm not hard to look at, but my primary goal is to make people laugh," he continues. "Of course, there's nothing wrong with a bit of titillation if it's done well. There's a danger if all you have to offer is basically saying, 'I am sexually available. Come and get it.' But that is generally not the case. There is generally a lot more to boylesque than 'Aren't I pretty?' You're not leaving the audience with the impression that all men are just meat."

It should also be noted that, like their female counterparts, male burlesquers do not often conform to the mainstream, magazine-cover idea of attractiveness. Backstage at the Classic Grand there are a variety of body types on display. Kenny Anderson, a 29-year-old bank worker, is sitting in his Green Lantern pants, sewing his Superman shirt and singing along to Don't Stop Believing. He has a hairy chest, is a little podgy in the middle, and does a striptease act that plays up his geekiness. "I'm a bloke, I'm not an Adonis," he says. "I can't take my clothes off in a sexy way, so f*** it, I won't try."

For Buck Fast, a 27-year-old former soldier called Dave Gillespie, burlesque can improve personal body image. "A lot of women do this because they feel empowered and it helps any anxiety issues they have about their bodies, and that's amazing," he says. "For us it's the same. Guys will look at themselves in the mirror and worry. For years I was very skinny and a bit self-conscious about it, six foot two and built like a whippet. But when you are standing on stage in your pants and you've got hundreds of people screaming for you, that's going to give you an ego-boost."

Clearly, there is much more to Scottish boylesque than Jocks in jocks. It's about art, ego, humour and eroticism. It gets under your skin.

On the way out, after the show, the audience are full of praise for boylesque and optimistic about its future. "I think," says Ian Diamond, co-owner of the sex shop Luke And Jack, "this is the early part of a wave."

Georgina Legg, 18, has been dancing to Lust For Life, carried away by the charms of Tom DeLish. "Oh," she adds. "I hope the wave comes soon." n

A Scandalous Affair, is at The Bath Street Pony, Glasgow, 13 July. Cherry Loco appears as part of the Voodoo Revue at the Voodoo Rooms, Edinburgh, 3-28 August. Club Noir is at the Picture House, Edinburgh, 13 August.