The Male Hustler Read online

  • • •

  Derek spoke at length about his clients, both generally and specifically. Some, he said, were exclusively homosexual and enjoyed going to a masseur partly for the extra-sexual aspects of the treatment and partly because it represented a convenient and uncomplicated way for them to obtain casual sexual gratification.

  “Homosexual clients of this sort have generally shopped the massage market rather thoroughly. They often have permanent or semi-permanent relationships of their own and may cruise the bars or walk the promenade. When they come for a massage it’s not because they can’t have homosexual contacts elsewhere, or because they’re unable to relate to a male lover.

  “What I can offer them is a purely selfish experience, and everyone who’s honest with himself wants that sort of thing now and then. They don’t have to please me, they don’t have to think about what I might want to do. All they have to do is stretch out on the massage table and enjoy. They can be very specific, outlining precisely what they want and what they don’t want. It’s almost a master-slave relationship without all the leather trappings or emotional exploitation of the sadomasochism subgroup, I can find this quite enjoyable as an occasional thing, incidentally. If you’re really involved in sex, the pleasure you give is at least as important as the pleasure you get. Some times more so.

  “Others won’t be specific at all. They may say ‘Do something wildly interesting, darling,’ or words to that effect.

  “I rarely have any complaints.”

  A somewhat larger proportion of his clients are men Derek characterizes as bisexual.

  “I’m sure I constitute an initial homosexual experience for a great many men. Let me qualify that—an initial experience in their present stage of life. They may have gotten into homosexual relations to a degree in childhood or adolescence, may have had something going at college or in the army, but that’s behind them now and they’ve limited themselves to heterosexual contacts since then. Either way, in terms of their present life-style they are wholly heterosexual in deed if not in thought.

  “They’re business or professional types, and either because of youthful memories or out of general curiosity, they feel themselves starting to come out of the shell of their preconceptions. A fellow I know—not a client—got a divorce after close to twenty years of marriage and is now living on Bank Street with a photographer I’ve known for years. We’ve never made it together but we’ve talked, and he told me something I found interesting. Throughout his marriage, he was essentially faithful to his wife. He would pick up a girl once in a great while or spend his lunch hour with a call girl, but he never had an enduring relationship, or for that matter anything you would be inclined to call a relationship with anyone but his wife. And after not too many years he started to help his sexual relationship with his wife along through the medium of fantasy. He would be thinking of someone else while he fucked her, or would be thinking of some unusual act, an orgy with several girls, whatever fantasy appealed.

  “That in itself is hardly unusual. I suspect almost any partner in a long-standing relationship does that at least some of the time. The holy compromise of monogamy—you only ball each other but you both grind away thinking of other people. You know, I would consider that the only genuine sort of infidelity, to be unfaithful to one’s partner in the very act of love . . .

  “This chap found, though, that his fantasies were beginning to have homosexual components creeping in. Maybe he would imagine himself sharing a woman with another man. And he found this thought very exciting. And subsequently his fantasies became more specifically homosexual in nature. He imagined acts between himself and another man. He found himself focusing more and more on one fantasy, that he was sucking another man’s penis.

  “From what he said, I gather he fought this. He had always felt himself to be exclusively heterosexual. Never actively desired sex with another man. Couldn’t imagine himself actually performing such an act, but in fantasy it was acceptable because it wasn’t really happening. And, of course, because it was the ultimate secret; one might conceivably be found out in the commission of an act, however careful one might be, but fantasies are safe. No one could possibly know what he was thinking about.

  “There were times, he told me, when he would suck his thumb while having coitus with his wife. Imagining, of course, that it was something else.

  “Inevitably one thing led to another. If he had gone out early on in the game and blown someone he might have gotten it all out of his system, but he was too inhibited, he couldn’t possibly do that. So it became more and more important in his mind until he found himself thinking compulsively about fellatio, scared to death to go out and give it a try but compulsively dwelling on it. He went through all the nonsense. Bought homosexual pornography on Sixth Avenue, read it in a lavatory, masturbated over it and threw it away so no one could guess his dirty secret. Went out of his way to walk past gay bars, magnetically drawn to them but terrified to go inside. Found himself glancing at men’s crotches, and was positive men knew what he was doing, so that he tried to overcompensate by never looking at another man below the neck.

  “And other things too tedious to mention. Went to whores all the time and couldn’t get excited with them. Never had had trouble before, of course, but now he was nervous and compulsive and his penis accordingly refused to perform. He fought this by trying to have homosexual experiences with female prostitutes. Had them bugger him with dildos, that sort of thing. And got excited about that.

  “Finally he did go with a hustler, one of the 42nd Street types. Picked him up outside a theater and didn’t even go to a room. Instead he took him into the theater, bought a pair of tickets, and then he and the number went to the lavatory and he got in the stall with the hustler and blew him. Paid I think ten dollars for the privilege.

  “I suspect a lot of my clients have a similar history behind them by the time I see them. They want to try it but they are genuinely frightened. With me they have a clean and safe experience that they can stop at any time (although they never want to) and that they can direct according to who will do what and with which and to whom. They have privacy and safety and security. They don’t have to come on conversationally, they can just let things happen. If there’s something they’ve wondered about, at least they can find out just what it’s like and whether they like it or not. They can find out whether or not it’s the kind of thing they can live comfortably with, or if it’s something they’d be happier living without because the guilt and ego damage is more than they can readily handle.

  “Understand this, Jack. I do feel everybody is fundamentally bisexual. I do not feel that everybody necessarily ought to attempt to realize his bisexuality. If you take a man who has been automatically heterosexual for a sufficient period of time, a man who has erected certain defenses and has grown rigid in his thinking and feeling, it can be very bad for him to break out of the mold. Very disastrous. The fellow I was talking about, the fantasy cocksucker who’s over on Bank Street now. I’m not so certain he’s better off for having done what he did. There should have been a way for him to gratify his impulses without tearing up his marriage. He could have had a boyfriend on the side, he could have taken off one night a week and cruised the bars. Anything. But he repressed himself for so long, he got himself so thoroughly compulsive, that when he flipped out he immediately went overboard, left his wife, left his kids, and does everything but wear lipstick. Says he’s finally being himself, but all he’s doing is going to a different extreme.

  “Many of the men I see do what I think he would have been better off doing. People call them closet queens, and militant homosexuals look down their noses at them, but many of them are simply men who have accepted certain facts about themselves. That they like being married, that they like fucking women, but that they want sex with a male partner a certain amount of the time. So they maintain their home life and everything that goes with it and get a gay piece on the side now and then. The ones I see prefer to
pay for it. Others go out and cruise for it. I don’t know that one approach is healthier than the other. In a pure dollars and cents basis, I think it probably costs less to get a massage than to make the rounds of the bars, slopping down all those drinks at a buck and a half a copy and frequently not even getting laid in the bargain, which can happen more often than people think, even with all the vaunted permissiveness and openness of the homosexual community. Sometimes, no matter who you are, you wind up going home alone. And if you’re a closet person with only one night a week to devote to the sport, it can be pretty frustrating.”

  • • •

  Derek regards his present situation as ideal in all respects. He earns a substantial amount of money with a minimum of work and enjoys what he does. His roommate, Gene, shares his liberal outlook.

  “We’re lovers in that we make love frequently and very genuinely care about and for one another. But it would never occur to either of us to be jealous of the other for having extracurricular interests. Neither of us has that kind of outlook. I could never live with anyone who was at all possessive. I went through that type of living situation once. Never again!

  “Gene and I are both oriented toward swinging and enjoy pluralism. In addition to the massage ads I run, we now and then run an ad in Screw for girls interested in swinging with two guys. Not as a commercial proposition, needless to say, but for the mutual pleasure of it. We’re both so highly sensitized and so sexually oriented that we can do things to a woman that most men couldn’t, straight or gay or in-between. We had a girl last week who called up, not in response to an ad but because a girlfriend of hers had swung with us once and was passing the word.

  “Lovely thing. Young and beautiful and slender and healthy, and absolutely out of her sweet mind for cock. I think she may have been on something, very possibly a mixture of mescaline and speed. That’s just a guess.

  “We spent hours on end with her. Took the phone off the hook and drew the blinds and simply fucked for an incredible length of time. Played with her and vibrated her and sandwiched her and took turns with her and ate her and nearly turned the little thing inside out. When she staggered out I told her, ‘Now don’t forget, love, we’re just a couple of faggots. Imagine what a real man could do for you.’

  “I’d like to see her again and get her to swing with a girl I know. I think she’s ready for it. Everybody has the potential for all of it, you know. It’s just a question of getting into something when you’re ready for it.”

  Derek’s attitudes are so consistent and his life such a perfect mirror of them that one can easily make the mistake of thinking he has always been this way, very much at ease in the role of a sexual revolutionary.

  This is not the case. On the contrary, his early sexual experiences were of the sort usually considered to have dire consequences. Orphaned at an early age, he was raised in a home for orphans until he was placed in a foster home at age ten.

  “The orphan home was what the Daily News might have called a hotbed of sex. That was really the only bearable thing about it. Dreary food, gray-green walls, broken down equipment, a staff of incompetents who only cared that we avoid dying in such a way that they might be held personally accountable for it. It never occurred to me to cry for Oliver Twist. I’ve always felt the sniveling little bastard had it relatively easy.

  “But we did screw around a lot for children our age. I’ve known so many persons, male and female alike, who managed to remain not merely virginal but relatively inexperienced altogether to the age of sixteen, eighteen, even twenty. I know this happens but still find it inconceivable. We all played with each other and sucked each other as far back as I can remember. It was this ongoing thing, you know; the older children taught the younger children and so on. I had my cock inside a girl years before I was capable of ejaculating. I couldn’t even guess how old I was at the time. No more than seven or eight, certainly.

  “As far as I am concerned, that was the only good thing about that place. In every other respect it was a horrible way to grow up. In an ideal situation children ought to have love and affection and security and stability and good food and comfortable surroundings. But if they could have all those things and have a free and open and easy sex life on top of it all—ah, then we might begin to see the emergence of sanity in human relationships. We truly might.”

  Derek’s foster parents provided a certain measure of the ingredients on his list. They also seduced him, and in the four years he lived with them his sexual education was broadened considerably.

  “They went out and got themselves a child from the orphan home so that they could act out a favorite fantasy. It was a rather cruel and calculating thing to do, because I don’t think they ever stopped to give a damn what kind of effect this might ultimately have on me. I think it would be perfectly possible for a couple to have that sort of relationship with a child and be attempting to act in the child’s best interests. To prepare him to cope with the life for which they’re readying him.

  “But Sheila and Ray were not operating on that level. They could never conceptualize anything to that extent. They hadn’t even freed themselves sexually. They did all this acting out, and then they felt a load of guilt and worked it out by regarding me as something dirty, the perverted little shit from the orphan home. Then when they were horny again and the guilt was gone they would turn loving. One could hardly have blamed me for turning catatonic, but I seem to have been made of sterner stuff, or perhaps I was simply too insensitive to have the imagination for schizophrenia. In any case, I was very fortunate.

  “I ran away once and came back after one night out in the cold. I ran away a second time when I was fourteen and never went back. I have never been in contact with them since and wouldn’t have the slightest idea how to go about finding them. They moved constantly at the time, one trailer camp after another. And I wouldn’t try to find them if I could. Inevitably I’ve thought about them a good deal, and I’ve occasionally wondered what they’ve turned into since I knew them and how they and I might react now, each to the other. I’m not so sure, though, that it might not be a very unsettling experience for me to meet them again, even now, after all these years.”

  The following years were characterized by a great deal of travel and a wide range of sexual contacts. Derek engaged periodically in petty crime and was twice sentenced to jail briefly for misdemeanors. He went on functioning as a promiscuous bisexual, while at the same time becoming increasingly aware of the gulf between his own sexual life-style and society’s normative mores. All of this combined to produce a series of identity crises during his middle twenties.

  “I spent a great deal of time going through a very bad situation. I was very fortunate in that I did not have to be alone during this period of time. I was in New York and I was acquainted with a great many people. I knew the gay scene and was known in return. I could always find someone to talk to, someone decent enough to sit across a table from me and listen sympathetically while I talked myself through one critical point after another. I’m sure there were more than a few times when I wasn’t making much sense. I’m sure there were times when I was literally insane. I was playing around with drugs. I don’t think there was anything I didn’t take at one time or another. Fortunately I could never conquer a fear of sticking needles in myself, and as result I never shot either speed or heroin. Fortunately

  “I’m sure the drugs served a purpose. This was a time when I had to look at myself in enormous detail, and when I also had to use myself as a lens with which to examine the world. You’ve commented that you’re astonished that I’m uneducated, that I’ve had virtually no formal education. I educated myself during this period of time. Read an enormous amount. Found myself using new words, more specific words, in the dialogues I would have with myself. I wasn’t doing this with any goal in mind. I was just trying to keep from breaking down entirely.

  “The attitudes I have now, the whole life-style I’ve developed for myself, is the result of a tremendo
us amount of concentrated meditation that finally began to resolve itself about eight years ago. I started with physical disciplines, eliminating drugs and alcohol, dropping tobacco, giving up meat. Once my head was straight—the kids’ phrase for it, and I know no better one—I found it very easy to organize the more physical aspects of my life. And ever since then I have consistently been the same person, and I have been a happy and satisfied person. I’ve come to like myself, to take a lot of pride in myself. You know the song, I take a lot of pride in what I am. A good phrase.

  “The massage business began a few years ago. I was modeling freelance at the time. Not hustling, but legitimate fashion modeling. It was easy work and paid well enough but I detested it. It’s not a fit occupation for a man to stand smiling like a nit wearing trendy clothes under hot lights while someone takes a thousand pictures of him. Some models keep scrapbooks. I was the reverse. I absolutely hated seeing my face in an ad. Hated it.

  “Besides, although the money was good, it was very erratic. You worked when someone needed you and not otherwise. I like independence and flexibility, and modeling had more of that than most jobs, but it wasn’t the same as a profession of one’s own. Gene and I were together at that point and I envied him his freedom. He had to make his idiot customers happy, and it bothered him to ruin a decor because they weren’t up to what he had in mind, but still he was operating on his own.

  “Where was I? Massage. Yes. I heard a discussion of some masseur or other in a bar. Must have heard of the profession before but never paid any attention. This time it struck a chord.

  “I approached the whole thing very systematically. Got regular appointments with half a dozen masseurs and paid very close attention to what they did. Practiced giving Gene massages and he said I seemed to know what I was about. Took the course, got the diploma, qualified for the license, and set up in business. Really not much more to it than that. Still had a lot to learn after I opened up the studio, but one gets by playing things by ear.