Playing It “Straight”

I had never been in the workaday closet closet until I started going “gay-for-pay.” I mean, there was that time when I was 15, but I more or less “came out” the night my 28 year-old manager Esteban jacked me up against the restaurant dumpster.

Needless to say, I went from $6.15 to $7.50 an hour.

These days, though, when I tell Johns I’m “gay” they just look disappointed. Why are “straight” guys so desirable to clients, anyways?

In their own words: straight is “studly,” “hot,” “exotic,” “youthful,” and, my personal favorite, the “real deal.” So in-between the lines of the “gay-for-pay” psyche, it’s the workers who fuck pro bono who are the “fake” ones.

But the world of paid sex can’t help but complicate the “either/or.” Michael Dorais, a sociologist and social worker, writes in Rent Boys that out of 40 of the male sex workers he studied “Seventeen described themselves as homosexual, thirteen as heterosexual, and ten as more or less bisexual.” Also, the figures coming out of the male-to-male porn industry suggest a large percentage of stars are straight-identified.

So, many male sex workers seem to identify sexuality with an emotional connection rather than a physical one; that’s why labels like MSM - “men who have sex with men” - are more than a CDC statistic. Some people, clearly, are “gay-for-pay,” and a hustler can be all these things; a whore, a “man,” and more.

The facts hold up in histories of MSM, as well. George Chauncey’s Gay New York shows that before World War II (1890-1940), the New York City scene was split up between the working-class areas of Times Square, Harlem, and The Bowery. The MSM could be  one of the visible “fairies” (effeminate gays), an undercover “queer” (masculine gay), or open “trade” (heterosexuals). “Trade,” Cauncey writes, were often sailors, transient workers, and other men who would fuck or suck for money, cheap enough for us to wonder why they’d do it for as little as a penny or a dime . . . but in the 1900s no one asked “trade” why they did it. Instead, they were recognized as “men” so long as they were, well, on top of the matter.

It was only in the 30s, 40s, and 50s, as the legendary (oh, if only we had pictures of him in drag. . .) J. Edgar Hoover and the vice cops swooped down on the friends of Dorothy and other communists, that all “men who have sex with men” came to be recognized as “inverts” by the shocked and appalled middle-class (who, by the way, had been “slumming” it in drag bars for years). And the fact that MSM were, at the same time, publicized more and more as perverse didn’t help the matter. The raucous bathhouses and balls of the 1900s, 10s, and 20s began to give way to an underground scene.

Then came Stonewall, where fairies, queers, and trade begot the universal “gay,” and that was that for trade.

Since Stonewall, the scope of “manliness” has narrowed criminally, and male sex workers who sleep with men don’t fit into the frame. Even if they are “gay-for-pay,” they often aren’t recognized as such. So in the midst of all this gender trouble, what’re we to make of a hustler who plays it “straight”?