The Male Hustler

Eldon

“Most Johns are very timid. Maybe that’s not the word I want. Shy. Reticent. As if there’s a certain formula for making arrangements, for managing a pick-up. And they aren’t sure they have it down pat, and they don’t want to do anything wrong. Like an actor in a new play who doesn’t have his lines. I find myself acting as prompter. ‘Hello.’ ‘Hello.’ ‘Nice night for a change.’ ‘Yes, nice night, I was afraid it was going to rain.’ ‘So was I, but it doesn’t look like rain.’ ‘Oh, I’m so glad of that, because I would positively melt.’ ‘Uh-huh, I don’t like the rain much either.’ ‘Yes, that’s very interesting, certainly, but it is a trifle cold, don’t you think?’ ‘Cold, yes, sure is.’ ‘And it would be nice to be somewhere warmer.’ ‘Yes, sure would, wouldn’t it? Uh, why don’t we go somewhere and have a drink?’ ‘Yes, why don’t we, and I thought you’d never ask.’

“Not quite like that, necessarily, but you get the general idea. The more unsure of themselves they are, the more tiresome they become, and when they’re simply too too tiresome I tell them in a nice way to fuck off. Or perhaps not in a nice way. It’s a very liberating thing, you know, to curl your lip at a total stranger and do things with your eyebrows and say ‘Oh, fuck off, will you?’ as bitchily as possible. One hates to be cruel, but there are times when it’s just so gratifying.

“And, my dear, the reactions! Most often their faces fall apart and they slunk off in a state. Is that a word? Slunk? Well, it is now.

“I remember one out-of-town dolt. ‘Fuck off,’ I told him. And he just fixed me with this stare of total disbelief. ‘Now hold on a minute,’ he said. ‘Listen, if I said anything the least bit out of line, I mean it wasn’t my intention. I’m a stranger here, I don’t want to do anything out of line.’

“I imagine I said something to the effect that I just wanted him to go away and leave me alone. ‘Well, just so I know the score,’ he said. ‘I mean, the way you’re dressed and the way you talk and all. I mean, you’re a queer, right? A homosexual, am I right or am I right?’

“‘Darling,’ I said, ‘I’m Marie of Roumania, and I’m aghast that you didn’t recognize me.’

“‘Well, look, Marie,’ he said. I swear I’m not making this up, darling. ‘Well, look, Marie, you’re a queer, right? I mean you’re gay, whatever you want to call it, right? So if you’re gay, what’s with this fuck off routine?’

“I asked him pleasantly if he ever fucked women. He got deliciously defensive. ‘Do I? What are you, kidding? Listen, I got a wife, I got kids. I get plenty of action. I’m not gay myself. Once in a while, something to change your luck, but I’m no faggot if that’s the question you’re asking me.’

“‘Well, do you ever make a pass at a woman and get turned down?’

“‘Listen, Marie or whatever your name is, I make out pretty good.’

“‘But do you ever get turned down, sugarloaf? That’s what I asked you.’

“‘Look, nobody’s a hundred percent. Let’s just leave it that I do pretty good.’

“‘Do you think only women have the right to turn you down?’

“There was quite a bit more of this before he got the point, which I didn’t think was that elusive a point — that anyone, male or female, had the right to say no to him when approached sexually. He had trouble understanding this. In his lexicon, a queen was supposed to be a sure thing. Even if she said her name was Marie of Roumania, evidently. And of course because I was wasting all this time in conversation with the fool, he thought my no was a yes in disguise and I was just camping it up a bit. I finally told him that he’d better be careful, that maybe we ought to walk around the corner because the fellow across the street was a plainclothesman with the Vice Squad and he seemed to be taking an undue interest in us. So if he wanted to walk along with me...

“He did everything but sprint away from me. And it was too too, really, because the number across the street has been peddling his cute little ass for donkey’s years, and is no more a vice bull than you or I. Or are you a cop, Jack, and is this an elaborate bust? And wouldn’t that be ironic?”

“I have nothing against homosexuals,” the typical enlightened heterosexual will say. “As far as I’m concerned, what two people do by themselves is their own business, so long as they don’t bother young kids or do their act in Macy’s window. But I’ve got to admit that a certain type of faggot rubs me the wrong way. You know the ones I mean. Queens, I guess they’re called, The ones who lisp and mince and make themselves into caricatures of women. Caricatures of homosexuals, even. I agree that they have their rights and I’m not one of these hard-hat types who think they ought to be gassed or locked up. They have a right to live their lives. It’s just a personal thing with me. I get uncomfortable in their company. I don’t like to have them around me. They get on my nerves.”

I have heard innumerable versions of this little speech over the years, and at one time or another have probably uttered something faintly similar myself. Indeed, I’ve heard essentially the same opinion voiced by overt homosexual males who find the extreme manner of the drag queen off-putting. “They make it difficult for the rest of us,” is a familiar comment.

Eldon is a perfect example of this type of homosexual. He is very different from Brendan, who acts and reacts very much like a female. Eldon would never be taken for a girl, and his manners are not feminine but effeminate. He is consciously playing a role, but the role is not that of a woman. He is consciously playing the part of a queen, an effeminate homosexual.

This role occasionally but not always involves full-fledged transvestism, complete with female garb, false breasts, makeup and wig. At other times his face is free of make-up, his hair is his own, and his clothes, while faintly swish, could be worn by any man in the present age of male sartorial splendor. Yet, whether Eldon is in full drag or not, the effect is very much the same.

He is just under six feet but looks taller because he is so thin. His hair, originally brown (“a classic shade of mouse brown, God help me”) is bleached a somewhat unconvincing blond. He has finely drawn facial features which could be reasonably described as aristocratic. His walk is often a burlesque of a prostitute’s buttock rolling strut.

It is his manner of speech, unchanging whether he is in male or female attire, which is Eldon’s most obvious characteristic. The specially stressed words and syllables, the extreme inflection, is one of the most striking components of his personality. An accurate rendering of Eldon’s speech would call for the placement of an inordinate number of words in italics. I have tried to keep this to a minimum if only because dialogue presented that way is so annoying to read.

In addition, Eldon is a surprisingly good mimic. In the passage quoted above, where he describes the attempted pick-up by the John who would not believe he was being rejected, Eldon’s voice dropped a full register and took on all the tones and stresses of the person he was aping.

When I commented on this talent, he was obviously pleased. I asked if he had done any acting, if he had ever considered any sort of stage career.

“Acting?” he said, thoughtfully. “No, never. Unless you consider this acting.” His hands moved to indicate himself. “You could say that everything I do is an act, couldn’t you? That all my life is devoted to an imitation of... of whom? Of myself. I spend my entire fucking life developing and perfecting my imitation of me.”

His name is not the one he was given at birth. His original first name was Lyle, his middle name Donald. (“Miss Lyle Donald Thing, if you can bear it. Slightly yecchhh, don’t you think? I always loathed the name Lyle. Way back in grade school. I remember it was in fourth or fifth grade that I took to calling myself L. Donald. I signed everything that way and introduced myself that way. If people called me Lyle I didn’t answer. Unfortunately I didn’t much care for Donald either. Donald was a duck in a cartoon, you know. ‘Donald, duck!’ And then some ass would heave a snowball at me. Always good for a laugh. So there was a point where I made it L. Don, perhaps inspired by L. Ron Hubbard, that shrewd lunatic who invented scientology. And somewhere along the way L. Don became Eldon, which is a name I simply invented, but since then I’ve discovered that other persons have the name. I’ve read it or heard it here and there. Never met another Eldon. They all seem to be black football players. There was a time when certain intimates called me Donna, but I was never at ease with that. I never entirely saw the point of that, and I usually manage to keep my genders straight, at least in grammatical terms. Though there have been times when I wanted to be a girl. Not just to look like one but to be one, to go and have the operation, but one gets that way now and then when depressed. Nothing serious.”)

Eldon is twenty-three and has been in New York for the past three and a half years. He had his first homosexual experience at the age of thirteen.

“I was pretty Nelly before then. I got a certain amount of teasing. Part of having a sissy name more than anything else. I never did anything. There were boys I admired and I may have had crushes on them, but I never made any connection between admiring them and wanting to have sex with them. I didn’t really think much about sex. I didn’t think of anything when I masturbated. I just thought about masturbating, if you follow me, just dwelled on the physical sensations rather than wrapping a blanket of fantasy around it.

“One afternoon I was hitchhiking. I must have gone somewhere after school and was on my way home. This man — a mature man, but I couldn’t begin to guess his age — he stopped for me and must have known instantly the sort of person I was. I didn’t know myself; but one look and he knew.

“He drove for awhile. We talked, but I don’t have any memory of the conversation, Then he pulled the car off the road and behind a clump of bushes. No, a billboard. That’s right, because he said something about traffic cops hiding behind billboards, and then he said you could hide a lot of things behind a billboard, and then he grabbed me.

“‘You’re a little cutie, aren’t you?’ he said. ‘Why you’re just like a little girl.’ And then he opened his pants and took his cock out. He had an enormous erection and at that age I had naturally never seen anything like it.

“‘Okay, sweetie,’ he said, ‘Just look at the lollypop I got for you. Just look at my all-day sucker. You be nice to it or I’ll break your neck.’ And he put his hand on the back of my neck and pinched me, hard. Then he pushed my head down toward his cock.

“I really didn’t know what to do. He wouldn’t believe that I had never done this before, but he would tell me what to do and all. He wanted me to take it into my mouth to the hilt, which was clearly impossible, and every time I gagged on it he would slap my face or dig his fingers into my ribs.

“It took him forever to come. A couple of times I asked him if I could stop. ‘You keep going until you finish,’ he said. He shot about a quart in my mouth. I tried to get my head away when he started coming but he had his hand in my hair and wouldn’t let me get away. I got horribly nauseous. He got the door open and virtually threw me out of the car. I landed in the grass on my hands and knees and immediately started vomiting. He called me a dirty fairy bastard and drove away while I was still hunched over throwing up.

“For a long time afterward I always thought that there was something he sensed about me, something that made it instantly evident that I would do what he wanted me to do. I used to think this but now I’m not so sure. Because he was very forceful, you know, and a boy my age, oh, he probably did this all the time. And probably got away with it virtually all the time. Because there was really nothing I could have done. He was a huge strong son of a bitch and I was a skinny little kid. What could I do? If I had tried to resist he would have hit me for resisting, and sooner or later I would have gotten tired of being hit and I would have sucked him the way he wanted.

“At least he didn’t want to fuck me. Thank God. At that age, and with his cock as huge as it was, he would have split poor little me in half. He would have cleft me in twain, I surely believe he would.”

Over the following several years, until he graduated from high school and enlisted in the Army, Eldon had homosexual experiences on an increasingly regular basis. None of these experiences were of the sort that served as his introduction to homosexuality. On the contrary, all of his relationships during this interval were with boys his own age, classmates of his at a large suburban high school in the industrial Midwest.

“There were about a dozen of us, and a choice little covey of quail were we. Shy kids, rotten at sports, vague and dreamy. Generally good at class work but terrible at anything else. I’ve often wondered how many people realized that we were homosexual. Realized that we were doing anything about it, that is. They all knew there was something a little different about us, that we didn’t go out with girls, that we were sensitive types. But I wonder if many of them knew we were having it off with one another.

“I’m sure we weren’t the sum total of faggotry at that school. I thought we were at the time, but as I compare notes with other dear friends it seems more and more likely that there was a lot more going on than ever I was aware of. Football players shyly playing an inspired game of Drop The Soap in the shower room. And boys who would be best friends, and who would take their friendship a little further than anyone else ever realized. And I’m sure there were boys, who never had anything going at school but who hustled Johns downtown in the evening.

“In our little group, our little dirty dozen, we all knew who we were. We would speculate about school big-shots the way adult faggots speculate about show business personalities. We were convinced that one of the math teachers was gay, for instance, although none of us had ever had any personal contact with him to reinforce the suspicion. Speculation aside, we stuck with each other. Each of us at one time or another made it with each of the others.

“It was an odd sort of sex. Very much an adolescent sort of sex. Not that a great many adults don’t swing in a very similar way, but that the whole tone of it had a distinct adolescent quality.

“The sex was purely sexual. No elements of love. Very much the reverse, actually. We probably felt more friendship with each other than we were willing to express. I can’t specifically recall telling any of those boys that I really liked or admired him, although in many cases I certainly did, and although I suspect I was liked and admired in return, this was never put into words. And no one ever kissed anyone — on the mouth, that is. Or anywhere on the body, really, in the sense of simple kissing. Cocksucking was one thing, purely physical, purely sexual, but kissing implies intimacy of quite another sort.

“I wonder how thoroughly we identified ourselves as homosexual. I know none of us did much of anything with girls at the time. Some of us dated, but only in a cursory way, never going steady, never getting involved sexually. One of the crowd had gotten his first blow job when he was twelve from a female cousin four or five years older. And another kid who used to deliver prescriptions for a drugstore had one married woman for a customer who used to get him to give her a finger wave whenever he came by. I think she also taught him to muff her. I seem to remember him discoursing at length on the taste and aroma of hair pie. But she never did anything for him. Rather the selfish bitch...

“We did everything to each other, in twos or in larger groups. Is there anything on earth as experimental as a high school boy? If we could think of it we would try it, and we were imaginative little rascals. Jerked each other off, sucked each other’s cocks, fucked each other’s assholes. Worked out elaborate circle jerks and daisy chains. And all in the spirit of good clean fun.

“You know, it really was fun. And remarkably uncomplicated. From what I’ve read, I gather the English public schools, a good many of them, are little hotbeds of this sort of thing. Of course they complicate it with all that S and M, canings and birchings and other unpleasantries. That part is a bit much. The other, though, is probably very healthy for most of the boys, don’t you think? Because since it’s so universal one can participate without thinking of one’s self as Abbie Abnormal. And afterward those who are so inclined can button up and go straight, and when they think about the good old days it’s in a spirit of boys will be boys and all that.

“I wonder how many of the old crowd are gay today. I don’t keep up on news from home that closely. I’ve run into a few of the gang who are making the gay scene here in New York, and I get a certain amount of news through that particular grapevine. I know that one of my old friends is married and has presumably put his old life forever behind him. I wonder if his wife knows how he spent his high school years. I wonder how he looks back on them himself. And I wonder, oh, if he’ll stay straight. Or if he’ll fight the good fight for ten or twenty years and then turn up some fine night at one of the bars, looking to find some sweet young thing who will help him recapture his long lost youth.

“One interesting thing. Our classmates, the ones who were not a part of our circle. Their attitude toward us. If anything, you know, they thought of us as being basically sexless. Because we weren’t playing out the stereotyped male role. We weren’t interested in sports, we weren’t big and tough, we didn’t curse and spit, we didn’t go out with girls, hence we weren’t masculine, hence we weren’t sexual beings. And of course the irony lies in the fact that we were having tons more sex than they dreamed of. I’m positive I had more orgasms per week through homosexual contacts than they had masturbating. And damned few of them so much as lost their virginity during high school, you know, and the ones who did certainly didn’t get laid all that often.

“We camped it up a little, but we never really queened it. A boy might steal his sister’s bra and do a little number, but that was as far as it went. You could say that we were distinctly homosexual in manner but not genuinely effeminate.”

I asked Eldon how he felt about his homosexual behavior at the time in terms of morality and normality.

“But that’s so hard to say now. I knew it was something that had to be kept a secret. I knew there was something faintly dirty and forbidden about it, but I don’t know if I distinguished between it in this respect and any other form of sexual activity. Screwing a girl was faintly forbidden and faintly dirty. Jerking off was faintly ditto.

“I probably put it in a category with masturbation. Fun while one was young, but something one would give up in due course. Except that I was not particularly future-oriented. I’m still not. I don’t think about tomorrow. Well, that’s an exaggeration. I think about tomorrow but not about a year from tomorrow, not about ten years from tomorrow. I think I probably live more in the present than a great many people. I’m not sure that’s good. Janis Joplin said something to the effect that some people waste all their now by worrying about tomorrow. Poor poor baby, she should have taken a little less of her own advice. I loved her, you know. I mean that literally. I loved that woman. I’ve never been affected by a death as I was by hers. I still don’t really believe she’s dead. I’ll hear a record of hers and I can’t make myself believe that voice isn’t singing any more...

“Of course in certain ways I was obviously disturbed about being gay. That’s why I went into the Army. All that bullshit about the Army building men. I wanted to be built into a man. And I wanted a way to put distance between myself as a high school faggot and the man I would eventually become, so I went into the Army confident that I wouldn’t encounter any faggots there. Isn’t that hysterical? Isn’t that just too hysterical for words?

“Right from the beginning I liked the Army. Almost no one believes this when I tell them. Or I get a raised eyebrow and a smirk and words to the effect that of course I loved it, all those hard young bodies around and no female competition. But the point is that I liked the Army for completely different reasons, and at the beginning I had no homosexual contacts and simply devoted myself to being a good soldier.

“And I was one hell of a good soldier, hard as you may find that to believe. I was neat and clean and efficient. I was absolutely perfect at close order drill. I was excellent with weapons. Expert rifleman, sharpshooter, all of those heavy things. And I kept my weapon in perfect condition. I cleaned it far more often than one had to. Of course a rifle is a traditional penis symbol, and one can make the usual inferences. Maybe they apply, for all I know. I don’t much care. I was a good soldier.

“I could have gone OCS. Officer Candidates School. I had the chance but all I wanted to be was a soldier. Part of a manhood thing I was going through, perhaps.

“After Basic Training, I was stationed at an army base in Louisiana. There was going to be more training and eventually we would go to Vietnam. I was looking forward to combat, believe it or not. I wanted to do well, and doing well when there’s a war on means doing well in a combat situation. I don’t think I was afraid of dying. I’m not sure it occurred to me that death was a possible consequence. Or maybe it did and I just didn’t give a damn. But I wasn’t remotely concerned about the stupidity and immorality of that fucking war. I am damn well concerned now, I am absolutely appalled, and I still shudder occasionally at the thought of what I might have gotten into. Not so much what might have happened to me as the things I might have found myself doing. My Lai and all that. It’s easy to say that one would have acted in a certain way, but how is one to know? I could have been one of those thugs, machine-gunning children. In the right sort of situation I probably would have gone along with everyone else, and then how would I have lived with myself afterward? Or, if I was able to live with myself, what kind of a monster would I have thus turned into?

“The Captain changed all that.

“I guess he just knew instantly. He was about thirty-five or forty. A combat veteran. Very dark and wiry with a great deal of body hair. He came up to me one day with this knowing look in his eyes and told me he’d like to see me that evening, that I should come to his quarters. Just that, and my knees went weak.

“I went, of course. And he looked me up and down and told me I was a sweet little thing, and then he grabbed me and kissed me on the mouth. Put his tongue in my mouth.

“He didn’t act at all gay in terms of my concept of homosexuality at the time. He acted like a man making love to a woman, treated me absolutely like a girl. Took my clothes off and petted me and told me how pretty I was, and turned me over on my knees and fucked me.

“He reminded me of the man who picked me up, the one who forced me to blow him. It was the confidence, the unflappable male confidence.

“That man owned me. The Captain. He absolutely owned me. He kept me with him for a few hours that first night, and when I left I was in love for the first time in my life. I also hated him because of what he was able to do to me. But I loved him.

“And you know, he gradually turned me into a girl. Or into a queen, if you prefer. Because he treated me that way and I became what I was in his eyes. He had female clothes that I sometimes wore when I was with him. And he bought make up and perfume for me. Once he took me off base and we checked into a hotel. He brought a prostitute to our room. He fucked her and made me fuck her. My first woman, and to this day my last. Then he had me do things with him while the girl stayed in the room with us...

“I never learned how many times he had had relationships like this before. He had been married and divorced and used to get letters from girls, and occasionally he would go on a date with one. When I saw him after that he would tell me at great length what they had done and what the girl had been like. According to him, he never failed to score. I don’t know whether he was trying to make me jealous or what. Maybe it was to demonstrate his masculinity to me. I don’t know.

“He used to call me Ellie. I hated that and he must have known how I felt about it but it didn’t stop him. And I never asked him not to call me that. Not once. I always hated it and never had the guts to say a word about it.

“Maybe, much as I hated it, I wanted him to go on calling me Ellie. That’s sick, isn’t it? But it was a very sick relationship, all filled with love and hate.

“Can I tell you something? I thought, I thought we would always be together. I didn’t think it all the time. That is, I knew better. But I still pictured us, oh, living together. Him taking care of me. Me keeping house. I don’t know how clearly I defined all of this in my mind. My perception of my own role must have been vague. But I wanted it to go on forever. I don’t know if I can explain how he made me feel. I can’t entirely explain it because I can’t understand it that well myself. I can say that I loved him, but what does that say? Not very much, I’m afraid.

“I wonder if he ever wanted to keep our relationship going for a long period of time. I wonder how much I meant to him. I like to think that I was very important to him, if only for a little while. I know he was consciously exploiting me and in certain ways quite contemptuous of me. I think I realized that at the time, and I certainly realize it now. But I also know that he did relate to me as a person. He might have preferred to think that he was using me as an object, and in many respects he was, but I was also very much a person to him. If that hadn’t been so, he never would have gotten to me so completely. He wouldn’t have been able to.

“He must have half known this, Jack. I’m sure that’s what made him end it in an abrupt and truly cruel way. He dropped me. What happened — no, I’m sorry, I don’t want to go into it. What’s the point of picking at scabs? It still hurts, and it’s best left alone.

“Suffice it to say that he dumped me in cruel fashion, and that I went a bit bananas. And began queening it up a bit, though I must say I was cool enough so that I never implicated the Captain. Oh Captain! My Captain! Oh, sweet Christ...

“I got a general discharge, which is neither honorable nor dishonorable. I could have contested this but I didn’t have the heart for it. All I had wanted was to be a good soldier, and I had been a good soldier, and they wouldn’t let me stay there any more. I was in a bad way.

“I wound up in New York, of course. And drifted at once to the gay scene, and began to find myself becoming more and more effeminate. And one thing led to another.

“That says it, doesn’t it? One thing led to another. That’s what they can carve on my tombstone. I think I’ll write that into my will. I collect divine epitaphs. W. C. Fields — All things considered, I would rather be in Philadelphia. Don’t you love that? Or Dorothy Parker, I don’t think she actually used it, but she said she wanted to. Pardon my dust. For me they can put One thing led to another. Or At last he sleeps alone.

“About one thing leading to another. I wish I knew what I really believed. Was it all inevitable? I used to blame a great many things on that man in the car. I hate him and I hope he’s dead, but I wonder what real effect he had on me. I don’t honestly believe he was responsible for my going gay in high school. If anything he should have had the opposite effect. Because it wasn’t even remotely enjoyable with him. It was horrible, I hated everything about it. If anything he should have made me avoid homosexuality like the plague.

“But the Captain. I wonder about that man. What if he hadn’t come along? Now it’s easy to say that I wasn’t being myself in the Army. That all this obsession with being the good soldier Schweik was artificial and inconsistent. That it wasn’t really me. But isn’t it possible that I would have grown into that role? Or at least grown into part of it? Or was I waiting all along for someone like the Captain, someone who would come on with that arrogance, that confidence? The way I responded to him right away, I must have been subconsciously waiting for him all along. And in that sense if it hadn’t been him it would have been someone else, sooner or later. Because I hadn’t been resisting temptation all along. There hadn’t been any temptation. He was the first temptation to come along, and I never even tried to resist.

“I have met men since him who have been a great deal like him. Twice I’ve lived with men like that. Once for almost six months, another time for a couple of weeks. They didn’t take me over quite so completely as the Captain did. But he was the first, you know. That can make a difference, don’t you think?

“I’ve had a few Johns like him. Not many. Few of them have that assurance, that confidence. It’s not a common combination, absolute cocky male self-confidence coupled with an unequivocal lust for my fair white body. Not many men measure up to that particular ideal.

“Now and then I’ll get one. I think I go out looking for that more than for the money. In fact I know I do, although the money is frankly what makes the trip worthwhile, because satisfactory doppelgangers for the Captain are few and far between, while twenty-dollar tricks are — I was going to say they’re a dime a dozen, isn’t that rich? Let’s say that twenty-dollar tricks pay the rent and put food in the tum-tum and rags on the back.

“Sometimes I get one, though. Oh, indeed I do. And I’ll get a big hello and an arm tossed confidently around my shoulder, and I’m gone. I slip right into character. He treats me like a girl, exactly like a girl, and I become the girl he wants me to be. Any of those men could have me for free any time at all. In fact I don’t ask for money. They leave money more often than not, the same way any John would leave money for any whore as a matter of course, whether she asked for it or not.

“It’s so dangerous, all of it. Those heavy male types are just the ones who will beat you up and rob you. I have been lucky. I was robbed at knifepoint once, but that was by a pick-up, not actually a John. And there was a sailor who was set to punch me around, more out of belligerent drunkenness than anything else. I’m afraid he got a bit of a surprise. I was sober and he was not, and the Army had trained me well in hand-to-hand combat and some things one doesn’t forget. I softened him up with a kidney punch and bounced him off a few walls. And I buggered that bastard. A matter of letting the punishment fit the crime. He was always the stud, you know. Always the fucker and never the fuckee. I fucked him in the ass and made the son of a bitch like it. God, he must hate me!”

For Eldon, hustling is important in two ways. First of all, it provides him with a means of seeking out men who will fit his ideal as exemplified by the captain who was his lover. Secondly, it provides him with money, which is valuable not only for purely financial reasons but because it serves as proof of his ability to attract men.

This is not to say that hustling is Eldon’s sole sexual outlet, or even the most important. His sex life on the street — usually a two-block stretch of Christopher Street in Greenwich Village, but occasionally Times Square — constitutes but a part of his total sex life. He has a great many friends, including both effeminate types like himself and more masculine homosexuals. Sometimes he shares an apartment with another queen, usually but not invariably on a platonic basis. (“One gets the urge to try on a different role now and then, you know. Making love to another man who’s also in drag can be thrilling. It lets one feel like a lesbian.”) Occasionally he moves in with a more masculine homosexual for a week or a month or longer. At times, when the mutual emotional attraction of such a relationship is stronger than usual, he and his partner may be monogamous for a certain amount of time. (“But monogamy is hard to stay with. It’s fun as a change. A great place to visit, love, but you couldn’t possibly live there.”)

His hustling activities will vary in frequency. He may go out every night for several weeks, then go for a month without once soliciting a trick.

“I used to think it related to phases of the moon. I’m sure an astrologer could come up with something. I certainly do run in cycles, though. Sometimes I find myself becoming absolutely compulsive, keeping written score of the number of Johns I handle and the money they bring in. And other times I’ll be broke, really broke with a drawer full of bills, and I just can’t manage to get myself up for the scene. It’s strange the way it works out. When I just can’t make it and absolutely have to, I usually take a couple of ups. Bennies. I got the idea from a call girl. A female call girl. She also uses Librium for the same purpose when she’s too depressed to handle Johns. For me it isn’t depression, it’s more a sort of inertia, so ups work better for me than tranks. I don’t know exactly what it is they do for me. Just give me a lot of excess nervous energy, I guess, that I can burn up on the street. They ease the whole hassle of conversation with a John. And that, as you may have guessed, is often the hardest part. I can almost always get up enough enthusiasm to suck a cock, but it’s occasionally very bloody hard to talk to the man who’s attached to it.”

Eldon’s attitude toward hustling, vis-à-vis his social life, has much in common with that of many female prostitutes. Many of his friends also hustle intermittently, and others who do not are aware of this aspect of his life. His attitude — and presumably theirs as well — is that this is something mechanical one does in order to live.

“I’m not temperamentally fit to hold a job,” he explains. “I have worked. I have worked frequently, and perhaps someday I’ll find some sort of work that particularly appeals. So far this hasn’t happened. I’m young. Sometimes I’m broke and sometimes I’m swimming in money, and of the two states I prefer to be swimming in money. I’ve been rich and I’ve been poor and believe me, rich is better. Sophie Tucker. Well, God knows she’s right. But if I have money I spend it all like an idiot, and if I don’t have money I always get by, so it’s not something for me to be hung up about.

“I suppose I’m too self-indulgent to keep a job for any length of time. When I’m enjoying myself I don’t want to go home and go to sleep. It seems ridiculous to sleep not because you want to but so that you’ll be able to get up again at a particular hour. And when I get to sleep late I can’t drag myself out of bed at an impossible hour. I just can’t. And when there’s something to do and I’m cooped up in a store or an office, oh, I’m irresponsible, I know I am. But why not? I only have to please myself. I haven’t got a family to support. If things change eventually and I get interested in something, fine. Meanwhile I’m having fun.”

Nor does the morality of hustling bother him.

“I’m not cheating anyone. Any John who goes with me gets his money’s worth. Oh, let’s face it. Sometimes it’s demeaning. Selling sex. Selling one’s self. But. But I have friends who write advertising copy to urge young ladies to spend good money on an aerosol spray so that their cunts won’t smell like cunts. And urging any number of other people to buy any number of other products which they neither want nor need nor are able to afford. Now that I call immoral. And, interestingly, so do the people who do it. They think of their work as far more whorish than mine.”

The majority of Eldon’s clients are functioning bisexuals, and the majority of contact he has with them involves his performing fellatio upon them or their penetrating him anally.

“A lot of ordinary men go out looking for a girl and wind up settling for a man. This is something very few people realize. And a lot of hustlers don’t realize it themselves, because they simply assume that the Johns try to give this impression so no one will think they’re really gay. That may be true sometimes but not all of the time.

“Sailors, for example. Now sailors are sometimes more likely to be somebody else’s rough trade than my John, but I get them now and then. What happens typically is this. A sailor comes into town after God knows how long on a ship. And he wants to get drunk and have a woman, because the one thing he hasn’t had on that ship is a woman. He may have had a gay thing going and he may not have. Most sailors get into the gay thing now and then, but for a lot of them it’s something that never happens aboard ship. It happens only in port, on liberty. This is another thing that I don’t believe many people realize.

“Well, the sailor is ashore, and he goes around drinking and looking for a girl. He finds the drinks easily enough but the girl is something else again. You know and I know that it’s about as hard to find a girl in New York as it is to find sand in the desert, but that’s if you know where to look. And those poor sailors never know where to look. They go to taxi dance halls and are surprised that the girls won’t go out with them. They spend incredible sums trying to pick up B-girls, who are all but impossible to pick up.

“And they come to the Village. And they go to lesbian bars, my God, it’s unbelievable the way sailors wind up in lesbian bars! Who in hell sends them there? They see a bar overflowing with cunt, and they can’t believe that they won’t make out, and actually they would have a much better chance of fucking the Statue of Liberty.

“So all they get is drunk, and the hours go by, and they have a choice between going back to the ship without scoring or picking up a faggot. Now the only difference between a male mouth and a female mouth is that a male mouth is more apt to know what it’s doing. And the only difference between a male anus and a female anus is that a female anus is more likely to be off limits. I’ve had a sailor tell me, ‘Look, as far as I’m concerned, you’re a girl who’s having her period. That’s how I’m gonna think of you.’

“There are a lot of other men who operate in about the same way. Of course you can’t believe everything they say to you, but you can’t write off everything as a lie, either. Johns have said that they’ll come downtown, and if they can’t find a girl they’ll settle for a boy. Others tell me that there are certain kicks they can get better with a male than with a female.

“It’s common to hear the line that no woman really knows how to give head. I don’t know that this is true. The average hooker blows more than she screws, from what I’ve heard. Practice must make perfect, wouldn’t you think? But I’ve also heard women say that no man can go down on them the way another woman can, and if you stop to think about it, it does stand to reason. You’ve got to be better at something if you know what the process feels like from both sides. It makes sense.

“And I have had men say that they simply cannot find a woman who will let herself be buggered. This I believe because I’ve heard it from too many sources to discount it. One man told me he once had a girl who liked it that way, and in fact she suggested it, introduced him to it and they both loved it. Well, she’s not around anymore, and he’s married to someone else, and he tried to get his wife to do it but she hated it. It hurt her and she wouldn’t learn to loosen up and get past the pain and enjoy it. Maybe she also thought it was dirty. Maybe he thinks it’s dirty and didn’t press the point, in a manner of speaking.

“In any case, she as much as told him he would have to go elsewhere for this, if it was so important to him, and that she didn’t care as long as she didn’t have to know about it. Which seems like a fairly reasonable attitude on her part. So he went to a lot of prostitutes, female prostitutes, and a lot of them wouldn’t go for it at all. I know for a fact that a lot of them won’t. And the few who would, he couldn’t enjoy it because they didn’t like it. It was hard for him to find someone who would do it and when he did he could never bring himself to go back to her because he knew it had been an unpleasant experience for her. And what he wanted wasn’t just to fuck someone in the ass but to do it to someone who would like it.

“So now, when he’s in the mood, he picks up a male hustler. Preferably a queen, because he feels easier with someone who fits naturally into the female role.

“Now it’s easy to find ways in which the story might not be completely true. For example, I have a strong hunch that the ‘girl’ who first taught him to enjoy buggery wasn’t a girl, that it was a fag. If I had to guess one way or the other, that would be my guess. But it could very possibly be that he was telling the truth all the way. It certainly is a possibility.”

Other Johns want something different.

“Some will want to play with me while they bugger me, or while I blow them. Others will want to go down on me, either as an accompaniment or exclusively. Sometimes I have the feeling that this is curiosity, they want to see what it’s like. They’ve been on one end of the act a certain number of times and want to see what the other end is like. I think that kind of curiosity is natural, don’t you?

“One man — not a John, and not really bisexual, you would really have to call him a straight type by any usual definition of the term — he told me that it bothered him that he didn’t really know how a woman felt when she got screwed. He knew he could never know this completely but he wanted to see if he couldn’t get some idea. So he found someone to fuck him anally. He did this several times, because the first time the pain was too much a part of it, but ultimately he learned how to let go and enjoy it. And he didn’t repeat it after that, but he insists he understands something about female sexuality now that he didn’t understand then. He says he thinks it’s made him a better lover. I wouldn’t be surprised if it did.”

Does he enjoy his work?

“I can live with it. Sometimes it’s a trial, but you know I’m not obsessed with it, and unless I’m really in bad financial straits I don’t trick unless I feel like it. There are Johns who are pleasant company and others who are too tedious to be believed. I try to avoid the bores and score with the dolls.”

But under ideal circumstances, does he enjoy the sexual aspects? Or is he, like many female prostitutes, incapable of enjoying commercial sex?

“Oh, of course I enjoy it! Not every last time. No one could. Nobody enjoys any kind of sex every single time. But yes, I can usually enjoy it. I wonder about the people who insist that they don’t, by the way. Don’t you think they perhaps protest too much? Not only the girls but the butch types, they always want you to know that they get nothing out of it.

“I think they’re liars.”