The Male Hustler

Greg

“Most of my friends — my straight friends and my gay friends as well, they have no idea that I hustle guys for money. This is a part of my life that I keep secret. I would have to admit that one reason for this, one definite reason for it, is that I am ashamed of it. Ashamed of it to a certain extent. Not so ashamed of it that I don’t do it, but to the extent that I don’t want people I know socially to know about it. But it’s not just that I feel that what I do is necessarily bad or degrading. I feel that way part of the time but other times I have different feelings about it.

“But the subject of hustlers will come up in conversations. Particularly with gay friends, because naturally people who are gay themselves are more likely to know about the scene and more likely to talk about it. But if I’m with people who are straight and we pass some very obvious hustler on the street or if somebody is talking about Midnight Cowboy the subject may come up.

“The average person, whether he’s straight or gay, is inclined to be very contemptuous of the hustler. My gay friends always say that they would never pick up a boy on the street and can’t understand why anyone else would. I don’t know if this is true or not. I can see where they would say so in any case, because otherwise it sounds as though they had to pick up a hustler because they couldn’t make it in any other way. And some of them do pay for their sex in another way. They’ll connect with somebody at a bar, and it’s understood by both parties that they’ll pay for drinks and dinner, that they’ll be the one to give expensive presents and so on. It’s like a man who sets a girl up in an apartment and she costs him quite a bit of money, but he doesn’t feel that he’s literally paying for sex and she doesn’t feel like a whore.

“To get back to the subject of how other people think about hustlers, the thing is that they often think it’s a way for a guy to have gay sex without admitting to himself that he’s gay. And they also think that it’s an indication of a terrible weakness to be a hustler. Just as a lot of straight types think it’s an indication of a weakness to be gay. I’m talking about some of the hipper straights, incidentally. The square straights think only completely gay people have homosexual desires. The ones I’m talking about tend to think that yes, everybody has a certain amount of homosexual desire, but that you ought to be able to rise above this...

“What lots of people don’t realize is that for some guys it’s almost impossible not to hustle, the same as it’s almost impossible not to start having sexual relations, and this is because they happen to be the physical type that really turns on homosexuals. A man may pride himself in never having had a homosexual experience, not once ever, and it may very well be that nobody ever asked him, for Christ’s sake. It’s like a virgin priding herself on never giving into temptation, and what it comes down to is that nobody ever made a pass at her, so where was the temptation to give into?

“I know it sounds very dramatic to say I never had a chance. It sounds like I’m saying that here I am, this fantastic sex symbol that every faggot drools over the minute he looks at me. Well, no matter how it sounds, that’s about what it comes down to. It isn’t just that it’s a matter of being good-looking. There are many very good-looking men who are of a type that they may never have homosexuals coming on to them, and there are others who are the type that really appeal to homosexuals. With my particular face and my particular build I was always attractive to them.

“When this happens, you do one of two things. Either you try it or you turn completely in the other direction. There are certain straight men who have a really violent hatred for homosexuals. I think it’s common knowledge that they do this because they’re fighting something in themselves. They may or may not be aware of it, but that’s why they have this hatred.

“Now I would bet that most of the time these are men who are of the type I’m speaking of that they’re very attractive to homosexuals and have been getting constantly propositioned in one way or another over the years. And that bothers them, not only because they have to wonder if these queers know something, you know, and also because it would be very aggravating to anyone to get constantly solicited to do something that’s distasteful to you. A man who doesn’t have this problem may say that he doesn’t mind faggots because they don’t bother him and he doesn’t bother them. But when it’s a case of faggots bothering him all the time, that’s something else, and either he’s going to go along with it or he’s going to want to beat the shit out of anybody who makes a grab for his cock.

“In my case I had this happening all the time. I’m talking from the time I was fourteen, fifteen years old. I would have older guys trying to get to me. I would be on the subway or at a movie or anything and a guy would put his hand on my leg. So I would change my seat or something. I don’t want to make it sound like this was something that happened every single time I left the house. That I couldn’t go around the corner for a quart of milk without getting cruised. But it was a very frequent thing.

“I was also attractive to girls. This is crazy, sitting here and talking about how fucking beautiful and irresistible I am. Like if I were to read this in a book I would say to myself, Now who in the hell does this schmuck think he is that he’s so gorgeous. But I was attractive to girls. I still am. Let’s put it where it’s at. I’m a person that other people consider attractive. Physically attractive. I don’t know if many people like me so much as a person but sexually I tend to turn people on.

“With girls, though, I was always very shy. Well, for that matter I was always shy with everybody. I was sort of a loner in school. I was by myself most of the time, I never had any close friends. With girls I was shy to the point that I hardly ever had a date. They might think I was good looking but I never did anything about it.

“The first sex I had was with a woman. An older woman. As a matter of fact she had a kid two years behind me in school. I knew him to say hello to. So she was old enough to be my mother, this woman, although my own mother was much older than she was. This was when I was fifteen and she must of been I would say between thirty-five and forty, and maybe she was younger because she had a kid thirteen which she could have been eighteen or nineteen when she had him, so she could have been in her early thirties, whereas my mother at the time was almost fifty.

“What happened was that she liked my looks and made a regular play for me. I don’t know whether it was just me or if she had a regular thing for young boys. Were you saying you wrote a book on the subject?”

I said that I had written The Mrs. Robinson Syndrome which dealt with relationships between older women and boys or young men.

“You could of used me for that one. She was on my paper route and whenever I went there to collect she would talk and smile and everything, or give me a glass of milk. She always tipped me a quarter or so. On the entire fucking route I had three customers who tipped. Of course what she was doing was coming onto me, but I never thought. I mean, you know, she was somebody’s mother. Guys would have fantasies of getting laid this way and there were other women on the route, younger ones, that I would have these thoughts about, but not her.

“Finally one day she has me in the kitchen and she’s feeding me milk and cookies, and the next thing I know is I turn around and she is absolutely stark naked. Not a thing on. And huge tits.

“Well, she came over and stuck them in my face and started kissing and hugging me and took me to bed. I went to be with her once a week for I guess four months. I had a summer job in the mountains so I didn’t see her, and when I got back to town she was gone. They moved away, I never found out where. And I really wanted to see her when I got back. All these stories about how you constantly get laid working in the mountains. The older guys got a lot, but I got nothing that summer, and then I came back all ready for her and she wasn’t around.

“The whole thing was unreal because I would still see this kid around school and we would nod at each other, and every Tuesday I’m fucking his mother. Although actually we never fucked, I never once got inside of her. She was afraid of getting pregnant, or that’s what she said she was, but I don’t know whether she was telling the truth or not. What we did was eat each other. She would go down on me first always. She said that was so I would be relaxed and I would take my time with her. Then it would be her turn and she really took control, told me exactly what to do. How long to spend on her breasts and then what to do downstairs. And giving directions all the time until she got her gun. Then I would generally come again, because I would get excited doing her, and then I would put my clothes on and go home.

“Meanwhile I was getting passes made at me by homosexuals, as I said, but I guess I didn’t take them too seriously. I just thought of it as something annoying that I wasn’t interested in.

“Her leaving the neighborhood made a difference. I think I probably would have gotten into the gay thing sooner or later anyway, but I think it made a difference that I didn’t have that once a week to look forward to.

“The first time I ever went with a guy, I was at a movie theater and I went to the john. I think this guy followed me into the john. Well, I took one look at him and I knew what was coming. You can’t always tell but there are some guys who are obvious about it. He looked gay to begin with and there was the way he was looking at me.

“I was washing my hands and he came over and started a conversation. Something about the movie, I don’t know what. Now what I would usually do was just ignore the guy or give him a look or something. Some guys are more persistent than others and you have to tell them to beat it or you’ll call a cop, but most of them, once they know you’re not interested, they cool it. For one thing they don’t want to get into trouble. See, the thing is, when a guy is of a certain appearance, it’s not only that they’re attracted but also that they figure he’s gay.

“In this case for some reason or other I said something, agreed that it was a nice picture, I don’t know what. Then he said something about the actress, that she really looked sexy and he bet it would be fun to fuck her. This was for my benefit. This guy, I don’t think he would have fucked her unless he could have used somebody else’s cock. Oh, that’s not fair, he could have been acey-deucey. You never know.

“Then what else did he say? Something about how I must get a lot of girls, the way I looked. I don’t know what I said. I was getting a funny feeling. I wasn’t getting a hard-on or anything like that. A sort of jittery feeling. You know how you get when you drink too many cups of coffee? It was that kind of feeling.

“He went into this rap about how a young guy couldn’t always find a girl who was willing to do it, and how with girls you had to worry about catching a disease or getting her pregnant. ‘But a good-looking young man like you can always find somebody to take care of it for him,’ he said.

“I said, ‘Look, I know what you’re leading up to and I don’t think I’m interested.’

“‘You mean you can get a girl anytime you’re in the mood?’ he said.

“I said no, not always, which was putting it mildly because I was getting a lot of nothing at the time.

“‘I could make you come,’ he said.

“I told him if I wanted to come I could jerk off.

“‘But it’s not the same thing,’ he said.

“I don’t remember what I said. Then he asked me how I could know what I was talking about if I never tried it. And it came out in conversation that I had tried it to the extent that I had been getting a blow job off this woman. He said most men liked that better than actually fucking. He asked me which I liked better. Now I didn’t want to tell him that I never actually fucked a girl so I said I preferred fucking, but I did admit that a blow job was good and that it was better than jacking off. So he told me he wanted to blow me, and that he would do it better than a woman could, and what was the difference whether it was a man or a woman that did it, since either way all it was was a mouth, so what the hell difference did it make?

“The thing is, I knew why he was saying all this. He was saying it because he was trying to talk me into letting him go down on me. But even so there was a lot of sense in what he was saying. It made sense to me. I could remember the way I felt when she blew me, the woman, and that was always what I used to picture in my mind when I jacked off. Not necessarily that it was her, that particular woman, but that a girl was going down on me. Maybe a girl in school that I particularly liked, but what I would remember was the sensation of having her do it to me.

“So I more or less let him talk me into it. The conversation would stop whenever anyone walked into the men’s room and start after they left. He told me I didn’t have to do anything, that he could come just from doing me. And he offered to give me money. I have to admit that it wasn’t the money that made me go along with it. I would have let him do it anyway. He said he would give me three dollars. I don’t know why that amount but that was what he said.

“By this time I was excited by the conversation. Sexually excited. And I think I had the thought that by taking the money he wouldn’t think I was queer myself. I’m not positive whether I had that thought at the time or whether it was something that went through my mind later in connection with that particular incident, in thinking about it afterward.

“We went into one of the toilet stalls and he got down on his knees and did it. I wouldn’t say that he was better than the woman but he was good at it and I came. This was the first sex I had since masturbation in months, so it was very enjoyable for me. He asked me if I would like to blow him but I said definitely not and he didn’t seem upset or disappointed or anything. He left and went back to his seat but I didn’t watch the rest of the picture. I wanted to get out of there and be by myself.

“It’s hard to remember how I felt about it. Whether or not I felt bad about it. There was nobody I could go and talk to about it.

“One thing I felt was that he must have known something by looking at me. The same way I knew right away that he was queer, he must have known right away that I would enjoy him blowing me. And when I got the same reaction later on, with other fags, I would figure they could tell the same as he could.

“Now there’s a certain point where this becomes true. They may first start coming on that way because you’re the type that attracts them, but when you yourself are aware of it you act differently. You get sensitive about it, and you notice when a man is eying you, and you have to react in a certain way. And this is even greater when you’ve already done something. Thinking back on my own experience, I know I acted differently after I had been with this man the first time. Because I would not only be noticing that a guy was coming on to me, but I would also be deciding in my mind whether or not I was interested, which was something that hadn’t happened before because I never really gave any thought to going through with something like that.

“Did I think of myself as being queer? I guess I must of worried about it some of the time...

“Anyway, my first gay experience was hustling in that I got paid for it, I took money for it. So what happened after that was that when I wanted a blow job, what I would do was go and hustle. I don’t think it was so much that I wanted to take money to prove I was only doing it for the money. I don’t think I ever told myself that. I was doing it for the sex. Maybe I wanted other men to think I was doing it for the money. For my own part I knew better.

“The thing is, hustling was the only way I knew of operating on the gay scene. I didn’t know where else to go. I never thought in terms of finding someone my own age who was gay. Also I was afraid that if I just met somebody not in the hustling scene it would be expected that I would also blow him, which I didn’t want to do.

“So I began coming down to Times Square fairly regularly. I suppose a couple of times a month. Well, before long it was more often than that. Now I did not always take money. Almost always. But not always. Most of the time it wasn’t a matter of having to ask for it. Just being on Times Square they tend to assume that’s what you want, and if they approach you and you just take your time thinking it over, they generally offer you some money. Usually five or ten dollars. It depends on a lot of things.

“As to how I got into hustling, that’s the extent of it. You could say that I always had a choice, that I could have told that guy to fuck off and said the same thing to everybody else who asked. And the chances are that if I met the same guy a day earlier or a day later I would have been in a different frame of mind and nothing would have happened. But sooner or later the right guy would have made the right approach at the right time, so in that sense you could say that I really didn’t have any choice at all in that it was just going to happen sooner or later.

“That’s how I got into it. As to how come I stayed with it, how come I’m into it now, that’s something else again, but as to how I got into it there was nothing I could do about it because it was something that couldn’t help happen.”

Greg does not exaggerate when he speaks of his good looks. His physical beauty is undeniable, and it is of a difficult to define type which is undeniably attractive to homosexuals. He is twenty-two, slim, dark complected. His face is not particularly expressive, and remains much the same handsome mask whatever the tone of his conversation.

I suspect his theory that his looks made homosexual experience inevitable is largely true. It is a rationalization one encounters with some degree of frequency, but this does not entirely invalidate it. While it is certainly not valid to say that those men who never have homosexual experiences are those men who are never asked, it seems logical to assume that there is a correlation between one’s appeal to members of the same sex and one’s propensity to accept a homosexual solicitation.

Greg emphasized several times that his relations with the older woman and their abrupt termination had a good deal to do with his accepting the man’s overtures. It is interesting to note the striking similarities between sex with the woman and with the man. In both instances his partner was substantially older, there was no extra-sexual relationship, and the sex act was oral in nature. On the one hand he felt it was normal and desirable to accept and enjoy relations with the woman. Then, when the possibility of relations with the man presented itself, the points of similarity were such as to help bridge the gap and make this new experience similarly acceptable and similarly enjoyable.

In a sense, one could argue that there was less of a step required between his relationship with the woman and his relations with the man than there would have been for him to seek out and seduce a girl his own age.

Up to his graduation from high school, Greg had no homosexual contacts other than Times Square pick-ups. Almost invariably cash changed hands, and almost invariably the sex act was performed quickly, in a cheap room, in a lavatory, in the darkened balcony of a movie theater.

Shortly before graduation he began dating a girl.

“She really liked me. She was in my class and we had known each other for years, but we started dating and we liked each other a lot. We would make out together a little more every time we got together, and before very long we were giving each other hand jobs. She had done this with other guys she dated. She didn’t actually come out and say so, but when I took her hand and put it on me she knew right away what she was supposed to do.

“Ultimately I screwed her. She wasn’t a virgin, which I guess surprised me. I think it bothered me, too. I don’t know why.

“I enjoyed sex with her very much. I didn’t like having to use a rubber, but otherwise.

“When I used to think about hustling, I always said to myself that this is just something I’m doing because I can’t have sex with a girl. Not that I was really trying very hard to get a girl all this time. But I took it for granted that once I had a girl that I could have regular sex with then I wouldn’t make the Times Square scene because I would have no reason to.

“Then when we were in the hand job stage I found myself going down there now and then regardless, but I would say to myself that a hand job was not the same. And then even when I was screwing her I would find myself doing this. I would say to myself that I just wanted to catch a movie, and I would sit there in the theater thinking to myself that I’ll go right home afterward, but most of the time I would wind up scoring.

“Part of it was I’m sure the money. You know, high school. Five or ten bucks a week is a big difference at that age. I would even tell myself that I was making money hustling that I could spend on my girl. Not that I ever told her or anyone else how I got the money.

“But here I was screwing her and still going with queers, and it came to me that I must like it in a particular way or I wouldn’t continue to do it. I couldn’t say that I had to do it for sexual release because that wasn’t true. I did say that it was because I liked to be blown and she never did that to me, but if that was what I wanted I could have said it to her and taught her how to do it. At least I could have tried to do this to get her to blow me, but I never even hinted at it, and she never thought of it by herself. As a matter of fact it probably would have turned me off if she did it all by herself. It would have bothered me that she would think to do this. I was thinking to myself that I would ultimately marry this girl, and I had feelings that for a girl to blow a guy, it was wonderful, but it was also something a decent girl wouldn’t do. I might have wanted a girl to blow me after we were married, or even before, but if she just went ahead and did it on her own initiative it would be like saying that someone had taught her to do this before, and it even bothered me that she had been screwed by other guys and would have bothered me more to know some other guy taught her how to suck him off.

“What it came to was that finally I admitted to myself that I liked it. The sex part, having sex with a man. Not that I liked it when there was nothing else available but that I just plain liked it. Not that I liked it better than sex with a girl necessarily. But that there was something about it that I definitely liked for its own sake and that it made me keep coming back to it

“The fact that I knew this about myself gradually fucked things up with the girl. Not a matter of ‘Hello, I can’t see you anymore because I’m queer.’ But in the way I saw myself. I don’t know how to explain it, but I just know that we gradually broke up because of my attitude, although it happened as just one of those things, that we argued about some stupid thing and broke up.

“It was either right before or right after the breakup that I finally went down on another man. You would think I would know, whether it was before or after because of it being likely that the two were related, but I can’t remember which it was. Or maybe we were in the process of breaking up, because there was a period of time between starting to have stupid fights and not seeing each other anymore.

“What happened was that this guy picked me up and asked me if I’d like to have a couple drinks. By this time I was old enough to get served in a bar. I was eighteen, which is how old you have to be. The place we went wasn’t a gay bar. It was near Times Square, just a place to get some drinks. Then we went to his apartment.

“It was a nice place, and he was a pretty nice guy. I guess he was thirty or thirty-five. Most of the time when you hustle Times Square you don’t spend any time with your pick-ups. You hardly ever have any conversation. The whole thing is get it over with as fast as possible, and one guy pretends the other is just a cock while the other guy is busy pretending you’re just a mouth.

“With this guy, he was pleasant to be with, and also the drinks relaxed me. I wasn’t used to drinks and I wasn’t falling down drunk by any means but I was very loose and easy about things. We both got undressed and went to bed. Usually you just open your pants but we got our clothes off and got into bed together.

“He didn’t even touch my cock at the beginning. Instead he started making love to me, stroking me all over my body and whispering how beautiful I was. It was common to get lots of comments on how attractive I was, the usual shit, but this was different, it was a case of him really making love to me the way a man makes love to a woman or a woman to a man, and this was new to me. He kissed me on the body, the chest and the legs and all, which felt funny at first. Something about it bothered me but something else said to let go and relax and just go with it, and I did.

“Finally he went down on me and it was really great.

“Afterward I got up to go but he said there was no rush and I should stay where I was, he would make us something to eat and we could have a couple of beers. He made omelets and we ate them in the bedroom and drank some beer.

“We talked a lot about things. Not particularly about sex things. Eventually he said that by just being blown I was missing half the fun. I thought he meant that he wanted me to fuck him and I said I would do that if he wanted but I didn’t really dig it that much and a lot of the time I had trouble staying hard long enough to get it in, which was the truth. But he said that anal sex was banal sex, that was the phrase he used, and it was also the first time I heard the word banal anyway. He said he meant I missed the fun of blowing someone.

“‘You must wonder what it’s like to do it,’ he said.

“Well, of course this was true. I did wonder what they got out of it. How could you help but wonder?

“‘Why don’t you try it?’ he said. ‘You can stop if you want to. Obviously it won’t kill you to have a penis in your mouth. It won’t make you any different. And if it doesn’t jibe with your image of yourself, you can keep it as much a secret as you want. You don’t have to worry that everybody who sees you walking down the street will know at a glance that you like to suck.’

“By talking that way he was taking it for granted that I wanted to try it and that I would like it.

“I said, ‘I probably wouldn’t even know what to do, how to do it.’

“He said, ‘Oh, come now. Think of all the times you’ve had it done to you. You know what feels good when it’s done to you. Just do that to me. Pretend it’s your own cock, silly.’

“So I did it. I liked it. I didn’t get excited doing it but there was something I liked about it. I liked the fact that he was enjoying it. And I liked, oh, the act itself. Having it in my mouth.

“It didn’t even bother me afterward. That I liked it. That I was a cocksucker, because that was the word that kept going through my mind, cocksucker, cocksucker. But to tell you the truth what I felt was relief. A big wave of relief as though I finally went and did something that I had had to do for a long time. Like I finally knew what I was and I could live with it.

“A funny thing, he wouldn’t believe that I hadn’t done it before. After I did it, I mean. He wouldn’t believe that it was the first time for me.

“‘You seem to have a natural talent for this sort of thing,’ he said. ‘It would have been a shame to let such a God-given talent go to waste.’

“I figured he was probably right.”

Not long after having performed fellatio upon a man for the first time, Greg began to have homosexual experiences that were not related to hustling. He began leading what amounted to a double life. On some evenings he would hustle on Times Square, only permitting clients to fellate him. At other times he would go to a gay bar he had heard about, where he would let himself be picked up by someone who appealed to him. The two would engage in mutual fellatio and Greg would wind up staying the night at his partner’s apartment.

He kept both worlds strictly separate. His Johns were told (if they asked) that he only had homosexual relations for money and that he never took an active role. His chosen sex partners were never told of his hustling career. And the girls whom he began to date were never told of either of his homosexual life-styles.

Although there are obvious differences between his hustling and his noncommercial sex, differences in terms of the acts performed and his attitude toward his partners, there are also similarities worth noting. The men who pick him up buy the drinks, pay for taxis, and take him to their apartments rather than returning with him to his own place.

With some of these pick-ups Greg has established friendships of considerable duration, but he has never had a steady love-affair with any of them. He did live with one for a period of a few weeks, but only because he was in the process of finding an apartment of his own.

“I don’t fall in love. I will like certain guys very much, and I may enjoy sex with them very much, but I don’t love them in the sense of not wanting to have sex with anyone but them, or even of wanting to live with them. Some people say this is immature, or that there’s still something in me that holds me back from that kind of thing. Like I won’t admit I’m enough of a faggot to love another man. Well, maybe they’re right and maybe they’re not. But there are plenty of guys like me who just want their sex when they want it and with whoever they want it with, and they don’t want to get involved. Maybe I’ll change but I don’t think so. I could see myself living with a girl, maybe even getting married to a girl, but I couldn’t see myself falling in love with another guy, although I suppose I could turn out to be mistaken about that. There was a time when I couldn’t see myself, you know, going down on a guy.”

Why does he go on hustling?

“The money is part of it, man. I’m always broke. Clothes, everything. Somehow or other I’m always broke and the money always comes in handy.”

But he can make good money about as easily as a model, and does earn a decent living that way. Isn’t it possible that he derives some essential satisfaction from hustling? Some sort of gratification that is unavailable to him in any other way?

“Yeah, I suppose. Oh, shit, there’s no question about it. The only thing is that it’s such a childish thing, you don’t like to admit it.

“It’s a particular feeling, when you have this man who will actually want to pay money for the privilege of sucking your cock. It’s saying to you over and over that you’re beautiful, that you’re worthwhile, that you’re desirable. And I guess I have to have this, because otherwise it’s ridiculous to go through with it. The pleasure, a situation like that, you have an orgasm but it’s no pleasure compared to being with a person you like in a comfortable bed in a clean place. I mean, getting blown by some creep in a toilet, that isn’t pleasure.

“I guess it’s a matter of having a part of your brain that thinks you’re basically a worthless shit, and you need to keep proving you’re not.”