“She turned out to be a pretty great-looking chick. She had a place over in the East Village. This other hustler was living with her. She was already totally stoned when we got there, and we all sat around smoking together. I didn’t smoke very much. I didn’t want to get stoned. High, but not completely wasted.
“They must have made this kind of threesome scene on a fairly regular basis, because he never said anything to her and she just seemed to take it for granted that we were going to make it.
“Well, we spent a couple of hours balling. Took turns with her, or he would get off in one part of her while I got off in another part of her.
“I had never had any experience with more than one other person at a time. That added an exotic note to it that made it exciting. Also I hadn’t been with a girl in a long time, I guess it was a long time, and I was able really to get into it and let go, which I hadn’t done in a while.
“But there was something that I realized, and that was that this other hustler was fundamentally gay.
“Of course I never said anything to him. Christ, he would have had a shit fit, I mean, he went to great lengths to make sure that he and I never touched. When there are three of you in bed and you’re all involved sexually, it’s hard to be sure that two of the three never touch each other directly, but we were both conscious of this, of keeping that sort of distance between us.
“The thing was, he was getting special pleasure out of the fact that I was there. He was relating to me through the girl. Maybe the two of them would ball a lot without a third party present but I’m sure my presence got him off in a way he usually didn’t have. I remember flashing on the idea that he was fucking me through the girl.
“So afterward, I tended to avoid him. I would see him around and be friendly and all, and we would rap on the street, but when he suggested getting together with the chick or anything like that, I would always have something else that I had to do, something I would invent, and after awhile he stopped asking, and we gradually stopped rapping with each other.
“The whole thing, when I thought about it, made me a little uncomfortable.”
Alan is twenty-three, medium height, slim. He has light brown hair, small hands and feet, hazel eyes and handsome regular features. In dress he favors bell-bottoms, boots, and boldly patterned shirts. Some hustlers, he mentioned, tend to dress to fit whatever image they are trying to project — rough male stud, leather boy, Ivy Leaguer, or whatever. He insists that he dresses to please himself, that he does not try to create any particular image to interest potential Johns.
Alan’s hometown is the capital city of one of the Southeastern states. He went through high school there, then attended the state university for a year and a half before dropping out and coming to New York. He became interested in theater at college and originally came to New York with a theatrical career in mind. In the past three years he has had several small roles in short-lived off-Broadway productions.
“It’s so damned difficult,” he says. “I never expected it to be easy, although every hopeful actor fantasizes about the one big break and all the rest of it. I’m beginning to think, though, that I’ll never make it. As an actor. I’m good looking and I have a certain amount of grace on stage, I move around well, but the world is full of actors who are as good as I am. You have to be very good, very goddamned good, and you also have to have a tremendous amount of drive. I think I might have had that drive at the beginning but somewhere along the way I think I lost it. You have to care tremendously, you see, and I don’t know that I care all that much.
“Also, you have to be able to believe that you can make it completely, that you can be more than just another actor. Because being just another actor, even if you work fairly regularly, is a terrible life. It really is. You break your neck to get a part and break your neck again to be good in it, and even if the play runs you’re making less money than you would make in just about any other line of work. A friend of mine had the lead in a successful off-Broadway thing a year ago. The play was running, it was making decent money, and he was taking home something like eighty dollars a week. And he was the star. It just doesn’t make any sense. Then you’ll see other people, somebody who does commercials or some clown in a television Western, and they’re literally rich. Two years in a hit television series and you can literally retire. It doesn’t make sense that there’s such an enormous gulf between success and failure. Between success and near-success, actually.”
Alan still goes to auditions, still thinks of himself as an aspiring actor, but admits privately that he does so largely for lack of anything else to do.
“I don’t have any particular direction. Sometimes it bothers me, sometimes I can get enormously depressed about it. Part of it is my upbringing, I guess. The Protestant ethic, and no matter how liberated you are in this country it’s hard to escape that old Protestant ethic. That a person is here to work, to achieve. That you have to be pushing yourself in a particular direction and coming closer and closer to a particular goal. Well, my original goal, which is theater, is beginning to lose its luster, partly because I know I’m not really going to make it there. And I can’t just grab another goal and substitute it. I can’t just throw a switch and go out and become a doctor or a lawyer or something like that. And there are a lot of things I could see myself doing for six months or a year, but so far there’s not really anything I can see myself getting into for the rest of my life.”
“Sometimes this bugs me, and other times I’ll tell myself that after all I’m still pretty young, I’m just twenty-three years old, and I don’t have to be in a hell of a rush to decide where I’m going. Better to take it a day at a time and see what happens. There’s nothing wrong with keeping my options open.
“I find I’ve been getting into myself a lot more lately, sitting in my own room and trying to get my own head together. Sometimes I’ll do some grass, other times I’ll just sit around straight, and I’ll work different ideas through my mind and see how I feel about things. I imagine myself getting into different life-styles and try to see what I would want. Like, do I want to really get involved with a girl, like living together, possibly even making it a permanent thing? I’m a little afraid of jumping into something like that as a reaction to the hustling, because it would be very easy to do, very easy to use some girl as a total escape from this gay scene, however much a part of the gay scene I actually am. Which is another thing I’m trying to figure out.
“But basically I’m a very private person. I can talk like this with you the same way a person could talk to a psychiatrist, in that you’re not involved, you and I don’t know each other. I don’t really have friends I can rap with at great length. I’m not good at relating to people. At one point I thought this hurt me as an actor, but I’m more inclined to think it helps me, in that I just get into a part and have no trouble becoming the role I play, because I’m nobody particular to begin with.
“A very private person. I have an apartment on West 93rd that’s no more than a furnished room, but I really treasure it because it’s completely mine. I’ve never brought anyone there. It goes without saying that I would never bring a John there, but never anyone at all, not a friend, not a girl, no one at all. I guess I need a place that’s exclusively mine, that no one but me is ever inside of.”
Alan’s first homosexual experience took place while he was in high school. He describes himself as essentially a loner during those years. He was moderately active socially but had no close friends. He dated, and engaged in incomplete sexual relationships with a variety of girls, but says that he never really related to the girls and never enjoyed the essentially artificial sexual relations which took place on those dates.