The Male Hustler

Cary

“Sometimes I wonder why in the hell I come down there. Oh, that’s easy to answer. The money. I’ll take the subway in and catch a movie and have something to eat, maybe a couple of drinks, and instead of the whole evening costing me money I come out ahead of the game. Maybe I wind up with ten or fifteen bucks more than I started with.

“See, it’s not a matter of I get up in the morning and say to myself, well, tonight you’re gonna make it to Times Square and hustle some queers. I won’t lay it out in front like that. I live out in Queens, you know. Over in Bayside. The old man is in construction and I got a sister finishing high school this year. Sometimes I’ll think about getting out on my own. You know, an apartment of my own in Manhattan. The only thing is that this place is so expensive if you want to live halfway decent. What do you have to pay for a decent apartment? I don’t mean some rat hole on the Lower East Side, because who wants to live like that? But a halfway respectable place on the Upper West Side, maybe the Village. I’ve been to guys’ places that are no bigger than my bedroom in Queens, with a refrigerator and a stove in one corner so they can call it a kitchenette, and a toilet you couldn’t turn around in, and they’ll tell me they’re paying a hundred, a hundred and fifty a month. More if it’s a really decent neighborhood. If it’s the East Side, you got to take that number and double it.

“Even if I was working, if I had a good job, that’s a lot of dough to put out just for a place to stay. And I have to say I’ve got a good deal where I am. My old lady is a great cook, you know, and the house is always clean, and it’s really very convenient for me. The only hassle is the subway but I’m never on it in rush hour so it’s no big deal, just that it’s a waste of time. But one thing I got is time. More time than I need, time all over the place.

“Another thing, my folks don’t hassle me lately. It used to be a hassle. While I was in high school, and the first couple years I was out. Where were you, what were you doing, who were you with, all of that shit. And then after I graduated it was a whole lot of what are you going to do with yourself, when are you going to start looking for a job. I can’t see spending my life like the old man, busting my hump with a pick and shovel. I just can’t see it. He makes decent dough, I guess, but he comes home every night beat as hell and just puts himself in front of the television set and pours the beer down. I don’t think he even knows what he’s watching, unless it’s a sports program. He watches the Mets in the summer and football in the fall and the Knicks in the winter, the few games that they broadcast, and the rest of the time he just puts on one channel and watches it until it’s time for him to hit the rack. Whatever comes up on that one channel, that’s what he watches. And pours the beer down. I suppose it’s a life, but I can’t see it.

“I figured I would just hang loose and see what happened with the draft. Some buddies of mine enlisted right after school, figured on getting it out of the way. I thought about it and I said to myself, no, let them come for me, I ain’t going out looking for them. And then when they finally called me I got out. Never expected it, but I went out for freshman football in high school and a knee went on me, and it turned out to be enough of a permanent injury to keep me out of the service. Never even thought of it until about two days before my physical. This cat was telling me how a back injury kept him out, a nothing back injury, and I remembered my knee would still go on me every now and then and I brought this up during my physical, and it was no question, 4F all the way. Talk about beautiful breaks...

“So I’ll get up in the morning and have something to eat, then maybe go on down the block for an egg cream, see who’s hanging around, shoot the shit a little. And maybe I run into somebody who says there’s a party that night, or something to do, or I’ll ask some girl I know if she wants to catch a movie. See, the point is that if anything comes up, I don’t make the Times Square thing. It’s more something I do when there’s nothing else to do.

“A couple of nights ago, for instance, you know, like I went home and had dinner with the folks, and my sister rapped a little about school and some boy who didn’t ask her to this party that she was hoping he would, and my mother said something about me looking for work, but no major hassle, because the way the unemployment is now, I mean everybody knows it’s impossible to find anything and the old man has been worrying himself about getting laid off after they finish the job he’s on now. And there was nothing to do, nothing happening, so I got on the phone and called Phillie.

“Usual conversation. ‘Hey, what’s happening?’ ‘Hey, nothing much. What’s happening with you?’ ‘Oh, nothing happening.’ ‘Want to go catch a flick, see what’s doing?’ ‘Yeah, sure, why not?’

“Phillie’s the same age as me. I guess he’s a couple of months older, he’ll be twenty-one in May. We been friends for years. What’s funny is we were both coming to Times Square off and on with neither of us knowing about the other, and then I met him in front of a movie house and we got to talking, and neither of us is quite ready to say what we’re doing, and then it comes out and we laugh about it. We’re real close, you know, so going to Times Square with him is no hassle. We ride in together and catch a movie and stand around together, and if either of us scores an overnight it’s no sweat, and if not we’ll ride back out to Queens together. He just lives two blocks away from me.

“Not that I always go in with Phillie. Sometimes he’ll have something on, a chick or something, or he’s not in the mood, and I’ll go in alone. Either way it’s something to do, pass the time and pick up a couple of bucks.”

Cary is twenty years old. He stands just under six feet tall. His shoulders are broad, his waist narrow. His arms and legs are large and well muscled. His walk, unhampered by the trick knee that kept him out of the service, is a firm aggressive stride.

His black hair is worn longish, combed straight back from his broad forehead. He has long sideburns, and several months ago grew a moustache and goatee, which he has since shaved off. “I liked the look of it but the itching drove me out of my mind. It’s supposed to stop itching after the first couple of weeks but it never did, and finally I said the hell with it and shaved it off.”

Cary’s habitual costume, on or off Times Square, consists of tight dungarees and a black leather motorcycle jacket. At one time he had a motorcycle to go with it, but tired of it and sold it. “I loved the feeling of riding, all that power under you, but there’s so much hassle connected with a bike in this fucking city. You have to chain it up all the time or some son of a bitch steals it. And even with the chains it’s no guarantee. They’ll have a couple of guys with a truck and a pair of bolt cutters, and they’ll just cut right through the chains and toss the bike in the back of the truck and you’re fucked. And riding it in traffic is a pain in the ass. I like to go to bike pictures, and of course Easy Rider; which was totally out of sight. I saw that picture five times, I got totally wasted watching it. The whole idea of riding in open spaces. If I ever got out of the city I could see getting a bike and just taking off. Just grooving on the whole thing. But not around here.”

Cary is physically well developed, although he does not have the extreme proportions of the muscle boys in homosexual “beefcake” magazines. His physique came to him naturally and he has made no particular effort to keep in shape. He owns a barbell and a set of weights, purchased from a friend who was entering the Army, but does not work out with them regularly. “Every once in awhile I’ll go on a kick and do a little lifting, but I don’t really stay with it. When you think about it it’s just boring, pick ’em up and put ’em down, like my old man out on the job but without even getting paid for it. And at least when he’s done there’s a building standing there. All you get this way is muscles so you can lift more weights so you can get more muscles. It’ll be something to do now and then but that’s about all.”

Cary’s first homosexual experiences came in early adolescence, when a friend taught him to masturbate. “We were over in his yard shooting baskets, and he said something about jerking off and I didn’t know exactly what it was. I would get hard-ons and I would play with it because it felt good but I didn’t know anything about coming, that anything else happened except that you played with it for awhile and then stopped. I don’t remember what was said exactly but the outcome was that he was going to teach me to jerk off. We went in his room and first he jerked himself off while I watched. He came, and then he told me to try it. I practically wore it out but I couldn’t shoot, so he came over and did it for me, and I shot.

“I can still remember how it felt, because here it was, you know, this fantastic feeling, and I hadn’t expected it. I had no idea what it was going to be like and it was really great.

“After that I used to jerk off regularly. Sometimes I would decide it was a bad thing to do. You know the shit you hear about it being bad for you, weakening you. It’s funny, because since then, in all the years since then, I’ve read enough things about sex to know that there’s nothing wrong with it. That everybody does it, that men go on doing it now and then even after they grow up, that it probably does you a lot more harm not to do it than it does to do it. But even knowing all this I still to this day have a feeling inside me that there’s something wrong with jerking yourself off. I don’t know what’s wrong about it. I can’t pin it down, you know, what would be wrong about it. But even so I used to try then not to do it too often, and nowadays it’s very rare that I’ll do it. If I get the urge to come and I’m not seeing a girl or anything I can always find a faggot.”

For several months Cary went on seeing the friend who had introduced him to masturbation, and mutual masturbation became a regular part of their meetings. Sometimes they merely manipulated themselves in each other’s presence, but more often each would masturbate the other.

“What I would do, I would try not to do it by myself, to save it until we were together. I made this distinction in my mind between jerking off by myself, which I thought was bad, and jerking off with Eddie, which I don’t think I ever had any bad thoughts about. I knew it was something to keep a secret and I never told anybody about it, but if I ever felt guilty about it I never knew it.

“Having this secret made a bond between us. We were friends before but this made us much closer. We would get together all the time, you know, not that we would always jerk off but that we spent loads of time together. Tossing a football around or shooting baskets or just sitting and talking about girls. The ones we knew from school and imagining what they looked like naked and how big their tits were and what we would like to do with them. Imagining what it would be like to fuck a girl. I guess we were thirteen or fourteen. No, it couldn’t have been more than thirteen.

“We never thought of this as gay because we both would talk about girls all the time and concentrate on them. I would lie back with my eyes closed while Eddie had my joint in his hand, rubbing it, and he would talk about some girl and tell me to imagine I was sucking her tits or giving it to her, and I would just let my mind go with it, and it was good.”

Eddie’s father was subsequently transferred to the West Coast and Cary never saw his friend again. “I wonder about him now and then. What sort of scene he’s into. And what would have happened if he hadn’t of moved away. Like would the two of us have stopped jerking off together or what. Sometimes I wonder if we would have gotten into it in a heavier way. The thing is, we never thought of ourselves as doing anything that was a homosexual thing, that was queer. We knew there was such a thing as fairies and that they dressed up like women and lisped, you know, all the typical things that are all a kid that age knows about the whole gay scene. And we knew that fairies were men who would kiss each other and suck each other off, or they would suck other men off.

“The guys I used to hang out with, the guys in my neighborhood, this was a way of telling someone to go to hell. Like instead of saying Go to hell or Fuck off or Go screw yourself, you would say Eat it or Eat me or Blow me or Suck my cock or something like that. As a form of expressing contempt.

“Eddie and I, I don’t think no matter how long we hung around together, that we would have gone down on each other. That it would have occurred to us. Or that either of us would have tried to cornhole the other, which I’m sure I never even heard of at that time. But blowing, that was something queers did, and we never thought what we were doing was queer. We thought of what we were doing as jerking off, that it was the same as doing it yourself but more enjoyable. That we were sharing the experience of jerking off. Not that we loved each other or had something sexual between us or thought of each other as girls or anything.”

Did he, considering the question retrospectively, feel that his relationship with Eddie was homosexual?

“Well, to be technical, anything sexual between two males is considered homosexual. If you want to be technical about the whole thing.”

But as far as his own thinking was concerned?

“Well, put it this way. If I had a scene like that now... like if Phillie and I were doing to each other what Eddie and I used to do, yes, I would think that what I was doing was a homosexual act. Not that I was necessarily a homosexual, but that it was a homosexual act. You follow me? Like a person will have a couple of drinks now and then without you calling him an alcoholic.

“But when I think back to what we did, what I think is this is something that happened like seven years ago with a couple of kids, that it was kid stuff, and that’s all I really think about it, and not considering whether it was homosexual or not.”

After Eddie moved away, Cary’s sex life was confined to solitary masturbation. Shortly before his sixteenth birthday he had coitus with a neighborhood girl. “There’s a couple of girls in every neighborhood that put out, and that everybody knows about. This girl was a couple of years older than us but was a year behind us in school because she wasn’t the brightest. A batch of guys would go off with her and she would pull a train. You know, a gang bang. I got in on it once and lost my cherry.

“It was great, but it wasn’t as much as I thought it would be. We were in somebody’s garage and we took turns fucking her on a ping pong table. One guy would go and then another and everybody stood around watching and making comments. You know the kind of comments. There were about eight of us and I was fourth or fifth and with watching and all, the excitement of it, and also being nervous because anybody could of walked in on us. I remember one of the guys couldn’t get a hard-on because of it, the nervousness, and the girl made a remark and some of the guys rode him a little about it, and I was afraid it would happen with me, but as it turned out it was just the reverse. I was so hot and bothered that I just about got it in before I shot my load. One or two strokes and bang! and it was over. It felt wonderful, a girl’s cunt feels like nothing else in the entire world, but it was over so fast. Still, I got this feeling of satisfaction out of losing my cherry.

“I was worried that I had the clap, because the first time I pissed after that it was a little painful, and I thought I must have a dose because I had heard it was a symptom, pain in urination. But I didn’t get a dose and it was just painful that first time, maybe out of worrying about it and expecting it.

“I never fucked that particular girl again. Like I was glad it happened but I didn’t want to see her again. She was really a pig, you know, and also she didn’t seem to get anything at all out of it. She wasn’t even excited. She would fuck for anybody, ten guys one after the other, but she never even wiggled her ass, never even changed the expression on her face. What did she get out of it? I often wondered about that, about why she bothered to go through with it when it didn’t do a thing for her. Like what was she trying to prove?

“I had always thought that a girl who would do that was, you know, a nymphomaniac. A girl who would get terribly excited so she couldn’t live without it, or else that she got hot but couldn’t come, that it took a fucking army to satisfy her. I never thought a girl like that would turn out to be one who didn’t feel anything at all.

“As far as other girls, none of our crowd went out on dates too much. Nobody had a hell of a lot of money to spend. You might take a girl to the movies and do a little necking, or maybe go to her house when her parents were out for the evening, or keep her company if she was baby-sitting or something. I had this one girl who used to baby-sit and I would go over and keep her company. We would make out, but in all the months that I saw her off and on, I never fucked her once. This was common. All through high school, I don’t think hardly any of the guys I knew were getting fucked regular. Except for a couple that were going steady and it was fairly set that they were going to get married eventually. The girls I knew, I never found one I wanted to spend that much time with. For sex, and to have a good time, but not that I would want to see every night and not to spend the rest of your life with.

“This particular girl, with the baby-sitting, we would make out for a while and I would finally walk out of there with my nuts ready to explode. I hated to jerk off afterwards because I felt, I don’t know, that I ought to be coming with her instead of by myself. That it was really settling for next to nothing to come alone in my bedroom. But if I didn’t jerk off it was painful. When you get all that hot and bothered and don’t shoot, your balls hurt. This is on top of being generally frustrated because it’s a definite physical thing and there’s nothing you can do about it.

“This more or less led to what happened one night, because I left her with my balls in an uproar and I was waiting for a bus. The people she was sitting for were a bus ride away, and generally I would wait and ride home with her, but for some reason I left early. I’m not sure if this is what it was this particular time, but occasionally we would have an argument, because she wouldn’t let me fuck her which was generally the cause of our arguments.

“Anyway, I missed my bus and I’m standing there in the cold and this cat pulls up and offers me a lift. So I get in. It’s this guy, he must have been about thirty or forty, and he starts coming on to me right off the bat, although because this is the first time, I never knew what he was getting at. I never would have thought of him as a faggot because I had this picture in my mind that all faggots were the queen type and he was just an ordinary guy in appearance. Nowadays I would recognize him as a faggot from a block away. There are all these mannerisms and ways of looking at you that you learn to spot, but I didn’t know anything about them at the time.

“So he says something like, ‘I remember what I was like at your age. I bet you have a lot of fun with girls.’

“And I said, ‘Oh, I can take ’em or leave ’em.’

“He says, ‘Do you have a girl?’

“‘Well, I do and I don’t.’

“‘What do you mean by that?’

“‘Well, I’ve got a girl, I was just spending some hours with her, but I can’t get anyplace with her.’

“See, right off the bat I’m laying a whole trip on the guy. Nowadays, knowing what I know, I don’t know if I would be ready to come on that strong. I mean, what it amounted to was that I was playing up to him, feeding him openings, without even being aware of what I’m doing.

“So we went on talking. I did this whole routine about how she liked me to pet her and she lets me play with her tits and suck them and even get a finger into her snatch, but that’s as far as it goes. She won’t put out. And he says I must be frustrated, and I say damn right I’m frustrated, and he says it’s bad for you physically, an experience like that. Well, I more or less intended to jerk off when I got home, but I wasn’t going to come out and tell him this, so I said I would just have to live with it, and he said maybe he could do me some good.

“‘I know a lot of girls,’ he said. ‘Look, Cary, I have an apartment not far from here. Why don’t you come up to my place and we can both have a couple of drinks and unwind, and maybe everything’ll work out for you.’

“You may not believe me, but I still don’t know what he was driving at. I still didn’t think of him as a queer, see. I got the impression that he was going to call up some girls. I don’t know if I really believed that some girl would come over and I would get to screw her, but he was a nice guy and I had nothing better to do, and even the idea of a drink sounded pretty good. Besides, I knew that strange things could happen. There was a guy at school who had a steady thing going with a married woman, and the way it happened was that a guy got to talking to him the same way this guy had started with me, and brought him back home and had the kid screw his wife. That was his thing, he liked to have his wife get fucked by a young kid while he watched. I guess he would jerk off while he watched the two of them, or maybe he would fuck the wife afterward himself. Whatever it was, at least according to the story I heard, the guy never touched him or anything, just wanted him to fuck the wife. And the way he told it the wife was good looking and great in bed, she would do everything, suck him off, fuck him in all these different positions, and he was going back for more just about every day. So for all I knew this was going to turn out to be something along those lines and I didn’t have anything better to do than go along for the ride and see what happened.

“He had a very nice apartment. We had a few drinks and I felt myself loosening up. Then he gave me a batch of pictures and said I might find them interesting. I had seen dirty pictures before, but never like this. These were in color and well photographed and the girl in the series was really great looking. Really beautiful. A blonde with a fantastic figure.

“I can still remember what she looked like.

“Of course I got a hard-on immediately. All the excitement with the baby-sitter and now these pictures, and I was having to reach and straighten my cock because it was cramped up in my pants, and he made a remark and said I sure seemed to like the pictures, and he sat next to me on the couch and put his hand on my cock just for a minute, just a quick feel, and he said it was obvious I was getting hot over the pictures, which must have been obvious, I guess.

“I felt a little funny about him touching my cock, but the way he did it made it seem natural enough.

“He asked me which of the pictures I liked the best. About half of them were pictures of the girl blowing this guy, licking it or taking it in her mouth, you know. And the expression on her face, you could see she really loved what she was doing.

“So I told him I really liked those pictures.

“‘Won’t your girl do that for you?’

“‘Listen,’ I said, ‘are you kidding? She won’t even jerk me off!’ Which was true, but actually I never really tried to get her to jerk me off. I was just set on getting her to let me screw her and hadn’t really made a point of suggesting the other thing, so whether or not she would have done it I don’t know.

“‘Well,’ he says, ‘you must have had blow jobs before?’

“I told him I never did.

“‘The problem is that most girls don’t like to do it. But you’re really missing something. It’s a wonderful feeling.’

“I said I could imagine.

“He asked if I had ever been laid, and I told him about that and told him it was great. I made it sound better than it actually was, not telling him about the parts of it that weren’t so terrific. He said a blow job was better, and then he patted my cock again and said it was a shame I never had one, and that it would be the perfect thing for me now to relax me and get rid of all the tension.

“I don’t remember just how the conversation went from there. By now I knew he wanted to blow me and by now I guess I wanted him to. I still didn’t think of him as a queer but as a guy who liked me and wanted to do something to make me feel better.

“He opened my pants and took my cock out and gave me a long elaborate blow job. When he first went down on me I thought it would be like with the girl, that I would go off instantly, but it was just the reverse. Maybe the drinks had something to do with it. I don’t know. It lasted a long time and felt incredible. Really great. And then I came, and it was dynamite.

“Right after I came it occurred to me that he would want me to blow him in return, which I knew I didn’t want to do. But he never even suggested it, and I have the feeling that he came in his pants while he was going down on me.

“Anyway, he took me right on home afterward, drove me right to my door. He gave me his phone number and told me to call him if I was ever in the mood again. That girls could give a guy a hard time, and there was no reason to go through life frustrated when there were people who would be glad to help a guy out.”

I asked Cary how he felt about the experience after it was over.

“I don’t know. Of course I got to realizing that he was a queer. That he got his kicks this way.”

“Did this make you contemptuous of him?”

“I don’t think so. See, I saw him as a guy first and later found out he was a fag. If it happened the other way around it might have been different. Like there have been guys who have said how they’ll go in a men’s room to take a leak and some man will come up out of the blue and make a grab for their cock. And if he did something like this I think it would have been a different story, like I might have hauled off and belted him because I was disgusted. But the way this guy got to me, I have to admit he was very smooth about it. He had my cock in his mouth before I really knew what the hell was coming off, and by that time I was in no mood to argue.”

“Did you worry that what you had done was abnormal?”

“No. I mean, I didn’t do anything, I just sat there. If he wanted me to blow him it would of been something else, but that never came up. He just wanted to blow me, and if you stop and think about it, what’s the difference between getting a blow job from a guy or a girl? Either way you sit there with your eyes closed and let your cock enjoy itself.”

“So there’s no difference between a blow job from a man or a woman?”

“Actually there is.”

“Oh?”

“Well, here I’m going to sound as though I’m queer myself, what I’m going to say, so you can think what you want to think. It doesn’t matter to me, just so I know what I am, and I don’t have any worries.”

“Go ahead.”

“Well, it’s better with a guy.”

“It’s better to be blown by a male?”

“Yeah. The act itself is. See, this is hard to explain. Since then a couple of times I’ve had girls blow me. As a matter of fact I ultimately got that girl, the baby-sitter, I got her to do it. I went on seeing her over a period of time and I eventually got her to jerk me off and finally to blow me, and she didn’t know what she was doing. And other girls who have done it to me, even the ones who enjoyed doing it, which the baby-sitter never enjoyed it, even then they don’t really know how to do it well.”

“I see.”

“The point is, there’s a lot of technique to it. There’s a tremendous difference between a good blow job and a bad blow job. Listen to me, the way I’m talking, like I’m the fucking king of the faggots the way it sounds. But it’s different from fucking.”

“How?”

“When you fuck a girl, maybe she’s good at it and maybe not, but either way you move around in her cunt and that’s enough to get you off. Even if she’s a lousy lay, even if she’s the next thing to unconscious, it can work out all right. But there’s more variation in blow jobs. There just is. And you get faggots who for them this is their whole thing, this is the big source of kicks for them, and they become experts at it.

“But at the same time, it’s more exciting for me to be blown by a girl because there’s a sense of accomplishment, getting a girl to do this. So the act itself isn’t as good, but the feeling you have about it is better. I don’t know if you can make head or tail out of it, but that’s the way I feel about it.”

Whatever guilt feelings may have arisen from the experience, they don’t seem to have affected Cary’s subsequent behavior to any extent. He telephoned the man who had fellated him on several occasions and enjoyed a repeat performance at the man’s apartment. Through his contact with this man, he began to learn a great deal about the homosexual underground and the way he could play a role in it.

“He told me that guys like me are known among faggots as rough trade. In other words, guys who aren’t queer themselves but who will let faggots blow them when they want to get relaxed sexually. He said that certain faggots preferred rough trade and would actually pay money to blow a guy.

“I suppose it was from what I learned from him that it first came to me to make the Times Square scene. Although I had gone to Times Square in the past, it was as if I didn’t know what was going on. Nobody ever came on to me there; I would just see a movie, maybe have a frank over at Grant’s or a slice of pizza... Maybe hang around a little. I would see the real queen types there but I didn’t know that the other guys who were hanging around were looking to get picked up by fags. But I got the message from what he told me, so later on when I went to Times Square I saw it in a different light, and I was able to stand around in such a way as to get myself picked up.

“Before that, though, I had learned you could score right there in Queens if you wanted to hitchhike around. I would ride a few blocks and then get out and catch another ride if nothing came up. I didn’t always score, but a lot of the time. Not for money, just to relieve myself after making out, or any time when I was feeling horny, because from that time on I almost never jerked off. I was able to give it up more or less completely because I could find a faggot to blow me, or sometimes to jerk me off, which is what a large number of them like to do.

“Some of the guys I hitched rides with also wanted to be blown in return, which I never did. I didn’t get mad when they wanted it because I expected they would ask me to, but I said I wouldn’t do it. I would jerk them off if they wanted me to. I mean, just using your hand on somebody for a few minutes, that’s usually not such a big deal.

“I did get money that way once, actually. This guy had blown me in a parked car and wanted me to blow him, and of course I refused, and he said how about jerking him off, and I hadn’t yet done this and I refused. He actually begged me, and I was going to do it just so he would shut up, but before I could agree he offered me five bucks to do it, so I thought, hell, why not? So I jerked him off onto a Kleenex and he gave me the five bucks, which is the first money I ever earned hustling, if you could call it hustling, just jerking a guy off in a car.”

Cary found the Times Square scene perfectly natural. Initial experiences there were pleasant ones, and he was gratified to receive money for his favors. Rather than set a price, he will tell a prospective John that he is low on money and will wait to see what sum is offered. He rarely haggles, generally accepting the sum offered, which may be as little as five dollars or as much as twenty.

Unlike some rough trade hustlers, he is not inclined to be contemptuous of his Johns, nor is he unwilling to see them as people. Often he will accept a dinner invitation in lieu of cash.

“A good meal and a couple of drinks in a nice place, that’s as good as five or ten bucks any time. As a matter of fact, I’ve had some really great conversations with faggots. Some of them are very interesting people, really educated. They’ve been to Europe, they’ve read all these books, but in spite of how much more they know, how much better educated they are than me, they’ll still take the trouble to have an intelligent conversation with me. A lot of what I know has come out of conversations with faggots.

“Now when Phillie and I rap on the way home, we’ll generally make fun of the guys on the street if we talk about them at all. I don’t know if Phillie really feels that way or not. Sometimes I think he says it for the same reason I say it, so we can be proving to each other that we’re not like those guys, which I think we’re not, but we have to come on with each other to this extent.

“Of course some of the faggots are a pain in the ass. You’ll get these snot-nose types who keep throwing it at you that they’re superior to you, that you’re just a dumb kid who’s only good in bed. And then you get a tremendous amount of uptight guys who don’t like to admit to themselves that they like to suck cock, and they won’t talk at all. Not a word after they make the arrangements, and then when they go down on you they seem to go into a trance, they get completely lost in it, and then afterward all they want to do is get out of the hotel room and go home without saying a word to you. They won’t even look at you. Which is fine with me, because they aren’t that much fun to be with.

“But as far as just despising a guy because he’s gay, I can’t see it. I mean, if a guy happens to get his kicks by blowing another man, that’s just his particular scene. It’s what he likes. I mean, I eat meat, and some people are into vegetarianism, which is no reason why I should hate them or they should hate me. Or one guy’s a Catholic and another’s a Jew and so on, and each person is whatever he is and that’s no reason not to get along with each other.

“The only thing that I wonder is if maybe I like it too much. I mean getting blown by faggots. Because I have to admit that I enjoy it. I wouldn’t go so far as to say that I like it better than fucking a girl. If someone said you have to give up fucking girls I would say like forget it, man, I’m not about to.

“But from time to time I wonder what would happen, you know, if I got something steady going with a girl. You know, some girl that I really dug and that I could get it together with her in an intense way. I was rapping before about Easy Rider, and I’ll think what a groove it would be, you know, me and a chick, with the two of us really digging each other completely, and each of us on a motorcycle and just cutting across all that space together. And being completely into each other, and never staying one place too long, going here and going there and hanging together, and like balling each other constantly.

“I suppose if I had that and it worked out perfectly I would never want to go with a fag. But the way things are now, there’s nothing like that. I’ll see girls but I don’t spend that much time chasing them because it’s so much easier with the faggots. It really is.

“The way things are now, if I had a girl I could screw any time I wanted, not that I was in love with but that it was always there for me, I’m tempted to say they would never see me on Times Square again. But I’m not positive that’s the truth. Not that it makes me queer, that I can dig it both ways. I don’t know. The thing is, when you learn to like something like that, how are you going to stop liking it?”