“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.