The Male Hustler

Derek

“You know, if I were inclined to be picky, and if I weren’t so egocentric as to take immeasurable delight in being interviewed, I’d have to take exception to this project. You want me as an interview subject for a work on homosexual prostitution, and according to my own lights I fail to qualify on either count.

“I’m not a homosexual. I’m a bisexual. Though even the article is objectionable, don’t you think? A homosexual. A bisexual. These terms should be adjectives. They should describe rather than categorize. Human beings have such a compulsion to fit everyone into a drawer, and the more uptight one is, the greater the necessity...

“I am a bisexual male. Or, as the unisex contingent prefers it, a bisexual human being who is genitally male. ACDC, if you will. Versatile. Select your own euphemism, it mattereth not.

“But of course everyone is bisexual, you know. An infant scarcely cares whether the hand tickling its genitalia is attached to a body which is in turn equipped with a penis or a vagina. Which is not to say that there’s no difference between men and women. Of course there’s a difference. And vive la difference, as our French friends say.

“As I see it, to describe a man or woman as bisexual is simply to state that he or she is open to the full range of human sexuality. When one is exclusively homosexual or heterosexual, on the other hand, one is the victim of a more or less damaging neurotic condition. A homosexual is a person who, because of various personal hang-ups to a greater or lesser extent induced by society and personal environment, is solely capable of responding sexually to members of his own sex. And a heterosexual individual is one who, because of personal hang-ups of another sort, is capable only of responding to members of the opposite sex.

“Not that there’s anyone quite like that, however. I don’t think there’s ever been a faggot who hasn’t occasionally looked at a girl and found her attractive. And the straightest of heterosexual males will recognize others of their number as attractive. But hang-ups get in the way to the extent that these people may not even think of doing anything about it, let alone going through with it.

“If this limitation makes either of these sets of people normal in any sense other than a purely statistical one, then a button’s a birdcage. The Gay Liberation people are doing very important work, but they insist that homosexuality is not neurotic, and I disagree. I think it is neurotic in precisely the same way that heterosexuality is. Life is short and life is beautiful and people who place limits on themselves are foolish.

“And this is all changing, you know. That, as much as anything else, is what the counterculture is all about. It’s the real expression of the sexual revolution. The more obvious manifestations that you’ll see are reactions to generations of repression. The excesses of pornography, the wild behavior of some swingers. Theaters with public fucking. All of this is a passing phenomenon. What will be enduring is a genuine attitudinal change, and that’s most apparent with the young. Not all of them, of course. Some of them are every bit as uptight as their parents. Boys are scared to urinate in a public men’s room because someone might steal a peek at their cocks.

“More and more of them, however, consciously open themselves to new experience. They aren’t afraid of homosexual relations, and as a result they don’t take it for granted that an inevitable consequence of an enthusiasm for penises is an antipathy toward vaginas.

“You know that button? If it feels good I’ll do it. Now there is the credo for the Aquarian Age in what? Seven words? Words to live by. Animals know instinctively that anything that makes them feel better is good for them. That’s why wild animals will automatically select the foods their bodies need. Human beings have spent millennia developing their intellects at the expense of their instincts. That’s why civilization has invariably led to a deterioration in diet, because the overdeveloped brain tells the belly what it wants, and makes the wrong choice. You never see fat animals, you know. Only in zoos...

“The new culture, the counterculture, is turning away from a whole body of past experience. What is being rejected, you know, is not merely the value system of a few generations but the social directions of several thousand years. All of this is bound up in all the rest of it. The ecology movement, the return to natural foods, the investigation of the occult sciences, the appeal of mysticism. The rejection of the state and the return to the tribal unit. The emphasis on developing self-sufficiency, on performing for oneself the tasks needed for one’s survival rather than doing a specialized type of work to obtain money to purchase what one requires. And this is happening not in any animal way, not through a rejection of the intellect, but through an expansion of the intellectual vision into newer ways of seeing.

“I’m sure drugs have a great deal to do with this. They encourage new perspectives, cut through ritualized thinking. And no doubt McLuhan can attribute much of this to television, although we can hardly be sure until some dedicated soul takes on the job of transferring his writings into English.

“In twenty years, barring some dramatic planetary tragedy, bisexuality will be statistically normal. This is already true in certain circles, especially for females. You’ve spent a great deal of time yourself with swingers and swappers and orgiasts. I’ve read a couple of your things. The New Sexual Underground. A little sensationalistic, I thought, but I was able to see your own attitudes lurking between the lines and felt at the time that you were not merely reporting, that you understood what is happening. So of course I don’t have to tell you that in large areas of this underground, if you will, the bisexual female is the norm. And the exclusively heterosexual woman is almost becoming a curiosity. Isn’t that your experience?”

I agreed that it was.

“To the point where some couples are unwilling to swing with other couples unless the wife is bisexual. True?”

“True.”

“Would you agree that this is fairly recent? And that it’s very much an accelerating trend?”

“Definitely. I’ve written as much.”

“And male bisexuality is beginning to follow the trend?”

“Yes. But there’s less of it and the acceleration is slower.”

“Absolutely. There’s a double standard. But this trend, I don’t see it reversing, do you?”

“No. But no trend ever looks capable of reversing itself until it reaches the crest.”

“I’m not sure I agree with that. I think sometimes you can see a thesis-antithesis wave in the future, while other times you can identify a trend as historically continuous. In politics and social change and other areas as well. Do you agree, though, that bisexualism is the wave of the future? Not the only wave, but a strong one?”

I thought for a moment, then nodded. “I prefer not to predict,” I said. “My astrologer is usually better at it than I am. But if the question were whether I expected bisexual behavior to increase or decrease, I could only answer that it will increase. On an either/or basis, that’s the only possible answer.”

“Absolutely.”

“Gore Vidal thinks it will help solve the population problem.”

“Well, Gore Vidal is so good at saying memorable things that it doesn’t always seem to matter to him if they make any sense. Bisexualism will not mean that fewer women will be getting fucked by men, so why should it limit the number of pregnancies? I do think, though, that the population problem has had a liberating effect sexually. One of the most persistent arguments against homosexual relations has always been that they are unnatural because you can’t get pregnant that way. If God wanted men to make love to each other, He would have made them capable of knocking each other up. The rejoinder to that has always been that if He hadn’t wanted them to enjoy it He wouldn’t have made it enjoyable. Personally I find it offensive when people put words into God’s mouth. If He exists, and if He wants to speak, He doesn’t need such noisome puppets.”

“I saw a sign once,” I said, “in front of a shipyard. They built wooden ships there. It read, ‘If God had wanted us to have fiberglass boats, he would have given us fiberglass trees.’

“I’d love to meet the chap who wrote that... But getting back to the population problem, the argument always ran that if everyone were homosexual, the race would die out. Well, in the first place, no one ever said everyone should be completely homosexual. And that’s like saying that if everyone were a lawyer the race would die out, because nobody would be growing food. Completely irrational nonsense. Even so, we’ve finally reached a point where the average person knows that the last thing this poor crowded planet needs is more babies. So when one considers a couple of faggots living together, one doesn’t automatically think they’re shirking their duty by not rushing out and reproducing. That has to have an attitudinal effect over a period of time. A subtle one, but a real one.”

I consider myself fortunate that Derek’s dissatisfaction with the designation homosexual prostitute did not stand in the way of an interview. He was in every sense a perfect subject.

When one does a substantial amount of interviewing, one soon discovers that a great deal of one’s time is largely wasted insofar as the compilation of publishable material is concerned. (In a larger sense, all interviews are of some value; the interviewer widens his own perspective and forms valuable impressions regardless.) But many subjects are virtually incapable of opening up in an interview. Some rather obviously lie to avoid a disclosure they would find embarrassing. Others, out of a need to be liked, try to tell an interviewer what they assume he wants to hear. Still others have gone through life automatically lying to themselves to the point where they cannot locate the truth even if they were inclined to voice it.

And many more are so fundamentally inarticulate that, much as they wish to cooperate, it is hard to get anything out of them. Sometimes questions will engender nothing but terse replies rather than leading to a worthwhile flow of thought. Sometimes a subject will chat on endlessly, constantly wandering off the subject, relating trivial anecdotes in a luxury of detail, but never putting anything much together because of his own limited inner vision.

Derek, on the other hand, was not only willing and able to speak to the point about his own experiences and feelings, but was also given to speaking quite brilliantly about the wider implications of the points we discussed. I spent a good deal of time interviewing him, and but for space limitations I would have liked to reproduce the several reels of tape verbatim. At one point I did suggest that he had the insight and experience for a book, and seemed in every way capable of writing such a book himself. He confessed that he had been considering just such a project, had taken some tentative steps in that direction, and was presently trying to decide whether he would prefer to write a pure autobiography or to couch his material in the guise of a novel. Whichever form he chooses, I suspect the results should be worthwhile.

Derek is thirty-two. On appearance alone he could readily pass for twenty-five. He is tall, fairly broad in the shoulders, narrow in the waist and trim in the hips. His physique is athletic rather than muscular. His hair is dark brown, styled fashionably by a men’s hair stylist. His facial features are too strong for him to be conventionally handsome. His nose is prominent, almost hawk-like. Similarly prominent are the ridges of bone above his eyes. His gaze is direct but not intimidating. His overall appearance is such that one would not automatically suppose him to be homosexual, but neither would one be much surprised to see him at a gay bar.

Derek looks younger than his age at least in part because he keeps in excellent physical condition. He jogs and plays handball. His preferred mode of transportation within New York is a bicycle. He is a vegetarian, limits himself for the most part to organically grown foods, takes natural vitamin and mineral supplements, eschews coffee, tea and tobacco. The only euphoriants he uses are dry wine (he and his roommate make their own) and marijuana (he has raised his own in a window box, but found it inferior to the Mexican product.)

In conversation, Derek seems at once older and younger than his years. His attitude is youthful, but the suggestion of depth and maturity in his speech counteract this impression. His clothes are expensive and well-chosen. His apartment, a brownstone floor-through on one of the quieter blocks of the West Village, has just enough personal flavor to avoid the “decorated” look. When I said as much, he laughed and said that his roommate deserved the credit. “Gene’s a decorator,” he said, “and the one thing he always tries to avoid is doing a place so that it looks professionally ‘done.’ Which is precisely what most of his clients want. They won’t trust their own taste — which is perhaps wise of them — and they feel that they’ve failed if guests don’t walk into the living room and immediately ask the name of their decorator. Here, of course, he was able to do just as he wanted. It is comfortable, isn’t it?”

Just as Derek took issue with the homosexual label, so did he dislike being characterized as a prostitute.

“I’m not a hustler or a prostitute. A prostitute is one who prostitutes oneself. A hustler is one who hustles. There are individuals whose life-style specifically fits either or both of those categories. I am not of their number. My profession does have a name, however. I am a masseur.”

But didn’t he have sexual relations with his clients?

“Not always. I have quite a few regular customers who want nothing more or less than an orthopedic massage. Men and women with back problems, for example.”

Didn’t the majority of clients prefer a sexual service of one sort or another?

“Yes. In the broadest sense, definitely yes. But you must understand that the whole profession of massage is inescapably sexual. The whole idea is relaxation and release of tension, and sexual tension is not that completely divorced from general muscular tension.

“I know a girl who has her own massage studio on the Upper East Side. She worked as a practical nurse for many years, in hospitals and clinics as well as in private nursing situations. She told me one common chore was giving a patient a rubdown. Often male patients would develop erections in the course of having their backs or legs rubbed. She learned early on that it was standard practice in most of the places she worked for the nurse to deal with this phenomenon by massaging the patient’s penis until he reached orgasm. According to her, it was quite remarkable how many of the older nurses took this as a matter of course, and how adept they became at it. Skilled professional hands, I suppose. A couple of disinterested strokes and Bob’s your uncle. And then there were other nurses who would give the penis a nasty slap to make the patient lose his erection. There should be a special circle of hell reserved for those bitches...”

I suggested that his advertising in Screw would seem to indicate the obvious sexual nature of his services.

“Yes, I advertise in Screw regularly, and now and then in some of the other sex tabloids. Also in the Village Voice, which now has two different categories in the classifieds, Licensed Massage and Unlicensed Massage. I advertise under both headings, incidentally. I do have a New York license, actually took a course and passed a qualifying examination. The ‘licensed’ listing assures certain clients that this is not a pure sex thing, that they can come for a sauna and back rub if that’s all they want. The other listing assures a client who wants sexual release that it’s available. And of course in all ads I specify that I serve male and female clientele, although the bulk of my clients are men.

“I also advertised briefly in the New York Times under situations wanted. They keep changing their policy as to the acceptability of massage ads. They’ve been taking male model advertisements which are fairly blatant fellows describing themselves as draped, which is another way of saying well-hung. For my own part, I found that the Times brought in too many phone calls and too few clients.

“In the past few months I’ve been getting quite a bit of repeat business, but even so the majority of my income comes from first-timers. I don’t suppose this will ever change significantly. With a first-time client, it’s necessary to determine just what he’s there for. I’ll always ask where they read my ad. If they mention Screw, it’s fairly obvious that they have some form of sex in mind. Some of them will say they don’t remember or that they got my number from a friend. In any case, it’s important not to do anything unless one is fairly certain the client wants it. When a man has absolutely nothing on his mind but lower back pain, and when the relaxing effect of a massage has his mind hovering on the verge of sleep, he can find it somewhat unnerving when the masseur makes a sudden grab for his cock.

“Of course one becomes increasingly sensitive to what people want. And some do come right out and tell you. They may state precisely what they want the minute they walk in the door. I remember a buttoned-down executive type who bustled in the other day, looked me up and down, and announced he wanted a blow job and what was the price. I’m sure he was all right but I had to tell him I didn’t do that sort of thing.

“You see, there’s a legal point. I charge thirty dollars for a fifty-minute hour of massage. (About the same as analysis, and it probably does more people more good.) That’s the whole fee, whether they get a purely physical massage or a total sexual experience. That way any sexual acts are just a bonus, and I haven’t legally committed prostitution. I’ll have violated various and sundry sodomy statutes, but not even the vice squad cares about that. So I won’t contract in advance to perform a sexual act. Clients who’ve been around at all are aware of this, but this chap, I’m positive he wasn’t a cop, but I just don’t take those chances.

“Often a client will suggest shortly after the massage begins that I might be more comfortable undressed. Or he may simply get an erection, or may handle himself suggestively, at which point I will feel free to touch him intimately. I have a variety of mechanical devices on display. Manual vibrators, vibrators for anal stimulation, and anyone who wants that can let me know. Naturally, once one actually begins fondling someone’s genitalia, the ice is broken. Then he can say what he wants and we can do it or not do it.

“You see, I won’t do everything with everyone. I do enjoy sex, you must understand. There is nothing I enjoy nearly so much, and nothing that plays nearly so great a part in every aspect of my life. When I see a man or woman whom I find attractive, my very immediate impulse is to desire sexual contact with that person. I don’t mean that I would want to ejaculate a hundred times a day. One would simply be fucking oneself to death that way. But it’s possible to have enjoyable sex without orgasm, just as it’s possible to have orgasm without ejaculating.

“If I like a client, if I find him attractive, I’ll do almost anything he wants to do. As he prefers, I’ll fellate him or be fellated by him, and either penetrate or accommodate him anally. These are all acts which I enjoy greatly, provided that there’s nothing about my partner that happens to turn me off.

“What turns me off? Attitude, more than anything else. If a man is obnoxious I don’t care to have sexual relations with him. Or if he’s unclean. You might think that anyone expecting to have sex would shower beforehand. It doesn’t seem to occur to some of them. And then things like a terrible complexion or extreme obesity also put me off. Health and beauty are largely, the same thing, you know. A person who looks unhealthy is sexually unappealing. To me, certainly, if not to everyone.

“If I’m turned off, there are some things I’ll do and some I won’t, depending upon the strength of my feelings. I will masturbate any client to orgasm. I feel that’s part of what thirty dollars entitles them to. And I will almost always permit a client to handle or fellate me. I have to respond to someone in order to go down on him, and I have to respond to him a great deal to take either role in buggery. These are personal reactions of mine. Certain acts and certain roles both imply and demand a greater level of intimacy than others.

“When there’s something I don’t want to do with an individual, I simply state that it’s an act I never perform, that it’s not part of the service. Occasionally I’m offered more money. I still refuse. When this happens I know I won’t see that customer again, and of course that’s as I want it. I want to limit myself to people I can relate to. In fact if I do get a repeat call from a customer who has wanted something I didn’t want to do, I won’t make an appointment for him. There are a lot of basically masochistic types who only want what they can’t get. I make enough money without exploiting them, and I’m happier without their company.”

Derek spoke at length about his clients, both generally and specifically. Some, he said, were exclusively homosexual and enjoyed going to a masseur partly for the extra-sexual aspects of the treatment and partly because it represented a convenient and uncomplicated way for them to obtain casual sexual gratification.

“Homosexual clients of this sort have generally shopped the massage market rather thoroughly. They often have permanent or semi-permanent relationships of their own and may cruise the bars or walk the promenade. When they come for a massage it’s not because they can’t have homosexual contacts elsewhere, or because they’re unable to relate to a male lover.

“What I can offer them is a purely selfish experience, and everyone who’s honest with himself wants that sort of thing now and then. They don’t have to please me, they don’t have to think about what I might want to do. All they have to do is stretch out on the massage table and enjoy. They can be very specific, outlining precisely what they want and what they don’t want. It’s almost a master-slave relationship without all the leather trappings or emotional exploitation of the sadomasochism subgroup, I can find this quite enjoyable as an occasional thing, incidentally. If you’re really involved in sex, the pleasure you give is at least as important as the pleasure you get. Some times more so.

“Others won’t be specific at all. They may say ‘Do something wildly interesting, darling,’ or words to that effect.

“I rarely have any complaints.”

A somewhat larger proportion of his clients are men Derek characterizes as bisexual.

“I’m sure I constitute an initial homosexual experience for a great many men. Let me qualify that — an initial experience in their present stage of life. They may have gotten into homosexual relations to a degree in childhood or adolescence, may have had something going at college or in the army, but that’s behind them now and they’ve limited themselves to heterosexual contacts since then. Either way, in terms of their present life-style they are wholly heterosexual in deed if not in thought.

“They’re business or professional types, and either because of youthful memories or out of general curiosity, they feel themselves starting to come out of the shell of their preconceptions. A fellow I know — not a client — got a divorce after close to twenty years of marriage and is now living on Bank Street with a photographer I’ve known for years. We’ve never made it together but we’ve talked, and he told me something I found interesting. Throughout his marriage, he was essentially faithful to his wife. He would pick up a girl once in a great while or spend his lunch hour with a call girl, but he never had an enduring relationship, or for that matter anything you would be inclined to call a relationship with anyone but his wife. And after not too many years he started to help his sexual relationship with his wife along through the medium of fantasy. He would be thinking of someone else while he fucked her, or would be thinking of some unusual act, an orgy with several girls, whatever fantasy appealed.

“That in itself is hardly unusual. I suspect almost any partner in a long-standing relationship does that at least some of the time. The holy compromise of monogamy — you only ball each other but you both grind away thinking of other people. You know, I would consider that the only genuine sort of infidelity, to be unfaithful to one’s partner in the very act of love...

“This chap found, though, that his fantasies were beginning to have homosexual components creeping in. Maybe he would imagine himself sharing a woman with another man. And he found this thought very exciting. And subsequently his fantasies became more specifically homosexual in nature. He imagined acts between himself and another man. He found himself focusing more and more on one fantasy, that he was sucking another man’s penis.

“From what he said, I gather he fought this. He had always felt himself to be exclusively heterosexual. Never actively desired sex with another man. Couldn’t imagine himself actually performing such an act, but in fantasy it was acceptable because it wasn’t really happening. And, of course, because it was the ultimate secret; one might conceivably be found out in the commission of an act, however careful one might be, but fantasies are safe. No one could possibly know what he was thinking about.

“There were times, he told me, when he would suck his thumb while having coitus with his wife. Imagining, of course, that it was something else.

“Inevitably one thing led to another. If he had gone out early on in the game and blown someone he might have gotten it all out of his system, but he was too inhibited, he couldn’t possibly do that. So it became more and more important in his mind until he found himself thinking compulsively about fellatio, scared to death to go out and give it a try but compulsively dwelling on it. He went through all the nonsense. Bought homosexual pornography on Sixth Avenue, read it in a lavatory, masturbated over it and threw it away so no one could guess his dirty secret. Went out of his way to walk past gay bars, magnetically drawn to them but terrified to go inside. Found himself glancing at men’s crotches, and was positive men knew what he was doing, so that he tried to overcompensate by never looking at another man below the neck.

“And other things too tedious to mention. Went to whores all the time and couldn’t get excited with them. Never had had trouble before, of course, but now he was nervous and compulsive and his penis accordingly refused to perform. He fought this by trying to have homosexual experiences with female prostitutes. Had them bugger him with dildos, that sort of thing. And got excited about that.

“Finally he did go with a hustler, one of the 42nd Street types. Picked him up outside a theater and didn’t even go to a room. Instead he took him into the theater, bought a pair of tickets, and then he and the number went to the lavatory and he got in the stall with the hustler and blew him. Paid I think ten dollars for the privilege.

“I suspect a lot of my clients have a similar history behind them by the time I see them. They want to try it but they are genuinely frightened. With me they have a clean and safe experience that they can stop at any time (although they never want to) and that they can direct according to who will do what and with which and to whom. They have privacy and safety and security. They don’t have to come on conversationally, they can just let things happen. If there’s something they’ve wondered about, at least they can find out just what it’s like and whether they like it or not. They can find out whether or not it’s the kind of thing they can live comfortably with, or if it’s something they’d be happier living without because the guilt and ego damage is more than they can readily handle.

“Understand this, Jack. I do feel everybody is fundamentally bisexual. I do not feel that everybody necessarily ought to attempt to realize his bisexuality. If you take a man who has been automatically heterosexual for a sufficient period of time, a man who has erected certain defenses and has grown rigid in his thinking and feeling, it can be very bad for him to break out of the mold. Very disastrous. The fellow I was talking about, the fantasy cocksucker who’s over on Bank Street now. I’m not so certain he’s better off for having done what he did. There should have been a way for him to gratify his impulses without tearing up his marriage. He could have had a boyfriend on the side, he could have taken off one night a week and cruised the bars. Anything. But he repressed himself for so long, he got himself so thoroughly compulsive, that when he flipped out he immediately went overboard, left his wife, left his kids, and does everything but wear lipstick. Says he’s finally being himself, but all he’s doing is going to a different extreme.

“Many of the men I see do what I think he would have been better off doing. People call them closet queens, and militant homosexuals look down their noses at them, but many of them are simply men who have accepted certain facts about themselves. That they like being married, that they like fucking women, but that they want sex with a male partner a certain amount of the time. So they maintain their home life and everything that goes with it and get a gay piece on the side now and then. The ones I see prefer to pay for it. Others go out and cruise for it. I don’t know that one approach is healthier than the other. In a pure dollars and cents basis, I think it probably costs less to get a massage than to make the rounds of the bars, slopping down all those drinks at a buck and a half a copy and frequently not even getting laid in the bargain, which can happen more often than people think, even with all the vaunted permissiveness and openness of the homosexual community. Sometimes, no matter who you are, you wind up going home alone. And if you’re a closet person with only one night a week to devote to the sport, it can be pretty frustrating.”

Derek regards his present situation as ideal in all respects. He earns a substantial amount of money with a minimum of work and enjoys what he does. His roommate, Gene, shares his liberal outlook.

“We’re lovers in that we make love frequently and very genuinely care about and for one another. But it would never occur to either of us to be jealous of the other for having extracurricular interests. Neither of us has that kind of outlook. I could never live with anyone who was at all possessive. I went through that type of living situation once. Never again!

“Gene and I are both oriented toward swinging and enjoy pluralism. In addition to the massage ads I run, we now and then run an ad in Screw for girls interested in swinging with two guys. Not as a commercial proposition, needless to say, but for the mutual pleasure of it. We’re both so highly sensitized and so sexually oriented that we can do things to a woman that most men couldn’t, straight or gay or in-between. We had a girl last week who called up, not in response to an ad but because a girlfriend of hers had swung with us once and was passing the word.

“Lovely thing. Young and beautiful and slender and healthy, and absolutely out of her sweet mind for cock. I think she may have been on something, very possibly a mixture of mescaline and speed. That’s just a guess.

“We spent hours on end with her. Took the phone off the hook and drew the blinds and simply fucked for an incredible length of time. Played with her and vibrated her and sandwiched her and took turns with her and ate her and nearly turned the little thing inside out. When she staggered out I told her, ‘Now don’t forget, love, we’re just a couple of faggots. Imagine what a real man could do for you.’

“I’d like to see her again and get her to swing with a girl I know. I think she’s ready for it. Everybody has the potential for all of it, you know. It’s just a question of getting into something when you’re ready for it.”

Derek’s attitudes are so consistent and his life such a perfect mirror of them that one can easily make the mistake of thinking he has always been this way, very much at ease in the role of a sexual revolutionary.

This is not the case. On the contrary, his early sexual experiences were of the sort usually considered to have dire consequences. Orphaned at an early age, he was raised in a home for orphans until he was placed in a foster home at age ten.

“The orphan home was what the Daily News might have called a hotbed of sex. That was really the only bearable thing about it. Dreary food, gray-green walls, broken down equipment, a staff of incompetents who only cared that we avoid dying in such a way that they might be held personally accountable for it. It never occurred to me to cry for Oliver Twist. I’ve always felt the sniveling little bastard had it relatively easy.

“But we did screw around a lot for children our age. I’ve known so many persons, male and female alike, who managed to remain not merely virginal but relatively inexperienced altogether to the age of sixteen, eighteen, even twenty. I know this happens but still find it inconceivable. We all played with each other and sucked each other as far back as I can remember. It was this ongoing thing, you know; the older children taught the younger children and so on. I had my cock inside a girl years before I was capable of ejaculating. I couldn’t even guess how old I was at the time. No more than seven or eight, certainly.

“As far as I am concerned, that was the only good thing about that place. In every other respect it was a horrible way to grow up. In an ideal situation children ought to have love and affection and security and stability and good food and comfortable surroundings. But if they could have all those things and have a free and open and easy sex life on top of it all — ah, then we might begin to see the emergence of sanity in human relationships. We truly might.”

Derek’s foster parents provided a certain measure of the ingredients on his list. They also seduced him, and in the four years he lived with them his sexual education was broadened considerably.

“They went out and got themselves a child from the orphan home so that they could act out a favorite fantasy. It was a rather cruel and calculating thing to do, because I don’t think they ever stopped to give a damn what kind of effect this might ultimately have on me. I think it would be perfectly possible for a couple to have that sort of relationship with a child and be attempting to act in the child’s best interests. To prepare him to cope with the life for which they’re readying him.

“But Sheila and Ray were not operating on that level. They could never conceptualize anything to that extent. They hadn’t even freed themselves sexually. They did all this acting out, and then they felt a load of guilt and worked it out by regarding me as something dirty, the perverted little shit from the orphan home. Then when they were horny again and the guilt was gone they would turn loving. One could hardly have blamed me for turning catatonic, but I seem to have been made of sterner stuff, or perhaps I was simply too insensitive to have the imagination for schizophrenia. In any case, I was very fortunate.

“I ran away once and came back after one night out in the cold. I ran away a second time when I was fourteen and never went back. I have never been in contact with them since and wouldn’t have the slightest idea how to go about finding them. They moved constantly at the time, one trailer camp after another. And I wouldn’t try to find them if I could. Inevitably I’ve thought about them a good deal, and I’ve occasionally wondered what they’ve turned into since I knew them and how they and I might react now, each to the other. I’m not so sure, though, that it might not be a very unsettling experience for me to meet them again, even now, after all these years.”

The following years were characterized by a great deal of travel and a wide range of sexual contacts. Derek engaged periodically in petty crime and was twice sentenced to jail briefly for misdemeanors. He went on functioning as a promiscuous bisexual, while at the same time becoming increasingly aware of the gulf between his own sexual life-style and society’s normative mores. All of this combined to produce a series of identity crises during his middle twenties.

“I spent a great deal of time going through a very bad situation. I was very fortunate in that I did not have to be alone during this period of time. I was in New York and I was acquainted with a great many people. I knew the gay scene and was known in return. I could always find someone to talk to, someone decent enough to sit across a table from me and listen sympathetically while I talked myself through one critical point after another. I’m sure there were more than a few times when I wasn’t making much sense. I’m sure there were times when I was literally insane. I was playing around with drugs. I don’t think there was anything I didn’t take at one time or another. Fortunately I could never conquer a fear of sticking needles in myself, and as result I never shot either speed or heroin. Fortunately

“I’m sure the drugs served a purpose. This was a time when I had to look at myself in enormous detail, and when I also had to use myself as a lens with which to examine the world. You’ve commented that you’re astonished that I’m uneducated, that I’ve had virtually no formal education. I educated myself during this period of time. Read an enormous amount. Found myself using new words, more specific words, in the dialogues I would have with myself. I wasn’t doing this with any goal in mind. I was just trying to keep from breaking down entirely.

“The attitudes I have now, the whole life-style I’ve developed for myself, is the result of a tremendous amount of concentrated meditation that finally began to resolve itself about eight years ago. I started with physical disciplines, eliminating drugs and alcohol, dropping tobacco, giving up meat. Once my head was straight — the kids’ phrase for it, and I know no better one — I found it very easy to organize the more physical aspects of my life. And ever since then I have consistently been the same person, and I have been a happy and satisfied person. I’ve come to like myself, to take a lot of pride in myself. You know the song, I take a lot of pride in what I am. A good phrase.

“The massage business began a few years ago. I was modeling freelance at the time. Not hustling, but legitimate fashion modeling. It was easy work and paid well enough but I detested it. It’s not a fit occupation for a man to stand smiling like a nit wearing trendy clothes under hot lights while someone takes a thousand pictures of him. Some models keep scrapbooks. I was the reverse. I absolutely hated seeing my face in an ad. Hated it.

“Besides, although the money was good, it was very erratic. You worked when someone needed you and not otherwise. I like independence and flexibility, and modeling had more of that than most jobs, but it wasn’t the same as a profession of one’s own. Gene and I were together at that point and I envied him his freedom. He had to make his idiot customers happy, and it bothered him to ruin a decor because they weren’t up to what he had in mind, but still he was operating on his own.

“Where was I? Massage. Yes. I heard a discussion of some masseur or other in a bar. Must have heard of the profession before but never paid any attention. This time it struck a chord.

“I approached the whole thing very systematically. Got regular appointments with half a dozen masseurs and paid very close attention to what they did. Practiced giving Gene massages and he said I seemed to know what I was about. Took the course, got the diploma, qualified for the license, and set up in business. Really not much more to it than that. Still had a lot to learn after I opened up the studio, but one gets by playing things by ear.

“It’s a good life...”