The Male Hustler Read online

  “With the girl I was going with, this was something that evolved naturally. She had had more experience than I did. We began having sex fairly regularly, and it was good. But she was in love with me and I thought I was in love with her and then discovered that I wasn’t, and there were too many times when she wanted to make love and I wasn’t in the mood, and I felt that she was too possessive and that I was in the process of getting trapped into a whole marriage routine. Then there was a false alarm, a pregnancy scare, and I could see everything closing in around me, and when she finally got her period I had to end it, I didn’t want to see her any more. It was shortly after that that I dropped out of school and came up to the city. I don’t know how much the one had to do with the other. It’s hard to say, because there were other factors as well, a whole discontent with the college scene and a desire to do something in the theater and a whole process of escaping from my family and everything.”

  This, incidentally, was as close as Alan came to talking about his family. Whenever I brought up the subject, he either avoided answering or said that this was a topic he would prefer not to discuss.

  • • •

  “I don’t think it ever occurred to me in front to start hustling when I got to New York. Of course I knew that there were men who would pay money to go down on young men. I had had the experience with the guy at home, and I had read books and saw Midnight Cowboy, so I was aware of the general existence of that whole scene. But I didn’t go to New York looking for it.

  “For one thing, I never thought of myself as a homosexual. I had never felt any desire for sex with another boy or man. As for what had happened with the queer, I thought of it as kid stuff, something hardly worth thinking about. And I still have never considered myself a homosexual and have never had genuine desires in that direction, not that I’ve been able to make myself aware of.

  “If anything, I think my particular hang-up is that I’m not a particularly sexual person at all. That I’m not able to relate to other people because I spend too much time inside my own head. With girls, for example, there’s a definite similarity between how I feel with them and how I feel with a John. There’s nothing distasteful about being with a girl, not for me, and there’s none of the guilt afterward, none of the gnawing worry that what you’ve done is perverted and that there’s something abnormal about you. So in that respect it’s much better. I feel good when I’ve had enjoyable sex with a girl, whereas I feel nothing but numb and a little dirty after I go with a John.

  “But on another level it’s the same, because I’m not completely involved. I’m acting, I’m performing, I’m going through the motions. It’s not real. I keep having the feeling that there’s something there that I’m not getting in touch with. That I go through life wrapped in a plastic bag and never touching anyone . . .

  “I was in the city and I would take one shitty job after another, washing dishes or bussing tables, the crap jobs actors take between parts. My expenses were low and I could coast easily enough but I never had money, I was always hung up over nickels and dimes. And ultimately I went over to Times Square to see what would happen.

  “Nobody turned me on to Times Square. I had passed by, I more or less knew what to expect from what I had heard and read, so I just latched onto the scene by myself. I went there one night and scored inside of half an hour. Went to a hotel room, let a guy give me head, made ten dollars and went home. I decided I would never do it again, and two nights later I went back.

  “The pattern I seem to be in now, I’ll go a couple of nights a week. I’ll make anywhere from ten to twenty-five dollars a trick. I rarely go with anyone more than once a night. Oh, you get into situations where you’re broke and the rent is due or there’s something you want to buy. You hustle hard for a brief period, but I think it works out on an average to maybe fifty dollars a week that I pick up. And I can virtually live on that. I don’t live very high. I’m not that thing oriented, I don’t always have to be spending money. And I do take a job from time to time, and of course I get an acting position every now and then, although I haven’t been making the audition rounds as much lately as I did, oh, say six months ago.

  “Periodically I decide that I ought to stop this, that it’s degrading. It really is, you know. You just look at Times Square and you can see how fundamentally sordid it is, even without the people, the sex hustle. It’s all compulsive behavior and it’s basically dirty. But I’ve come to the conclusion that I’ll never get away from it until there’s something to take its place. You sit around bored with nothing to do and nobody you feel like seeing, and you’re low on money, and it’s so easy to go out and hustle a few dollars. And maybe I get something sexual out of it, maybe just having an orgasm with another person has some kick to it that I can’t manage to admit to myself. I’m not honestly sure about that. I can see it both ways.

  “The thing that keeps me going, not what keeps me going back to the street but the thing that generally sustains me, makes me think that everything’ll work out by itself, is that I know I’ll drop this when something else takes its place, and that something like that will happen when I ultimately get my head together. Which is beginning to happen, because, just as an example, I’ve gone places in this conversation that I’ve never gone before, and I know that if we had had this interview six months or a year ago I never would have been able to open up this much, as much as I have today. I think that represents progress, growth.

  “So I know I’m beginning to open up, and I know that if I ever find anything I can really get into, this whole sex hustle will just dry up and blow away. I’m a hundred percent convinced of this. It’s a substitute for something, for being alive, maybe.

  “If I really found a girl and related to her, and didn’t stay inside my plastic bag, I’m sure I would never even consider going on the street again. It would just be impossible. And I think sooner or later this will happen with a girl. And another thing, I’ve never done anything on the street while I was acting, while I had a role. I would go back when the play closed, but from the time we started rehearsals I never went anywhere near Times Square.

  “Sooner or later something major will come along, whether it’s an acting break or a romance or some new career. It could be almost anything, because I lack direction right now and could find almost any sort of new thing opening up if it was the right thing at the right time.

  “So I just regard this as a stage . . .”

  • • •

  Alan’s attitude toward his clients was a mixture of contempt, resentment, and sympathy. He felt the mutual relationship, such as it was, was mutually exploitative. They were trying to possess him sexually by giving him money, while he was taking their money without giving anything of himself in return. This attitude was not dissimilar to that expressed by a large proportion of the prostitutes I interviewed in writing Tricks of the Trade.

  I mentioned as much, and Alan found the comparison an interesting one.

  “I think the faggot Johns are worse,” he said. “More pathetic, more compulsive about the whole thing. I can identify a lot more easily with a man who goes to female prostitutes from time to time. It really is a convenience if he doesn’t know women, or if he’s married and can’t run around in public. It’s the same thing, he’s getting non-sex, paid-for sex, but it’s a little less grubby. And it’s more a necessity because it’s difficult to pick up a girl and have sex with her. I’ve never been very good at it myself. The girls I have sex with are ones I know, usually through the theater or through mutual acquaintances. As far as picking up a girl at a singles bar, everything is so guarded, so phony, that I can see where a man might find it simpler to go directly to a prostitute.

  “With the gay Johns, though, the situation is different. Before I started making the Times Square scene I never realized how easy it is to have casual homosexual sex. Because Times Square is not entirely commercial, you know. A lot of guys come around here just to pick each other up and swing with each other, with nei
ther one hustling the other for bread. And to get away from the street there are the Turkish baths and the gay bars and everything. If what you want is casual sex, which is obviously what the Johns want, well, it’s all over the city. I can see it now because I’m into this particular scene and I know what to look for. It’s all over the place, believe me.

  “The typical John, though, has this compulsive obsession with keeping it a secret. He doesn’t want anybody to know what he’s into. He’s usually married and has children, and his attitude will be that he doesn’t want his wife to find out, he doesn’t want his kids to find out, he doesn’t want his boss or his friends or anybody to find out, and the way to guarantee against this is to find some young stud and pay him and that’s all there is to it.

  “Of course he could be just as anonymous at a Turkish bath, but with something like that, that kind of scene, the relationship would be a mutual one, a level one, two guys swinging because they want to. And that would mean that he would have to identify his partner as a human being, and he would be a man having open sex with another man, and he can’t handle that in his head, he’s still too much the closet queen to handle it. So he has to dehumanize his partner, and the easiest way to do that is to put sex on a cash-and-carry basis. In fact he may not just want a hustler, he may purposely want someone who looks like a hustler, so that there’s no human aspect involved anywhere.

  “And the act itself is limited to sex. Ninety percent of the time it’s his mouth and my cock and that’s the only contact there will be. He’ll leave all his clothes on, I’ll just open my pants. Maybe he’ll jerk off while he goes down on me. Maybe not. Part of his impersonality is because that’s all the hustler will permit. Like I would freak out if a John tried to kiss me. I couldn’t handle that at all. But the thing is, if that’s the kind of person the John seeks out, that’s obviously what he wants. Or otherwise he would go elsewhere for his sex.

  “Of course you do meet different types on the street. Ever since that one I told you about, the one who tried to rape me, I’ve been careful to get things settled in front. I’ll ask a man what he wants to do. If he wants to go down on me or if he wants me to bugger him, all right. Nothing else.

  “Most Johns are glad you draw the line. They like that you limit yourself to the male role. That you’re a real stud and not a faggot yourself. Oh, you do get a wide assortment. And they’re not all closet types. You occasionally get an all-out homosexual who happens to be attracted to you and is willing to play the game on your terms. But the vast majority are the closet clowns.

  “I sometimes wonder if this sort of scene is a phase for them, too, or if it’s a permanent thing. I could see, for instance, that they might be going through some changes themselves. You could have a guy who’s always been smothering gay impulses, he’s married and all that, and he’s been fighting something within himself, and he wants to find out where he’s at. So maybe the men I see, some of them at least, are coming to the street for a short period of time, and they either work it out one way and straighten themselves out again or they work it out another way and come to terms with the gay scene, going to the baths or developing a full-fledged gay relationship or wherever it turns out to be at for them.

  “I can relate to that easier than to someone who does this as a permanent thing, maybe because I see myself as going through my own set of changes.

  “I can’t imagine myself ever turning gay. I just can’t picture myself in that position. I can’t believe I could really get involved in homosexuality in any real way, that I could dig being blown by a man, for example. I mean in the sense of really digging it, not going through the motions as I do now. And I’ve tried to imagine myself going down on a guy, or any of those things, and I can’t. The entire idea is completely foreign to me.

  “The thing is, from everything I’ve heard and read, it’s supposed to work that way. Either you become a hustler because you’ve got those impulses within yourself or, and this makes even more sense, the whole hustling scene makes you curious about what the Johns are getting out of it, what it is that they dig, and you can’t help thinking about it a lot until it becomes some kind of an obsession with you, and ultimately you try it and maybe you dig it, and so on.

  “This is something that’s supposed to happen all the time, that you start off a hustler and wind up a genuine faggot. I can’t picture myself in a sexual relationship with another guy, and I certainly can’t picture myself becoming a John. God, I can’t see that at all. In fact after the time I’ve spent in this racket I could never go to a female prostitute. I would just be too conscious of how completely sterile and phony and empty it all was.

  “One thing I will say is that I’m sure I tend to think things through more than most of the street hustlers. And that’s not an advantage as far as the racket is concerned. The more deeply you think about it, the harder it is to keep coming back to it. Which is why I’m not too hung up about what I’m doing at the time being, because I can already see clearly that I’ll be out of it before very much longer.”

  Brendan

  “I was in therapy for a little over a year. I gave it up about eighteen months ago for the usual reasons. The cost, for one. I was going twice a week at twenty dollars a session, which is quite reasonable compared to what some people have to pay, but even so it was forty dollars a week, week in and week out, and that’s an enormous amount of money to pay just to hear yourself talk. And also I kept having the feeling that I wasn’t getting anywhere positive. I would go and lie there and talk, and the therapist would repeat phrases of mine and point things out, and I would get insights. Do you know, that in itself can become a habit, rehashing the past to death, getting high on these periodic insights. I felt after a certain amount of time that none of these breakthroughs were doing anything for me. They were something I went through twice a week, and sometimes the insights were gratifying at the time, and for that matter some of them would stay with me and make sense later on, giving me a new way of looking at certain aspects of myself.

  “But I suppose what bothered me was that I was still me. You go into something like that looking for a change. The bullshit aspect of therapy is that most people who go into it really think they are going to make major changes in their basic selves. I don’t believe that ever happens, do you? I have any number of friends who have been in intensive Freudian analysis for years and years, an hour a day five days a week until the end of time, and they’re so addicted to this that God help them when the shrink takes two weeks off in the summer—they become absolutely paralyzed and just live on Librium until the great man returns. And they will insist, so many of them, that it’s doing them worlds of good. That they have changed, that they are different people now. But if you look at them objectively you see the same people with the same hang-ups. They say they understand their hang-ups now. Well, marvelous, baby. I mean, it’s like understanding you have terminal cancer. You can understand the hell out of it, but that don’t make you get better.

  “What I’m getting at, though, is that about six months or so after I stopped therapy, I then began to realize that it had helped me after all. Not by eliminating hang-ups or changing them but by teaching me to be a fundamentally analytical person, which I very definitely had not been before then.

  “Do you do grass? Well, do you know how, when you smoke, you can hear music in a new way? For example, one of the first times I smoked I listened to some Vivaldi chamber music, which I’ve always absolutely loved, but for the first time I was able to concentrate on what the various instruments were doing all at the same time. I could follow different polyphonic tracks in my head all at once. I gather people who are really involved in music do this as a matter of course, but it was an enormous change for me. But after that, I found I could always listen to music that way, whether I was stoned or not.

  “In much the same way, therapy taught me to listen to my own self on a new level, and that ability stayed with me after I discontinued it. As a matter of fact it intensifi
ed, because I had to do all the work myself instead of having the therapist to point things out for me. And they say that analysis is always an individual project, that you have to do the real work by yourself . . .

  “So I’ll think back to various aspects of my childhood, and think of ways in which I always saw myself as an essentially feminine person, and at the same time I’ll see ways in which I always found it necessary to have a particular male identity. As I said, this didn’t banish any of my hang-ups. In fact there were times when it seemed to intensify them. You know, the idea that self-awareness is the ultimate answer, that’s a very dangerous theory. So often after an enormous insight, an enormous emotional breakthrough, people become desperately depressed. Even suicidal. I’ve known of an appalling number of cases of people who have gotten into the encounter group scene in a very intense way, and suddenly one day they are bubbling all over the place telling everybody that they have really opened themselves up as never before, and the next week they commit suicide. It’s scary to shine lights into all those dark places, baby. You can’t always live with what you find there.

  “In my own case, I like to think that I’ve come to terms with some of my hang-ups in fairly sane and healthy ways. For example, for a couple of years I was seriously considering a sex-change operation. Of having them cut off the family jewels and tuck them away in the vault. There was a period of time when I felt enormously ambivalent about my penis. I’ve been cross-dressing for years and with my build and features and everything else I look more like a girl than most girls do. I can make my voice nice and butchy-deep, but I find it just as easy and natural to talk in a sexy female contralto. So when I got all dressed and made up and set out to cruise, the one constant reminder that I wasn’t what I looked like was this hunk of meat down here. I would hitch it back between my legs to hide the damned thing.