The Male Hustler

Brendan

“I was in therapy for a little over a year. I gave it up about eighteen months ago for the usual reasons. The cost, for one. I was going twice a week at twenty dollars a session, which is quite reasonable compared to what some people have to pay, but even so it was forty dollars a week, week in and week out, and that’s an enormous amount of money to pay just to hear yourself talk. And also I kept having the feeling that I wasn’t getting anywhere positive. I would go and lie there and talk, and the therapist would repeat phrases of mine and point things out, and I would get insights. Do you know, that in itself can become a habit, rehashing the past to death, getting high on these periodic insights. I felt after a certain amount of time that none of these breakthroughs were doing anything for me. They were something I went through twice a week, and sometimes the insights were gratifying at the time, and for that matter some of them would stay with me and make sense later on, giving me a new way of looking at certain aspects of myself.

“But I suppose what bothered me was that I was still me. You go into something like that looking for a change. The bullshit aspect of therapy is that most people who go into it really think they are going to make major changes in their basic selves. I don’t believe that ever happens, do you? I have any number of friends who have been in intensive Freudian analysis for years and years, an hour a day five days a week until the end of time, and they’re so addicted to this that God help them when the shrink takes two weeks off in the summer — they become absolutely paralyzed and just live on Librium until the great man returns. And they will insist, so many of them, that it’s doing them worlds of good. That they have changed, that they are different people now. But if you look at them objectively you see the same people with the same hang-ups. They say they understand their hang-ups now. Well, marvelous, baby. I mean, it’s like understanding you have terminal cancer. You can understand the hell out of it, but that don’t make you get better.

“What I’m getting at, though, is that about six months or so after I stopped therapy, I then began to realize that it had helped me after all. Not by eliminating hang-ups or changing them but by teaching me to be a fundamentally analytical person, which I very definitely had not been before then.

“Do you do grass? Well, do you know how, when you smoke, you can hear music in a new way? For example, one of the first times I smoked I listened to some Vivaldi chamber music, which I’ve always absolutely loved, but for the first time I was able to concentrate on what the various instruments were doing all at the same time. I could follow different polyphonic tracks in my head all at once. I gather people who are really involved in music do this as a matter of course, but it was an enormous change for me. But after that, I found I could always listen to music that way, whether I was stoned or not.

“In much the same way, therapy taught me to listen to my own self on a new level, and that ability stayed with me after I discontinued it. As a matter of fact it intensified, because I had to do all the work myself instead of having the therapist to point things out for me. And they say that analysis is always an individual project, that you have to do the real work by yourself...

“So I’ll think back to various aspects of my childhood, and think of ways in which I always saw myself as an essentially feminine person, and at the same time I’ll see ways in which I always found it necessary to have a particular male identity. As I said, this didn’t banish any of my hang-ups. In fact there were times when it seemed to intensify them. You know, the idea that self-awareness is the ultimate answer, that’s a very dangerous theory. So often after an enormous insight, an enormous emotional breakthrough, people become desperately depressed. Even suicidal. I’ve known of an appalling number of cases of people who have gotten into the encounter group scene in a very intense way, and suddenly one day they are bubbling all over the place telling everybody that they have really opened themselves up as never before, and the next week they commit suicide. It’s scary to shine lights into all those dark places, baby. You can’t always live with what you find there.

“In my own case, I like to think that I’ve come to terms with some of my hang-ups in fairly sane and healthy ways. For example, for a couple of years I was seriously considering a sex-change operation. Of having them cut off the family jewels and tuck them away in the vault. There was a period of time when I felt enormously ambivalent about my penis. I’ve been cross-dressing for years and with my build and features and everything else I look more like a girl than most girls do. I can make my voice nice and butchy-deep, but I find it just as easy and natural to talk in a sexy female contralto. So when I got all dressed and made up and set out to cruise, the one constant reminder that I wasn’t what I looked like was this hunk of meat down here. I would hitch it back between my legs to hide the damned thing.

“So in that respect I hated my genitals, I felt they were male organs attached to a basically female body. But at the same time, they were what I got my kicks with. I would come by ejaculating through my penis, and the idea of cutting that off, of removing that pleasure part of the body — well, it was a conflict. I never did go to Denmark but I never entirely stopped thinking about it.

“I could never go that route now because of things I have learned about myself. I know that I am a woman in certain very important respects, but I also know and am able to accept that I am a man in other respects, and an operation would take something away without giving me anything in return. If you’re familiar with the operation, you know that they build in an artificial vagina. They create folds in your flesh surgically. If that’s a real vagina, then you can get milk from a bull’s tits. I mean, love, it’s nonsense. A woman is more than something with a hole to stuff a cock into. A woman is ovaries and tubes and a uterus and all sorts of subtle plumbing which no doctor can install in a male body. Oh, for heaven’s sake, a clitoris is the female version of the penis, right? So a transsexual who has his cock removed is brilliantly turning himself into a woman without a clit. There are so many ways in which the whole thing doesn’t make sense. You give up your manhood without getting womanhood in return, and you turn into, I hate to say this because I’ve known transsexuals and hate to put them down, but you turn into a nothing! Neither fish nor fowl. Nothing!

“A perfectly straight man, straight in the sense that he could not under any circumstances have sexual relations with any sort of male, is never comfortable with a transsexual unless she keeps the whole thing a secret from him. And a gay male is usually put off by a transsexual. He will usually think of her as some sort of freak, someone with something missing. So what does a TS do? Either you move to a new town and hide your past completely, or you see your old friends and find out that they have trouble relating to you. I know that fucking operation is popular now, and I know it’s getting increasingly more popular every year, but I’ll make a prediction — I’d be willing to bet that in another generation it will hardly ever be performed. Because as sexual liberation gets more and more widespread and as more and more people are able to accept abnormal aspects of themselves, the lines between the sexes are going to blur far more than they already have. And a person like me is going to feel far more comfortable being himself or herself — if you prefer? — than trying to conform surgically to the old idea of two firmly delineated sexes.

“I was talking to a fellow the other day, a man I would characterize as very square but very open-minded. And he asked me, ‘Well, what are you? How would you categorize yourself?’ There was a time when I really objected to that question.

“So this time I said, ‘I’m a woman with a penis and testicles.’ He wanted to know what I meant, so I just repeated what I had said.

“‘But a woman can’t have a penis and testicles.’

“‘Why not?’

“Well, he was really confused. ‘Look, sweet,’ I said, ‘you can think of me as a man with female features, and a female personality. Or you can think of me as a woman with male sex organs. Or you can cut through this bullshit about labels and just think of me as me, Brendan or Brenda, whichever comes easier to you. You think of yourself as completely straight and you respond to the femaleness of me, but if all you want is a genuine woman you don’t have to see me. Would you like me better if I didn’t have a cock? Think about it.’

“This was a fairly heavy speech to lay on this particular person. I’m sure he’ll be working it through his mind for a long time, and he may not be delighted with what he comes up with. The point is that I wouldn’t like me better without a penis, and, even more to the point, I’ve come to like myself a lot better than I once did. I went through a long period of shame and another long period of anxiety about my identity, and now I’m largely past that. Oh, I get depressed, and I find any number of things about myself I’m not thrilled with, but generally speaking I feel pretty comfortable being me. And I don’t know of anything more important than that. Life is a bitch no matter what, and if you don’t like yourself it’s a disaster.”

Brendan is twenty-two, short and small-boned, with chestnut hair and haunting brown eyes. The first time I met him I had not the slightest idea that he was anything other than the singularly beautiful young woman he appeared to be. Our meeting was arranged by a homosexual acquaintance who thought I might enjoy interviewing a “fag hag” — i.e., an ostensibly heterosexual woman who prefers the company of male homosexuals. I was thus introduced to “Brenda” and chatted with him and my friend over drinks.

In the course of this elaborate charade, “Brenda” gave me the full treatment — long-drink looks with those extraordinary eyes, little vocal tricks in a rich contralto, suggestive flicking of tongue over lips, and the intermittent pressure of “her” knee against mine under the table.

I must admit that there was nothing equivocal about my reaction to Brenda. I was very strongly attracted to her, responded to all her flirting, and wanted nothing more than to send my gay friend on his way and take this beautiful young thing home to bed. I did realize that this sort of flirtatiousness on the part of a fag hag is not uncommon, and is often accompanied by a total unwillingness to carry a relationship any further than flirting. But Brenda’s coquetry seemed so unqualified, so genuine, that I could not believe she did not intend to see the game through to its proper conclusion.

After all of this had gone on for awhile, my friend excused himself and went to the men’s room. I took Brenda’s hand in mine and suggested we might have dinner together.

“Just the two of us?”

I admitted that was what I had in mind.

“Oh, dear,” she purred. “Whoever knows where that sort of thing might lead?”

I suggested it might be interesting to find out.

“It might,” she said mysteriously, “be rather more interesting than you suspect.”

When my friend returned, Brenda and I were still holding hands. The two of them exchanged cryptic glances and began to laugh. I wondered aloud what was so funny.

“Jack,” my friend said, “we had better get you another drink, because I am about to blow your mind.”

He refused to explain until the drink came. I went on holding Brenda’s hand and used my free hand to take a sip of my drink.

“Brenda,” my friend said, “is a boy.”

I didn’t get it. He repeated it, and I asked if he meant that she was a lesbian.

“A male in drag,” my friend said.

“I have a cock,” Brenda(n) said.

This anecdote — one, incidentally, of which I am not particularly proud — is reported in detail because I can think of no better way to stress how deceptively female Brendan is in appearance and attitude. I cannot recall ever having been quite so completely astonished by anything that has happened to me. The series of mental changes I went through on the heels of this revelation is almost impossible to recount. I had never previously felt sexually attracted to a male and had never considered having relations with another male, and now a person who had attracted me as strongly as anyone had ever done was suddenly revealed as a male. And I was still sitting there like an idiot with his or her hand in mine.

There was a bad moment there. Brendan’s face took on an expression of alarm at the possibility that I might grow suddenly violent. (This, I learned later, had occasionally happened at somewhat more intimate moments of revelation.) I, for my part, was struck momentarily dumb. And then the three of us simultaneously erupted in laughter, hysterical laughter that dissolved the tension quite completely.

“I couldn’t resist it,” my friend told me, after the hilarity had settled down. “I felt Brendan would be a perfect person for you to interview. He’s the most convincing transvestite I’ve ever met. So many teevees look like parodies of girls, and he looks like the genuine article. I mean, it’s not all clothes and makeup. He can wear male clothing and come on like a girl. And he’s bright and self-aware, and you were bitching that so many interview subjects are shallow and inarticulate.”

“And I’d just love to have you interview me,” Brendan murmured, doing the full number with the eyes again.

“And you figured it would be an unparalleled put-on,” I said.

“Not only that. I felt the only way you could get Brendan’s full impact was this way. If you knew in advance that he was a male, you would have to approach him with preconceptions. I had only your best interests at heart, Jack.”

“Oh, I’m sure you did.”

My friend grinned. “And I must admit I wouldn’t have missed this scene for the world. I’ve got a good streak of bitch in me, you know. And it delights me that you’ll be wondering about yourself for a good long while after this. Are you as straight as you thought you were? Is there such a thing as straight? After all, a person who writes books on sex ought to contend with questions of that sort.”

“You’re a real prince,” I said, approximately.

“I’ll take that as a compliment, Jack. Actually I think I played quite fair. Suppose I never said anything, just excused myself and vanished? Suppose you took this luscious little number to dinner? And suppose she went right on being Brenda, and you didn’t get to the moment of truth until the two of you were in bed?

“Christ,” I said.

“Must run,” said my friend. (Friend?) “Have fun, boys and girls. Have a pleasant interview. And Jack, you should enjoy pretending that she doesn’t turn you on any more now that you know the awful truth...”

Later Brendan told me that my friend had originally wanted to let me make the discovery in bed. “But I told him absolutely no. I’m not the masochistic type. I don’t enjoy having some uptight latent beat the living shit out of me because he doesn’t want to face uncertain things about himself. I had that happen once, and the stories I’ve heard. You can imagine. But I like running the number we did today. Attracting a man, getting him to commit himself, and then letting the cock out of the bag, so to speak.”

“What usually happens?”

“Shock. Disbelief. More shock. A lot of the time we wind up laughing, like today. It’s a great way to deal with something that’s hard to handle.” A significant pause. “You’d be surprised how often a man who never went that route before will decide that my cock is no reason to stop wanting to get me in bed.”

The full treatment with the eyes again. A soft, knowing smile.

“Interested?”

“I had a childhood that was so classic it seems positively banal. Mother was a repressed mouse of a girl who managed to preserve her maidenhead for almost thirty years, perhaps because nobody was interested enough to contend with all that shyness and churchiness. This was in a little town in Schoharie County in upstate New York. The only county in the state with less population now than during the Civil War, so you can imagine what a swinging cosmopolitan place it is.

“Then someone seduced the poor woman, evidently with a promise of marriage, and left town around the time that she began not having periods. God knows who he may have been. A proverbial traveling salesman, I suspect. I grew up thinking my father had died in the war, then learned by accident more or less what had happened. I spent a long time wondering about my father, who he was, if he’s still alive, all of that. The standard fixation on the unknown father, the standard love-hate thing. Like he’s a bastard for having left me, but also he’s out there somewhere, the father who will take care of me and make me a whole and secure person. I think I’ve largely outgrown that bullshit by now.

“Except that I still find myself wondering if I might ever have made it with him, without either of us knowing who the other one was. Of course I’ve always been promiscuous, and I went through a stage shortly after I came to New York where I really played the numbers game. I had to prove to myself that I was attractive, and I wanted quantitative proof. I’ve serviced as many as thirty men in a night. Forgive the crudeness, but sucking doesn’t really tire one out, you know, and you can just go on as long as you want. So it’s not inconceivable that one of the men I balled at one time or another was my long-lost Papa.

“Pointless to brood about it. Or to go on Freudian trips about how my whole sex life represents a search for my father and an attempt to possess him sexually. That kind of thing is worth considering but not worth dwelling on forever...

“After she was pregnant and deserted, my mother moved in with my Aunt Alma. Alma was her older sister, a good dozen years older and a childless widow. It surprises me that she ever got married in the first place. I never met a woman who had less use for men. It wasn’t so much that she hated them as that she was totally incapable of relating to them. I’m sure she was fundamentally a dyke, but that her orientation was such that the possibility of female homosexuality never once occurred to her. She would have the inclinations but would never recognize them, never even suspect them.

“That was the house I grew up in. Huge old house in this dying town with these two cloistered sexless ladies. Alma absolutely dominated Mother, treated her more like a child than a sibling. And mother learned her lesson, never looked at another man. I think she would have grown her hymen back if she could have found a way.

“Classic faggot background, isn’t it? I had the whole bit, played with dolls, was coddled, all of that. And I was physically right for the part. Small and dainty and neat and all the rest of it. It wasn’t a bad time, you must understand. I enjoyed childhood. It only becomes unpleasant in retrospect.

“I’m not sure when I first realized that I was different. That I was a boy who was not like other boys. It sometimes seems as though it was something I always knew...

“My first sexual experience came when I was twelve years old. At this stage I had not yet learned how to masturbate. Although there was a thing I had started doing. I would lie in bed at night and stroke my body, sometimes with my hand but more often with a piece of fur or a silk stocking. But I didn’t concentrate on my genitals. I would just stroke myself all over. I didn’t identify this as a sexual thing at the time, nor did I have orgasm. I just liked the feeling of it and the whole process made me feel, oh, admirable, attractive.

“I was in seventh grade. For the past few years other kids had made fun of me, called me Brenda, that sort of thing. Imitated me. As best as I can remember, I didn’t hate this as much as you would expect. There was something about the teasing that I enjoyed. I think it must have made me feel important. And I don’t think it bothered me that I didn’t have friends. I felt so different from everyone, from both the boys and the girls, that it must have seemed logical to me that I would be alone most of the time.

“I was on my way home from school one afternoon and these two high school boys, I suppose they were fifteen or sixteen, started walking along with me and talking about me. ‘Isn’t it cute? Is it a boy or a girl?’ Obviously I wasn’t cross-dressing or making up, but I was naturally effeminate in behavior and, hell, I looked like a girl. ‘What’s your name, sweetie?’ They knew my name, but I said it was Brendan, and of course they called me Brenda.

“I was excited that they were paying attention to me.

“Then one of them told the other that they could have some fun with me, that I was the same thing as a girl. I was totally ignorant about sex at the time, just incredibly ignorant. But I was wildly excited without knowing what I was excited about. They asked me to come for a walk with them and I did. We walked on out of town and they went on teasing me and talking about blow jobs, which was an expression I had heard, but didn’t begin to understand.

“We wound up in a wooded area on the edge of town. They told me to take my clothes off and I refused. If I knew nothing else, I knew nudity was taboo. They forced me. I put up a token struggle, but, actually I was thrilled to the core and enjoyed being forced this way. That element of masochism, incidentally, has long since vanished. I like a man to be masculine but I don’t enjoy being overpowered. As a matter of fact, it’s very important to me that I be the one who does the seducing...

“They made a big thing about my penis. ‘Look, he’s got one after all! I guess he’s a boy after all! But it’s so small it hardly counts.’ That kind of thing. Of course it was small, I was twelve years old and undeveloped and hairless. It’s grown somewhat since then, lover, in case you were wondering.

“They dropped their pants and I blew them. Sucked them off. They had obviously experienced this before; though whether it was with girls or other boys or even with each other I have no idea. I didn’t like the act itself. There was an odor that disturbed me, perhaps because I associated it with uncleanliness. I had always been scrupulously clean, fastidious. But I was enormously impressed with the size of their cocks. The only cock I was familiar with was my own, and it was a puny thing in comparison. For the longest time afterward I thought that the relative size of my cock was an indication of my femaleness, that because I had a tiny one I was halfway between being a boy and a girl.

“The ejaculation surprised the hell out of me. I gather a lot of people throw up the first time. I didn’t, but kept spitting, and when I got home I must have brushed my teeth and gargled for hours on end. Ah, how tastes change!

“Afterward, they asked me if I knew how to jerk off, and I again didn’t know what they meant, although again I had heard the expression. One of them played with my balls and said he didn’t think there was enough there to work with, and then he began playing with my penis and wonder of wonders, it got hard. Still tiny, but hard, and what an exciting sensation! I had the first orgasm of my young life. The one who did it told the other one that I was fun to play with, and the second one tried it, but I couldn’t get aroused a second time. They wanted to do other things, I don’t remember what, but I said I had to get home, and home I went. Later that night I jerked myself off with a piece of fur and thought about being a girl and imagined having a huge stiff cock in my mouth.”

Over the next few years, Brendan continued to have relations with those boys and a great many others. Most of the time he performed fellatio upon them, and occasionally served as a passive partner in anal intercourse. “I got a certain degree of pleasure from this right from the beginning,” he said, “but it was a long time before I learned how to enjoy it completely, to the point where I could get a pleasure from it equivalent to what a woman experiences when she gets fucked.”

Quite often his partners would bring him to a climax manually, and some of them performed fellatio on him in return, while a smaller number wanted him to sodomize them.

“It was a long time understanding this. I was completely into this either/or thing, male or female, and I thought they would prefer to relate to me as to a girl and ignore my penis entirely. Which of course a great many of them did, wanting me to leave my clothes on completely and just go on down there and blow them. But I’ve since realized that they responded both to my girlishness and to my maleness.

“You might think that this was partly because some of them at that time were genuinely gay, or bisexual if you prefer. Or that they were young with their sexual preferences incompletely formed and thus open to experiment. You know, the old concept of the child as a polymorphous pervert who can get off on anything that feels good, until social standards and role development teach him just what he may and may not find exciting.

“Not true. Not the whole story, anyway. Because I have gone to bed with any number of men who consider themselves wholly masculine and exclusively heterosexual and who will say to me that they can dig me because I am feminine, and that they could not possibly get interested in an ordinary faggot. And I’m sure they quite honestly believe this. But answer me this. If that’s so, why do they always want my cock? They may not go down on me necessarily but almost invariably they have to touch me, they have to play with me. Realizing this helped me realize that I wanted to keep my cock. It wasn’t the only factor, but it was important.”

And, in a later conversation on this theme, “I’ll tell you what it is. Everybody not only starts life as a polymorphous pervert, but everybody stays that way. Forever. And the defenses you throw up along the way to rule out certain sexual acts never get rid of the underlying desire. So every man, however straight he may think he is, has an urge somewhere inside himself to play with another man’s cock, to take it in his mouth, to get buggered. But he buries it so deep he doesn’t even know it’s there, and he can never recognize another man as a sex object.

“All right. Now when a man buries this deeply enough, he’s what we call heterosexual. Exclusively heterosexual. So then suppose he meets me, and he finds himself capable of regarding me as a girl. A girl who happens to wear a cock, but a girl. A girl who walks like a girl and talks like a girl and probably knows more about making effective sexual overtures than any girl he ever met. He says to himself, well, this thing may have a cock on it but it’s still a girl, and thus I can ball it without compromising my manhood, my heterosexuality. I can just lie there and let this ‘girl’ blow me, and what’s so faggy about that?

“At which point we go somewhere and go to bed, and believe me, I’m sensational. Nobody ever complains. And after he comes he looks in his mental mirror and realizes that he’s still the man he always was, that he’s no rotten creepy faggot, for Christ’s sake. And if he just balled me, and he’s not a faggot, then I’m not a man, right? Which means he can do anything he wants with me and it won’t count. It won’t reflect on that manhood of his.

“And the next thing you know he’s got my cock halfway down his throat and he’s so excited by the whole thing that you wouldn’t believe it—”

Brendan first began cross-dressing shortly before his sixteenth birthday. He took a bus to Albany, bought several female garments, and changed in a men’s room.

“Talk about panic scenes! I was all changed and made up when I realized I had to walk out of there and everybody would see this girl heading out of a men’s room. I just got my courage up and walked out of there with my face burning. I suppose I must have drawn some stares but nobody bothered me. After that I used to take a hotel room for three dollars just to have a place to change my clothes. I could afford it. I was getting money now and then from boys I went with in my hometown. Just small change. A quarter or fifty cents or a dollar. I wasn’t actually whoring. Someone would put a make on me and I would be reluctant and they would bribe me with the money. It’s fairly obvious why I liked taking the money. You know, proof that I was desirable.

“It also occurred to me that I could bring men back to the hotel room, but I never did, and as a matter of fact I went to Albany one evening a week for months before I ever made it with anyone. I wasn’t looking for sex. What I wanted was to pass as a girl. To look completely like a girl, to be taken for a girl. To walk around in full drag and have everyone relate to me as a girl.

“I got better and better at it. I would go someplace for a hamburger, or go to a movie, or just spend a lot of time walking around. I would have gone to a gay bar, I suppose, but I didn’t know how to find one or who to ask. And I didn’t want sex. Well, I did, but I was afraid to lead someone on and then have him discover I wasn’t what he thought I was. I mean, it was awhile before I stopped panicking when I had to use a ladies’ room. I thought, suppose somebody can tell? But with anything like that, after you’ve done it a few times you loosen up.

“I would flirt like mad. Do tricks with my eyes, all of that. I’ve learned a lot since then, but I was good at it even then. Oh, at the time I wore falsies, too. I outgrew that when I came to New York.

“I would pick someone out and flirt with him, and occasionally let myself get picked up and taken out for coffee, but it was a long time before I let it go any further than that. Then ultimately I let an older man buy me dinner and take me for a ride, and he parked the car on a dark stretch of road and we necked.

“See, this was the first time I had ever had any of this. The kissing and petting. And it was such a wonderful feeling, such a feeling of total warmth that I had never experienced before. You know, I think that was a tremendous turning point, because it made me see how incomplete it was, what I had in my hometown. Those other boys had wanted me because I was easier to get than a girl, and because I was a weird experience for them. But this man wanted me!

“So I was thrilled, and also I was terrified, because he was going to want to fuck and he was going to be dismayed to find that I had a penis instead of a vagina. I had my cock tucked way back so that he wouldn’t hit it on a casual grope. Even so!

“When we stopped for breath I gave him the predictable story, that I was having my period, a very heavy flow, all of that. And also that I had to get back home in a hurry or my mother would have a fit. Before he could decide that I was a cockteaser I went on to say that I didn’t want to leave him frustrated, and I would go down on him. Which was fine with him.

“Funny thing. When he dropped me back at the bus station, he said something that didn’t register at the time. That I was the first girl he ever met who really knew how to blow.

“It hit me about an hour later. That of course he had had homosexual experiences, or how could he have a basis for comparison?

“After a couple months of the double-life routine, I dropped out of school and came to New York. There were so many reasons for this that I won’t go into them now. Let’s just say the time was right. I was very young, just sixteen, but I was ready to bid a fond adieu to home and family.

“I didn’t have any trouble finding the gay scene here. It would have been harder not to find it. And it was a very heady experience for me at the time. All at once I was meeting hundreds of other boys who were feminine to one extent or another, who would cross-dress and make up and the rest. And I was meeting men who were attracted to other men, and some men who were specifically attracted to feminine men.

“And instead of being the local queer, the boy-girl, the freak of Schoharie County, I was literally treasured! I didn’t have to pretend. I was being sought out by men who thought I made a beautiful girl but who were delighted that I was genitally a male. I don’t think I can make you understand what a wonderful feeling that was. There was never a point where it even occurred to me to be homesick, because it was as if I was finally home after spending the first sixteen years of my life in a hostile foreign environment.

“Not that it was all roses. There is a hang-up I have, and I’ve come to think that it’s a hang-up of the human condition. You never quite find what you’re looking for, or if you do find it you discover it wasn’t what you hoped it would be. Also, my wants were ambivalent. I wanted to prove myself with as many lovers as I possibly could. I wanted proof that they liked me, loved me, lusted for me, respected me, everything. At the same time I wanted to be somebody’s wife, to form a totally monogamous relationship with a really strong straight man whom I could adore and respect. And the old Catch-23 — I wanted my man to be completely heterosexual, but if he went for me that proved he wasn’t, and if he didn’t I didn’t get him. Even when you realize the basic contradiction, that doesn’t help you get out of the bind.”

Brendan’s hustling is worlds apart from the world of the Times Square hustler, and neither his motivations nor his life-style have much in common with Alan’s. He does not solicit a fee for sexual favors and frequently has contacts without receiving any money.

“I am only a hustler — I hate the term — in that I do get supported by men. I’ve had jobs from time to time but there’s no denying that men support me. But I never whore. I don’t charge. And I don’t go with anyone who doesn’t appeal to me. Admittedly I like a lot of men, sweetie, but I’m no Will Rogers. I’ve met men I don’t like, and there’s no way they can seduce me or buy me or anything. I can’t be gotten. I have to like the idea.”

But men give Brendan presents and do him favors and pick up his tabs. When he is short of money he will mention this to his lover, who will in turn press a small loan upon him. Brendan never offers to repay the loan, and repayment is never expected. From time to time Brendan shares someone’s apartment without paying rent. He is given money for cab fare. His drinks and dinners are bought for him. He certainly gets far more financially out of his sex life than does Alan.

He has had some sexual experience with females. “Once with a lesbian, it was sheer bedroom farce. We met at a party and she thought I was a girl and I thought she was a man, and we both got hysterical about the whole thing, and decided to ball just to see what would happen. It was the weirdness of the whole thing that excited us. We ate each other and fucked a little. And I’ve been at group scenes with straights and gays where everybody does everything with everybody, and it isn’t as if I became impotent with a girl. I can perform, I can get excited and I can satisfy a woman and I can come that way. But the excitement is only physical. I don’t really get into the whole thing. I feel as though only a portion of me is involved. In that sense, I feel more involved and more completely myself when I go down on a man and don’t have an orgasm or even become physically excited than I do having complete sexual relations with a girl.

“You know, the number we ran earlier about fag hags, well, there is a kind of girl who is sort of marginally in that classification who gets tremendous satisfaction out of seducing male homosexuals. Not in the standard sense of flirting with faggots because she knows it’s safe, but really meaning it and wanting to get a gay guy in bed with her. I suppose to prove what a dynamite woman she is if she can manage to ball a faggot. Well, we all have our ego trips...

“I have a certain amount of girls who will come onto me like that, and occasionally I take them up on it, more or less to see how I react to it. One of them had had lesbian experience and I think saw me as an acceptable way to get that old kick again. But the experience I have not had is to make it with a girl who was absolutely reacting to me as a male and who didn’t even know I was gay, or feminine, or whatever. And now and then I will imagine myself coming on totally butch and picking up a girl that way and finding out how I would relate to it and whether or not she would want me, and what it would be like.

“Lord, if I keep talking like this you’ll come to the conclusion that I’m a latent heterosexual!

“About the different men, there was one scene that’s worth mentioning. There’s this fellow I know, a very successful Wall Street lawyer, and genuinely ACDC. Married, solid position, a couple of girlfriends on the side, and he also makes the gay scene. And doesn’t try to hide who he is, you know, none of this slouching around 42nd Street and keeping his name a secret. He figures that anybody he meets in a gay bar is apt to be gay, so what’s to hide from him? Which is perfectly sensible, but not everybody has that much self-assurance.

“I’ve gone with him quite a few times. He’s very generous with cash presents and very gracious about it, and he’s damned attractive and I like him. One thing he likes to do is take me to straight parties. Not his family’s set, obviously, but the circle of friends he’s apt to see when he’s squiring any of his female girlfriends. He passes me off as a girl and no one suspects, and generally his friends will ask me for my phone number — I give a phony — or ask my date for my phone number afterward. And then we go back to his apartment in town and ball each other, and the whole deception aspect of it turns him on tremendously...”

I had not intended to return to the subject of my own reactions toward Brendan, but I cannot entirely dismiss the feeling that they may be relevant to an understanding of Brendan, and indeed to an understanding of various aspects of homosexuality in the broader sense.

On re-reading the material quoted, I find it does not sufficiently convey the tone of the time we spent together. Our interview sessions covered a period of about eight hours spread over two days, during which time Brendan seemed to change sex periodically, drifting from boy to girl and back again any number of times. There were times when I found myself quite consciously avoiding his eyes because the liquid intensity of his stare was so disturbing to me. At other times he stopped vamping me entirely and I related to him as to any male, and was completely at ease conversationally.

At one point he said, not as a boast but as a flat statement of fact, “I can get any man I want.”

I told him that sounded like hyperbole to me.

“But I think it’s true, Jack. Not that I’m never rejected. I don’t mean I’m Iris Irresistible. I get turned down, and usually the turndown turns me off and I don’t keep pursuing. But if I keep pursuing, if I want it badly enough, I generally get my man.”

“Like the Mounted Police?”

“I could get you.”

“I doubt it.”

“You wanted me before.”

“I thought you were a girl.”

“So?”

“So I know you’re not.”

“Uh-huh. And you’re gradually getting used to it. You’re getting less and less shocked at having been turned on by me before. You held hands with me before.”

“True.”

“Would you hold hands with me now?”

“I don’t know.”

“Scared?”

“Probably.”

“So you’ll do the ostrich number? Bury your head in the sand and pretend I don’t exist?”

“Not exactly that.”

“Do you know what you’re afraid of?”

“Of course.”

“It’s cabbage. ‘I don’t like cabbage and I’m not going to try cabbage because I might like it and I already know I hate it.’ Your mind is made up and you don’t want to be confused with the facts.”

“There’s no way to win, is there, Brendan? If I don’t want to, it means I’m repressing it. A equals A and B equals A.”

“Absolutely.”

“Let’s just say I’m not interested. And that I want you to stop coming on.”

“If that’s the way you want it.”

“It is.”

“I’ll let it alone then,” he said, the throatiness suddenly gone from his voice. “Of course,” he added, “think of the benefit if you tried it and found out you didn’t like it. You could stop worrying about it.”

“I’m not worrying about it.”

“Lucky you. But I’ll let it alone. Of course, you can always change your mind, can’t you?”

“I doubt that I will.”

“But you have the option. And you do have my number, don’t you?”

“Yes.”

“Lovely.” The eyes again. “And that’s only fair, honey, because you better believe I’ve got your number.”