“We’re eternal romantics,” another friend said. “Take me, for example. Take me! I’m yours! No, seriously. I don’t really cruise the meat racks as a general thing. I don’t care for impersonal sex and I don’t like to create a relationship by handing over money. It’s not my style. But now and then I’ll find myself walking down one of those mean streets, perhaps by design but as often not, and my eyes will light on some young beauty and I’m lost. Because, much as I know better, my cock will promptly send my head a message announcing that here is the perfect love, the ultimate ideal, the beginning of a beautiful friendship. And of course I know better, but when the cock speaks the brain listens. Inevitably. And so what if the number is a little hardboiled, let us say, or a little dirty behind the ears and around the neck. Why be put off from a great love by such superficial trivia? And so what, for that matter, if the number is going to cost a ten or a twenty-dollar bill, because what after all is money for? And so what if there’s a chance that the little darling may decide to deal with his own self-disgust by punching one around, or using a knife, or looting one’s apartment?
“So you make the pick-up and take the package home and pay the money and go to bed, and if you’re very lucky the enchantment stays with you all the way to orgasm, and you come good. Which is about as much as anyone can ask in this world, wouldn’t you say?
If the clients of male hustlers vary greatly in type and motive, so do the hustlers themselves. If there is one common denominator of male hustlers, it is their extreme youth. Almost all of them are under twenty.
While society in general places a great premium on youth, it is nowhere emphasized so much and treasured so highly as among male homosexuals. I know several female prostitutes who have gone on tricking into their sixties (although that is by no means the norm.) I can cite nothing faintly similar in the annals of male prostitution.
“I figure I’ve got a good five years left in this game,” a hustler told me. “I don’t drink, I don’t do anything heavier than grass, I work out every day at a gym, I eat health foods, all in all I take good care of myself. I think Johns’ll still want me when I’m thirty.”
And after that?
“Then I’ll be paying for it, I guess.” And he winked to show he was joking, but I’m not sure he convinced either of us.
It ought to go without saying that all names have been deliberately altered throughout the text, as have any other particulars which might in any way serve to identify any of the interviewed subjects. The reader will further note that by far the greater portion of the material which follows is presented in the subject’s own words, with the author’s own observations largely confined to connective material. I have edited these interviews only in the following sense — I have excised the extraneous material which forms a substantial portion of any relaxed conversation, and I have distilled material in the interest of space limitations. Obviously, one could hardly reproduce verbatim an interview of several hours’ duration.
With these qualifications, the following interviews are as I obtained them. Nothing has been added, nothing of substance has been excised.
This book was originally conceived as a sort of companion volume to an earlier work, Tricks of the Trade: a hooker’s handbook of sexual technique. Because Tricks had been a particularly satisfying book to write (and one which has had an extremely gratifying sale) I approached the present work with a good deal of enthusiasm.
At the same time, I was not entirely at ease with the project. While I could say, quoting the catechism of the sexual liberal, that some of my best friends are gay, I was faced with the necessity of doing extensive research in an area with which I was quite unfamiliar and in which I often found myself more than a little uptight. A large number of hustlers whom I approached directly, rather than through a mutual acquaintance, took it for granted that “interview” was purely euphemistic and that I wanted more from them than words. (This reaction was equally common during the research of Tricks, but I found the inference in that context less personally unnerving.)
Now seems as good a time as any to express my gratitude to all those who contributed to the research of this book, both those whose interviews appear in the pages which follow and also those whose cases I, for one reason or another, elected to omit. Without their cooperation, this book literally would not have been written.
It is to be expected that homosexuals will form a large portion of this book’s readership. And yet I am even more hopeful that it will be widely read by heterosexuals. There are any number of questions with which I found myself confronted in the course of this book’s preparation, questions dealing not simply with homosexuality but with overall human sexuality, questions I think all of us might profitably ponder.
John Warren Wells
January 1971
Alan
“I’m not making a career of this. I don’t go out on the street that often and I don’t hustle hard when I do, the way some of the guys down here will. Every now and then I’m uptight for money, and when that happens I’ll occasionally make it down to Times Square and hang around and just see what happens. If nothing happens, that’s cool with me. To tell you the truth, sometimes I’m relieved when nobody comes on to me.
“Because I certainly don’t enjoy the whole scene.” A sudden laugh. “You’ll probably hear that from ninety percent of the hustlers you talk to. I wouldn’t be surprised. I don’t know many of the other guys. I’m not interested in forming relationships around here, sexual or otherwise, but a certain amount of conversation is inevitable. Another guy working the same racket will see you around and figure out what your scene is, that it’s basically the same scene as his, and you’ll progress from casual nods to an occasional conversation in a doorway.
“And you come up against the same attitude time and time again. I’m just here for the easy bread and I don’t feel a thing for these faggots. I despise them, they turn me off, but it’s easy bread and you can just close your eyes and pretend it’s a girl swinging on your joint instead of a guy, and even so it’s no big deal, believe me. I’d rather jerk off, but it’s a cinch dollar so what the hell, and you and me, man, we’re both men together, we know where it’s at. That’s the standard attitude. I suppose I shouldn’t criticize it because it’s not all that far from where my own head is at, but I think I am sufficiently self-aware to be sure that I mean it, while with a lot of the stud hustlers that I’ve met, well, I think they go to great lengths to stress their masculinity because deep down inside they’re not so positive of it themselves.
“I remember one thing that happened, it must have been about a year ago. I was, what? Twenty-two, and I had been making the Times Square scene for just a couple of months, and not very regularly. That particular night I let myself get picked up by this big heavyset guy in his forties. He didn’t look anything like the typical faggot, incidentally, which is not that unusual in this particular scene. The Johns you get here are usually closet types of one sort or another. Either they’re in town on a convention or they’ve got a wife and kids in Queens or something like that. The type who would drop dead if they ran into a friend from the straight world here. I could rap about the typical 42nd Street John for hours...