The following essay will appear in the forthcoming Male Sex Work and Society, edited by Victor Minichiello and John Scott (Harrington Park Press). Reprinted with permission.
THE HISTORY of male prostitution extends deep into the past, mirroring the historical depth of what was referred to (wrongly, and with negative implication) as “the world’s oldest profession”: female prostitution. While records indicate the existence of male prostitution in some of the most ancient societies, one is immediately confronted by the slipperiness of the two terms: what is “male” and what is “prostitution”?
Perhaps the most widespread pattern of “male prostitution” practiced in Europe and the United States at the turn of the 19th century involved biological men who dressed like female prostitutes. Commonly known in the U.S. as “fairies,” these individuals worked variously in all-fairy brothels and saloons, as solo offerings in brothels that were otherwise devoted to female workers, or on the streets in either semi-segregated or “mixed sex” cruising zones. In some instances, the individuals may have tried to pass themselves off as biological women, though in most cases this seems not to have been the case.
Writing before the concept of “transsexuality” had arisen, early sexologists such as Magnus Hirschfeld and Havelock Ellis readily included this type of prostitution as an instance of “male prostitution” more generally. It is unclear how the subjects of these writings would have presented themselves, but most individuals who fit this description today would probably identify as transsexual or simply as females, placing their work outside of the category of “male prostitution” as such. These definitional uncertainties make it unclear whether what occurred in the late 1800s and early 1900s should be classified as “male prostitution,” and, if so, when exactly it ceased to be “male prostitution” and became something else.
Similar difficulties arise when considering the precise limits of a word such as “prostitution.” From the early 1700s well into the 20th century, a pattern of prostitution developed in which “normally identified” male soldiers engaged in paid sex for a queer-identified male clientele. Other working-class men also sold sex to “queer” customers, but military men apparently had their own bars and “soldiers’ promenades” in which they worked. This means of supplementing the military’s meager wages gained such subcultural status that, within certain regiments, noncommissioned officers apparently began initiating new recruits into prostitution immediately on enlistment.
Although some of what became known as “barracks prostitution” was constituted by clear sex for cash transactions, there was apparently an oversupply of workers throughout much of the history of this institution, leading many of the soldiers to seek longer-term relations with individual clients. Relations between soldiers and clients therefore often involved a good deal more emotional intimacy than was typical between female prostitutes and their clientele, and at least a few of these relationships developed into domestic arrangements in which the queer-identified person would cook, clean, and sew for his soldier–partner during periods of leave. Wrote Hirschfeld of this arrangement: “The financial dependence of the beloved on the loving person often makes it look like prostitution, although no one thinks twice when in a heterosexual relationship a wealthy man spends a lot of money on a young woman he greatly loves, regardless of whether he marries her or not.”
Most of these relationships ended at the completion of a soldier’s tour of duty. Even in shorter-term arrangements, many material exchanges took the form of gifts, particularly with wealthier persons, making it possible that the participants did not identify their activities as “prostitution” per se. But the attempt to decide whether these exchanges were truly instances of prostitution may be beside the point. A more fruitful approach would be to examine the ways in which participants may have used the term “prostitution” to set social and emotional limits around certain interactions while leaving others deliberately vague. Rather than seeing prostitution as a trans-historical category, common to all periods, we might concede that the very definition of the term allows for some ambiguity, enabling it to be used by both outsiders and participants as a political tool.
In the modern era (say, 1900 to present), the rise of male prostitution as a recognizable pattern of behavior has been associated with the rise of homosexuality as a sexual category and as a subject of study. Before that, even seemingly “obvious” examples of male prostitution are difficult to categorize. In one famous case from 1860, the English police arrested two men—Ernest Boulton and Frederick William Park—because they were dressed as women. The police weren’t sure what to make of the situation despite the fact that the two men carried letters that mentioned cash exchanges with various clients. By the turn of the 20th century, police had no such difficulty, having been familiarized with these new sexual identities through the writings of sexuality specialists and through a series of scandals—notably the Cleveland Street Affair and the Oscar Wilde trials—that effectively publicized the “problems” associated with the new identities.
Male prostitutes came to the particular attention of the early sexologists because many of them seemed to lie on a border between “normal” sexuality and the new idea of “homosexuality” that they were formulating. But by grouping sexual acts that had previously been considered deviant but malleable into a category that was inherent and permanent, sexologists created a dilemma for themselves: what to make of all the men who were having sex with each other but did not seem to be true homosexuals? If “innate sexual desire” was a defining characteristic, were men who had sex for cash genuine homosexuals or merely “pseudohomosexuals” (another favorite term of the time)? Along with men who had sex only in the confines of all-male institutions (prisons, the military, maritime crews, boarding schools, etc.), male prostitutes became a hotly debated marker in the establishment of homosexuality as a distinctive orientation. Eventually, professional thinking tended toward the opinion that most male prostitutes were not in fact homosexual.
Curiously enough, this issue came to the fore again in the 1970s with another challenge to the boundaries of homosexual identity. Early gay activists pointed to male prostitutes because of their borderline status, generally claiming that they were using prostitution as a way to have sex with men while not coming to terms with their underlying gayness (thus expanding the term’s applicability to numerous such “closet cases”). The medical profession sometimes went to unusual lengths when engaging in these debates. In 1974, for example, the sexologist Kurt Freund measured the erections of male prostitutes while showing them gay and straight pornography, concluding that most of the workers were basically heterosexual. Again, however, it is perhaps less important to ask whether these claims are true than to notice how the category of homosexuality was constituted and deployed to various political effects.
Male prostitution has been closely associated with another of the central controversies surrounding gay life. Portrayals of gay men as child molesters became particularly prominent during three waves of antigay bigotry: from 1937 to 1940 (when FBI director J. Edgar Hoover called for a “War on the Sex Criminal”), from 1949 to 1955 (the McCarthy era), and in the early 1970s (when singer and former beauty queen Anita Bryant led a movement to “Save Our Children” from “the homosexual menace”). Although the earliest of these three campaigns was not exclusively waged against gay men (the “sexual psychopath” that Hoover targeted was thought to threaten both girls and boys), all three of these campaigns essentially equated male homosexuality with the sexual abuse of children. Notably, however, when antigay campaigners cited actual instances of abuse, they frequently referred to cases in which teens had turned to prostitution with older men as a means of survival or simply to make additional cash. Of course they avoided mentioning this fact since that would have diminished their status as victims and their customers’ status as predators. By the 1970s, however, the notion had crept in that such young people could still be victims, only now they were seen as susceptible to “recruitment” by older homosexuals even though they might not actually be gay themselves.
The prostitution of male youths has an extensive past. There is powerful evidence that in 15th-century Florence, a significant percentage of adolescent male youths (from age twelve to twenty) developed long-term sexual relations with wealthy benefactors (who were most commonly in their twenties, but who might be older as well). These liaisons sometimes met with the support of the youth’s parents, who benefited financially from the arrangements. Centuries later, the social practices and meanings associated with such arrangements had changed significantly, and they would change even more until the practice was completely transformed and then virtually eliminated during the 20th century.
By the end of the 19th century, the age of those involved had gone up slightly, generally following a parallel rise in the age of consent for girls. Another difference was that, while the youths in Renaissance Florence came from all classes, the young men involved in prostitution at the end of the 19th century were overwhelmingly from the working class. During the 1889 Cleveland Street Affair, for example, in which a small handful of messenger boys (most aged fifteen and sixteen) from the Royal General Post Office were found to be moonlighting at a nearby gay brothel, the lead investigator wrote an internal memo stating that it was the duty of his office “to enforce the law and protect the children of respectable parents [my emphasis].” This qualification suggests that children of less respectable parents might not warrant such concern. By the final decades of the 19th century, this type of government oversight had effectively pushed all but the poorest youths out of the sex trade.
However, given the widespread poverty associated with industrialization on both sides of the Atlantic, this limitation still left a large number of young men in the sex trade. Darkened movie theaters, many with private rooms and public lavatories, were the most popular pickup areas, but prostitution might also happen in any of the gay cruising zones throughout a city like London or New York: public gardens, certain bars, river walks, and so on. Indeed, pickups could happen practically anywhere, particularly as there were no particular markers that identified who was available as a prostitute. Many poor and working-class youths were willing to participate when the opportunity arose, and prostitution was in no way limited to an isolated subculture that was seen as categorically deviant. For example, one gay man sent telegrams to himself as a way to contact random messenger boys, whom he then propositioned with general success.
The practice of prostitution was extremely widespread and in fact constituted a primary means of sexual interaction for many gay men (particularly for those in the middle class or above). Some gay men from privileged backgrounds eroticized the “genuine manliness” of working-class men. Oscar Wilde, for example, said that he preferred to be with working-class youths because “their passion was all body and no soul”—“feasting with panthers,” he called it. Others, such as the early sexologist and gay rights activist Edward Carpenter, offered a less fetishized and more optimistic interpretation of such cross-class contact, arguing that “Eros is a great leveler.”
For their part, many working-class youths approached prostitution as a simple means to an end. Interested adolescents openly shared information with each other regarding clients and their wants. Working-class parents didn’t necessarily approve of this behavior, and at times they took action against the adult clients, particularly if a relationship was ongoing and deemed to be exploitative. Yet parents sometimes knew about and condoned their sons’ activities, being in need of the additional income that their sons brought in. Working-class boys were generally expected to contribute to the household economy, often taking dangerous jobs in the process. (Indeed, children had a rate of workplace-related accidents that was three times that of adults.)
With the ongoing rise and stigmatization of homosexuality in the early 20th century, fewer “normally identified” men were willing to engage in sex with other men. This shift could be seen in the changing vernacular of the day, as George Chauncey (1994) pointed out:
The term “trade” originally referred to the customer of a fairy prostitute, a meaning analogous to and derived from its usage in the slang of female prostitutes; by the 1910s, it referred to any “straight” man who responded to a gay man’s advances. As one fairy put it in 1919, a man was trade if he “would stand to have ‘queer’ persons fool around [with]him in any way, shape or manner.” “Trade” was also increasingly used in the middle third of the century to refer to straight-identified men who worked as prostitutes serving gay-identified men, reversing the dynamic of economic exchange and desire implied by the original meaning.
Nevertheless, many working-class “straight” men remained willing to sell sex to “gay” men. During the Depression years, when many men were pushed into prostitution by economic need, straight-acting men effectively overwhelmed the old effeminate style of streetwalking, joining the soldier prostitute strolls and pushing the remaining fairy prostitutes to more marginalized locations. This transition, which occurred in New York City in the early ’30s, marks the virtual demise of widespread straight cruising of fairy men. Although fairy prostitutes continued to exist, and although some straight men even cruised the new generation of “normal” youths, gay men now dominated the market for the first time.
Despite their willingness to have sex with men, some men upheld prevailing ideas concerning gay identity that made certain acts more acceptable than others. Most “normally identified” working-class men and adolescents would only take the dominant or insertive role in sex lest they be seen as “fairies.” In contrast to the late Victorian period, now sexual encounters often involved nothing more than oral or manual stimulation by the client, or perhaps mutual masturbation at most. The new restrictions on sexual behavior were not always welcomed by clients. The notable British memoirist J. R. Ackerley, who cruised both working-class men and soldiers during the 1920s, complained that “those normal young men who request for themselves this form of amusement [oral sex]never offer it in return.”
But if the rise of gay culture put limits on what most straight men were willing to do, it also led queer-identified men to sell sex to each other for the first time. This pattern represented only a small minority, however, and the men selling sex within this new scene were discreetly normative in appearance, avoiding effeminate mannerisms.
As the century wore on, the growing awareness of homosexuality as a sexual identity reduced the number of “normal” men who were willing to seek out fairies as clients. Increasingly the term “trade” was used to refer to male prostitution, highlighting the monetary nature of the transaction, and the pool of available straight men slowly became restricted to undisguised cash for sex with specialists called “street hustlers.” If previously a wide cross-section of the straight working-class youths had been willing to trade sex for money, by mid-century only the most marginalized were willing to deal with the stigma associated with being seen as gay.
The literature concerning male prostitution in the 1950s, ’60s, and early ’70s is replete with stories of “deviants” or “hoodlum types” who engaged in prostitution as a means of obtaining money. Gone for the most part were the “barracks prostitution,” the messenger boys, and the newspaper sellers of the Victorian era. In their place were mostly those “delinquent” youths who were unable or unwilling to secure work in the mainstream labor market and used the cash they obtained to finance their recreational activities, including, for a growing minority, to support drug habits. In the larger cities, there were also unemployed men who relied on prostitution for their survival, as well as a small number of straight-identified bodybuilders who posed in muscle magazines and occasionally sold sex to gay men on the side. There was also a small but growing number of gay men who followed the 1920s pattern of selling sex to gay men while remaining somewhat discreet. Full-time professional hustlers existed mostly in larger cities, but even a small city such as Boise, Idaho, with a population of around 50,000 in the 1950s, had a male street hustling scene, made up mostly of delinquent youths.
By the late 1960s and early ’70s, gay writers were questioning the “straightness” of any man who had sex of any sort with another man. “As for the hustler,” wrote one observer, “most gays look down upon him for maintaining that he’s really straight.” The rise of gay liberation made it still more difficult for men to engage in same-sex relations while maintaining that they weren’t really gay. Male street prostitutes came to occupy a very marginal space within the gay social world and did not generally participate in the gay political struggle. Quite the contrary, street hustlers often felt quite hostile to gay liberation, seeing in it a movement that excluded them and their concerns.
But if the ideology of homosexuality brought difficult personal challenges for some hustlers, for others the rise of gay liberation led to an increasing acceptance of a gay or bisexual identity. One of the first openly gay authors of this period was, in fact, a formerly straight-identified hustler who wrote more-or-less autobiographically about his life. John Rechy’s first book, City of Night (1963), remained on bestseller lists for months and is now considered a gay classic. It precisely documented the central character’s confrontation with his own inclinations toward homosexuality. Ironically, many of those who worked on the street were unable to claim their gay status openly, as their gay clientele still frequently preferred straight “trade.” “I have on occasion made a definite statement [proclaiming myself gay],” wrote Rechy, “and the person has lost interest in me.”
Although a preference for straight or semi-straight trade was manifest on the streets in the late 1960s, other sexual markets began to open up in which the clients displayed no such tendency. Gay men began selling sex to one another in much larger numbers, mostly working off the street through escort agencies and ads. Although some gay clients had sought gay workers before the 1970s, the gay liberation era marked the first time that most gay men began to buy sex from other gay men, rather than from straight outsiders who lived the bulk of their lives outside the gay world. The new relationship between client and prostitute produced new sexual practices. Clients in the late 19th century had only sought to act as “tops” with youths, but gay men could now pay to take a “dominant” role with adult men. Clients calling agencies often sought much more than to give oral satisfaction to the hustler, seeking “versatile” partners whom they could anally penetrate, workers willing to participate in three-ways with another worker, or others who would help create sexual fantasy scenes via costumes. The resulting possibilities transformed the work dynamics even for those on the street who sought to continue in the prior, top-only modality, as greater pressure was placed upon them to perform a greater variety of sexual acts.
The shifts in male prostitution associated with gay liberation led to a significant reworking of the meanings associated with prostitution. Although it was always primarily a means to financial ends, it also became a possible means of affirming one’s sexual identity. Indeed, for a brief time, the gay-identified prostitute came to represent the new spirit of gay liberation. Just as earlier writers used the figure of the prostitute male to illuminate aspects of homosexuality more generally, a new generation of gay writers took to the image of the hustler to rework this theme. For many in the newly emerging gay world, the gay prostitute symbolized a life option that embraced sexual pleasure and avoided any need to hide one’s sexual identity. Thus, for example, the pornographic stories of Samuel Steward (writing as Phil Andros) in books such as My Brother the Hustler and San Francisco Hustler (both 1970), announced a shift in gay writing from a literature of apology to one of defiance and liberation.
Kerwin Kaye is assistant professor of sociology at SUNY–Old Westbury.
