The Male Hustler Read online

  “And this is all changing, you know. That, as much as anything else, is what the counterculture is all about. It’s the real expression of the sexual revolution. The more obvious manifestations that you’ll see are reactions to generations of repression. The excesses of pornography, the wild behavior of some swingers. Theaters with public fucking. All of this is a passing phenomenon. What will be enduring is a genuine attitudinal change, and that’s most apparent with the young. Not all of them, of course. Some of them are every bit as uptight as their parents. Boys are scared to urinate in a public men’s room because someone might steal a peek at their cocks.

  “More and more of them, however, consciously open themselves to new experience. They aren’t afraid of homosexual relations, and as a result they don’t take it for granted that an inevitable consequence of an enthusiasm for penises is an antipathy toward vaginas.

  “You know that button? If it feels good I’ll do it. Now there is the credo for the Aquarian Age in what? Seven words? Words to live by. Animals know instinctively that anything that makes them feel better is good for them. That’s why wild animals will automatically select the foods their bodies need. Human beings have spent millennia developing their intellects at the expense of their instincts. That’s why civilization has invariably led to a deterioration in diet, because the overdeveloped brain tells the belly what it wants, and makes the wrong choice. You never see fat animals, you know. Only in zoos . . .

  “The new culture, the counterculture, is turning away from a whole body of past experience. What is being rejected, you know, is not merely the value system of a few generations but the social directions of several thousand years. All of this is bound up in all the rest of it. The ecology movement, the return to natural foods, the investigation of the occult sciences, the appeal of mysticism. The rejection of the state and the return to the tribal unit. The emphasis on developing self-sufficiency, on performing for oneself the tasks needed for one’s survival rather than doing a specialized type of work to obtain money to purchase what one requires. And this is happening not in any animal way, not through a rejection of the intellect, but through an expansion of the intellectual vision into newer ways of seeing.

  “I’m sure drugs have a great deal to do with this. They encourage new perspectives, cut through ritualized thinking. And no doubt McLuhan can attribute much of this to television, although we can hardly be sure until some dedicated soul takes on the job of transferring his writings into English.

  “In twenty years, barring some dramatic planetary tragedy, bisexuality will be statistically normal. This is already true in certain circles, especially for females. You’ve spent a great deal of time yourself with swingers and swappers and orgiasts. I’ve read a couple of your things. The New Sexual Underground. A little sensationalistic, I thought, but I was able to see your own attitudes lurking between the lines and felt at the time that you were not merely reporting, that you understood what is happening. So of course I don’t have to tell you that in large areas of this underground, if you will, the bisexual female is the norm. And the exclusively heterosexual woman is almost becoming a curiosity. Isn’t that your experience?”

  I agreed that it was.

  “To the point where some couples are unwilling to swing with other couples unless the wife is bisexual. True?”

  “True.”

  “Would you agree that this is fairly recent? And that it’s very much an accelerating trend?”

  “Definitely. I’ve written as much.”

  “And male bisexuality is beginning to follow the trend?”

  “Yes. But there’s less of it and the acceleration is slower.”

  “Absolutely. There’s a double standard. But this trend, I don’t see it reversing, do you?”

  “No. But no trend ever looks capable of reversing itself until it reaches the crest.”

  “I’m not sure I agree with that. I think sometimes you can see a thesis-antithesis wave in the future, while other times you can identify a trend as historically continuous. In politics and social change and other areas as well. Do you agree, though, that bisexualism is the wave of the future? Not the only wave, but a strong one?”

  I thought for a moment, then nodded. “I prefer not to predict,” I said. “My astrologer is usually better at it than I am. But if the question were whether I expected bisexual behavior to increase or decrease, I could only answer that it will increase. On an either/or basis, that’s the only possible answer.”

  “Absolutely.”

  “Gore Vidal thinks it will help solve the population problem.”

  “Well, Gore Vidal is so good at saying memorable things that it doesn’t always seem to matter to him if they make any sense. Bisexualism will not mean that fewer women will be getting fucked by men, so why should it limit the number of pregnancies? I do think, though, that the population problem has had a liberating effect sexually. One of the most persistent arguments against homosexual relations has always been that they are unnatural because you can’t get pregnant that way. If God wanted men to make love to each other, He would have made them capable of knocking each other up. The rejoinder to that has always been that if He hadn’t wanted them to enjoy it He wouldn’t have made it enjoyable. Personally I find it offensive when people put words into God’s mouth. If He exists, and if He wants to speak, He doesn’t need such noisome puppets.”

  “I saw a sign once,” I said, “in front of a shipyard. They built wooden ships there. It read, ‘If God had wanted us to have fiberglass boats, he would have given us fiberglass trees.’

  “I’d love to meet the chap who wrote that . . . But getting back to the population problem, the argument always ran that if everyone were homosexual, the race would die out. Well, in the first place, no one ever said everyone should be completely homosexual. And that’s like saying that if everyone were a lawyer the race would die out, because nobody would be growing food. Completely irrational nonsense. Even so, we’ve finally reached a point where the average person knows that the last thing this poor crowded planet needs is more babies. So when one considers a couple of faggots living together, one doesn’t automatically think they’re shirking their duty by not rushing out and reproducing. That has to have an attitudinal effect over a period of time. A subtle one, but a real one.”

  • • •

  I consider myself fortunate that Derek’s dissatisfaction with the designation homosexual prostitute did not stand in the way of an interview. He was in every sense a perfect subject.

  When one does a substantial amount of interviewing, one soon discovers that a great deal of one’s time is largely wasted insofar as the compilation of publishable material is concerned. (In a larger sense, all interviews are of some value; the interviewer widens his own perspective and forms valuable impressions regardless.) But many subjects are virtually incapable of opening up in an interview. Some rather obviously lie to avoid a disclosure they would find embarrassing. Others, out of a need to be liked, try to tell an interviewer what they assume he wants to hear. Still others have gone through life automatically lying to themselves to the point where they cannot locate the truth even if they were inclined to voice it.

  And many more are so fundamentally inarticulate that, much as they wish to cooperate, it is hard to get anything out of them. Sometimes questions will engender nothing but terse replies rather than leading to a worthwhile flow of thought. Sometimes a subject will chat on endlessly, constantly wandering off the subject, relating trivial anecdotes in a luxury of detail, but never putting anything much together because of his own limited inner vision.

  Derek, on the other hand, was not only willing and able to speak to the point about his own experiences and feelings, but was also given to speaking quite brilliantly about the wider implications of the points we discussed. I spent a good deal of time interviewing him, and but for space limitations I would have liked to reproduce the several reels of tape verbatim. At one point I did suggest that he had the insight and experienc
e for a book, and seemed in every way capable of writing such a book himself. He confessed that he had been considering just such a project, had taken some tentative steps in that direction, and was presently trying to decide whether he would prefer to write a pure autobiography or to couch his material in the guise of a novel. Whichever form he chooses, I suspect the results should be worthwhile.

  Derek is thirty-two. On appearance alone he could readily pass for twenty-five. He is tall, fairly broad in the shoulders, narrow in the waist and trim in the hips. His physique is athletic rather than muscular. His hair is dark brown, styled fashionably by a men’s hair stylist. His facial features are too strong for him to be conventionally handsome. His nose is prominent, almost hawk-like. Similarly prominent are the ridges of bone above his eyes. His gaze is direct but not intimidating. His overall appearance is such that one would not automatically suppose him to be homosexual, but neither would one be much surprised to see him at a gay bar.

  Derek looks younger than his age at least in part because he keeps in excellent physical condition. He jogs and plays handball. His preferred mode of transportation within New York is a bicycle. He is a vegetarian, limits himself for the most part to organically grown foods, takes natural vitamin and mineral supplements, eschews coffee, tea and tobacco. The only euphoriants he uses are dry wine (he and his roommate make their own) and marijuana (he has raised his own in a window box, but found it inferior to the Mexican product.)

  In conversation, Derek seems at once older and younger than his years. His attitude is youthful, but the suggestion of depth and maturity in his speech counteract this impression. His clothes are expensive and well-chosen. His apartment, a brownstone floor-through on one of the quieter blocks of the West Village, has just enough personal flavor to avoid the “decorated” look. When I said as much, he laughed and said that his roommate deserved the credit. “Gene’s a decorator,” he said, “and the one thing he always tries to avoid is doing a place so that it looks professionally ‘done.’ Which is precisely what most of his clients want. They won’t trust their own taste—which is perhaps wise of them—and they feel that they’ve failed if guests don’t walk into the living room and immediately ask the name of their decorator. Here, of course, he was able to do just as he wanted. It is comfortable, isn’t it?”

  • • •

  Just as Derek took issue with the homosexual label, so did he dislike being characterized as a prostitute.

  “I’m not a hustler or a prostitute. A prostitute is one who prostitutes oneself. A hustler is one who hustles. There are individuals whose life-style specifically fits either or both of those categories. I am not of their number. My profession does have a name, however. I am a masseur.”

  But didn’t he have sexual relations with his clients?

  “Not always. I have quite a few regular customers who want nothing more or less than an orthopedic massage. Men and women with back problems, for example.”

  Didn’t the majority of clients prefer a sexual service of one sort or another?

  “Yes. In the broadest sense, definitely yes. But you must understand that the whole profession of massage is inescapably sexual. The whole idea is relaxation and release of tension, and sexual tension is not that completely divorced from general muscular tension.

  “I know a girl who has her own massage studio on the Upper East Side. She worked as a practical nurse for many years, in hospitals and clinics as well as in private nursing situations. She told me one common chore was giving a patient a rubdown. Often male patients would develop erections in the course of having their backs or legs rubbed. She learned early on that it was standard practice in most of the places she worked for the nurse to deal with this phenomenon by massaging the patient’s penis until he reached orgasm. According to her, it was quite remarkable how many of the older nurses took this as a matter of course, and how adept they became at it. Skilled professional hands, I suppose. A couple of disinterested strokes and Bob’s your uncle. And then there were other nurses who would give the penis a nasty slap to make the patient lose his erection. There should be a special circle of hell reserved for those bitches . . .”

  I suggested that his advertising in Screw would seem to indicate the obvious sexual nature of his services.

  “Yes, I advertise in Screw regularly, and now and then in some of the other sex tabloids. Also in the Village Voice, which now has two different categories in the classifieds, Licensed Massage and Unlicensed Massage. I advertise under both headings, incidentally. I do have a New York license, actually took a course and passed a qualifying examination. The ‘licensed’ listing assures certain clients that this is not a pure sex thing, that they can come for a sauna and back rub if that’s all they want. The other listing assures a client who wants sexual release that it’s available. And of course in all ads I specify that I serve male and female clientele, although the bulk of my clients are men.

  “I also advertised briefly in the New York Times under situations wanted. They keep changing their policy as to the acceptability of massage ads. They’ve been taking male model advertisements which are fairly blatant fellows describing themselves as draped, which is another way of saying well-hung. For my own part, I found that the Times brought in too many phone calls and too few clients.

  “In the past few months I’ve been getting quite a bit of repeat business, but even so the majority of my income comes from first-timers. I don’t suppose this will ever change significantly. With a first-time client, it’s necessary to determine just what he’s there for. I’ll always ask where they read my ad. If they mention Screw, it’s fairly obvious that they have some form of sex in mind. Some of them will say they don’t remember or that they got my number from a friend. In any case, it’s important not to do anything unless one is fairly certain the client wants it. When a man has absolutely nothing on his mind but lower back pain, and when the relaxing effect of a massage has his mind hovering on the verge of sleep, he can find it somewhat unnerving when the masseur makes a sudden grab for his cock.

  “Of course one becomes increasingly sensitive to what people want. And some do come right out and tell you. They may state precisely what they want the minute they walk in the door. I remember a buttoned-down executive type who bustled in the other day, looked me up and down, and announced he wanted a blow job and what was the price. I’m sure he was all right but I had to tell him I didn’t do that sort of thing.

  “You see, there’s a legal point. I charge thirty dollars for a fifty-minute hour of massage. (About the same as analysis, and it probably does more people more good.) That’s the whole fee, whether they get a purely physical massage or a total sexual experience. That way any sexual acts are just a bonus, and I haven’t legally committed prostitution. I’ll have violated various and sundry sodomy statutes, but not even the vice squad cares about that. So I won’t contract in advance to perform a sexual act. Clients who’ve been around at all are aware of this, but this chap, I’m positive he wasn’t a cop, but I just don’t take those chances.

  “Often a client will suggest shortly after the massage begins that I might be more comfortable undressed. Or he may simply get an erection, or may handle himself suggestively, at which point I will feel free to touch him intimately. I have a variety of mechanical devices on display. Manual vibrators, vibrators for anal stimulation, and anyone who wants that can let me know. Naturally, once one actually begins fondling someone’s genitalia, the ice is broken. Then he can say what he wants and we can do it or not do it.

  “You see, I won’t do everything with everyone. I do enjoy sex, you must understand. There is nothing I enjoy nearly so much, and nothing that plays nearly so great a part in every aspect of my life. When I see a man or woman whom I find attractive, my very immediate impulse is to desire sexual contact with that person. I don’t mean that I would want to ejaculate a hundred times a day. One would simply be fucking oneself to death that way. But it’s possible to have enjoyable sex without orgasm, just as i
t’s possible to have orgasm without ejaculating.

  “If I like a client, if I find him attractive, I’ll do almost anything he wants to do. As he prefers, I’ll fellate him or be fellated by him, and either penetrate or accommodate him anally. These are all acts which I enjoy greatly, provided that there’s nothing about my partner that happens to turn me off.

  “What turns me off? Attitude, more than anything else. If a man is obnoxious I don’t care to have sexual relations with him. Or if he’s unclean. You might think that anyone expecting to have sex would shower beforehand. It doesn’t seem to occur to some of them. And then things like a terrible complexion or extreme obesity also put me off. Health and beauty are largely, the same thing, you know. A person who looks unhealthy is sexually unappealing. To me, certainly, if not to everyone.

  “If I’m turned off, there are some things I’ll do and some I won’t, depending upon the strength of my feelings. I will masturbate any client to orgasm. I feel that’s part of what thirty dollars entitles them to. And I will almost always permit a client to handle or fellate me. I have to respond to someone in order to go down on him, and I have to respond to him a great deal to take either role in buggery. These are personal reactions of mine. Certain acts and certain roles both imply and demand a greater level of intimacy than others.

  “When there’s something I don’t want to do with an individual, I simply state that it’s an act I never perform, that it’s not part of the service. Occasionally I’m offered more money. I still refuse. When this happens I know I won’t see that customer again, and of course that’s as I want it. I want to limit myself to people I can relate to. In fact if I do get a repeat call from a customer who has wanted something I didn’t want to do, I won’t make an appointment for him. There are a lot of basically masochistic types who only want what they can’t get. I make enough money without exploiting them, and I’m happier without their company.”