The Male Hustler Read online

  • • •

  Over the next few years, Brendan continued to have relations with those boys and a great many others. Most of the time he performed fellatio upon them, and occasionally served as a passive partner in anal intercourse. “I got a certain degree of pleasure from this right from the beginning,” he said, “but it was a long time before I learned how to enjoy it completely, to the point where I could get a pleasure from it equivalent to what a woman experiences when she gets fucked.”

  Quite often his partners would bring him to a climax manually, and some of them performed fellatio on him in return, while a smaller number wanted him to sodomize them.

  “It was a long time understanding this. I was completely into this either/or thing, male or female, and I thought they would prefer to relate to me as to a girl and ignore my penis entirely. Which of course a great many of them did, wanting me to leave my clothes on completely and just go on down there and blow them. But I’ve since realized that they responded both to my girlishness and to my maleness.

  “You might think that this was partly because some of them at that time were genuinely gay, or bisexual if you prefer. Or that they were young with their sexual preferences incompletely formed and thus open to experiment. You know, the old concept of the child as a polymorphous pervert who can get off on anything that feels good, until social standards and role development teach him just what he may and may not find exciting.

  “Not true. Not the whole story, anyway. Because I have gone to bed with any number of men who consider themselves wholly masculine and exclusively heterosexual and who will say to me that they can dig me because I am feminine, and that they could not possibly get interested in an ordinary faggot. And I’m sure they quite honestly believe this. But answer me this. If that’s so, why do they always want my cock? They may not go down on me necessarily but almost invariably they have to touch me, they have to play with me. Realizing this helped me realize that I wanted to keep my cock. It wasn’t the only factor, but it was important.”

  And, in a later conversation on this theme, “I’ll tell you what it is. Everybody not only starts life as a polymorphous pervert, but everybody stays that way. Forever. And the defenses you throw up along the way to rule out certain sexual acts never get rid of the underlying desire. So every man, however straight he may think he is, has an urge somewhere inside himself to play with another man’s cock, to take it in his mouth, to get buggered. But he buries it so deep he doesn’t even know it’s there, and he can never recognize another man as a sex object.

  “All right. Now when a man buries this deeply enough, he’s what we call heterosexual. Exclusively heterosexual. So then suppose he meets me, and he finds himself capable of regarding me as a girl. A girl who happens to wear a cock, but a girl. A girl who walks like a girl and talks like a girl and probably knows more about making effective sexual overtures than any girl he ever met. He says to himself, well, this thing may have a cock on it but it’s still a girl, and thus I can ball it without compromising my manhood, my heterosexuality. I can just lie there and let this ‘girl’ blow me, and what’s so faggy about that?

  “At which point we go somewhere and go to bed, and believe me, I’m sensational. Nobody ever complains. And after he comes he looks in his mental mirror and realizes that he’s still the man he always was, that he’s no rotten creepy faggot, for Christ’s sake. And if he just balled me, and he’s not a faggot, then I’m not a man, right? Which means he can do anything he wants with me and it won’t count. It won’t reflect on that manhood of his.

  “And the next thing you know he’s got my cock halfway down his throat and he’s so excited by the whole thing that you wouldn’t believe it—”

  • • •

  Brendan first began cross-dressing shortly before his sixteenth birthday. He took a bus to Albany, bought several female garments, and changed in a men’s room.

  “Talk about panic scenes! I was all changed and made up when I realized I had to walk out of there and everybody would see this girl heading out of a men’s room. I just got my courage up and walked out of there with my face burning. I suppose I must have drawn some stares but nobody bothered me. After that I used to take a hotel room for three dollars just to have a place to change my clothes. I could afford it. I was getting money now and then from boys I went with in my hometown. Just small change. A quarter or fifty cents or a dollar. I wasn’t actually whoring. Someone would put a make on me and I would be reluctant and they would bribe me with the money. It’s fairly obvious why I liked taking the money. You know, proof that I was desirable.

  “It also occurred to me that I could bring men back to the hotel room, but I never did, and as a matter of fact I went to Albany one evening a week for months before I ever made it with anyone. I wasn’t looking for sex. What I wanted was to pass as a girl. To look completely like a girl, to be taken for a girl. To walk around in full drag and have everyone relate to me as a girl.

  “I got better and better at it. I would go someplace for a hamburger, or go to a movie, or just spend a lot of time walking around. I would have gone to a gay bar, I suppose, but I didn’t know how to find one or who to ask. And I didn’t want sex. Well, I did, but I was afraid to lead someone on and then have him discover I wasn’t what he thought I was. I mean, it was awhile before I stopped panicking when I had to use a ladies’ room. I thought, suppose somebody can tell? But with anything like that, after you’ve done it a few times you loosen up.

  “I would flirt like mad. Do tricks with my eyes, all of that. I’ve learned a lot since then, but I was good at it even then. Oh, at the time I wore falsies, too. I outgrew that when I came to New York.

  “I would pick someone out and flirt with him, and occasionally let myself get picked up and taken out for coffee, but it was a long time before I let it go any further than that. Then ultimately I let an older man buy me dinner and take me for a ride, and he parked the car on a dark stretch of road and we necked.

  “See, this was the first time I had ever had any of this. The kissing and petting. And it was such a wonderful feeling, such a feeling of total warmth that I had never experienced before. You know, I think that was a tremendous turning point, because it made me see how incomplete it was, what I had in my hometown. Those other boys had wanted me because I was easier to get than a girl, and because I was a weird experience for them. But this man wanted me!

  “So I was thrilled, and also I was terrified, because he was going to want to fuck and he was going to be dismayed to find that I had a penis instead of a vagina. I had my cock tucked way back so that he wouldn’t hit it on a casual grope. Even so!

  “When we stopped for breath I gave him the predictable story, that I was having my period, a very heavy flow, all of that. And also that I had to get back home in a hurry or my mother would have a fit. Before he could decide that I was a cockteaser I went on to say that I didn’t want to leave him frustrated, and I would go down on him. Which was fine with him.

  “Funny thing. When he dropped me back at the bus station, he said something that didn’t register at the time. That I was the first girl he ever met who really knew how to blow.

  “It hit me about an hour later. That of course he had had homosexual experiences, or how could he have a basis for comparison?

  “After a couple months of the double-life routine, I dropped out of school and came to New York. There were so many reasons for this that I won’t go into them now. Let’s just say the time was right. I was very young, just sixteen, but I was ready to bid a fond adieu to home and family.

  “I didn’t have any trouble finding the gay scene here. It would have been harder not to find it. And it was a very heady experience for me at the time. All at once I was meeting hundreds of other boys who were feminine to one extent or another, who would cross-dress and make up and the rest. And I was meeting men who were attracted to other men, and some men who were specifically attracted to feminine men.

  “And instead of being the local
queer, the boy-girl, the freak of Schoharie County, I was literally treasured! I didn’t have to pretend. I was being sought out by men who thought I made a beautiful girl but who were delighted that I was genitally a male. I don’t think I can make you understand what a wonderful feeling that was. There was never a point where it even occurred to me to be homesick, because it was as if I was finally home after spending the first sixteen years of my life in a hostile foreign environment.

  “Not that it was all roses. There is a hang-up I have, and I’ve come to think that it’s a hang-up of the human condition. You never quite find what you’re looking for, or if you do find it you discover it wasn’t what you hoped it would be. Also, my wants were ambivalent. I wanted to prove myself with as many lovers as I possibly could. I wanted proof that they liked me, loved me, lusted for me, respected me, everything. At the same time I wanted to be somebody’s wife, to form a totally monogamous relationship with a really strong straight man whom I could adore and respect. And the old Catch-23—I wanted my man to be completely heterosexual, but if he went for me that proved he wasn’t, and if he didn’t I didn’t get him. Even when you realize the basic contradiction, that doesn’t help you get out of the bind.”

  • • •

  Brendan’s hustling is worlds apart from the world of the Times Square hustler, and neither his motivations nor his life-style have much in common with Alan’s. He does not solicit a fee for sexual favors and frequently has contacts without receiving any money.

  “I am only a hustler—I hate the term—in that I do get supported by men. I’ve had jobs from time to time but there’s no denying that men support me. But I never whore. I don’t charge. And I don’t go with anyone who doesn’t appeal to me. Admittedly I like a lot of men, sweetie, but I’m no Will Rogers. I’ve met men I don’t like, and there’s no way they can seduce me or buy me or anything. I can’t be gotten. I have to like the idea.”

  But men give Brendan presents and do him favors and pick up his tabs. When he is short of money he will mention this to his lover, who will in turn press a small loan upon him. Brendan never offers to repay the loan, and repayment is never expected. From time to time Brendan shares someone’s apartment without paying rent. He is given money for cab fare. His drinks and dinners are bought for him. He certainly gets far more financially out of his sex life than does Alan.

  He has had some sexual experience with females. “Once with a lesbian, it was sheer bedroom farce. We met at a party and she thought I was a girl and I thought she was a man, and we both got hysterical about the whole thing, and decided to ball just to see what would happen. It was the weirdness of the whole thing that excited us. We ate each other and fucked a little. And I’ve been at group scenes with straights and gays where everybody does everything with everybody, and it isn’t as if I became impotent with a girl. I can perform, I can get excited and I can satisfy a woman and I can come that way. But the excitement is only physical. I don’t really get into the whole thing. I feel as though only a portion of me is involved. In that sense, I feel more involved and more completely myself when I go down on a man and don’t have an orgasm or even become physically excited than I do having complete sexual relations with a girl.

  “You know, the number we ran earlier about fag hags, well, there is a kind of girl who is sort of marginally in that classification who gets tremendous satisfaction out of seducing male homosexuals. Not in the standard sense of flirting with faggots because she knows it’s safe, but really meaning it and wanting to get a gay guy in bed with her. I suppose to prove what a dynamite woman she is if she can manage to ball a faggot. Well, we all have our ego trips . . .

  “I have a certain amount of girls who will come onto me like that, and occasionally I take them up on it, more or less to see how I react to it. One of them had had lesbian experience and I think saw me as an acceptable way to get that old kick again. But the experience I have not had is to make it with a girl who was absolutely reacting to me as a male and who didn’t even know I was gay, or feminine, or whatever. And now and then I will imagine myself coming on totally butch and picking up a girl that way and finding out how I would relate to it and whether or not she would want me, and what it would be like.

  “Lord, if I keep talking like this you’ll come to the conclusion that I’m a latent heterosexual!

  “About the different men, there was one scene that’s worth mentioning. There’s this fellow I know, a very successful Wall Street lawyer, and genuinely ACDC. Married, solid position, a couple of girlfriends on the side, and he also makes the gay scene. And doesn’t try to hide who he is, you know, none of this slouching around 42nd Street and keeping his name a secret. He figures that anybody he meets in a gay bar is apt to be gay, so what’s to hide from him? Which is perfectly sensible, but not everybody has that much self-assurance.

  “I’ve gone with him quite a few times. He’s very generous with cash presents and very gracious about it, and he’s damned attractive and I like him. One thing he likes to do is take me to straight parties. Not his family’s set, obviously, but the circle of friends he’s apt to see when he’s squiring any of his female girlfriends. He passes me off as a girl and no one suspects, and generally his friends will ask me for my phone number—I give a phony—or ask my date for my phone number afterward. And then we go back to his apartment in town and ball each other, and the whole deception aspect of it turns him on tremendously . . .”

  • • •

  I had not intended to return to the subject of my own reactions toward Brendan, but I cannot entirely dismiss the feeling that they may be relevant to an understanding of Brendan, and indeed to an understanding of various aspects of homosexuality in the broader sense.

  On re-reading the material quoted, I find it does not sufficiently convey the tone of the time we spent together. Our interview sessions covered a period of about eight hours spread over two days, during which time Brendan seemed to change sex periodically, drifting from boy to girl and back again any number of times. There were times when I found myself quite consciously avoiding his eyes because the liquid intensity of his stare was so disturbing to me. At other times he stopped vamping me entirely and I related to him as to any male, and was completely at ease conversationally.

  At one point he said, not as a boast but as a flat statement of fact, “I can get any man I want.”

  I told him that sounded like hyperbole to me.

  “But I think it’s true, Jack. Not that I’m never rejected. I don’t mean I’m Iris Irresistible. I get turned down, and usually the turndown turns me off and I don’t keep pursuing. But if I keep pursuing, if I want it badly enough, I generally get my man.”

  “Like the Mounted Police?”

  “I could get you.”

  “I doubt it.”

  “You wanted me before.”

  “I thought you were a girl.”

  “So?”

  “So I know you’re not.”

  “Uh-huh. And you’re gradually getting used to it. You’re getting less and less shocked at having been turned on by me before. You held hands with me before.”

  “True.”

  “Would you hold hands with me now?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “Scared?”

  “Probably.”

  “So you’ll do the ostrich number? Bury your head in the sand and pretend I don’t exist?”

  “Not exactly that.”

  “Do you know what you’re afraid of?”

  “Of course.”

  “It’s cabbage. ‘I don’t like cabbage and I’m not going to try cabbage because I might like it and I already know I hate it.’ Your mind is made up and you don’t want to be confused with the facts.”

  “There’s no way to win, is there, Brendan? If I don’t want to, it means I’m repressing it. A equals A and B equals A.”

  “Absolutely.”

  “Let’s just say I’m not interested. And that I want you to stop coming on.”

  “I
f that’s the way you want it.”

  “It is.”

  “I’ll let it alone then,” he said, the throatiness suddenly gone from his voice. “Of course,” he added, “think of the benefit if you tried it and found out you didn’t like it. You could stop worrying about it.”

  “I’m not worrying about it.”

  “Lucky you. But I’ll let it alone. Of course, you can always change your mind, can’t you?”

  “I doubt that I will.”

  “But you have the option. And you do have my number, don’t you?”

  “Yes.”

  “Lovely.” The eyes again. “And that’s only fair, honey, because you better believe I’ve got your number.”

  Cary

  “Sometimes I wonder why in the hell I come down there. Oh, that’s easy to answer. The money. I’ll take the subway in and catch a movie and have something to eat, maybe a couple of drinks, and instead of the whole evening costing me money I come out ahead of the game. Maybe I wind up with ten or fifteen bucks more than I started with.

  “See, it’s not a matter of I get up in the morning and say to myself, well, tonight you’re gonna make it to Times Square and hustle some queers. I won’t lay it out in front like that. I live out in Queens, you know. Over in Bayside. The old man is in construction and I got a sister finishing high school this year. Sometimes I’ll think about getting out on my own. You know, an apartment of my own in Manhattan. The only thing is that this place is so expensive if you want to live halfway decent. What do you have to pay for a decent apartment? I don’t mean some rat hole on the Lower East Side, because who wants to live like that? But a halfway respectable place on the Upper West Side, maybe the Village. I’ve been to guys’ places that are no bigger than my bedroom in Queens, with a refrigerator and a stove in one corner so they can call it a kitchenette, and a toilet you couldn’t turn around in, and they’ll tell me they’re paying a hundred, a hundred and fifty a month. More if it’s a really decent neighborhood. If it’s the East Side, you got to take that number and double it.