The Male Hustler

Introduction

Not too long ago an extraordinary motion picture played an informational role in the sexual revolution by letting the general public know what a male prostitute is. The film, Midnight Cowboy, was enormously successful, and was said to have added a phrase to the American language. It is interesting to note that the phrase itself did not by any means originate with the movie. It has for years been a generic term in the homosexual subculture and serves to label a particular type of male prostitute.

But the phrase was certainly new to the general public, as indeed was the film’s subject matter. The majority of non-homosexual viewers probably had previously shared the delusion of Joe Buck, the film’s title character — i.e., that a male prostitute was a physically attractive and sexually competent young man who earned his living by selling his services to women.

Heterosexual male prostitution does exist, as it happens, but on an infinitely smaller scale than its male counterpart. Typically, the heterosexual male prostitute is far more the amateur whore, living off one woman’s bounty for a certain amount of time, then moving on to another. He is more likely to be a male mistress than a male prostitute as such.

The bordello for women is a device of long standing in pornographic novels, but if it exists to any appreciable extent in present day America, it is well concealed indeed. Nor do there seem to be many cases of males earning a living by servicing female clients on a cash-and-carry basis.

“The underground press carries any number of advertisements of “masseurs” and “male models.” Often the advertiser will state that he only services males. My personal research has indicated that female response to these ads is quite low, although it does exist. (I would suspect, incidentally, that as the distinction between male and female roles in our society narrows, women will be considerably more inclined to avail themselves of these services. Just as certain men will occasionally prefer purchased sex to the free article, so would it appear that emancipated women may feel free to exercise a like option.)

Still a greater portion of the masseurs and male models emphasize that they accept both male and female clients. Here the gulf becomes quickly evident, as almost all of those whom I interviewed reported an extreme preponderance of male clients, with several confessing that, while they received periodic telephone inquiries from females, they had never “massaged” or “modeled” for a female — except free of charge for their own amusement. Some insisted at the onset that female formed a substantial part of their clientele; in each instance, subsequent questioning established that this was not the case and that they elected to give this impression either to maintain a heterosexual image or for some other purpose of ego-gratification.

None of this surprised me much. There are several reasons why heterosexual prostitution is apt to be a far more rewarding career for a woman than for a man. The most obvious is that there is nothing easier for a woman to find than casual sex. A woman who goes to a bar with the avowed intention of getting picked up can hardly fail to accomplish this end, while a man who prowls the streets looking for an agreeable woman can wear holes in his shoes to no avail. This seems every bit as true in the sexual underground, where advertisements placed by males looking for contact with females outnumber their opposite by perhaps a hundred to one. There seem to be more men interested in casual sex and more men actively looking for casual sex in every stratum of society. And, while I expect this dichotomy may narrow over the coming years, I doubt that it will ever disappear entirely. Women’s Lib theorists to the contrary, there are fundamental biological differences between the sexes that do seem to define their differing sexual attitudes. Nor can one explain this away as an effect of culture or society; a parallel dichotomy exists throughout the animal kingdom.

“Higgimus, hoggimus, girls are monogamous,” said Dorothy Parker. “Hoggimus, higgimus, men are polygamous.”

No one ever said it better.

Thus, as Joe Buck found out, a male prostitute’s customers are almost invariably male themselves. Are they, then — the hustlers, cowboys, trade, studs, or what you will — are they homosexuals themselves?

The answer is (a) that it depends how you define homosexual, and (b) that it depends what sort of male prostitute you are talking about. Some hustlers consider themselves exclusively heterosexual and insist that they would never go with another man except for money, that they do it because it is the world’s easiest way to make a dollar, and that the suggestion that they derive any pleasure whatsoever from the act is absurd. Others regard themselves as bisexual, either expressing a general preference for heterosexual relations or insisting that the sex of their partner makes no difference at all, that it is the least important variable in determining whether or not another individual is sexually attractive. And quite a few others are exclusively homosexual.

(Moreover, a large proportion of the more typical “midnight cowboys,” the street hustlers, could most accurately be described as asexual. They do not really relate to any sexual partners, male or female. They may be basically narcissistic or may simply be too emotionally inhibited to relate to another person. Of the cases studied in the following pages, Alan is the most articulate example of the asexual hustler.)

Who patronizes male prostitutes?

Homosexuals, obviously. But what sort of homosexuals? And what motivates them?

At first glance, it would seem logical to assume that homosexuals would be far less inclined to purchase sexual favors than would heterosexual males, if only because it is so much easier for a homosexual to find a willing partner for a casual encounter.

“You just don’t spend money on a stud because you can’t get anything else,” an acquaintance told me. “That’s nothing but absurd. Anyone who really wants to can score at a gay bar. And even if you don’t feel up to the bar scene, and all you want is something quick and impersonal, why, there’s nothing simpler than the baths. I suppose it’s humanly possible to go to a Turkish bath and not have contact, but only if you’ve made up your mind you don’t want any. You can spend a whole night there and absolutely fuck yourself into a coma. You can be fat and bald and old and ugly and you’ll still find something.

Then why don’t male hustlers starve to death?

“Ah, that’s something else. You might want a particular type, you know. A lot of fellows are partial to rough trade, extreme butch types who are supposedly not gay themselves. Now you can find no end of butch types who are gay and will be delighted to unzip for you, but that’s the catch, don’t you see? If they’ll do it for free they aren’t really rough trade, so you don’t want them. But if you have to pay for it, ah, then it’s the genuine article.

“Others pay because they want to call the shots. They don’t want reciprocity. They want to give the orders. For a few dollars they get to do this.”

Another homosexual explained his occasional patronage of male hustlers this way:

“We’re so conscious of appearance, Jack. Not all of us, not those of us who tend toward long-term alliances, but most of those of us who make a life-style of promiscuity and do this endless neurotic cruising. We make a cult of good looks, we make another cult of youth. When I walk into a gay bar I check everyone out, not only to see who appeals to me and who doesn’t, but in a comparative way. Is this one more attractive than I am? Is that one younger or older than I am. I doubt that heteros go through this nonsense. When a man sizes up a woman I don’t suppose he has to convince himself with whether she’s more or less attractive than he is. She’s either pretty enough to fuck or she’s not. But one finds oneself in this absurd situation where one only wants to have sex with someone more attractive than oneself. And when others feel the same way — well, you can see how it’s all quite frustrating. But if I cruise Christopher Street or Sherman Square or Times Square and see some young thing who looks better than I do, and hence appeals, I can spend ten or fifteen or twenty dollars and have him.”

“We’re eternal romantics,” another friend said. “Take me, for example. Take me! I’m yours! No, seriously. I don’t really cruise the meat racks as a general thing. I don’t care for impersonal sex and I don’t like to create a relationship by handing over money. It’s not my style. But now and then I’ll find myself walking down one of those mean streets, perhaps by design but as often not, and my eyes will light on some young beauty and I’m lost. Because, much as I know better, my cock will promptly send my head a message announcing that here is the perfect love, the ultimate ideal, the beginning of a beautiful friendship. And of course I know better, but when the cock speaks the brain listens. Inevitably. And so what if the number is a little hardboiled, let us say, or a little dirty behind the ears and around the neck. Why be put off from a great love by such superficial trivia? And so what, for that matter, if the number is going to cost a ten or a twenty-dollar bill, because what after all is money for? And so what if there’s a chance that the little darling may decide to deal with his own self-disgust by punching one around, or using a knife, or looting one’s apartment?

“So you make the pick-up and take the package home and pay the money and go to bed, and if you’re very lucky the enchantment stays with you all the way to orgasm, and you come good. Which is about as much as anyone can ask in this world, wouldn’t you say?

If the clients of male hustlers vary greatly in type and motive, so do the hustlers themselves. If there is one common denominator of male hustlers, it is their extreme youth. Almost all of them are under twenty.

While society in general places a great premium on youth, it is nowhere emphasized so much and treasured so highly as among male homosexuals. I know several female prostitutes who have gone on tricking into their sixties (although that is by no means the norm.) I can cite nothing faintly similar in the annals of male prostitution.

“I figure I’ve got a good five years left in this game,” a hustler told me. “I don’t drink, I don’t do anything heavier than grass, I work out every day at a gym, I eat health foods, all in all I take good care of myself. I think Johns’ll still want me when I’m thirty.”

And after that?

“Then I’ll be paying for it, I guess.” And he winked to show he was joking, but I’m not sure he convinced either of us.

It ought to go without saying that all names have been deliberately altered throughout the text, as have any other particulars which might in any way serve to identify any of the interviewed subjects. The reader will further note that by far the greater portion of the material which follows is presented in the subject’s own words, with the author’s own observations largely confined to connective material. I have edited these interviews only in the following sense — I have excised the extraneous material which forms a substantial portion of any relaxed conversation, and I have distilled material in the interest of space limitations. Obviously, one could hardly reproduce verbatim an interview of several hours’ duration.

With these qualifications, the following interviews are as I obtained them. Nothing has been added, nothing of substance has been excised.

This book was originally conceived as a sort of companion volume to an earlier work, Tricks of the Trade: a hooker’s handbook of sexual technique. Because Tricks had been a particularly satisfying book to write (and one which has had an extremely gratifying sale) I approached the present work with a good deal of enthusiasm.

At the same time, I was not entirely at ease with the project. While I could say, quoting the catechism of the sexual liberal, that some of my best friends are gay, I was faced with the necessity of doing extensive research in an area with which I was quite unfamiliar and in which I often found myself more than a little uptight. A large number of hustlers whom I approached directly, rather than through a mutual acquaintance, took it for granted that “interview” was purely euphemistic and that I wanted more from them than words. (This reaction was equally common during the research of Tricks, but I found the inference in that context less personally unnerving.)

Now seems as good a time as any to express my gratitude to all those who contributed to the research of this book, both those whose interviews appear in the pages which follow and also those whose cases I, for one reason or another, elected to omit. Without their cooperation, this book literally would not have been written.

It is to be expected that homosexuals will form a large portion of this book’s readership. And yet I am even more hopeful that it will be widely read by heterosexuals. There are any number of questions with which I found myself confronted in the course of this book’s preparation, questions dealing not simply with homosexuality but with overall human sexuality, questions I think all of us might profitably ponder.

John Warren Wells

January 1971