John Warren Wells

The Male Hustler

Introduction

Not too long ago an extraordinary motion picture played an informational role in the sexual revolution by letting the general public know what a male prostitute is. The film, Midnight Cowboy, was enormously successful, and was said to have added a phrase to the American language. It is interesting to note that the phrase itself did not by any means originate with the movie. It has for years been a generic term in the homosexual subculture and serves to label a particular type of male prostitute.

But the phrase was certainly new to the general public, as indeed was the film’s subject matter. The majority of non-homosexual viewers probably had previously shared the delusion of Joe Buck, the film’s title character — i.e., that a male prostitute was a physically attractive and sexually competent young man who earned his living by selling his services to women.

Heterosexual male prostitution does exist, as it happens, but on an infinitely smaller scale than its male counterpart. Typically, the heterosexual male prostitute is far more the amateur whore, living off one woman’s bounty for a certain amount of time, then moving on to another. He is more likely to be a male mistress than a male prostitute as such.

The bordello for women is a device of long standing in pornographic novels, but if it exists to any appreciable extent in present day America, it is well concealed indeed. Nor do there seem to be many cases of males earning a living by servicing female clients on a cash-and-carry basis.

“The underground press carries any number of advertisements of “masseurs” and “male models.” Often the advertiser will state that he only services males. My personal research has indicated that female response to these ads is quite low, although it does exist. (I would suspect, incidentally, that as the distinction between male and female roles in our society narrows, women will be considerably more inclined to avail themselves of these services. Just as certain men will occasionally prefer purchased sex to the free article, so would it appear that emancipated women may feel free to exercise a like option.)

Still a greater portion of the masseurs and male models emphasize that they accept both male and female clients. Here the gulf becomes quickly evident, as almost all of those whom I interviewed reported an extreme preponderance of male clients, with several confessing that, while they received periodic telephone inquiries from females, they had never “massaged” or “modeled” for a female — except free of charge for their own amusement. Some insisted at the onset that female formed a substantial part of their clientele; in each instance, subsequent questioning established that this was not the case and that they elected to give this impression either to maintain a heterosexual image or for some other purpose of ego-gratification.

None of this surprised me much. There are several reasons why heterosexual prostitution is apt to be a far more rewarding career for a woman than for a man. The most obvious is that there is nothing easier for a woman to find than casual sex. A woman who goes to a bar with the avowed intention of getting picked up can hardly fail to accomplish this end, while a man who prowls the streets looking for an agreeable woman can wear holes in his shoes to no avail. This seems every bit as true in the sexual underground, where advertisements placed by males looking for contact with females outnumber their opposite by perhaps a hundred to one. There seem to be more men interested in casual sex and more men actively looking for casual sex in every stratum of society. And, while I expect this dichotomy may narrow over the coming years, I doubt that it will ever disappear entirely. Women’s Lib theorists to the contrary, there are fundamental biological differences between the sexes that do seem to define their differing sexual attitudes. Nor can one explain this away as an effect of culture or society; a parallel dichotomy exists throughout the animal kingdom.

“Higgimus, hoggimus, girls are monogamous,” said Dorothy Parker. “Hoggimus, higgimus, men are polygamous.”

No one ever said it better.

Thus, as Joe Buck found out, a male prostitute’s customers are almost invariably male themselves. Are they, then — the hustlers, cowboys, trade, studs, or what you will — are they homosexuals themselves?

The answer is (a) that it depends how you define homosexual, and (b) that it depends what sort of male prostitute you are talking about. Some hustlers consider themselves exclusively heterosexual and insist that they would never go with another man except for money, that they do it because it is the world’s easiest way to make a dollar, and that the suggestion that they derive any pleasure whatsoever from the act is absurd. Others regard themselves as bisexual, either expressing a general preference for heterosexual relations or insisting that the sex of their partner makes no difference at all, that it is the least important variable in determining whether or not another individual is sexually attractive. And quite a few others are exclusively homosexual.

(Moreover, a large proportion of the more typical “midnight cowboys,” the street hustlers, could most accurately be described as asexual. They do not really relate to any sexual partners, male or female. They may be basically narcissistic or may simply be too emotionally inhibited to relate to another person. Of the cases studied in the following pages, Alan is the most articulate example of the asexual hustler.)

Who patronizes male prostitutes?

Homosexuals, obviously. But what sort of homosexuals? And what motivates them?

At first glance, it would seem logical to assume that homosexuals would be far less inclined to purchase sexual favors than would heterosexual males, if only because it is so much easier for a homosexual to find a willing partner for a casual encounter.

“You just don’t spend money on a stud because you can’t get anything else,” an acquaintance told me. “That’s nothing but absurd. Anyone who really wants to can score at a gay bar. And even if you don’t feel up to the bar scene, and all you want is something quick and impersonal, why, there’s nothing simpler than the baths. I suppose it’s humanly possible to go to a Turkish bath and not have contact, but only if you’ve made up your mind you don’t want any. You can spend a whole night there and absolutely fuck yourself into a coma. You can be fat and bald and old and ugly and you’ll still find something.

Then why don’t male hustlers starve to death?

“Ah, that’s something else. You might want a particular type, you know. A lot of fellows are partial to rough trade, extreme butch types who are supposedly not gay themselves. Now you can find no end of butch types who are gay and will be delighted to unzip for you, but that’s the catch, don’t you see? If they’ll do it for free they aren’t really rough trade, so you don’t want them. But if you have to pay for it, ah, then it’s the genuine article.

“Others pay because they want to call the shots. They don’t want reciprocity. They want to give the orders. For a few dollars they get to do this.”

Another homosexual explained his occasional patronage of male hustlers this way:

“We’re so conscious of appearance, Jack. Not all of us, not those of us who tend toward long-term alliances, but most of those of us who make a life-style of promiscuity and do this endless neurotic cruising. We make a cult of good looks, we make another cult of youth. When I walk into a gay bar I check everyone out, not only to see who appeals to me and who doesn’t, but in a comparative way. Is this one more attractive than I am? Is that one younger or older than I am. I doubt that heteros go through this nonsense. When a man sizes up a woman I don’t suppose he has to convince himself with whether she’s more or less attractive than he is. She’s either pretty enough to fuck or she’s not. But one finds oneself in this absurd situation where one only wants to have sex with someone more attractive than oneself. And when others feel the same way — well, you can see how it’s all quite frustrating. But if I cruise Christopher Street or Sherman Square or Times Square and see some young thing who looks better than I do, and hence appeals, I can spend ten or fifteen or twenty dollars and have him.”

“We’re eternal romantics,” another friend said. “Take me, for example. Take me! I’m yours! No, seriously. I don’t really cruise the meat racks as a general thing. I don’t care for impersonal sex and I don’t like to create a relationship by handing over money. It’s not my style. But now and then I’ll find myself walking down one of those mean streets, perhaps by design but as often not, and my eyes will light on some young beauty and I’m lost. Because, much as I know better, my cock will promptly send my head a message announcing that here is the perfect love, the ultimate ideal, the beginning of a beautiful friendship. And of course I know better, but when the cock speaks the brain listens. Inevitably. And so what if the number is a little hardboiled, let us say, or a little dirty behind the ears and around the neck. Why be put off from a great love by such superficial trivia? And so what, for that matter, if the number is going to cost a ten or a twenty-dollar bill, because what after all is money for? And so what if there’s a chance that the little darling may decide to deal with his own self-disgust by punching one around, or using a knife, or looting one’s apartment?

“So you make the pick-up and take the package home and pay the money and go to bed, and if you’re very lucky the enchantment stays with you all the way to orgasm, and you come good. Which is about as much as anyone can ask in this world, wouldn’t you say?

If the clients of male hustlers vary greatly in type and motive, so do the hustlers themselves. If there is one common denominator of male hustlers, it is their extreme youth. Almost all of them are under twenty.

While society in general places a great premium on youth, it is nowhere emphasized so much and treasured so highly as among male homosexuals. I know several female prostitutes who have gone on tricking into their sixties (although that is by no means the norm.) I can cite nothing faintly similar in the annals of male prostitution.

“I figure I’ve got a good five years left in this game,” a hustler told me. “I don’t drink, I don’t do anything heavier than grass, I work out every day at a gym, I eat health foods, all in all I take good care of myself. I think Johns’ll still want me when I’m thirty.”

And after that?

“Then I’ll be paying for it, I guess.” And he winked to show he was joking, but I’m not sure he convinced either of us.

It ought to go without saying that all names have been deliberately altered throughout the text, as have any other particulars which might in any way serve to identify any of the interviewed subjects. The reader will further note that by far the greater portion of the material which follows is presented in the subject’s own words, with the author’s own observations largely confined to connective material. I have edited these interviews only in the following sense — I have excised the extraneous material which forms a substantial portion of any relaxed conversation, and I have distilled material in the interest of space limitations. Obviously, one could hardly reproduce verbatim an interview of several hours’ duration.

With these qualifications, the following interviews are as I obtained them. Nothing has been added, nothing of substance has been excised.

This book was originally conceived as a sort of companion volume to an earlier work, Tricks of the Trade: a hooker’s handbook of sexual technique. Because Tricks had been a particularly satisfying book to write (and one which has had an extremely gratifying sale) I approached the present work with a good deal of enthusiasm.

At the same time, I was not entirely at ease with the project. While I could say, quoting the catechism of the sexual liberal, that some of my best friends are gay, I was faced with the necessity of doing extensive research in an area with which I was quite unfamiliar and in which I often found myself more than a little uptight. A large number of hustlers whom I approached directly, rather than through a mutual acquaintance, took it for granted that “interview” was purely euphemistic and that I wanted more from them than words. (This reaction was equally common during the research of Tricks, but I found the inference in that context less personally unnerving.)

Now seems as good a time as any to express my gratitude to all those who contributed to the research of this book, both those whose interviews appear in the pages which follow and also those whose cases I, for one reason or another, elected to omit. Without their cooperation, this book literally would not have been written.

It is to be expected that homosexuals will form a large portion of this book’s readership. And yet I am even more hopeful that it will be widely read by heterosexuals. There are any number of questions with which I found myself confronted in the course of this book’s preparation, questions dealing not simply with homosexuality but with overall human sexuality, questions I think all of us might profitably ponder.

John Warren Wells

January 1971

Alan

“I’m not making a career of this. I don’t go out on the street that often and I don’t hustle hard when I do, the way some of the guys down here will. Every now and then I’m uptight for money, and when that happens I’ll occasionally make it down to Times Square and hang around and just see what happens. If nothing happens, that’s cool with me. To tell you the truth, sometimes I’m relieved when nobody comes on to me.

“Because I certainly don’t enjoy the whole scene.” A sudden laugh. “You’ll probably hear that from ninety percent of the hustlers you talk to. I wouldn’t be surprised. I don’t know many of the other guys. I’m not interested in forming relationships around here, sexual or otherwise, but a certain amount of conversation is inevitable. Another guy working the same racket will see you around and figure out what your scene is, that it’s basically the same scene as his, and you’ll progress from casual nods to an occasional conversation in a doorway.

“And you come up against the same attitude time and time again. I’m just here for the easy bread and I don’t feel a thing for these faggots. I despise them, they turn me off, but it’s easy bread and you can just close your eyes and pretend it’s a girl swinging on your joint instead of a guy, and even so it’s no big deal, believe me. I’d rather jerk off, but it’s a cinch dollar so what the hell, and you and me, man, we’re both men together, we know where it’s at. That’s the standard attitude. I suppose I shouldn’t criticize it because it’s not all that far from where my own head is at, but I think I am sufficiently self-aware to be sure that I mean it, while with a lot of the stud hustlers that I’ve met, well, I think they go to great lengths to stress their masculinity because deep down inside they’re not so positive of it themselves.

“I remember one thing that happened, it must have been about a year ago. I was, what? Twenty-two, and I had been making the Times Square scene for just a couple of months, and not very regularly. That particular night I let myself get picked up by this big heavyset guy in his forties. He didn’t look anything like the typical faggot, incidentally, which is not that unusual in this particular scene. The Johns you get here are usually closet types of one sort or another. Either they’re in town on a convention or they’ve got a wife and kids in Queens or something like that. The type who would drop dead if they ran into a friend from the straight world here. I could rap about the typical 42nd Street John for hours...

“This particular pick-up wasn’t anything unusual. Wasn’t New York a lonely town? Yeah, it sure was. How about a drink? Great idea. Listen, I’ve got an idea, why pay bar prices for watered liquor when I’ve got a comfortable hotel room and a full bottle of Johnny Walker Black Label? Fine idea, great idea. But, I added, the only problem was that I myself was kind of broke, and I’d been planning on working a shift at a restaurant around the corner, and I needed the bread. No problem, he says, he’s got plenty of dough, and it’s worth a couple of bucks for him to have somebody to drink with. What the hell, if he went to a bar for company he’d spend twenty bucks before the night was over, so how would it be if he gave me the twenty and we drank his liquor in his room? It would be fine, I told him.

“Now, that sort of horseshit is something you often find yourself going through. Both you and the John will know where it’s at, but it’s often easier to play the game that this isn’t a straight sex-for-bread hustle. Easier on everybody’s ego is I guess what it comes down to. Part of it stems from genuine embarrassment on the part of the Johns, I think. Some of them will make the street scene once a month or once a week or however they schedule it, and all the time they try to pretend that they aren’t really gay, that they aren’t actually looking for sex with other males. If it’s just something that happens in the course of an evening of good companionship, they find the whole thing easier to handle emotionally. At the same time, these Johns will often make damned certain that money passes from them to you. I usually like to get that part straight in front, maybe because of hang-ups of my own, maybe because I don’t want them to think that I’m interested in anything but the money. I don’t know exactly.

“We went to his hotel room. He never said where he was from but it was obvious he was an out-of-towner, not a local New Yorker on the prowl. He was staying at a decent hotel instead of one of the holes in the neighborhood that make most of their money off hustling dates. He went on up ahead, and then I went up to the room he told me and he let me in.

“We had a couple of drinks and he put the television set on and we talked about one thing or another. I don’t remember the conversation itself. I generally turn myself off during conversations with someone like that. I’ll play my part and keep up my end of the conversation, but it’s as if I turn my mind off while it’s going on, as if I send it for a walk in the hallway, while my mouth goes on talking.

“Then he said something about how uncomfortable the chairs were, and why didn’t we sit on the bed, and we did, and I was already starting to pick up negative vibrations but this happens anyway a lot of the time, so I didn’t think anything of it. He groped me, and he played with me a little, and I stretched out and let him go down on me. After awhile I came. I was never excited. I honestly don’t think I ever get what you would call excitement or pleasure with a John. Getting erect and then having an orgasm, that’s a purely physical thing. It always happens for me. I don’t suppose I could prevent it if I tried. All that stimulation has to have an effect if you’re healthy, unless you can just turn yourself off entirely, which I can’t do. But I don’t put that in the same drawer with excitement or pleasure. Sometimes while it’s going on it’s as if I’m not in the room at all, as if my mind is not inside my body. A lot of the time, I guess it’s what you would call a schizophrenic reaction or mechanism, but a lot of the time it’s as if my mind is on the other side of the room watching what’s happening to my body, and not even watching very closely, for that matter.

“The bit of pretending the person with you is a girl, of closing your eyes and getting off on fantasies, I never do that. I’d rather just ignore the whole thing entirely, like it’s happening to somebody else, like it’s not really me that’s involved there.

“This time, though, the guy wanted me to return the favor. He wanted me to blow him. Now there’s a way to avoid bad scenes like that but I was very green at the time and had never come up against anybody like this. I had had Johns who wanted me to go down on them, or wanted to bugger me, the two things I won’t do. But they had always taken no for an answer, so before this particular John I had never found it necessary to spell out in advance what I would do or what I wouldn’t do. So I just told him, no, I don’t do that, and he went out of his mind. Called me a little cockteaser, told me I was going to put out whether I wanted to or not.

“He was a big guy, and I guess he figured this gave him a tremendous edge. I’m thin and not the muscle type at all, so he probably felt it wouldn’t be hard to rape me, and rape was definitely what he had in mind. ‘You’re gonna get fucked,’ he told me. ‘And you’re gonna like it.’ He really turned tremendously hostile.

“I got lucky. I kicked him square in the balls and picked up one of his shoes and beat him over the head with it. There was a point where I almost got carried away, I almost beat him to death. It still scares me to think of it. I was really furious, and churning inside, and I hit him once or twice with the shoe and was very close to just letting go and hitting him again and again until he was dead, but somehow I caught hold of myself and stopped. He was out cold. I found his wallet and took the twenty he owed me, and there was a couple hundred more in the wallet, and I stood there for what seemed like a long time trying to decide whether I should take the rest of his bread or not. I figured I might as well, and that I couldn’t get in worse trouble, but I wasn’t positive. I wound up taking an extra fifty, which seems pretty silly in retrospect. Then I got the hell out of there.

“I never did see him again.

“I was going to go straight home, but I wandered back to the street again, and that’s when I got to talking with this other hustler. I guess I had to tell somebody. In the story I made myself a lot cooler about the whole thing and didn’t let on that I was really terrified there for awhile. And this other guy, he rapped about how really obnoxious some of these faggots were, and how when he packed it in for a night he really had to have a girl to get the taste of it all out of his system. He said that he hardly ever came with his Johns, that he didn’t like to let himself come, and he would save it up for a girl and really get himself together that way.

“We rapped on about a lot of things, and he asked if I had an old lady. I said I knew a lot of chicks but had nothing steady at the time, which was more or less true. He said he had a chick who really dug balling and liked group scenes, and asked if I’d like to come up and take turns with her.

“I wasn’t sure it was a scene I could go for, but the thing is that this deal with the John had shaken me up quite a bit and I did feel I needed something to get it out of my head. I don’t know that I thought of it in these terms at the time, man, but looking back on it, I suppose I was having a lot of doubts about my own masculinity. It bugged me that the guy had taken it for granted that I would go for something like this, that I was gay and would go down on him or let him fuck me. And you know how your head will play with ideas and get insecure about it. Like, maybe he sensed something about me that I wasn’t aware of. Like, maybe I really wanted it, what he wanted, and I was fighting it within myself, and that was why I got so violent about it.

“When you get into your head that way and wind up in an anxiety state, the more that you try to think things through, the worse it all gets. So I figured, wow, maybe I can get out of it by balling this guy’s chick.

“She turned out to be a pretty great-looking chick. She had a place over in the East Village. This other hustler was living with her. She was already totally stoned when we got there, and we all sat around smoking together. I didn’t smoke very much. I didn’t want to get stoned. High, but not completely wasted.

“They must have made this kind of threesome scene on a fairly regular basis, because he never said anything to her and she just seemed to take it for granted that we were going to make it.

“Well, we spent a couple of hours balling. Took turns with her, or he would get off in one part of her while I got off in another part of her.

“I had never had any experience with more than one other person at a time. That added an exotic note to it that made it exciting. Also I hadn’t been with a girl in a long time, I guess it was a long time, and I was able really to get into it and let go, which I hadn’t done in a while.

“But there was something that I realized, and that was that this other hustler was fundamentally gay.

“Of course I never said anything to him. Christ, he would have had a shit fit, I mean, he went to great lengths to make sure that he and I never touched. When there are three of you in bed and you’re all involved sexually, it’s hard to be sure that two of the three never touch each other directly, but we were both conscious of this, of keeping that sort of distance between us.

“The thing was, he was getting special pleasure out of the fact that I was there. He was relating to me through the girl. Maybe the two of them would ball a lot without a third party present but I’m sure my presence got him off in a way he usually didn’t have. I remember flashing on the idea that he was fucking me through the girl.

“So afterward, I tended to avoid him. I would see him around and be friendly and all, and we would rap on the street, but when he suggested getting together with the chick or anything like that, I would always have something else that I had to do, something I would invent, and after awhile he stopped asking, and we gradually stopped rapping with each other.

“The whole thing, when I thought about it, made me a little uncomfortable.”

Alan is twenty-three, medium height, slim. He has light brown hair, small hands and feet, hazel eyes and handsome regular features. In dress he favors bell-bottoms, boots, and boldly patterned shirts. Some hustlers, he mentioned, tend to dress to fit whatever image they are trying to project — rough male stud, leather boy, Ivy Leaguer, or whatever. He insists that he dresses to please himself, that he does not try to create any particular image to interest potential Johns.

Alan’s hometown is the capital city of one of the Southeastern states. He went through high school there, then attended the state university for a year and a half before dropping out and coming to New York. He became interested in theater at college and originally came to New York with a theatrical career in mind. In the past three years he has had several small roles in short-lived off-Broadway productions.

“It’s so damned difficult,” he says. “I never expected it to be easy, although every hopeful actor fantasizes about the one big break and all the rest of it. I’m beginning to think, though, that I’ll never make it. As an actor. I’m good looking and I have a certain amount of grace on stage, I move around well, but the world is full of actors who are as good as I am. You have to be very good, very goddamned good, and you also have to have a tremendous amount of drive. I think I might have had that drive at the beginning but somewhere along the way I think I lost it. You have to care tremendously, you see, and I don’t know that I care all that much.

“Also, you have to be able to believe that you can make it completely, that you can be more than just another actor. Because being just another actor, even if you work fairly regularly, is a terrible life. It really is. You break your neck to get a part and break your neck again to be good in it, and even if the play runs you’re making less money than you would make in just about any other line of work. A friend of mine had the lead in a successful off-Broadway thing a year ago. The play was running, it was making decent money, and he was taking home something like eighty dollars a week. And he was the star. It just doesn’t make any sense. Then you’ll see other people, somebody who does commercials or some clown in a television Western, and they’re literally rich. Two years in a hit television series and you can literally retire. It doesn’t make sense that there’s such an enormous gulf between success and failure. Between success and near-success, actually.”

Alan still goes to auditions, still thinks of himself as an aspiring actor, but admits privately that he does so largely for lack of anything else to do.

“I don’t have any particular direction. Sometimes it bothers me, sometimes I can get enormously depressed about it. Part of it is my upbringing, I guess. The Protestant ethic, and no matter how liberated you are in this country it’s hard to escape that old Protestant ethic. That a person is here to work, to achieve. That you have to be pushing yourself in a particular direction and coming closer and closer to a particular goal. Well, my original goal, which is theater, is beginning to lose its luster, partly because I know I’m not really going to make it there. And I can’t just grab another goal and substitute it. I can’t just throw a switch and go out and become a doctor or a lawyer or something like that. And there are a lot of things I could see myself doing for six months or a year, but so far there’s not really anything I can see myself getting into for the rest of my life.”

“Sometimes this bugs me, and other times I’ll tell myself that after all I’m still pretty young, I’m just twenty-three years old, and I don’t have to be in a hell of a rush to decide where I’m going. Better to take it a day at a time and see what happens. There’s nothing wrong with keeping my options open.

“I find I’ve been getting into myself a lot more lately, sitting in my own room and trying to get my own head together. Sometimes I’ll do some grass, other times I’ll just sit around straight, and I’ll work different ideas through my mind and see how I feel about things. I imagine myself getting into different life-styles and try to see what I would want. Like, do I want to really get involved with a girl, like living together, possibly even making it a permanent thing? I’m a little afraid of jumping into something like that as a reaction to the hustling, because it would be very easy to do, very easy to use some girl as a total escape from this gay scene, however much a part of the gay scene I actually am. Which is another thing I’m trying to figure out.

“But basically I’m a very private person. I can talk like this with you the same way a person could talk to a psychiatrist, in that you’re not involved, you and I don’t know each other. I don’t really have friends I can rap with at great length. I’m not good at relating to people. At one point I thought this hurt me as an actor, but I’m more inclined to think it helps me, in that I just get into a part and have no trouble becoming the role I play, because I’m nobody particular to begin with.

“A very private person. I have an apartment on West 93rd that’s no more than a furnished room, but I really treasure it because it’s completely mine. I’ve never brought anyone there. It goes without saying that I would never bring a John there, but never anyone at all, not a friend, not a girl, no one at all. I guess I need a place that’s exclusively mine, that no one but me is ever inside of.”

Alan’s first homosexual experience took place while he was in high school. He describes himself as essentially a loner during those years. He was moderately active socially but had no close friends. He dated, and engaged in incomplete sexual relationships with a variety of girls, but says that he never really related to the girls and never enjoyed the essentially artificial sexual relations which took place on those dates.

“You would go out, two couples, and you would park somewhere and neck. Even if you didn’t happen to feel like it, it was all part of the expected pattern. You had to try to screw a girl because she expected it, but she wouldn’t go all the way and everyone more or less took that for granted. From what I’ve read, this was standard American dating behavior about ten years ago. Well, the South is always at least ten years behind the times. When I talk to people my age who grew up in New York or California I feel as though I was cheated. They were into a semi-hippie thing all through high school and it was more than just that they smoked grass and let their hair grow and got into rock music. They were much more honest with each other, they opened up with each other. We didn’t, and I still haven’t learned how to do this in certain important ways.”

After one such date, a friend told Alan that he knew a homosexual who would perform fellatio upon them and thus ease the frustrations caused by a night of necking. “He said it was better than jerking off. Of course I always jerked off after dates, but I felt very uptight about it and would never admit it to anyone, or be inclined to talk about it. And I would go through periods of time when I would try to give up masturbation, which I suppose everybody does, and probably with as little success as I had.

“I told him I wasn’t queer, and he said of course not, neither was he, that the guy who did the blowing was the queer. He said the guy was always good for a couple of bucks, and that it was a way to get rid of your frustration and pay for the cost of the date at the same time. I said I wasn’t interested, but we doubled again about a week later and I asked him if he had gone to that queer that night, and he said yes, and he was going again. I said, well, I could use a couple of dollars, so why not.

“There was this particular place where the queer — it’s funny, I never use that word nowadays, but that was how I always thought of this particular fellow — particular place where he would park his car. I guess he was in his thirties or forties. He would park his car in this one spot and anybody who wanted to get blown would go there. I don’t know if he paid everybody or just the guys who asked for it, but I gather that there were plenty of guys who went down there every Friday and Saturday night. He liked teenagers and he was a number freak, he wanted to suck as many guys as he possibly could. He didn’t touch any part of me but my penis, just opened my pants and went to work. It was all over in a couple of seconds. I told him I needed some money for gas, which was what my friend told me to say. He gave me two dollars.

“I saw him another three or four times and it was always the same routine. I think one time he gave me five dollars, I’m not sure.”

Alan still has trouble defining the experience. “I don’t think I enjoyed it. I remember thinking that it was really a big nothing. No real pleasure at all. That factually it was less fun than jerking off because there was something basically uncomfortable about the whole scene. There was another person involved but the other person wasn’t appealing or interesting, he was just a device. Whereas when jerking off you could have fantasies, but here all I did was sit there while he went to work, and then I would come, but I would feel as though I hadn’t come at all...

“But something made me go back a few times, and I suppose I ought to be able to figure out what it was. I can’t think it was the money, not then. On the New York scene it’s different, because I really do need the money. Not that I would starve without it, but that I would have to work without it, and I’m not ready for that right now.

“Sometimes I think that I went to him because of the ego pleasure of being wanted, of being wanted by someone who got nothing out of it but the pleasure of using me as a love object. And who actually was willing to pay for that pleasure. But the thing that I’m not absolutely positive about was whether this motivated me or whether this is something I read about and I just think it might apply in my case. That’s the trouble with reading a great deal and tending to intellectualize a subject. You can’t really be sure whether something applies or whether you are just grabbing onto the idea.

Alan had no homosexual experiences while at college. He did have heterosexual relations there, once with a prostitute, several times with a girl with whom he thought himself in love.

“I went to the whore to get it over with. I felt ridiculous being a virgin and I just wanted to get it over and done with. I did some drinking first to get my courage up. I was so afraid of making a fool of myself, and I was also scared of catching a disease. Naturally I couldn’t get erect at first, and she went down on me. I remember how I responded immediately when she did this, and how it flashed through my mind that she was doing just what the queer had done. I thought I could climax like that and it would be just what I had done in the past, except that before I got paid for it and now I was paying for it. And I felt that I would still be a virgin unless I succeeded in coming in her cunt. So I insisted that she stop and I got on top of her and screwed her in the usual fashion. It wasn’t very enjoyable.

“With the girl I was going with, this was something that evolved naturally. She had had more experience than I did. We began having sex fairly regularly, and it was good. But she was in love with me and I thought I was in love with her and then discovered that I wasn’t, and there were too many times when she wanted to make love and I wasn’t in the mood, and I felt that she was too possessive and that I was in the process of getting trapped into a whole marriage routine. Then there was a false alarm, a pregnancy scare, and I could see everything closing in around me, and when she finally got her period I had to end it, I didn’t want to see her any more. It was shortly after that that I dropped out of school and came up to the city. I don’t know how much the one had to do with the other. It’s hard to say, because there were other factors as well, a whole discontent with the college scene and a desire to do something in the theater and a whole process of escaping from my family and everything.”

This, incidentally, was as close as Alan came to talking about his family. Whenever I brought up the subject, he either avoided answering or said that this was a topic he would prefer not to discuss.

“I don’t think it ever occurred to me in front to start hustling when I got to New York. Of course I knew that there were men who would pay money to go down on young men. I had had the experience with the guy at home, and I had read books and saw Midnight Cowboy, so I was aware of the general existence of that whole scene. But I didn’t go to New York looking for it.

“For one thing, I never thought of myself as a homosexual. I had never felt any desire for sex with another boy or man. As for what had happened with the queer, I thought of it as kid stuff, something hardly worth thinking about. And I still have never considered myself a homosexual and have never had genuine desires in that direction, not that I’ve been able to make myself aware of.

“If anything, I think my particular hang-up is that I’m not a particularly sexual person at all. That I’m not able to relate to other people because I spend too much time inside my own head. With girls, for example, there’s a definite similarity between how I feel with them and how I feel with a John. There’s nothing distasteful about being with a girl, not for me, and there’s none of the guilt afterward, none of the gnawing worry that what you’ve done is perverted and that there’s something abnormal about you. So in that respect it’s much better. I feel good when I’ve had enjoyable sex with a girl, whereas I feel nothing but numb and a little dirty after I go with a John.

“But on another level it’s the same, because I’m not completely involved. I’m acting, I’m performing, I’m going through the motions. It’s not real. I keep having the feeling that there’s something there that I’m not getting in touch with. That I go through life wrapped in a plastic bag and never touching anyone...

“I was in the city and I would take one shitty job after another, washing dishes or bussing tables, the crap jobs actors take between parts. My expenses were low and I could coast easily enough but I never had money, I was always hung up over nickels and dimes. And ultimately I went over to Times Square to see what would happen.

“Nobody turned me on to Times Square. I had passed by, I more or less knew what to expect from what I had heard and read, so I just latched onto the scene by myself. I went there one night and scored inside of half an hour. Went to a hotel room, let a guy give me head, made ten dollars and went home. I decided I would never do it again, and two nights later I went back.

“The pattern I seem to be in now, I’ll go a couple of nights a week. I’ll make anywhere from ten to twenty-five dollars a trick. I rarely go with anyone more than once a night. Oh, you get into situations where you’re broke and the rent is due or there’s something you want to buy. You hustle hard for a brief period, but I think it works out on an average to maybe fifty dollars a week that I pick up. And I can virtually live on that. I don’t live very high. I’m not that thing oriented, I don’t always have to be spending money. And I do take a job from time to time, and of course I get an acting position every now and then, although I haven’t been making the audition rounds as much lately as I did, oh, say six months ago.

“Periodically I decide that I ought to stop this, that it’s degrading. It really is, you know. You just look at Times Square and you can see how fundamentally sordid it is, even without the people, the sex hustle. It’s all compulsive behavior and it’s basically dirty. But I’ve come to the conclusion that I’ll never get away from it until there’s something to take its place. You sit around bored with nothing to do and nobody you feel like seeing, and you’re low on money, and it’s so easy to go out and hustle a few dollars. And maybe I get something sexual out of it, maybe just having an orgasm with another person has some kick to it that I can’t manage to admit to myself. I’m not honestly sure about that. I can see it both ways.

“The thing that keeps me going, not what keeps me going back to the street but the thing that generally sustains me, makes me think that everything’ll work out by itself, is that I know I’ll drop this when something else takes its place, and that something like that will happen when I ultimately get my head together. Which is beginning to happen, because, just as an example, I’ve gone places in this conversation that I’ve never gone before, and I know that if we had had this interview six months or a year ago I never would have been able to open up this much, as much as I have today. I think that represents progress, growth.

“So I know I’m beginning to open up, and I know that if I ever find anything I can really get into, this whole sex hustle will just dry up and blow away. I’m a hundred percent convinced of this. It’s a substitute for something, for being alive, maybe.

“If I really found a girl and related to her, and didn’t stay inside my plastic bag, I’m sure I would never even consider going on the street again. It would just be impossible. And I think sooner or later this will happen with a girl. And another thing, I’ve never done anything on the street while I was acting, while I had a role. I would go back when the play closed, but from the time we started rehearsals I never went anywhere near Times Square.

“Sooner or later something major will come along, whether it’s an acting break or a romance or some new career. It could be almost anything, because I lack direction right now and could find almost any sort of new thing opening up if it was the right thing at the right time.

“So I just regard this as a stage...”

Alan’s attitude toward his clients was a mixture of contempt, resentment, and sympathy. He felt the mutual relationship, such as it was, was mutually exploitative. They were trying to possess him sexually by giving him money, while he was taking their money without giving anything of himself in return. This attitude was not dissimilar to that expressed by a large proportion of the prostitutes I interviewed in writing Tricks of the Trade.

I mentioned as much, and Alan found the comparison an interesting one.

“I think the faggot Johns are worse,” he said. “More pathetic, more compulsive about the whole thing. I can identify a lot more easily with a man who goes to female prostitutes from time to time. It really is a convenience if he doesn’t know women, or if he’s married and can’t run around in public. It’s the same thing, he’s getting non-sex, paid-for sex, but it’s a little less grubby. And it’s more a necessity because it’s difficult to pick up a girl and have sex with her. I’ve never been very good at it myself. The girls I have sex with are ones I know, usually through the theater or through mutual acquaintances. As far as picking up a girl at a singles bar, everything is so guarded, so phony, that I can see where a man might find it simpler to go directly to a prostitute.

“With the gay Johns, though, the situation is different. Before I started making the Times Square scene I never realized how easy it is to have casual homosexual sex. Because Times Square is not entirely commercial, you know. A lot of guys come around here just to pick each other up and swing with each other, with neither one hustling the other for bread. And to get away from the street there are the Turkish baths and the gay bars and everything. If what you want is casual sex, which is obviously what the Johns want, well, it’s all over the city. I can see it now because I’m into this particular scene and I know what to look for. It’s all over the place, believe me.

“The typical John, though, has this compulsive obsession with keeping it a secret. He doesn’t want anybody to know what he’s into. He’s usually married and has children, and his attitude will be that he doesn’t want his wife to find out, he doesn’t want his kids to find out, he doesn’t want his boss or his friends or anybody to find out, and the way to guarantee against this is to find some young stud and pay him and that’s all there is to it.

“Of course he could be just as anonymous at a Turkish bath, but with something like that, that kind of scene, the relationship would be a mutual one, a level one, two guys swinging because they want to. And that would mean that he would have to identify his partner as a human being, and he would be a man having open sex with another man, and he can’t handle that in his head, he’s still too much the closet queen to handle it. So he has to dehumanize his partner, and the easiest way to do that is to put sex on a cash-and-carry basis. In fact he may not just want a hustler, he may purposely want someone who looks like a hustler, so that there’s no human aspect involved anywhere.

“And the act itself is limited to sex. Ninety percent of the time it’s his mouth and my cock and that’s the only contact there will be. He’ll leave all his clothes on, I’ll just open my pants. Maybe he’ll jerk off while he goes down on me. Maybe not. Part of his impersonality is because that’s all the hustler will permit. Like I would freak out if a John tried to kiss me. I couldn’t handle that at all. But the thing is, if that’s the kind of person the John seeks out, that’s obviously what he wants. Or otherwise he would go elsewhere for his sex.

“Of course you do meet different types on the street. Ever since that one I told you about, the one who tried to rape me, I’ve been careful to get things settled in front. I’ll ask a man what he wants to do. If he wants to go down on me or if he wants me to bugger him, all right. Nothing else.

“Most Johns are glad you draw the line. They like that you limit yourself to the male role. That you’re a real stud and not a faggot yourself. Oh, you do get a wide assortment. And they’re not all closet types. You occasionally get an all-out homosexual who happens to be attracted to you and is willing to play the game on your terms. But the vast majority are the closet clowns.

“I sometimes wonder if this sort of scene is a phase for them, too, or if it’s a permanent thing. I could see, for instance, that they might be going through some changes themselves. You could have a guy who’s always been smothering gay impulses, he’s married and all that, and he’s been fighting something within himself, and he wants to find out where he’s at. So maybe the men I see, some of them at least, are coming to the street for a short period of time, and they either work it out one way and straighten themselves out again or they work it out another way and come to terms with the gay scene, going to the baths or developing a full-fledged gay relationship or wherever it turns out to be at for them.

“I can relate to that easier than to someone who does this as a permanent thing, maybe because I see myself as going through my own set of changes.

“I can’t imagine myself ever turning gay. I just can’t picture myself in that position. I can’t believe I could really get involved in homosexuality in any real way, that I could dig being blown by a man, for example. I mean in the sense of really digging it, not going through the motions as I do now. And I’ve tried to imagine myself going down on a guy, or any of those things, and I can’t. The entire idea is completely foreign to me.

“The thing is, from everything I’ve heard and read, it’s supposed to work that way. Either you become a hustler because you’ve got those impulses within yourself or, and this makes even more sense, the whole hustling scene makes you curious about what the Johns are getting out of it, what it is that they dig, and you can’t help thinking about it a lot until it becomes some kind of an obsession with you, and ultimately you try it and maybe you dig it, and so on.

“This is something that’s supposed to happen all the time, that you start off a hustler and wind up a genuine faggot. I can’t picture myself in a sexual relationship with another guy, and I certainly can’t picture myself becoming a John. God, I can’t see that at all. In fact after the time I’ve spent in this racket I could never go to a female prostitute. I would just be too conscious of how completely sterile and phony and empty it all was.

“One thing I will say is that I’m sure I tend to think things through more than most of the street hustlers. And that’s not an advantage as far as the racket is concerned. The more deeply you think about it, the harder it is to keep coming back to it. Which is why I’m not too hung up about what I’m doing at the time being, because I can already see clearly that I’ll be out of it before very much longer.”

Brendan

“I was in therapy for a little over a year. I gave it up about eighteen months ago for the usual reasons. The cost, for one. I was going twice a week at twenty dollars a session, which is quite reasonable compared to what some people have to pay, but even so it was forty dollars a week, week in and week out, and that’s an enormous amount of money to pay just to hear yourself talk. And also I kept having the feeling that I wasn’t getting anywhere positive. I would go and lie there and talk, and the therapist would repeat phrases of mine and point things out, and I would get insights. Do you know, that in itself can become a habit, rehashing the past to death, getting high on these periodic insights. I felt after a certain amount of time that none of these breakthroughs were doing anything for me. They were something I went through twice a week, and sometimes the insights were gratifying at the time, and for that matter some of them would stay with me and make sense later on, giving me a new way of looking at certain aspects of myself.

“But I suppose what bothered me was that I was still me. You go into something like that looking for a change. The bullshit aspect of therapy is that most people who go into it really think they are going to make major changes in their basic selves. I don’t believe that ever happens, do you? I have any number of friends who have been in intensive Freudian analysis for years and years, an hour a day five days a week until the end of time, and they’re so addicted to this that God help them when the shrink takes two weeks off in the summer — they become absolutely paralyzed and just live on Librium until the great man returns. And they will insist, so many of them, that it’s doing them worlds of good. That they have changed, that they are different people now. But if you look at them objectively you see the same people with the same hang-ups. They say they understand their hang-ups now. Well, marvelous, baby. I mean, it’s like understanding you have terminal cancer. You can understand the hell out of it, but that don’t make you get better.

“What I’m getting at, though, is that about six months or so after I stopped therapy, I then began to realize that it had helped me after all. Not by eliminating hang-ups or changing them but by teaching me to be a fundamentally analytical person, which I very definitely had not been before then.

“Do you do grass? Well, do you know how, when you smoke, you can hear music in a new way? For example, one of the first times I smoked I listened to some Vivaldi chamber music, which I’ve always absolutely loved, but for the first time I was able to concentrate on what the various instruments were doing all at the same time. I could follow different polyphonic tracks in my head all at once. I gather people who are really involved in music do this as a matter of course, but it was an enormous change for me. But after that, I found I could always listen to music that way, whether I was stoned or not.

“In much the same way, therapy taught me to listen to my own self on a new level, and that ability stayed with me after I discontinued it. As a matter of fact it intensified, because I had to do all the work myself instead of having the therapist to point things out for me. And they say that analysis is always an individual project, that you have to do the real work by yourself...

“So I’ll think back to various aspects of my childhood, and think of ways in which I always saw myself as an essentially feminine person, and at the same time I’ll see ways in which I always found it necessary to have a particular male identity. As I said, this didn’t banish any of my hang-ups. In fact there were times when it seemed to intensify them. You know, the idea that self-awareness is the ultimate answer, that’s a very dangerous theory. So often after an enormous insight, an enormous emotional breakthrough, people become desperately depressed. Even suicidal. I’ve known of an appalling number of cases of people who have gotten into the encounter group scene in a very intense way, and suddenly one day they are bubbling all over the place telling everybody that they have really opened themselves up as never before, and the next week they commit suicide. It’s scary to shine lights into all those dark places, baby. You can’t always live with what you find there.

“In my own case, I like to think that I’ve come to terms with some of my hang-ups in fairly sane and healthy ways. For example, for a couple of years I was seriously considering a sex-change operation. Of having them cut off the family jewels and tuck them away in the vault. There was a period of time when I felt enormously ambivalent about my penis. I’ve been cross-dressing for years and with my build and features and everything else I look more like a girl than most girls do. I can make my voice nice and butchy-deep, but I find it just as easy and natural to talk in a sexy female contralto. So when I got all dressed and made up and set out to cruise, the one constant reminder that I wasn’t what I looked like was this hunk of meat down here. I would hitch it back between my legs to hide the damned thing.

“So in that respect I hated my genitals, I felt they were male organs attached to a basically female body. But at the same time, they were what I got my kicks with. I would come by ejaculating through my penis, and the idea of cutting that off, of removing that pleasure part of the body — well, it was a conflict. I never did go to Denmark but I never entirely stopped thinking about it.

“I could never go that route now because of things I have learned about myself. I know that I am a woman in certain very important respects, but I also know and am able to accept that I am a man in other respects, and an operation would take something away without giving me anything in return. If you’re familiar with the operation, you know that they build in an artificial vagina. They create folds in your flesh surgically. If that’s a real vagina, then you can get milk from a bull’s tits. I mean, love, it’s nonsense. A woman is more than something with a hole to stuff a cock into. A woman is ovaries and tubes and a uterus and all sorts of subtle plumbing which no doctor can install in a male body. Oh, for heaven’s sake, a clitoris is the female version of the penis, right? So a transsexual who has his cock removed is brilliantly turning himself into a woman without a clit. There are so many ways in which the whole thing doesn’t make sense. You give up your manhood without getting womanhood in return, and you turn into, I hate to say this because I’ve known transsexuals and hate to put them down, but you turn into a nothing! Neither fish nor fowl. Nothing!

“A perfectly straight man, straight in the sense that he could not under any circumstances have sexual relations with any sort of male, is never comfortable with a transsexual unless she keeps the whole thing a secret from him. And a gay male is usually put off by a transsexual. He will usually think of her as some sort of freak, someone with something missing. So what does a TS do? Either you move to a new town and hide your past completely, or you see your old friends and find out that they have trouble relating to you. I know that fucking operation is popular now, and I know it’s getting increasingly more popular every year, but I’ll make a prediction — I’d be willing to bet that in another generation it will hardly ever be performed. Because as sexual liberation gets more and more widespread and as more and more people are able to accept abnormal aspects of themselves, the lines between the sexes are going to blur far more than they already have. And a person like me is going to feel far more comfortable being himself or herself — if you prefer? — than trying to conform surgically to the old idea of two firmly delineated sexes.

“I was talking to a fellow the other day, a man I would characterize as very square but very open-minded. And he asked me, ‘Well, what are you? How would you categorize yourself?’ There was a time when I really objected to that question.

“So this time I said, ‘I’m a woman with a penis and testicles.’ He wanted to know what I meant, so I just repeated what I had said.

“‘But a woman can’t have a penis and testicles.’

“‘Why not?’

“Well, he was really confused. ‘Look, sweet,’ I said, ‘you can think of me as a man with female features, and a female personality. Or you can think of me as a woman with male sex organs. Or you can cut through this bullshit about labels and just think of me as me, Brendan or Brenda, whichever comes easier to you. You think of yourself as completely straight and you respond to the femaleness of me, but if all you want is a genuine woman you don’t have to see me. Would you like me better if I didn’t have a cock? Think about it.’

“This was a fairly heavy speech to lay on this particular person. I’m sure he’ll be working it through his mind for a long time, and he may not be delighted with what he comes up with. The point is that I wouldn’t like me better without a penis, and, even more to the point, I’ve come to like myself a lot better than I once did. I went through a long period of shame and another long period of anxiety about my identity, and now I’m largely past that. Oh, I get depressed, and I find any number of things about myself I’m not thrilled with, but generally speaking I feel pretty comfortable being me. And I don’t know of anything more important than that. Life is a bitch no matter what, and if you don’t like yourself it’s a disaster.”

Brendan is twenty-two, short and small-boned, with chestnut hair and haunting brown eyes. The first time I met him I had not the slightest idea that he was anything other than the singularly beautiful young woman he appeared to be. Our meeting was arranged by a homosexual acquaintance who thought I might enjoy interviewing a “fag hag” — i.e., an ostensibly heterosexual woman who prefers the company of male homosexuals. I was thus introduced to “Brenda” and chatted with him and my friend over drinks.

In the course of this elaborate charade, “Brenda” gave me the full treatment — long-drink looks with those extraordinary eyes, little vocal tricks in a rich contralto, suggestive flicking of tongue over lips, and the intermittent pressure of “her” knee against mine under the table.

I must admit that there was nothing equivocal about my reaction to Brenda. I was very strongly attracted to her, responded to all her flirting, and wanted nothing more than to send my gay friend on his way and take this beautiful young thing home to bed. I did realize that this sort of flirtatiousness on the part of a fag hag is not uncommon, and is often accompanied by a total unwillingness to carry a relationship any further than flirting. But Brenda’s coquetry seemed so unqualified, so genuine, that I could not believe she did not intend to see the game through to its proper conclusion.

After all of this had gone on for awhile, my friend excused himself and went to the men’s room. I took Brenda’s hand in mine and suggested we might have dinner together.

“Just the two of us?”

I admitted that was what I had in mind.

“Oh, dear,” she purred. “Whoever knows where that sort of thing might lead?”

I suggested it might be interesting to find out.

“It might,” she said mysteriously, “be rather more interesting than you suspect.”

When my friend returned, Brenda and I were still holding hands. The two of them exchanged cryptic glances and began to laugh. I wondered aloud what was so funny.

“Jack,” my friend said, “we had better get you another drink, because I am about to blow your mind.”

He refused to explain until the drink came. I went on holding Brenda’s hand and used my free hand to take a sip of my drink.

“Brenda,” my friend said, “is a boy.”

I didn’t get it. He repeated it, and I asked if he meant that she was a lesbian.

“A male in drag,” my friend said.

“I have a cock,” Brenda(n) said.

This anecdote — one, incidentally, of which I am not particularly proud — is reported in detail because I can think of no better way to stress how deceptively female Brendan is in appearance and attitude. I cannot recall ever having been quite so completely astonished by anything that has happened to me. The series of mental changes I went through on the heels of this revelation is almost impossible to recount. I had never previously felt sexually attracted to a male and had never considered having relations with another male, and now a person who had attracted me as strongly as anyone had ever done was suddenly revealed as a male. And I was still sitting there like an idiot with his or her hand in mine.

There was a bad moment there. Brendan’s face took on an expression of alarm at the possibility that I might grow suddenly violent. (This, I learned later, had occasionally happened at somewhat more intimate moments of revelation.) I, for my part, was struck momentarily dumb. And then the three of us simultaneously erupted in laughter, hysterical laughter that dissolved the tension quite completely.

“I couldn’t resist it,” my friend told me, after the hilarity had settled down. “I felt Brendan would be a perfect person for you to interview. He’s the most convincing transvestite I’ve ever met. So many teevees look like parodies of girls, and he looks like the genuine article. I mean, it’s not all clothes and makeup. He can wear male clothing and come on like a girl. And he’s bright and self-aware, and you were bitching that so many interview subjects are shallow and inarticulate.”

“And I’d just love to have you interview me,” Brendan murmured, doing the full number with the eyes again.

“And you figured it would be an unparalleled put-on,” I said.

“Not only that. I felt the only way you could get Brendan’s full impact was this way. If you knew in advance that he was a male, you would have to approach him with preconceptions. I had only your best interests at heart, Jack.”

“Oh, I’m sure you did.”

My friend grinned. “And I must admit I wouldn’t have missed this scene for the world. I’ve got a good streak of bitch in me, you know. And it delights me that you’ll be wondering about yourself for a good long while after this. Are you as straight as you thought you were? Is there such a thing as straight? After all, a person who writes books on sex ought to contend with questions of that sort.”

“You’re a real prince,” I said, approximately.

“I’ll take that as a compliment, Jack. Actually I think I played quite fair. Suppose I never said anything, just excused myself and vanished? Suppose you took this luscious little number to dinner? And suppose she went right on being Brenda, and you didn’t get to the moment of truth until the two of you were in bed?

“Christ,” I said.

“Must run,” said my friend. (Friend?) “Have fun, boys and girls. Have a pleasant interview. And Jack, you should enjoy pretending that she doesn’t turn you on any more now that you know the awful truth...”

Later Brendan told me that my friend had originally wanted to let me make the discovery in bed. “But I told him absolutely no. I’m not the masochistic type. I don’t enjoy having some uptight latent beat the living shit out of me because he doesn’t want to face uncertain things about himself. I had that happen once, and the stories I’ve heard. You can imagine. But I like running the number we did today. Attracting a man, getting him to commit himself, and then letting the cock out of the bag, so to speak.”

“What usually happens?”

“Shock. Disbelief. More shock. A lot of the time we wind up laughing, like today. It’s a great way to deal with something that’s hard to handle.” A significant pause. “You’d be surprised how often a man who never went that route before will decide that my cock is no reason to stop wanting to get me in bed.”

The full treatment with the eyes again. A soft, knowing smile.

“Interested?”

“I had a childhood that was so classic it seems positively banal. Mother was a repressed mouse of a girl who managed to preserve her maidenhead for almost thirty years, perhaps because nobody was interested enough to contend with all that shyness and churchiness. This was in a little town in Schoharie County in upstate New York. The only county in the state with less population now than during the Civil War, so you can imagine what a swinging cosmopolitan place it is.

“Then someone seduced the poor woman, evidently with a promise of marriage, and left town around the time that she began not having periods. God knows who he may have been. A proverbial traveling salesman, I suspect. I grew up thinking my father had died in the war, then learned by accident more or less what had happened. I spent a long time wondering about my father, who he was, if he’s still alive, all of that. The standard fixation on the unknown father, the standard love-hate thing. Like he’s a bastard for having left me, but also he’s out there somewhere, the father who will take care of me and make me a whole and secure person. I think I’ve largely outgrown that bullshit by now.

“Except that I still find myself wondering if I might ever have made it with him, without either of us knowing who the other one was. Of course I’ve always been promiscuous, and I went through a stage shortly after I came to New York where I really played the numbers game. I had to prove to myself that I was attractive, and I wanted quantitative proof. I’ve serviced as many as thirty men in a night. Forgive the crudeness, but sucking doesn’t really tire one out, you know, and you can just go on as long as you want. So it’s not inconceivable that one of the men I balled at one time or another was my long-lost Papa.

“Pointless to brood about it. Or to go on Freudian trips about how my whole sex life represents a search for my father and an attempt to possess him sexually. That kind of thing is worth considering but not worth dwelling on forever...

“After she was pregnant and deserted, my mother moved in with my Aunt Alma. Alma was her older sister, a good dozen years older and a childless widow. It surprises me that she ever got married in the first place. I never met a woman who had less use for men. It wasn’t so much that she hated them as that she was totally incapable of relating to them. I’m sure she was fundamentally a dyke, but that her orientation was such that the possibility of female homosexuality never once occurred to her. She would have the inclinations but would never recognize them, never even suspect them.

“That was the house I grew up in. Huge old house in this dying town with these two cloistered sexless ladies. Alma absolutely dominated Mother, treated her more like a child than a sibling. And mother learned her lesson, never looked at another man. I think she would have grown her hymen back if she could have found a way.

“Classic faggot background, isn’t it? I had the whole bit, played with dolls, was coddled, all of that. And I was physically right for the part. Small and dainty and neat and all the rest of it. It wasn’t a bad time, you must understand. I enjoyed childhood. It only becomes unpleasant in retrospect.

“I’m not sure when I first realized that I was different. That I was a boy who was not like other boys. It sometimes seems as though it was something I always knew...

“My first sexual experience came when I was twelve years old. At this stage I had not yet learned how to masturbate. Although there was a thing I had started doing. I would lie in bed at night and stroke my body, sometimes with my hand but more often with a piece of fur or a silk stocking. But I didn’t concentrate on my genitals. I would just stroke myself all over. I didn’t identify this as a sexual thing at the time, nor did I have orgasm. I just liked the feeling of it and the whole process made me feel, oh, admirable, attractive.

“I was in seventh grade. For the past few years other kids had made fun of me, called me Brenda, that sort of thing. Imitated me. As best as I can remember, I didn’t hate this as much as you would expect. There was something about the teasing that I enjoyed. I think it must have made me feel important. And I don’t think it bothered me that I didn’t have friends. I felt so different from everyone, from both the boys and the girls, that it must have seemed logical to me that I would be alone most of the time.

“I was on my way home from school one afternoon and these two high school boys, I suppose they were fifteen or sixteen, started walking along with me and talking about me. ‘Isn’t it cute? Is it a boy or a girl?’ Obviously I wasn’t cross-dressing or making up, but I was naturally effeminate in behavior and, hell, I looked like a girl. ‘What’s your name, sweetie?’ They knew my name, but I said it was Brendan, and of course they called me Brenda.

“I was excited that they were paying attention to me.

“Then one of them told the other that they could have some fun with me, that I was the same thing as a girl. I was totally ignorant about sex at the time, just incredibly ignorant. But I was wildly excited without knowing what I was excited about. They asked me to come for a walk with them and I did. We walked on out of town and they went on teasing me and talking about blow jobs, which was an expression I had heard, but didn’t begin to understand.

“We wound up in a wooded area on the edge of town. They told me to take my clothes off and I refused. If I knew nothing else, I knew nudity was taboo. They forced me. I put up a token struggle, but, actually I was thrilled to the core and enjoyed being forced this way. That element of masochism, incidentally, has long since vanished. I like a man to be masculine but I don’t enjoy being overpowered. As a matter of fact, it’s very important to me that I be the one who does the seducing...

“They made a big thing about my penis. ‘Look, he’s got one after all! I guess he’s a boy after all! But it’s so small it hardly counts.’ That kind of thing. Of course it was small, I was twelve years old and undeveloped and hairless. It’s grown somewhat since then, lover, in case you were wondering.

“They dropped their pants and I blew them. Sucked them off. They had obviously experienced this before; though whether it was with girls or other boys or even with each other I have no idea. I didn’t like the act itself. There was an odor that disturbed me, perhaps because I associated it with uncleanliness. I had always been scrupulously clean, fastidious. But I was enormously impressed with the size of their cocks. The only cock I was familiar with was my own, and it was a puny thing in comparison. For the longest time afterward I thought that the relative size of my cock was an indication of my femaleness, that because I had a tiny one I was halfway between being a boy and a girl.

“The ejaculation surprised the hell out of me. I gather a lot of people throw up the first time. I didn’t, but kept spitting, and when I got home I must have brushed my teeth and gargled for hours on end. Ah, how tastes change!

“Afterward, they asked me if I knew how to jerk off, and I again didn’t know what they meant, although again I had heard the expression. One of them played with my balls and said he didn’t think there was enough there to work with, and then he began playing with my penis and wonder of wonders, it got hard. Still tiny, but hard, and what an exciting sensation! I had the first orgasm of my young life. The one who did it told the other one that I was fun to play with, and the second one tried it, but I couldn’t get aroused a second time. They wanted to do other things, I don’t remember what, but I said I had to get home, and home I went. Later that night I jerked myself off with a piece of fur and thought about being a girl and imagined having a huge stiff cock in my mouth.”

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.”

“If 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.

“Even if I was working, if I had a good job, that’s a lot of dough to put out just for a place to stay. And I have to say I’ve got a good deal where I am. My old lady is a great cook, you know, and the house is always clean, and it’s really very convenient for me. The only hassle is the subway but I’m never on it in rush hour so it’s no big deal, just that it’s a waste of time. But one thing I got is time. More time than I need, time all over the place.

“Another thing, my folks don’t hassle me lately. It used to be a hassle. While I was in high school, and the first couple years I was out. Where were you, what were you doing, who were you with, all of that shit. And then after I graduated it was a whole lot of what are you going to do with yourself, when are you going to start looking for a job. I can’t see spending my life like the old man, busting my hump with a pick and shovel. I just can’t see it. He makes decent dough, I guess, but he comes home every night beat as hell and just puts himself in front of the television set and pours the beer down. I don’t think he even knows what he’s watching, unless it’s a sports program. He watches the Mets in the summer and football in the fall and the Knicks in the winter, the few games that they broadcast, and the rest of the time he just puts on one channel and watches it until it’s time for him to hit the rack. Whatever comes up on that one channel, that’s what he watches. And pours the beer down. I suppose it’s a life, but I can’t see it.

“I figured I would just hang loose and see what happened with the draft. Some buddies of mine enlisted right after school, figured on getting it out of the way. I thought about it and I said to myself, no, let them come for me, I ain’t going out looking for them. And then when they finally called me I got out. Never expected it, but I went out for freshman football in high school and a knee went on me, and it turned out to be enough of a permanent injury to keep me out of the service. Never even thought of it until about two days before my physical. This cat was telling me how a back injury kept him out, a nothing back injury, and I remembered my knee would still go on me every now and then and I brought this up during my physical, and it was no question, 4F all the way. Talk about beautiful breaks...

“So I’ll get up in the morning and have something to eat, then maybe go on down the block for an egg cream, see who’s hanging around, shoot the shit a little. And maybe I run into somebody who says there’s a party that night, or something to do, or I’ll ask some girl I know if she wants to catch a movie. See, the point is that if anything comes up, I don’t make the Times Square thing. It’s more something I do when there’s nothing else to do.

“A couple of nights ago, for instance, you know, like I went home and had dinner with the folks, and my sister rapped a little about school and some boy who didn’t ask her to this party that she was hoping he would, and my mother said something about me looking for work, but no major hassle, because the way the unemployment is now, I mean everybody knows it’s impossible to find anything and the old man has been worrying himself about getting laid off after they finish the job he’s on now. And there was nothing to do, nothing happening, so I got on the phone and called Phillie.

“Usual conversation. ‘Hey, what’s happening?’ ‘Hey, nothing much. What’s happening with you?’ ‘Oh, nothing happening.’ ‘Want to go catch a flick, see what’s doing?’ ‘Yeah, sure, why not?’

“Phillie’s the same age as me. I guess he’s a couple of months older, he’ll be twenty-one in May. We been friends for years. What’s funny is we were both coming to Times Square off and on with neither of us knowing about the other, and then I met him in front of a movie house and we got to talking, and neither of us is quite ready to say what we’re doing, and then it comes out and we laugh about it. We’re real close, you know, so going to Times Square with him is no hassle. We ride in together and catch a movie and stand around together, and if either of us scores an overnight it’s no sweat, and if not we’ll ride back out to Queens together. He just lives two blocks away from me.

“Not that I always go in with Phillie. Sometimes he’ll have something on, a chick or something, or he’s not in the mood, and I’ll go in alone. Either way it’s something to do, pass the time and pick up a couple of bucks.”

Cary is twenty years old. He stands just under six feet tall. His shoulders are broad, his waist narrow. His arms and legs are large and well muscled. His walk, unhampered by the trick knee that kept him out of the service, is a firm aggressive stride.

His black hair is worn longish, combed straight back from his broad forehead. He has long sideburns, and several months ago grew a moustache and goatee, which he has since shaved off. “I liked the look of it but the itching drove me out of my mind. It’s supposed to stop itching after the first couple of weeks but it never did, and finally I said the hell with it and shaved it off.”

Cary’s habitual costume, on or off Times Square, consists of tight dungarees and a black leather motorcycle jacket. At one time he had a motorcycle to go with it, but tired of it and sold it. “I loved the feeling of riding, all that power under you, but there’s so much hassle connected with a bike in this fucking city. You have to chain it up all the time or some son of a bitch steals it. And even with the chains it’s no guarantee. They’ll have a couple of guys with a truck and a pair of bolt cutters, and they’ll just cut right through the chains and toss the bike in the back of the truck and you’re fucked. And riding it in traffic is a pain in the ass. I like to go to bike pictures, and of course Easy Rider; which was totally out of sight. I saw that picture five times, I got totally wasted watching it. The whole idea of riding in open spaces. If I ever got out of the city I could see getting a bike and just taking off. Just grooving on the whole thing. But not around here.”

Cary is physically well developed, although he does not have the extreme proportions of the muscle boys in homosexual “beefcake” magazines. His physique came to him naturally and he has made no particular effort to keep in shape. He owns a barbell and a set of weights, purchased from a friend who was entering the Army, but does not work out with them regularly. “Every once in awhile I’ll go on a kick and do a little lifting, but I don’t really stay with it. When you think about it it’s just boring, pick ’em up and put ’em down, like my old man out on the job but without even getting paid for it. And at least when he’s done there’s a building standing there. All you get this way is muscles so you can lift more weights so you can get more muscles. It’ll be something to do now and then but that’s about all.”

Cary’s first homosexual experiences came in early adolescence, when a friend taught him to masturbate. “We were over in his yard shooting baskets, and he said something about jerking off and I didn’t know exactly what it was. I would get hard-ons and I would play with it because it felt good but I didn’t know anything about coming, that anything else happened except that you played with it for awhile and then stopped. I don’t remember what was said exactly but the outcome was that he was going to teach me to jerk off. We went in his room and first he jerked himself off while I watched. He came, and then he told me to try it. I practically wore it out but I couldn’t shoot, so he came over and did it for me, and I shot.

“I can still remember how it felt, because here it was, you know, this fantastic feeling, and I hadn’t expected it. I had no idea what it was going to be like and it was really great.

“After that I used to jerk off regularly. Sometimes I would decide it was a bad thing to do. You know the shit you hear about it being bad for you, weakening you. It’s funny, because since then, in all the years since then, I’ve read enough things about sex to know that there’s nothing wrong with it. That everybody does it, that men go on doing it now and then even after they grow up, that it probably does you a lot more harm not to do it than it does to do it. But even knowing all this I still to this day have a feeling inside me that there’s something wrong with jerking yourself off. I don’t know what’s wrong about it. I can’t pin it down, you know, what would be wrong about it. But even so I used to try then not to do it too often, and nowadays it’s very rare that I’ll do it. If I get the urge to come and I’m not seeing a girl or anything I can always find a faggot.”

For several months Cary went on seeing the friend who had introduced him to masturbation, and mutual masturbation became a regular part of their meetings. Sometimes they merely manipulated themselves in each other’s presence, but more often each would masturbate the other.

“What I would do, I would try not to do it by myself, to save it until we were together. I made this distinction in my mind between jerking off by myself, which I thought was bad, and jerking off with Eddie, which I don’t think I ever had any bad thoughts about. I knew it was something to keep a secret and I never told anybody about it, but if I ever felt guilty about it I never knew it.

“Having this secret made a bond between us. We were friends before but this made us much closer. We would get together all the time, you know, not that we would always jerk off but that we spent loads of time together. Tossing a football around or shooting baskets or just sitting and talking about girls. The ones we knew from school and imagining what they looked like naked and how big their tits were and what we would like to do with them. Imagining what it would be like to fuck a girl. I guess we were thirteen or fourteen. No, it couldn’t have been more than thirteen.

“We never thought of this as gay because we both would talk about girls all the time and concentrate on them. I would lie back with my eyes closed while Eddie had my joint in his hand, rubbing it, and he would talk about some girl and tell me to imagine I was sucking her tits or giving it to her, and I would just let my mind go with it, and it was good.”

Eddie’s father was subsequently transferred to the West Coast and Cary never saw his friend again. “I wonder about him now and then. What sort of scene he’s into. And what would have happened if he hadn’t of moved away. Like would the two of us have stopped jerking off together or what. Sometimes I wonder if we would have gotten into it in a heavier way. The thing is, we never thought of ourselves as doing anything that was a homosexual thing, that was queer. We knew there was such a thing as fairies and that they dressed up like women and lisped, you know, all the typical things that are all a kid that age knows about the whole gay scene. And we knew that fairies were men who would kiss each other and suck each other off, or they would suck other men off.

“The guys I used to hang out with, the guys in my neighborhood, this was a way of telling someone to go to hell. Like instead of saying Go to hell or Fuck off or Go screw yourself, you would say Eat it or Eat me or Blow me or Suck my cock or something like that. As a form of expressing contempt.

“Eddie and I, I don’t think no matter how long we hung around together, that we would have gone down on each other. That it would have occurred to us. Or that either of us would have tried to cornhole the other, which I’m sure I never even heard of at that time. But blowing, that was something queers did, and we never thought what we were doing was queer. We thought of what we were doing as jerking off, that it was the same as doing it yourself but more enjoyable. That we were sharing the experience of jerking off. Not that we loved each other or had something sexual between us or thought of each other as girls or anything.”

Did he, considering the question retrospectively, feel that his relationship with Eddie was homosexual?

“Well, to be technical, anything sexual between two males is considered homosexual. If you want to be technical about the whole thing.”

But as far as his own thinking was concerned?

“Well, put it this way. If I had a scene like that now... like if Phillie and I were doing to each other what Eddie and I used to do, yes, I would think that what I was doing was a homosexual act. Not that I was necessarily a homosexual, but that it was a homosexual act. You follow me? Like a person will have a couple of drinks now and then without you calling him an alcoholic.

“But when I think back to what we did, what I think is this is something that happened like seven years ago with a couple of kids, that it was kid stuff, and that’s all I really think about it, and not considering whether it was homosexual or not.”

After Eddie moved away, Cary’s sex life was confined to solitary masturbation. Shortly before his sixteenth birthday he had coitus with a neighborhood girl. “There’s a couple of girls in every neighborhood that put out, and that everybody knows about. This girl was a couple of years older than us but was a year behind us in school because she wasn’t the brightest. A batch of guys would go off with her and she would pull a train. You know, a gang bang. I got in on it once and lost my cherry.

“It was great, but it wasn’t as much as I thought it would be. We were in somebody’s garage and we took turns fucking her on a ping pong table. One guy would go and then another and everybody stood around watching and making comments. You know the kind of comments. There were about eight of us and I was fourth or fifth and with watching and all, the excitement of it, and also being nervous because anybody could of walked in on us. I remember one of the guys couldn’t get a hard-on because of it, the nervousness, and the girl made a remark and some of the guys rode him a little about it, and I was afraid it would happen with me, but as it turned out it was just the reverse. I was so hot and bothered that I just about got it in before I shot my load. One or two strokes and bang! and it was over. It felt wonderful, a girl’s cunt feels like nothing else in the entire world, but it was over so fast. Still, I got this feeling of satisfaction out of losing my cherry.

“I was worried that I had the clap, because the first time I pissed after that it was a little painful, and I thought I must have a dose because I had heard it was a symptom, pain in urination. But I didn’t get a dose and it was just painful that first time, maybe out of worrying about it and expecting it.

“I never fucked that particular girl again. Like I was glad it happened but I didn’t want to see her again. She was really a pig, you know, and also she didn’t seem to get anything at all out of it. She wasn’t even excited. She would fuck for anybody, ten guys one after the other, but she never even wiggled her ass, never even changed the expression on her face. What did she get out of it? I often wondered about that, about why she bothered to go through with it when it didn’t do a thing for her. Like what was she trying to prove?

“I had always thought that a girl who would do that was, you know, a nymphomaniac. A girl who would get terribly excited so she couldn’t live without it, or else that she got hot but couldn’t come, that it took a fucking army to satisfy her. I never thought a girl like that would turn out to be one who didn’t feel anything at all.

“As far as other girls, none of our crowd went out on dates too much. Nobody had a hell of a lot of money to spend. You might take a girl to the movies and do a little necking, or maybe go to her house when her parents were out for the evening, or keep her company if she was baby-sitting or something. I had this one girl who used to baby-sit and I would go over and keep her company. We would make out, but in all the months that I saw her off and on, I never fucked her once. This was common. All through high school, I don’t think hardly any of the guys I knew were getting fucked regular. Except for a couple that were going steady and it was fairly set that they were going to get married eventually. The girls I knew, I never found one I wanted to spend that much time with. For sex, and to have a good time, but not that I would want to see every night and not to spend the rest of your life with.

“This particular girl, with the baby-sitting, we would make out for a while and I would finally walk out of there with my nuts ready to explode. I hated to jerk off afterwards because I felt, I don’t know, that I ought to be coming with her instead of by myself. That it was really settling for next to nothing to come alone in my bedroom. But if I didn’t jerk off it was painful. When you get all that hot and bothered and don’t shoot, your balls hurt. This is on top of being generally frustrated because it’s a definite physical thing and there’s nothing you can do about it.

“This more or less led to what happened one night, because I left her with my balls in an uproar and I was waiting for a bus. The people she was sitting for were a bus ride away, and generally I would wait and ride home with her, but for some reason I left early. I’m not sure if this is what it was this particular time, but occasionally we would have an argument, because she wouldn’t let me fuck her which was generally the cause of our arguments.

“Anyway, I missed my bus and I’m standing there in the cold and this cat pulls up and offers me a lift. So I get in. It’s this guy, he must have been about thirty or forty, and he starts coming on to me right off the bat, although because this is the first time, I never knew what he was getting at. I never would have thought of him as a faggot because I had this picture in my mind that all faggots were the queen type and he was just an ordinary guy in appearance. Nowadays I would recognize him as a faggot from a block away. There are all these mannerisms and ways of looking at you that you learn to spot, but I didn’t know anything about them at the time.

“So he says something like, ‘I remember what I was like at your age. I bet you have a lot of fun with girls.’

“And I said, ‘Oh, I can take ’em or leave ’em.’

“He says, ‘Do you have a girl?’

“‘Well, I do and I don’t.’

“‘What do you mean by that?’

“‘Well, I’ve got a girl, I was just spending some hours with her, but I can’t get anyplace with her.’

“See, right off the bat I’m laying a whole trip on the guy. Nowadays, knowing what I know, I don’t know if I would be ready to come on that strong. I mean, what it amounted to was that I was playing up to him, feeding him openings, without even being aware of what I’m doing.

“So we went on talking. I did this whole routine about how she liked me to pet her and she lets me play with her tits and suck them and even get a finger into her snatch, but that’s as far as it goes. She won’t put out. And he says I must be frustrated, and I say damn right I’m frustrated, and he says it’s bad for you physically, an experience like that. Well, I more or less intended to jerk off when I got home, but I wasn’t going to come out and tell him this, so I said I would just have to live with it, and he said maybe he could do me some good.

“‘I know a lot of girls,’ he said. ‘Look, Cary, I have an apartment not far from here. Why don’t you come up to my place and we can both have a couple of drinks and unwind, and maybe everything’ll work out for you.’

“You may not believe me, but I still don’t know what he was driving at. I still didn’t think of him as a queer, see. I got the impression that he was going to call up some girls. I don’t know if I really believed that some girl would come over and I would get to screw her, but he was a nice guy and I had nothing better to do, and even the idea of a drink sounded pretty good. Besides, I knew that strange things could happen. There was a guy at school who had a steady thing going with a married woman, and the way it happened was that a guy got to talking to him the same way this guy had started with me, and brought him back home and had the kid screw his wife. That was his thing, he liked to have his wife get fucked by a young kid while he watched. I guess he would jerk off while he watched the two of them, or maybe he would fuck the wife afterward himself. Whatever it was, at least according to the story I heard, the guy never touched him or anything, just wanted him to fuck the wife. And the way he told it the wife was good looking and great in bed, she would do everything, suck him off, fuck him in all these different positions, and he was going back for more just about every day. So for all I knew this was going to turn out to be something along those lines and I didn’t have anything better to do than go along for the ride and see what happened.

“He had a very nice apartment. We had a few drinks and I felt myself loosening up. Then he gave me a batch of pictures and said I might find them interesting. I had seen dirty pictures before, but never like this. These were in color and well photographed and the girl in the series was really great looking. Really beautiful. A blonde with a fantastic figure.

“I can still remember what she looked like.

“Of course I got a hard-on immediately. All the excitement with the baby-sitter and now these pictures, and I was having to reach and straighten my cock because it was cramped up in my pants, and he made a remark and said I sure seemed to like the pictures, and he sat next to me on the couch and put his hand on my cock just for a minute, just a quick feel, and he said it was obvious I was getting hot over the pictures, which must have been obvious, I guess.

“I felt a little funny about him touching my cock, but the way he did it made it seem natural enough.

“He asked me which of the pictures I liked the best. About half of them were pictures of the girl blowing this guy, licking it or taking it in her mouth, you know. And the expression on her face, you could see she really loved what she was doing.

“So I told him I really liked those pictures.

“‘Won’t your girl do that for you?’

“‘Listen,’ I said, ‘are you kidding? She won’t even jerk me off!’ Which was true, but actually I never really tried to get her to jerk me off. I was just set on getting her to let me screw her and hadn’t really made a point of suggesting the other thing, so whether or not she would have done it I don’t know.

“‘Well,’ he says, ‘you must have had blow jobs before?’

“I told him I never did.

“‘The problem is that most girls don’t like to do it. But you’re really missing something. It’s a wonderful feeling.’

“I said I could imagine.

“He asked if I had ever been laid, and I told him about that and told him it was great. I made it sound better than it actually was, not telling him about the parts of it that weren’t so terrific. He said a blow job was better, and then he patted my cock again and said it was a shame I never had one, and that it would be the perfect thing for me now to relax me and get rid of all the tension.

“I don’t remember just how the conversation went from there. By now I knew he wanted to blow me and by now I guess I wanted him to. I still didn’t think of him as a queer but as a guy who liked me and wanted to do something to make me feel better.

“He opened my pants and took my cock out and gave me a long elaborate blow job. When he first went down on me I thought it would be like with the girl, that I would go off instantly, but it was just the reverse. Maybe the drinks had something to do with it. I don’t know. It lasted a long time and felt incredible. Really great. And then I came, and it was dynamite.

“Right after I came it occurred to me that he would want me to blow him in return, which I knew I didn’t want to do. But he never even suggested it, and I have the feeling that he came in his pants while he was going down on me.

“Anyway, he took me right on home afterward, drove me right to my door. He gave me his phone number and told me to call him if I was ever in the mood again. That girls could give a guy a hard time, and there was no reason to go through life frustrated when there were people who would be glad to help a guy out.”

I asked Cary how he felt about the experience after it was over.

“I don’t know. Of course I got to realizing that he was a queer. That he got his kicks this way.”

“Did this make you contemptuous of him?”

“I don’t think so. See, I saw him as a guy first and later found out he was a fag. If it happened the other way around it might have been different. Like there have been guys who have said how they’ll go in a men’s room to take a leak and some man will come up out of the blue and make a grab for their cock. And if he did something like this I think it would have been a different story, like I might have hauled off and belted him because I was disgusted. But the way this guy got to me, I have to admit he was very smooth about it. He had my cock in his mouth before I really knew what the hell was coming off, and by that time I was in no mood to argue.”

“Did you worry that what you had done was abnormal?”

“No. I mean, I didn’t do anything, I just sat there. If he wanted me to blow him it would of been something else, but that never came up. He just wanted to blow me, and if you stop and think about it, what’s the difference between getting a blow job from a guy or a girl? Either way you sit there with your eyes closed and let your cock enjoy itself.”

“So there’s no difference between a blow job from a man or a woman?”

“Actually there is.”

“Oh?”

“Well, here I’m going to sound as though I’m queer myself, what I’m going to say, so you can think what you want to think. It doesn’t matter to me, just so I know what I am, and I don’t have any worries.”

“Go ahead.”

“Well, it’s better with a guy.”

“It’s better to be blown by a male?”

“Yeah. The act itself is. See, this is hard to explain. Since then a couple of times I’ve had girls blow me. As a matter of fact I ultimately got that girl, the baby-sitter, I got her to do it. I went on seeing her over a period of time and I eventually got her to jerk me off and finally to blow me, and she didn’t know what she was doing. And other girls who have done it to me, even the ones who enjoyed doing it, which the baby-sitter never enjoyed it, even then they don’t really know how to do it well.”

“I see.”

“The point is, there’s a lot of technique to it. There’s a tremendous difference between a good blow job and a bad blow job. Listen to me, the way I’m talking, like I’m the fucking king of the faggots the way it sounds. But it’s different from fucking.”

“How?”

“When you fuck a girl, maybe she’s good at it and maybe not, but either way you move around in her cunt and that’s enough to get you off. Even if she’s a lousy lay, even if she’s the next thing to unconscious, it can work out all right. But there’s more variation in blow jobs. There just is. And you get faggots who for them this is their whole thing, this is the big source of kicks for them, and they become experts at it.

“But at the same time, it’s more exciting for me to be blown by a girl because there’s a sense of accomplishment, getting a girl to do this. So the act itself isn’t as good, but the feeling you have about it is better. I don’t know if you can make head or tail out of it, but that’s the way I feel about it.”

Whatever guilt feelings may have arisen from the experience, they don’t seem to have affected Cary’s subsequent behavior to any extent. He telephoned the man who had fellated him on several occasions and enjoyed a repeat performance at the man’s apartment. Through his contact with this man, he began to learn a great deal about the homosexual underground and the way he could play a role in it.

“He told me that guys like me are known among faggots as rough trade. In other words, guys who aren’t queer themselves but who will let faggots blow them when they want to get relaxed sexually. He said that certain faggots preferred rough trade and would actually pay money to blow a guy.

“I suppose it was from what I learned from him that it first came to me to make the Times Square scene. Although I had gone to Times Square in the past, it was as if I didn’t know what was going on. Nobody ever came on to me there; I would just see a movie, maybe have a frank over at Grant’s or a slice of pizza... Maybe hang around a little. I would see the real queen types there but I didn’t know that the other guys who were hanging around were looking to get picked up by fags. But I got the message from what he told me, so later on when I went to Times Square I saw it in a different light, and I was able to stand around in such a way as to get myself picked up.

“Before that, though, I had learned you could score right there in Queens if you wanted to hitchhike around. I would ride a few blocks and then get out and catch another ride if nothing came up. I didn’t always score, but a lot of the time. Not for money, just to relieve myself after making out, or any time when I was feeling horny, because from that time on I almost never jerked off. I was able to give it up more or less completely because I could find a faggot to blow me, or sometimes to jerk me off, which is what a large number of them like to do.

“Some of the guys I hitched rides with also wanted to be blown in return, which I never did. I didn’t get mad when they wanted it because I expected they would ask me to, but I said I wouldn’t do it. I would jerk them off if they wanted me to. I mean, just using your hand on somebody for a few minutes, that’s usually not such a big deal.

“I did get money that way once, actually. This guy had blown me in a parked car and wanted me to blow him, and of course I refused, and he said how about jerking him off, and I hadn’t yet done this and I refused. He actually begged me, and I was going to do it just so he would shut up, but before I could agree he offered me five bucks to do it, so I thought, hell, why not? So I jerked him off onto a Kleenex and he gave me the five bucks, which is the first money I ever earned hustling, if you could call it hustling, just jerking a guy off in a car.”

Cary found the Times Square scene perfectly natural. Initial experiences there were pleasant ones, and he was gratified to receive money for his favors. Rather than set a price, he will tell a prospective John that he is low on money and will wait to see what sum is offered. He rarely haggles, generally accepting the sum offered, which may be as little as five dollars or as much as twenty.

Unlike some rough trade hustlers, he is not inclined to be contemptuous of his Johns, nor is he unwilling to see them as people. Often he will accept a dinner invitation in lieu of cash.

“A good meal and a couple of drinks in a nice place, that’s as good as five or ten bucks any time. As a matter of fact, I’ve had some really great conversations with faggots. Some of them are very interesting people, really educated. They’ve been to Europe, they’ve read all these books, but in spite of how much more they know, how much better educated they are than me, they’ll still take the trouble to have an intelligent conversation with me. A lot of what I know has come out of conversations with faggots.

“Now when Phillie and I rap on the way home, we’ll generally make fun of the guys on the street if we talk about them at all. I don’t know if Phillie really feels that way or not. Sometimes I think he says it for the same reason I say it, so we can be proving to each other that we’re not like those guys, which I think we’re not, but we have to come on with each other to this extent.

“Of course some of the faggots are a pain in the ass. You’ll get these snot-nose types who keep throwing it at you that they’re superior to you, that you’re just a dumb kid who’s only good in bed. And then you get a tremendous amount of uptight guys who don’t like to admit to themselves that they like to suck cock, and they won’t talk at all. Not a word after they make the arrangements, and then when they go down on you they seem to go into a trance, they get completely lost in it, and then afterward all they want to do is get out of the hotel room and go home without saying a word to you. They won’t even look at you. Which is fine with me, because they aren’t that much fun to be with.

“But as far as just despising a guy because he’s gay, I can’t see it. I mean, if a guy happens to get his kicks by blowing another man, that’s just his particular scene. It’s what he likes. I mean, I eat meat, and some people are into vegetarianism, which is no reason why I should hate them or they should hate me. Or one guy’s a Catholic and another’s a Jew and so on, and each person is whatever he is and that’s no reason not to get along with each other.

“The only thing that I wonder is if maybe I like it too much. I mean getting blown by faggots. Because I have to admit that I enjoy it. I wouldn’t go so far as to say that I like it better than fucking a girl. If someone said you have to give up fucking girls I would say like forget it, man, I’m not about to.

“But from time to time I wonder what would happen, you know, if I got something steady going with a girl. You know, some girl that I really dug and that I could get it together with her in an intense way. I was rapping before about Easy Rider, and I’ll think what a groove it would be, you know, me and a chick, with the two of us really digging each other completely, and each of us on a motorcycle and just cutting across all that space together. And being completely into each other, and never staying one place too long, going here and going there and hanging together, and like balling each other constantly.

“I suppose if I had that and it worked out perfectly I would never want to go with a fag. But the way things are now, there’s nothing like that. I’ll see girls but I don’t spend that much time chasing them because it’s so much easier with the faggots. It really is.

“The way things are now, if I had a girl I could screw any time I wanted, not that I was in love with but that it was always there for me, I’m tempted to say they would never see me on Times Square again. But I’m not positive that’s the truth. Not that it makes me queer, that I can dig it both ways. I don’t know. The thing is, when you learn to like something like that, how are you going to stop liking it?”

Derek

“You know, if I were inclined to be picky, and if I weren’t so egocentric as to take immeasurable delight in being interviewed, I’d have to take exception to this project. You want me as an interview subject for a work on homosexual prostitution, and according to my own lights I fail to qualify on either count.

“I’m not a homosexual. I’m a bisexual. Though even the article is objectionable, don’t you think? A homosexual. A bisexual. These terms should be adjectives. They should describe rather than categorize. Human beings have such a compulsion to fit everyone into a drawer, and the more uptight one is, the greater the necessity...

“I am a bisexual male. Or, as the unisex contingent prefers it, a bisexual human being who is genitally male. ACDC, if you will. Versatile. Select your own euphemism, it mattereth not.

“But of course everyone is bisexual, you know. An infant scarcely cares whether the hand tickling its genitalia is attached to a body which is in turn equipped with a penis or a vagina. Which is not to say that there’s no difference between men and women. Of course there’s a difference. And vive la difference, as our French friends say.

“As I see it, to describe a man or woman as bisexual is simply to state that he or she is open to the full range of human sexuality. When one is exclusively homosexual or heterosexual, on the other hand, one is the victim of a more or less damaging neurotic condition. A homosexual is a person who, because of various personal hang-ups to a greater or lesser extent induced by society and personal environment, is solely capable of responding sexually to members of his own sex. And a heterosexual individual is one who, because of personal hang-ups of another sort, is capable only of responding to members of the opposite sex.

“Not that there’s anyone quite like that, however. I don’t think there’s ever been a faggot who hasn’t occasionally looked at a girl and found her attractive. And the straightest of heterosexual males will recognize others of their number as attractive. But hang-ups get in the way to the extent that these people may not even think of doing anything about it, let alone going through with it.

“If this limitation makes either of these sets of people normal in any sense other than a purely statistical one, then a button’s a birdcage. The Gay Liberation people are doing very important work, but they insist that homosexuality is not neurotic, and I disagree. I think it is neurotic in precisely the same way that heterosexuality is. Life is short and life is beautiful and people who place limits on themselves are foolish.

“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 experience 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 it’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.”

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 tremendous 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.

“It’s a good life...”

Eldon

“Most Johns are very timid. Maybe that’s not the word I want. Shy. Reticent. As if there’s a certain formula for making arrangements, for managing a pick-up. And they aren’t sure they have it down pat, and they don’t want to do anything wrong. Like an actor in a new play who doesn’t have his lines. I find myself acting as prompter. ‘Hello.’ ‘Hello.’ ‘Nice night for a change.’ ‘Yes, nice night, I was afraid it was going to rain.’ ‘So was I, but it doesn’t look like rain.’ ‘Oh, I’m so glad of that, because I would positively melt.’ ‘Uh-huh, I don’t like the rain much either.’ ‘Yes, that’s very interesting, certainly, but it is a trifle cold, don’t you think?’ ‘Cold, yes, sure is.’ ‘And it would be nice to be somewhere warmer.’ ‘Yes, sure would, wouldn’t it? Uh, why don’t we go somewhere and have a drink?’ ‘Yes, why don’t we, and I thought you’d never ask.’

“Not quite like that, necessarily, but you get the general idea. The more unsure of themselves they are, the more tiresome they become, and when they’re simply too too tiresome I tell them in a nice way to fuck off. Or perhaps not in a nice way. It’s a very liberating thing, you know, to curl your lip at a total stranger and do things with your eyebrows and say ‘Oh, fuck off, will you?’ as bitchily as possible. One hates to be cruel, but there are times when it’s just so gratifying.

“And, my dear, the reactions! Most often their faces fall apart and they slunk off in a state. Is that a word? Slunk? Well, it is now.

“I remember one out-of-town dolt. ‘Fuck off,’ I told him. And he just fixed me with this stare of total disbelief. ‘Now hold on a minute,’ he said. ‘Listen, if I said anything the least bit out of line, I mean it wasn’t my intention. I’m a stranger here, I don’t want to do anything out of line.’

“I imagine I said something to the effect that I just wanted him to go away and leave me alone. ‘Well, just so I know the score,’ he said. ‘I mean, the way you’re dressed and the way you talk and all. I mean, you’re a queer, right? A homosexual, am I right or am I right?’

“‘Darling,’ I said, ‘I’m Marie of Roumania, and I’m aghast that you didn’t recognize me.’

“‘Well, look, Marie,’ he said. I swear I’m not making this up, darling. ‘Well, look, Marie, you’re a queer, right? I mean you’re gay, whatever you want to call it, right? So if you’re gay, what’s with this fuck off routine?’

“I asked him pleasantly if he ever fucked women. He got deliciously defensive. ‘Do I? What are you, kidding? Listen, I got a wife, I got kids. I get plenty of action. I’m not gay myself. Once in a while, something to change your luck, but I’m no faggot if that’s the question you’re asking me.’

“‘Well, do you ever make a pass at a woman and get turned down?’

“‘Listen, Marie or whatever your name is, I make out pretty good.’

“‘But do you ever get turned down, sugarloaf? That’s what I asked you.’

“‘Look, nobody’s a hundred percent. Let’s just leave it that I do pretty good.’

“‘Do you think only women have the right to turn you down?’

“There was quite a bit more of this before he got the point, which I didn’t think was that elusive a point — that anyone, male or female, had the right to say no to him when approached sexually. He had trouble understanding this. In his lexicon, a queen was supposed to be a sure thing. Even if she said her name was Marie of Roumania, evidently. And of course because I was wasting all this time in conversation with the fool, he thought my no was a yes in disguise and I was just camping it up a bit. I finally told him that he’d better be careful, that maybe we ought to walk around the corner because the fellow across the street was a plainclothesman with the Vice Squad and he seemed to be taking an undue interest in us. So if he wanted to walk along with me...

“He did everything but sprint away from me. And it was too too, really, because the number across the street has been peddling his cute little ass for donkey’s years, and is no more a vice bull than you or I. Or are you a cop, Jack, and is this an elaborate bust? And wouldn’t that be ironic?”

“I have nothing against homosexuals,” the typical enlightened heterosexual will say. “As far as I’m concerned, what two people do by themselves is their own business, so long as they don’t bother young kids or do their act in Macy’s window. But I’ve got to admit that a certain type of faggot rubs me the wrong way. You know the ones I mean. Queens, I guess they’re called, The ones who lisp and mince and make themselves into caricatures of women. Caricatures of homosexuals, even. I agree that they have their rights and I’m not one of these hard-hat types who think they ought to be gassed or locked up. They have a right to live their lives. It’s just a personal thing with me. I get uncomfortable in their company. I don’t like to have them around me. They get on my nerves.”

I have heard innumerable versions of this little speech over the years, and at one time or another have probably uttered something faintly similar myself. Indeed, I’ve heard essentially the same opinion voiced by overt homosexual males who find the extreme manner of the drag queen off-putting. “They make it difficult for the rest of us,” is a familiar comment.

Eldon is a perfect example of this type of homosexual. He is very different from Brendan, who acts and reacts very much like a female. Eldon would never be taken for a girl, and his manners are not feminine but effeminate. He is consciously playing a role, but the role is not that of a woman. He is consciously playing the part of a queen, an effeminate homosexual.

This role occasionally but not always involves full-fledged transvestism, complete with female garb, false breasts, makeup and wig. At other times his face is free of make-up, his hair is his own, and his clothes, while faintly swish, could be worn by any man in the present age of male sartorial splendor. Yet, whether Eldon is in full drag or not, the effect is very much the same.

He is just under six feet but looks taller because he is so thin. His hair, originally brown (“a classic shade of mouse brown, God help me”) is bleached a somewhat unconvincing blond. He has finely drawn facial features which could be reasonably described as aristocratic. His walk is often a burlesque of a prostitute’s buttock rolling strut.

It is his manner of speech, unchanging whether he is in male or female attire, which is Eldon’s most obvious characteristic. The specially stressed words and syllables, the extreme inflection, is one of the most striking components of his personality. An accurate rendering of Eldon’s speech would call for the placement of an inordinate number of words in italics. I have tried to keep this to a minimum if only because dialogue presented that way is so annoying to read.

In addition, Eldon is a surprisingly good mimic. In the passage quoted above, where he describes the attempted pick-up by the John who would not believe he was being rejected, Eldon’s voice dropped a full register and took on all the tones and stresses of the person he was aping.

When I commented on this talent, he was obviously pleased. I asked if he had done any acting, if he had ever considered any sort of stage career.

“Acting?” he said, thoughtfully. “No, never. Unless you consider this acting.” His hands moved to indicate himself. “You could say that everything I do is an act, couldn’t you? That all my life is devoted to an imitation of... of whom? Of myself. I spend my entire fucking life developing and perfecting my imitation of me.”

His name is not the one he was given at birth. His original first name was Lyle, his middle name Donald. (“Miss Lyle Donald Thing, if you can bear it. Slightly yecchhh, don’t you think? I always loathed the name Lyle. Way back in grade school. I remember it was in fourth or fifth grade that I took to calling myself L. Donald. I signed everything that way and introduced myself that way. If people called me Lyle I didn’t answer. Unfortunately I didn’t much care for Donald either. Donald was a duck in a cartoon, you know. ‘Donald, duck!’ And then some ass would heave a snowball at me. Always good for a laugh. So there was a point where I made it L. Don, perhaps inspired by L. Ron Hubbard, that shrewd lunatic who invented scientology. And somewhere along the way L. Don became Eldon, which is a name I simply invented, but since then I’ve discovered that other persons have the name. I’ve read it or heard it here and there. Never met another Eldon. They all seem to be black football players. There was a time when certain intimates called me Donna, but I was never at ease with that. I never entirely saw the point of that, and I usually manage to keep my genders straight, at least in grammatical terms. Though there have been times when I wanted to be a girl. Not just to look like one but to be one, to go and have the operation, but one gets that way now and then when depressed. Nothing serious.”)

Eldon is twenty-three and has been in New York for the past three and a half years. He had his first homosexual experience at the age of thirteen.

“I was pretty Nelly before then. I got a certain amount of teasing. Part of having a sissy name more than anything else. I never did anything. There were boys I admired and I may have had crushes on them, but I never made any connection between admiring them and wanting to have sex with them. I didn’t really think much about sex. I didn’t think of anything when I masturbated. I just thought about masturbating, if you follow me, just dwelled on the physical sensations rather than wrapping a blanket of fantasy around it.

“One afternoon I was hitchhiking. I must have gone somewhere after school and was on my way home. This man — a mature man, but I couldn’t begin to guess his age — he stopped for me and must have known instantly the sort of person I was. I didn’t know myself; but one look and he knew.

“He drove for awhile. We talked, but I don’t have any memory of the conversation, Then he pulled the car off the road and behind a clump of bushes. No, a billboard. That’s right, because he said something about traffic cops hiding behind billboards, and then he said you could hide a lot of things behind a billboard, and then he grabbed me.

“‘You’re a little cutie, aren’t you?’ he said. ‘Why you’re just like a little girl.’ And then he opened his pants and took his cock out. He had an enormous erection and at that age I had naturally never seen anything like it.

“‘Okay, sweetie,’ he said, ‘Just look at the lollypop I got for you. Just look at my all-day sucker. You be nice to it or I’ll break your neck.’ And he put his hand on the back of my neck and pinched me, hard. Then he pushed my head down toward his cock.

“I really didn’t know what to do. He wouldn’t believe that I had never done this before, but he would tell me what to do and all. He wanted me to take it into my mouth to the hilt, which was clearly impossible, and every time I gagged on it he would slap my face or dig his fingers into my ribs.

“It took him forever to come. A couple of times I asked him if I could stop. ‘You keep going until you finish,’ he said. He shot about a quart in my mouth. I tried to get my head away when he started coming but he had his hand in my hair and wouldn’t let me get away. I got horribly nauseous. He got the door open and virtually threw me out of the car. I landed in the grass on my hands and knees and immediately started vomiting. He called me a dirty fairy bastard and drove away while I was still hunched over throwing up.

“For a long time afterward I always thought that there was something he sensed about me, something that made it instantly evident that I would do what he wanted me to do. I used to think this but now I’m not so sure. Because he was very forceful, you know, and a boy my age, oh, he probably did this all the time. And probably got away with it virtually all the time. Because there was really nothing I could have done. He was a huge strong son of a bitch and I was a skinny little kid. What could I do? If I had tried to resist he would have hit me for resisting, and sooner or later I would have gotten tired of being hit and I would have sucked him the way he wanted.

“At least he didn’t want to fuck me. Thank God. At that age, and with his cock as huge as it was, he would have split poor little me in half. He would have cleft me in twain, I surely believe he would.”

Over the following several years, until he graduated from high school and enlisted in the Army, Eldon had homosexual experiences on an increasingly regular basis. None of these experiences were of the sort that served as his introduction to homosexuality. On the contrary, all of his relationships during this interval were with boys his own age, classmates of his at a large suburban high school in the industrial Midwest.

“There were about a dozen of us, and a choice little covey of quail were we. Shy kids, rotten at sports, vague and dreamy. Generally good at class work but terrible at anything else. I’ve often wondered how many people realized that we were homosexual. Realized that we were doing anything about it, that is. They all knew there was something a little different about us, that we didn’t go out with girls, that we were sensitive types. But I wonder if many of them knew we were having it off with one another.

“I’m sure we weren’t the sum total of faggotry at that school. I thought we were at the time, but as I compare notes with other dear friends it seems more and more likely that there was a lot more going on than ever I was aware of. Football players shyly playing an inspired game of Drop The Soap in the shower room. And boys who would be best friends, and who would take their friendship a little further than anyone else ever realized. And I’m sure there were boys, who never had anything going at school but who hustled Johns downtown in the evening.

“In our little group, our little dirty dozen, we all knew who we were. We would speculate about school big-shots the way adult faggots speculate about show business personalities. We were convinced that one of the math teachers was gay, for instance, although none of us had ever had any personal contact with him to reinforce the suspicion. Speculation aside, we stuck with each other. Each of us at one time or another made it with each of the others.

“It was an odd sort of sex. Very much an adolescent sort of sex. Not that a great many adults don’t swing in a very similar way, but that the whole tone of it had a distinct adolescent quality.

“The sex was purely sexual. No elements of love. Very much the reverse, actually. We probably felt more friendship with each other than we were willing to express. I can’t specifically recall telling any of those boys that I really liked or admired him, although in many cases I certainly did, and although I suspect I was liked and admired in return, this was never put into words. And no one ever kissed anyone — on the mouth, that is. Or anywhere on the body, really, in the sense of simple kissing. Cocksucking was one thing, purely physical, purely sexual, but kissing implies intimacy of quite another sort.

“I wonder how thoroughly we identified ourselves as homosexual. I know none of us did much of anything with girls at the time. Some of us dated, but only in a cursory way, never going steady, never getting involved sexually. One of the crowd had gotten his first blow job when he was twelve from a female cousin four or five years older. And another kid who used to deliver prescriptions for a drugstore had one married woman for a customer who used to get him to give her a finger wave whenever he came by. I think she also taught him to muff her. I seem to remember him discoursing at length on the taste and aroma of hair pie. But she never did anything for him. Rather the selfish bitch...

“We did everything to each other, in twos or in larger groups. Is there anything on earth as experimental as a high school boy? If we could think of it we would try it, and we were imaginative little rascals. Jerked each other off, sucked each other’s cocks, fucked each other’s assholes. Worked out elaborate circle jerks and daisy chains. And all in the spirit of good clean fun.

“You know, it really was fun. And remarkably uncomplicated. From what I’ve read, I gather the English public schools, a good many of them, are little hotbeds of this sort of thing. Of course they complicate it with all that S and M, canings and birchings and other unpleasantries. That part is a bit much. The other, though, is probably very healthy for most of the boys, don’t you think? Because since it’s so universal one can participate without thinking of one’s self as Abbie Abnormal. And afterward those who are so inclined can button up and go straight, and when they think about the good old days it’s in a spirit of boys will be boys and all that.

“I wonder how many of the old crowd are gay today. I don’t keep up on news from home that closely. I’ve run into a few of the gang who are making the gay scene here in New York, and I get a certain amount of news through that particular grapevine. I know that one of my old friends is married and has presumably put his old life forever behind him. I wonder if his wife knows how he spent his high school years. I wonder how he looks back on them himself. And I wonder, oh, if he’ll stay straight. Or if he’ll fight the good fight for ten or twenty years and then turn up some fine night at one of the bars, looking to find some sweet young thing who will help him recapture his long lost youth.

“One interesting thing. Our classmates, the ones who were not a part of our circle. Their attitude toward us. If anything, you know, they thought of us as being basically sexless. Because we weren’t playing out the stereotyped male role. We weren’t interested in sports, we weren’t big and tough, we didn’t curse and spit, we didn’t go out with girls, hence we weren’t masculine, hence we weren’t sexual beings. And of course the irony lies in the fact that we were having tons more sex than they dreamed of. I’m positive I had more orgasms per week through homosexual contacts than they had masturbating. And damned few of them so much as lost their virginity during high school, you know, and the ones who did certainly didn’t get laid all that often.

“We camped it up a little, but we never really queened it. A boy might steal his sister’s bra and do a little number, but that was as far as it went. You could say that we were distinctly homosexual in manner but not genuinely effeminate.”

I asked Eldon how he felt about his homosexual behavior at the time in terms of morality and normality.

“But that’s so hard to say now. I knew it was something that had to be kept a secret. I knew there was something faintly dirty and forbidden about it, but I don’t know if I distinguished between it in this respect and any other form of sexual activity. Screwing a girl was faintly forbidden and faintly dirty. Jerking off was faintly ditto.

“I probably put it in a category with masturbation. Fun while one was young, but something one would give up in due course. Except that I was not particularly future-oriented. I’m still not. I don’t think about tomorrow. Well, that’s an exaggeration. I think about tomorrow but not about a year from tomorrow, not about ten years from tomorrow. I think I probably live more in the present than a great many people. I’m not sure that’s good. Janis Joplin said something to the effect that some people waste all their now by worrying about tomorrow. Poor poor baby, she should have taken a little less of her own advice. I loved her, you know. I mean that literally. I loved that woman. I’ve never been affected by a death as I was by hers. I still don’t really believe she’s dead. I’ll hear a record of hers and I can’t make myself believe that voice isn’t singing any more...

“Of course in certain ways I was obviously disturbed about being gay. That’s why I went into the Army. All that bullshit about the Army building men. I wanted to be built into a man. And I wanted a way to put distance between myself as a high school faggot and the man I would eventually become, so I went into the Army confident that I wouldn’t encounter any faggots there. Isn’t that hysterical? Isn’t that just too hysterical for words?

“Right from the beginning I liked the Army. Almost no one believes this when I tell them. Or I get a raised eyebrow and a smirk and words to the effect that of course I loved it, all those hard young bodies around and no female competition. But the point is that I liked the Army for completely different reasons, and at the beginning I had no homosexual contacts and simply devoted myself to being a good soldier.

“And I was one hell of a good soldier, hard as you may find that to believe. I was neat and clean and efficient. I was absolutely perfect at close order drill. I was excellent with weapons. Expert rifleman, sharpshooter, all of those heavy things. And I kept my weapon in perfect condition. I cleaned it far more often than one had to. Of course a rifle is a traditional penis symbol, and one can make the usual inferences. Maybe they apply, for all I know. I don’t much care. I was a good soldier.

“I could have gone OCS. Officer Candidates School. I had the chance but all I wanted to be was a soldier. Part of a manhood thing I was going through, perhaps.

“After Basic Training, I was stationed at an army base in Louisiana. There was going to be more training and eventually we would go to Vietnam. I was looking forward to combat, believe it or not. I wanted to do well, and doing well when there’s a war on means doing well in a combat situation. I don’t think I was afraid of dying. I’m not sure it occurred to me that death was a possible consequence. Or maybe it did and I just didn’t give a damn. But I wasn’t remotely concerned about the stupidity and immorality of that fucking war. I am damn well concerned now, I am absolutely appalled, and I still shudder occasionally at the thought of what I might have gotten into. Not so much what might have happened to me as the things I might have found myself doing. My Lai and all that. It’s easy to say that one would have acted in a certain way, but how is one to know? I could have been one of those thugs, machine-gunning children. In the right sort of situation I probably would have gone along with everyone else, and then how would I have lived with myself afterward? Or, if I was able to live with myself, what kind of a monster would I have thus turned into?

“The Captain changed all that.

“I guess he just knew instantly. He was about thirty-five or forty. A combat veteran. Very dark and wiry with a great deal of body hair. He came up to me one day with this knowing look in his eyes and told me he’d like to see me that evening, that I should come to his quarters. Just that, and my knees went weak.

“I went, of course. And he looked me up and down and told me I was a sweet little thing, and then he grabbed me and kissed me on the mouth. Put his tongue in my mouth.

“He didn’t act at all gay in terms of my concept of homosexuality at the time. He acted like a man making love to a woman, treated me absolutely like a girl. Took my clothes off and petted me and told me how pretty I was, and turned me over on my knees and fucked me.

“He reminded me of the man who picked me up, the one who forced me to blow him. It was the confidence, the unflappable male confidence.

“That man owned me. The Captain. He absolutely owned me. He kept me with him for a few hours that first night, and when I left I was in love for the first time in my life. I also hated him because of what he was able to do to me. But I loved him.

“And you know, he gradually turned me into a girl. Or into a queen, if you prefer. Because he treated me that way and I became what I was in his eyes. He had female clothes that I sometimes wore when I was with him. And he bought make up and perfume for me. Once he took me off base and we checked into a hotel. He brought a prostitute to our room. He fucked her and made me fuck her. My first woman, and to this day my last. Then he had me do things with him while the girl stayed in the room with us...

“I never learned how many times he had had relationships like this before. He had been married and divorced and used to get letters from girls, and occasionally he would go on a date with one. When I saw him after that he would tell me at great length what they had done and what the girl had been like. According to him, he never failed to score. I don’t know whether he was trying to make me jealous or what. Maybe it was to demonstrate his masculinity to me. I don’t know.

“He used to call me Ellie. I hated that and he must have known how I felt about it but it didn’t stop him. And I never asked him not to call me that. Not once. I always hated it and never had the guts to say a word about it.

“Maybe, much as I hated it, I wanted him to go on calling me Ellie. That’s sick, isn’t it? But it was a very sick relationship, all filled with love and hate.

“Can I tell you something? I thought, I thought we would always be together. I didn’t think it all the time. That is, I knew better. But I still pictured us, oh, living together. Him taking care of me. Me keeping house. I don’t know how clearly I defined all of this in my mind. My perception of my own role must have been vague. But I wanted it to go on forever. I don’t know if I can explain how he made me feel. I can’t entirely explain it because I can’t understand it that well myself. I can say that I loved him, but what does that say? Not very much, I’m afraid.

“I wonder if he ever wanted to keep our relationship going for a long period of time. I wonder how much I meant to him. I like to think that I was very important to him, if only for a little while. I know he was consciously exploiting me and in certain ways quite contemptuous of me. I think I realized that at the time, and I certainly realize it now. But I also know that he did relate to me as a person. He might have preferred to think that he was using me as an object, and in many respects he was, but I was also very much a person to him. If that hadn’t been so, he never would have gotten to me so completely. He wouldn’t have been able to.

“He must have half known this, Jack. I’m sure that’s what made him end it in an abrupt and truly cruel way. He dropped me. What happened — no, I’m sorry, I don’t want to go into it. What’s the point of picking at scabs? It still hurts, and it’s best left alone.

“Suffice it to say that he dumped me in cruel fashion, and that I went a bit bananas. And began queening it up a bit, though I must say I was cool enough so that I never implicated the Captain. Oh Captain! My Captain! Oh, sweet Christ...

“I got a general discharge, which is neither honorable nor dishonorable. I could have contested this but I didn’t have the heart for it. All I had wanted was to be a good soldier, and I had been a good soldier, and they wouldn’t let me stay there any more. I was in a bad way.

“I wound up in New York, of course. And drifted at once to the gay scene, and began to find myself becoming more and more effeminate. And one thing led to another.

“That says it, doesn’t it? One thing led to another. That’s what they can carve on my tombstone. I think I’ll write that into my will. I collect divine epitaphs. W. C. Fields — All things considered, I would rather be in Philadelphia. Don’t you love that? Or Dorothy Parker, I don’t think she actually used it, but she said she wanted to. Pardon my dust. For me they can put One thing led to another. Or At last he sleeps alone.

“About one thing leading to another. I wish I knew what I really believed. Was it all inevitable? I used to blame a great many things on that man in the car. I hate him and I hope he’s dead, but I wonder what real effect he had on me. I don’t honestly believe he was responsible for my going gay in high school. If anything he should have had the opposite effect. Because it wasn’t even remotely enjoyable with him. It was horrible, I hated everything about it. If anything he should have made me avoid homosexuality like the plague.

“But the Captain. I wonder about that man. What if he hadn’t come along? Now it’s easy to say that I wasn’t being myself in the Army. That all this obsession with being the good soldier Schweik was artificial and inconsistent. That it wasn’t really me. But isn’t it possible that I would have grown into that role? Or at least grown into part of it? Or was I waiting all along for someone like the Captain, someone who would come on with that arrogance, that confidence? The way I responded to him right away, I must have been subconsciously waiting for him all along. And in that sense if it hadn’t been him it would have been someone else, sooner or later. Because I hadn’t been resisting temptation all along. There hadn’t been any temptation. He was the first temptation to come along, and I never even tried to resist.

“I have met men since him who have been a great deal like him. Twice I’ve lived with men like that. Once for almost six months, another time for a couple of weeks. They didn’t take me over quite so completely as the Captain did. But he was the first, you know. That can make a difference, don’t you think?

“I’ve had a few Johns like him. Not many. Few of them have that assurance, that confidence. It’s not a common combination, absolute cocky male self-confidence coupled with an unequivocal lust for my fair white body. Not many men measure up to that particular ideal.

“Now and then I’ll get one. I think I go out looking for that more than for the money. In fact I know I do, although the money is frankly what makes the trip worthwhile, because satisfactory doppelgangers for the Captain are few and far between, while twenty-dollar tricks are — I was going to say they’re a dime a dozen, isn’t that rich? Let’s say that twenty-dollar tricks pay the rent and put food in the tum-tum and rags on the back.

“Sometimes I get one, though. Oh, indeed I do. And I’ll get a big hello and an arm tossed confidently around my shoulder, and I’m gone. I slip right into character. He treats me like a girl, exactly like a girl, and I become the girl he wants me to be. Any of those men could have me for free any time at all. In fact I don’t ask for money. They leave money more often than not, the same way any John would leave money for any whore as a matter of course, whether she asked for it or not.

“It’s so dangerous, all of it. Those heavy male types are just the ones who will beat you up and rob you. I have been lucky. I was robbed at knifepoint once, but that was by a pick-up, not actually a John. And there was a sailor who was set to punch me around, more out of belligerent drunkenness than anything else. I’m afraid he got a bit of a surprise. I was sober and he was not, and the Army had trained me well in hand-to-hand combat and some things one doesn’t forget. I softened him up with a kidney punch and bounced him off a few walls. And I buggered that bastard. A matter of letting the punishment fit the crime. He was always the stud, you know. Always the fucker and never the fuckee. I fucked him in the ass and made the son of a bitch like it. God, he must hate me!”

For Eldon, hustling is important in two ways. First of all, it provides him with a means of seeking out men who will fit his ideal as exemplified by the captain who was his lover. Secondly, it provides him with money, which is valuable not only for purely financial reasons but because it serves as proof of his ability to attract men.

This is not to say that hustling is Eldon’s sole sexual outlet, or even the most important. His sex life on the street — usually a two-block stretch of Christopher Street in Greenwich Village, but occasionally Times Square — constitutes but a part of his total sex life. He has a great many friends, including both effeminate types like himself and more masculine homosexuals. Sometimes he shares an apartment with another queen, usually but not invariably on a platonic basis. (“One gets the urge to try on a different role now and then, you know. Making love to another man who’s also in drag can be thrilling. It lets one feel like a lesbian.”) Occasionally he moves in with a more masculine homosexual for a week or a month or longer. At times, when the mutual emotional attraction of such a relationship is stronger than usual, he and his partner may be monogamous for a certain amount of time. (“But monogamy is hard to stay with. It’s fun as a change. A great place to visit, love, but you couldn’t possibly live there.”)

His hustling activities will vary in frequency. He may go out every night for several weeks, then go for a month without once soliciting a trick.

“I used to think it related to phases of the moon. I’m sure an astrologer could come up with something. I certainly do run in cycles, though. Sometimes I find myself becoming absolutely compulsive, keeping written score of the number of Johns I handle and the money they bring in. And other times I’ll be broke, really broke with a drawer full of bills, and I just can’t manage to get myself up for the scene. It’s strange the way it works out. When I just can’t make it and absolutely have to, I usually take a couple of ups. Bennies. I got the idea from a call girl. A female call girl. She also uses Librium for the same purpose when she’s too depressed to handle Johns. For me it isn’t depression, it’s more a sort of inertia, so ups work better for me than tranks. I don’t know exactly what it is they do for me. Just give me a lot of excess nervous energy, I guess, that I can burn up on the street. They ease the whole hassle of conversation with a John. And that, as you may have guessed, is often the hardest part. I can almost always get up enough enthusiasm to suck a cock, but it’s occasionally very bloody hard to talk to the man who’s attached to it.”

Eldon’s attitude toward hustling, vis-à-vis his social life, has much in common with that of many female prostitutes. Many of his friends also hustle intermittently, and others who do not are aware of this aspect of his life. His attitude — and presumably theirs as well — is that this is something mechanical one does in order to live.

“I’m not temperamentally fit to hold a job,” he explains. “I have worked. I have worked frequently, and perhaps someday I’ll find some sort of work that particularly appeals. So far this hasn’t happened. I’m young. Sometimes I’m broke and sometimes I’m swimming in money, and of the two states I prefer to be swimming in money. I’ve been rich and I’ve been poor and believe me, rich is better. Sophie Tucker. Well, God knows she’s right. But if I have money I spend it all like an idiot, and if I don’t have money I always get by, so it’s not something for me to be hung up about.

“I suppose I’m too self-indulgent to keep a job for any length of time. When I’m enjoying myself I don’t want to go home and go to sleep. It seems ridiculous to sleep not because you want to but so that you’ll be able to get up again at a particular hour. And when I get to sleep late I can’t drag myself out of bed at an impossible hour. I just can’t. And when there’s something to do and I’m cooped up in a store or an office, oh, I’m irresponsible, I know I am. But why not? I only have to please myself. I haven’t got a family to support. If things change eventually and I get interested in something, fine. Meanwhile I’m having fun.”

Nor does the morality of hustling bother him.

“I’m not cheating anyone. Any John who goes with me gets his money’s worth. Oh, let’s face it. Sometimes it’s demeaning. Selling sex. Selling one’s self. But. But I have friends who write advertising copy to urge young ladies to spend good money on an aerosol spray so that their cunts won’t smell like cunts. And urging any number of other people to buy any number of other products which they neither want nor need nor are able to afford. Now that I call immoral. And, interestingly, so do the people who do it. They think of their work as far more whorish than mine.”

The majority of Eldon’s clients are functioning bisexuals, and the majority of contact he has with them involves his performing fellatio upon them or their penetrating him anally.

“A lot of ordinary men go out looking for a girl and wind up settling for a man. This is something very few people realize. And a lot of hustlers don’t realize it themselves, because they simply assume that the Johns try to give this impression so no one will think they’re really gay. That may be true sometimes but not all of the time.

“Sailors, for example. Now sailors are sometimes more likely to be somebody else’s rough trade than my John, but I get them now and then. What happens typically is this. A sailor comes into town after God knows how long on a ship. And he wants to get drunk and have a woman, because the one thing he hasn’t had on that ship is a woman. He may have had a gay thing going and he may not have. Most sailors get into the gay thing now and then, but for a lot of them it’s something that never happens aboard ship. It happens only in port, on liberty. This is another thing that I don’t believe many people realize.

“Well, the sailor is ashore, and he goes around drinking and looking for a girl. He finds the drinks easily enough but the girl is something else again. You know and I know that it’s about as hard to find a girl in New York as it is to find sand in the desert, but that’s if you know where to look. And those poor sailors never know where to look. They go to taxi dance halls and are surprised that the girls won’t go out with them. They spend incredible sums trying to pick up B-girls, who are all but impossible to pick up.

“And they come to the Village. And they go to lesbian bars, my God, it’s unbelievable the way sailors wind up in lesbian bars! Who in hell sends them there? They see a bar overflowing with cunt, and they can’t believe that they won’t make out, and actually they would have a much better chance of fucking the Statue of Liberty.

“So all they get is drunk, and the hours go by, and they have a choice between going back to the ship without scoring or picking up a faggot. Now the only difference between a male mouth and a female mouth is that a male mouth is more apt to know what it’s doing. And the only difference between a male anus and a female anus is that a female anus is more likely to be off limits. I’ve had a sailor tell me, ‘Look, as far as I’m concerned, you’re a girl who’s having her period. That’s how I’m gonna think of you.’

“There are a lot of other men who operate in about the same way. Of course you can’t believe everything they say to you, but you can’t write off everything as a lie, either. Johns have said that they’ll come downtown, and if they can’t find a girl they’ll settle for a boy. Others tell me that there are certain kicks they can get better with a male than with a female.

“It’s common to hear the line that no woman really knows how to give head. I don’t know that this is true. The average hooker blows more than she screws, from what I’ve heard. Practice must make perfect, wouldn’t you think? But I’ve also heard women say that no man can go down on them the way another woman can, and if you stop to think about it, it does stand to reason. You’ve got to be better at something if you know what the process feels like from both sides. It makes sense.

“And I have had men say that they simply cannot find a woman who will let herself be buggered. This I believe because I’ve heard it from too many sources to discount it. One man told me he once had a girl who liked it that way, and in fact she suggested it, introduced him to it and they both loved it. Well, she’s not around anymore, and he’s married to someone else, and he tried to get his wife to do it but she hated it. It hurt her and she wouldn’t learn to loosen up and get past the pain and enjoy it. Maybe she also thought it was dirty. Maybe he thinks it’s dirty and didn’t press the point, in a manner of speaking.

“In any case, she as much as told him he would have to go elsewhere for this, if it was so important to him, and that she didn’t care as long as she didn’t have to know about it. Which seems like a fairly reasonable attitude on her part. So he went to a lot of prostitutes, female prostitutes, and a lot of them wouldn’t go for it at all. I know for a fact that a lot of them won’t. And the few who would, he couldn’t enjoy it because they didn’t like it. It was hard for him to find someone who would do it and when he did he could never bring himself to go back to her because he knew it had been an unpleasant experience for her. And what he wanted wasn’t just to fuck someone in the ass but to do it to someone who would like it.

“So now, when he’s in the mood, he picks up a male hustler. Preferably a queen, because he feels easier with someone who fits naturally into the female role.

“Now it’s easy to find ways in which the story might not be completely true. For example, I have a strong hunch that the ‘girl’ who first taught him to enjoy buggery wasn’t a girl, that it was a fag. If I had to guess one way or the other, that would be my guess. But it could very possibly be that he was telling the truth all the way. It certainly is a possibility.”

Other Johns want something different.

“Some will want to play with me while they bugger me, or while I blow them. Others will want to go down on me, either as an accompaniment or exclusively. Sometimes I have the feeling that this is curiosity, they want to see what it’s like. They’ve been on one end of the act a certain number of times and want to see what the other end is like. I think that kind of curiosity is natural, don’t you?

“One man — not a John, and not really bisexual, you would really have to call him a straight type by any usual definition of the term — he told me that it bothered him that he didn’t really know how a woman felt when she got screwed. He knew he could never know this completely but he wanted to see if he couldn’t get some idea. So he found someone to fuck him anally. He did this several times, because the first time the pain was too much a part of it, but ultimately he learned how to let go and enjoy it. And he didn’t repeat it after that, but he insists he understands something about female sexuality now that he didn’t understand then. He says he thinks it’s made him a better lover. I wouldn’t be surprised if it did.”

Does he enjoy his work?

“I can live with it. Sometimes it’s a trial, but you know I’m not obsessed with it, and unless I’m really in bad financial straits I don’t trick unless I feel like it. There are Johns who are pleasant company and others who are too tedious to be believed. I try to avoid the bores and score with the dolls.”

But under ideal circumstances, does he enjoy the sexual aspects? Or is he, like many female prostitutes, incapable of enjoying commercial sex?

“Oh, of course I enjoy it! Not every last time. No one could. Nobody enjoys any kind of sex every single time. But yes, I can usually enjoy it. I wonder about the people who insist that they don’t, by the way. Don’t you think they perhaps protest too much? Not only the girls but the butch types, they always want you to know that they get nothing out of it.

“I think they’re liars.”

Flip

“A year or so ago I had this old lady who would get very uptight if I was going to hustle my ass. I couldn’t dig this because I’ve never been able to get into this whole jealousy routine. We had quite a few hassles over this, as a matter of fact. I would say, ‘Look, if you see some guy you want to ball, be my guest.’ She couldn’t relate to my attitude. Like she thought if I really dug her I should want to own her. I wasn’t telling her she had to ball anybody. I know a lot of cats who like make their old ladies go out and turn tricks. I never told her to do this, or that she should ball people for free, or anything. Just that she should do her thing and I would do mine.

“But what bugged her wasn’t so much if I didn’t come home and she knew I was with some other chick. Which is it bugged her, but she wouldn’t come on strong about it because she knew better. Knew it wouldn’t be cool, and she was this middle-class girl on the outs with her family and so it was very important to her to be cool, to be hip. Like living near Tompkins Square Park and getting into drugs and living with me and no talk about marriage, all of that was important to her so she would know she was a rebel and she was staying away from the suburb trip that her parents were on, and being cool if I was with another chick was a part of this for her.

“But she couldn’t be completely cool. Like she wanted to be a hundred percent cool but she didn’t know the rules. ‘How can you go with men for money? You’re not queer, how can you go with other men?’ Except that she didn’t say queer, she knew better than to use the word. Gay, she would say. I’ll say words like queer and wop and nigger some of the time, partly because I grew up talking that way, thinking that way, and when it comes natural, I don’t know, I can say nigger in front of black friends of mine and they know how to take it, that it’s just the way I talk, that it’s not a matter of George Wallace or somebody saying nigger...

“‘How can you go with gay fellows?’ She didn’t understand hustling, the changes you go through in your mind so you can be cool about it. That I was able to be completely cool about it and not uptight at all. ‘How can you do it if you hate it, Flip?’ Well, who said I hated it? ‘But if you’re not gay, how can you help hating it?’

“She just didn’t understand. You know, in her mind. Either you’re gay or you’re not. Like I tried to explain that I wouldn’t do it without any money involved, that I had been into that scene once and it wasn’t where I lived, but that I had no objection to it. I said, ‘Look, take a guy who steals. Now in the building we were in there must of been five, six dudes who stole for a living. Certain things weren’t said, but if you lived there you knew what was happening. And there was a friend of ours who did a lot of boosting, stealing from department stores. ‘Take Marty,’ I said. ‘He steals to get money. You can accept that, right?’

“‘I think he’s very foolish,’ she said. ‘One of these days he’ll get caught and he’ll wind up in jail.’

“This is easy for her to say, but Marty at the time is into scag. Heroin. He’s just snorting, but it’s twenty dollars a day, and he’s too freaked to have any kind of a job, so what else is he gonna do but steal? But forget that. What I said was, ‘You think he’s foolish but you can dig why he steals, right?’ She agreed. ‘He steals for the money. Now if Marty did the same boosting from stores for the hell of it, and then threw the shit away afterward instead of selling it, what would you think then? You would think he was crazy, right?’

“She got the point, that certain things make a different kind of sense if you’re doing them for the bread. Marty stole and I hustled, but we both did it for the bread. But getting the point didn’t help, didn’t make things go down right for her. She still had her own hang-ups about the entire scene and they kept on getting in the way. I suppose that was the ultimate reason that we split up, although there are never reasons, there are just ways people gradually work out of each other. But it is difficult to live with a person who is bothered by the way another person lives, by what he does. Because you start questioning yourself. No matter how together your head is, there are times when you start worrying about yourself, and then later on you tend to resent the other person for doing these bad things to your head. Like anytime I felt bad about hustling, or felt confused about hustling, later on I would blame my old lady for making me feel that way.

“You met my current old lady. We been together, I don’t know, couple of months. And the thing with Glory is that you would expect the same kind of shit from her if not more so. I mean a Jewish girl from Long Island, her father’s a very successful radiologist, that whole middle-class Jewish scene. You would think it would be the same thing over again with this heavy rebellion with a thick layer of Great Neck underneath. But night and day, man. Like Glory is absolutely super-cool. I’ll hustle, she’ll hustle, either of us is free to ball other people, the whole thing. We can even talk about it without either of us feeling hassled. The other chick, the best we ever got it to was that we would neither of us bring it up in conversation. Glory and me rap about all of this and nobody gets brought down. Night and day.

“I’m just beginning to get used to it. For the longest time I was always on guard. Like waiting for the other shoe to drop. I couldn’t get rid of the thought that a lot of her cool was a pose and it would eventually come out that she was putting on a lot of this hipness, because I had known girls like her before but not with her background and not without other hang-ups of their own. And then I came to see that there was no pose to it, that she had turned her head around completely. It wasn’t what she was rebelling against. Maybe that was it in the first place but she was past that now, she had worked it out. She was just being real.

“So right now she’s important to me like no other chick ever was, because there’s nothing about her that threatens me. And in it’s own way, that’s a kind of a threat, if you can dig it. Everything is cool right now, we’re just going with things the way they are, but I can already see how out of caring about Glory in a certain way and relating to her in a certain way I could find my own head changing. And I’ll get flashes of the two of us getting out of the city and away from all this garbage. Not only the hustling but the whole way people live here. Garbage and cockroaches and heavy drugs and everybody’s apartment constantly getting ripped off. More and more of our friends tend to talk in terms of getting out of the city and going up to Vermont or out to New Mexico. Getting a place way out in the country and trying to grow your own food and getting it all together that way. I mean like just Glory and myself all by ourselves. Having kids, you know. That whole trip, which is something I would occasionally think about but never seriously.

“The beautiful thing is that we have been able to rap about this and we both are thinking our way along the same lines, but there’s no pressure to do it now. We’re grooving on what we have at the present time, and when something is perfect you want to be careful not to make any sudden changes. Future tripping scares me. Time is just a whole series of nows and you take them one at a time and you stay straight. But one of these nows I think we’ll be ready. Unless things turn around, which they could do, but I don’t think they will, not unless something unreal happens.

“I think about the past sometimes. Glory and I will sit around and get stoned and one of us will talk about the past, just going on and on, and the other one listens. Sometimes I tell her about things that happened to me that I haven’t even thought about in years. And it seems unreal, the whole person I was and the things I was into. Reform school, for example. Not just what went down there but the reason I was there in the first place. I was like totally freaked over cars. I would see a car and I would have to drive it. The reformatory where I was at, I think four out of five of the kids there were for GTA which is grand theft auto, which means stealing a car for the kick of riding around in it. Joy-riding. I can remember the way I used to get. Like you would see a car with the keys in the ignition and something happened inside you, like you got high on it. I remember how it felt but I can’t dig how I could be in that bag. It’s so unreal.

“And I think, suppose Glory and me get out of the city, suppose we go off to the country or to a small town or something. And have a kid or two. And really get into it, and the whole thing is dynamite and it works for us, and like imagine us in say ten years from now. I mean it’s impossible, you can’t really imagine ten years in front. But just supposing. The two of us sitting around and talking about how we used to live on East Fifth Street and stay stoned constantly and peddle our asses on the street. This is what we’re doing now, dig it, but if you look into the future you can see how a time will come when our now is going to look unreal. It really freaks me out, thinking that way.”

At twenty, Flip’s appearance is very much consistent with the image of the New Masculinity. He is tall, about six two or three, with perfectly straight dark brown hair that hangs down a few inches below his shoulders. He wears a full beard which he keeps neatly trimmed. His eyes are a light blue, his gaze penetrating. At certain times his face has a biblical cast to it; he would not seem at all out of place playing an early follower of Christ in a movie, and when he spoke of moving with his girl to the country, one could easily picture him in the role of one of today’s hip homesteaders.

His habitual attire consists of bell-bottom dungarees and an army field jacket. There is little spare flesh on his large frame, but he insists he is fat compared to a year ago.

“I was doing a lot of speed for a while there. I shot crystal a few times but mostly it was a pill thing, dex or meth or bennies — whatever was around. That really takes the weight off you. You don’t sleep and you tend to forget about eating. It doesn’t kill your appetite as much as it puts it out of your mind. I like speed in a lot of ways but it is a very bad drug to stay with for a long period of time. I still do speed once in a while but more as an occasional thing so that it doesn’t move in and take over. And I’ve gained some weight back and am in much better physical shape.”

For several years, drugs have been very much a part of Flip’s life-style. He is less apt to talk of the drug experience as a vehicle for self-realization than are many other members of the youthful drug scene.

“Drugs are to get high. I’ve been getting high for like ten years with one thing or another. Airplane glue. This was the first big thing I remember. Squirting a tube of glue into a bag and sniffing it. We used to do this all the time when I was like ten and eleven and twelve years old. What’s weird is that this is thought of as kid stuff, which it is in that it’s really young kids who are into it, but it’s one of the most dangerous drugs around. It can really fuck up your liver. Nobody knew this at the time. It was just a way to get high. Fifteen cents for a tube of glue and you were beautifully spaced.

“I would try everything at one time or another. Liquor, wine, beer. I don’t dig hard booze much but I still like to get off on beer or wine now and then. Codeine cough syrup. Different kinds of ups and downs, reds and greenies and tranquilizers. Mescaline. Acid. STP. I don’t know how long it’s been since I tripped. I guess it must be close to a year. What happens, all the trips are good at first, and then you’ll have a bummer and no matter how well prepared you are, it’s a freak scene. Really bad. And then there was a point like where every other trip was a bummer, and it wasn’t worth it.

“Cocaine is very nice but you can’t always get it, and too much of the coke nowadays is cut with methedrine which is a dangerous combination. In fact too much of everything is cut with meth. I’ve seen too many people get too hostile and paranoid on that.

“Heroin scared me. I snorted, and the sensation was too much. It was too good. I know people who are into scag in a careful way. Like they use it once a month because nobody gets hooked on anything using it once a month. That’s nice if you can keep your head in that compartment, but not everybody can. And I have just known too many junkies. It is an absolute death trip. You have to get off just to stay even. I’m too much into life to want that kind of scene. I don’t want to turn myself off, turn the world off.

“I told Glory, don’t. The only thing I ever told her don’t. I told her she ought to trip once and I would be with her even though I didn’t want to trip myself any more. I thought that would be worth it for her as an experience, and it was. But heroin, I told her not even once. I told her I made it once, and it was unbelievable, and nobody should fuck with anything that dangerous when there’s that much chance you could love it too much. And she agreed, but she said it was a minor bitch having something like that that you can’t know what it’s like. Which I could relate to. So what we did, we smoked some grass, which makes it easy to get back into a past experience, what it feels like, not just how you remember it. And I went completely into the one heroin experience I had and I described it for her. I couldn’t have done this completely straight but I was back into it myself. And she said afterward that hearing about it the way I described it was enough, that it handled her curiosity and now she could live without it.

“Another reason I didn’t want her to fuck with it was there’s this very close line between what it takes to get you off and what it takes to kill you. So many people have OD’d on the shit. And there was this thing in the paper, a girl who died of an overdose from snorting. This was something you never used to hear of, but there’s all this weird smack coming in from South America that nobody knows how much it’s cut or what with, and you can die from it. As a matter of fact I knew someone pretty well who they found dead with a needle in his arm, and I was really shook.

“Drugs in general I use a lot less than I did a year, two years ago. But I can’t see ever getting to the point where I won’t want to get high a certain amount of the time. I couldn’t see myself not smoking every day, for example. It’s something I do.”

Flip’s introduction to homosexuality took place while he was in a reformatory for stealing a car.

“Before that there were a few of us who used to fool around. It was nothing much. The same kids who would get off together sniffing glue. We would be at somebody’s house and we would jerk off together in front of each other. Or we would have these contests as to who could come first or who could shoot the farthest. It’s funny to think back that the object was to come first, where when you get into sex it’s more the object to be able to go a long time without coming, so that your chick can get off.

“Another thing we did that was a definite gay thing, although we didn’t see it that way, was to jerk each other off, and the object was seeing who could make the other come first. More than that I never did at the time. There was a kid who I knew vaguely who supposedly blew another kid but I never knew for sure if it was true. It was just something that was talked about. And two other kids that I know for a fact one of them tried to get into the other one’s ass, but they couldn’t manage to do it, and they would joke about how they had tried and it never went beyond that.

“Reform school was something completely different. If you were a new kid and a young kid you had absolutely no choice in the matter. It was open your mouth or spread your cheeks, whichever somebody had in mind, and if you didn’t cooperate in a hurry you could get the shit beaten out of you. Some of the guards were into this, too, they would fool around with some of the kids, but for the most part it was the kids themselves. Some of the kids were definitely queer. With others, I guess it was the same as what I’ve heard about a lot of adult prisons, that a con will get completely into the scene while he’s in slam but be completely straight on the outside. The general feeling was if there’s no meat then you eat potatoes and it’s better than starving. There were no girls for sex so you used boys for sex.

“I guess I was fourteen at the time. My fucking mother, with the age I was I could have gotten probation with no trouble. I got probation once before on the same charge and could of got it again, the judge as much as said so, but my mother did this number about how she couldn’t do a thing with me and maybe it would do me good to get sent away. In all the world there is only one person that I hate. There are people I have no use for but only one that I hate, and it’s my mother. I usually won’t talk about her, but Glory sees it that I should get into this more, or else one day I’ll find out that she’s dead and it might shake me on account of not working it out in my head first. Maybe she’s right, but I can’t even handle thinking about that stupid drunken cunt with the drunk bastards she would bring home to live off her, and then letting them send me down, fourteen years old and she lets them put me away...

“As far as being uptight about the queer stuff at the reformatory, I had no trouble getting used to it. All I could see was that I was stuck in that place and these were kids with the same hassles that I had, and the way to make it there was to be cool and fit in. And don’t make waves and don’t piss anybody off.

“The first time I got cornholed I cried like a baby. The second time it hurt like hell but I made up my mind I wasn’t going to cry and I didn’t. The third or fourth time I didn’t particularly enjoy it but I didn’t mind it either, and to my surprise I came. There’s a gland there and pressure on it will make you come even if you’re not excited. Not always but some of the time. It’s a physical thing.

“And by the end of the first week I was getting it both ways, doing one thing or another to kids and having the same things done to me. With a very few exceptions everybody was into this. There were older kids who didn’t want either end of it, and they were tough enough to make it stand up. But the thing is that with all of the sex that was going down, there were only a few kids who were into it for its own sake, who were getting more than sex kicks out of it. These two would be in love with each other, or one young kid would have a big crush on the jock who was punking him, but those were few and far between. The rest of us, we would talk about girls before doing things to each other, and sometimes think about girls while we were doing them.

“So I never worried about being queer or anything.

“The main thing about reformatory is that you learn things there. I consider myself very lucky being that I learned the one thing you’re supposed to learn and which not many kids did, and that was to stay out of jail. I really learned this. Don’t do things that they’ll put you away for. Don’t get caught.

“Now this doesn’t mean it became my religion, because obviously I’ve broken a lot of laws since then. There’s hardly ever a day that I don’t smoke grass, for example, and according to the law they can put you away for that. For that matter, hustling is also illegal. And I’ve boosted things occasionally. Let’s face it, I’ve done a lot of things.

“But I’m cool about it. When I walked out of that reformatory I was not about to hotwire a car and take it for a spin. No way. And I don’t smoke on the steps of the police station, and I never deal any kind of drugs to anybody I haven’t known a long long time. When I see trouble I walk across the street. That’s what they taught me inside.

“The other things I learned are the real education of reform school. It’s really out of sight. They take a kid who has this crazy kid thing for cars that he can’t control and they put him in a place where he learns how to be a criminal. Just from rapping I had a real education. How to rip off stores. How to get into an apartment. How to hustle queers. How to find a fence when you wanted to sell something you stole. How to get stoned on a hundred different things you never heard of before you went to the slam.

“There’s a crazy way that the whole reformatory system makes a kind of weird sense. Like there are these guys who run everything, and they look down and say, ‘Here’s a kid who’s going bad. Here’s a kid who is committing these little crimes, which means he’s going to grow up to be a criminal. Now this kid doesn’t know his ass from his elbow and if we just let him go on trying to be a criminal the poor bastard is going to starve to death. So we’ll send him to reform school, so that he can really learn how to be a criminal. I mean, if the punk’s going to be a crook, the least we can do is teach him how to be a good one.’

“I was inside for two years. Two miserable years, but when I came out it was like I had gone to college. Not that I was all set to be Dillinger and Al Capone rolled into one, because that was never my ambition, I was too set on never being inside again. But that I had all this store of criminal knowledge.”

At sixteen, Flip was released from the reformatory (or escaped — it’s hard to be certain). He came directly to New York and drifted automatically to Times Square.

“I had a crew cut then. And no beard. I only had to shave like once a week at the time so I couldn’t have grown a beard if I wanted to. And at the time I thought hippies were weird. I would see some on the street and I thought they were, I don’t know, crazy.”

He had already decided to make money by hustling homosexuals. His original plan, developed from information gleaned at the reformatory, was to let himself be picked up by homosexuals and demand money at knife point.

“This was supposed to be very easy because the word was that queers were sissies who would just about faint if you waved a fist at them, let alone a blade. And that they couldn’t go to the cops because they were queers. And especially if you were underage.

“I scored within maybe two hours of hitting Times Square. I had a knife on me at the time but I never even took it out of my pocket. The guy who picked me up, Jesus Christ, I can still remember what he looked like. Built like a house. Really a huge dude, he must have weighed two hundred and fifty pounds. As a matter of fact when he came on to me my first thought was that he was a really tough cop and I was in for a bust two hours after I was off the bus. And when he got to talking and offered to take me to his place for dinner I wasn’t really sure if he was queer or not. I figured he had to be, but I also figured there was a chance that he was just a nice guy who was feeling sorry for me because I was on the street without any bread.

“Of course when we got to his place and he gave me a friendly little pat on the ass I gave up that thought.

“We had some drinks and then went to bed. I was a little uptight about him corning me because of the size of him, but it turned out that his dick was the one thing small about him. Really small, as a matter of fact. He commented on this and said for this reason he couldn’t get any satisfaction with a woman. I don’t know if this was true or if it was an excuse he used because he happened to like it with boys. Maybe he was embarrassed with women, or he thought he couldn’t satisfy a woman with anything that small. I don’t know what he was really all about.

“Anyway, he got his kicks, and I was standing around trying to figure out what in hell I was going to do now. I mean, I didn’t feature going up against the cat with a gun, let alone a knife. I figured he would take the knife away from me and feed it to me through my ass. It wasn’t just the size of him but that he seemed like the kind of person who could take care of himself. The type who wouldn’t faint at the sight of a knife.

“So I thought, shit, some dynamite hustler I am. Like I made it with him and I got nothing. And while I’m still thinking this he says it looks as though we never did get around to having dinner, and he doesn’t feel up to going out, he just wants to go to sleep, so here’s a couple of bucks and I should get myself something to eat. And hands me a ten-dollar bill.

“I never wound up pulling the knife on anybody. I carried it for maybe a month after that until one day I lost it somewhere and never bothered getting another one. Because why have all that hassle if you could make money without it? Why take the chance of getting beat up yourself, or maybe hurting somebody badly or even killing them and having all that heat?

“What it is, at least according to what I’ve picked up here and there, is that cats will get into this set that it’s a manly thing to beat up a queer or force him to give you money. Or that you can get out of having sex with them that way. But I didn’t really mind the sex and I didn’t have to prove anything with a knife. And I’m not really into stealing, to taking something off another person. From a big store is different, because it’s not from a person, it’s from some fucking company that is ripping off the public in the first place, so all you’re doing is getting a little of your own back. I’m hip that either way it’s a case of stealing but how it goes down inside your head is a different thing.”

For Flip, hustling was a fairly steady occupation and one which could support him adequately without taking very much of his time. He gravitated in short order to the East Village and began to conform to the general pattern of life there. He let his hair grow, drifted into the drug culture, and gradually became a part of the society in which he was now living.

Almost immediately he began having casual sexual relations with girls.

“At the start I was completely out of it as far as girls were concerned. Remember, there were two big years there when I never saw anything female. And before then it wasn’t just a matter of never having sex with a girl but that I never really talked to a girl. In the sense of rapping at any length.

“I was a little uptight about this. I suppose it would have been very easy at this point to become gay. To just avoid the whole hassle of trying to make out with girls and just turn completely gay. I had this one dude who wanted me to live with him. He had this nice apartment and the bit was that I could live there and he would give me money for clothes and like that. I stayed there a couple of days but I couldn’t quite see it as a steady thing. I didn’t like the feeling that, you know, that he owned me.

“Fortunately for me, the girls around here are more open and easy about sex than other girls. I didn’t have to come on. I could just more or less hang around and be cool, and one afternoon I was rapping this one particular girl, and I was hardly even thinking of her as a girl because to me she was just somebody I knew that I had rapped with now and then. We were smoking and she said it was the kind of high where she really could dig to ball somebody, and would I like to ball her. And I said sure, why not, and we did it. I guess she was about twenty-five. I haven’t seen her in years. I don’t think she had any idea that she was the first girl I ever made it with. I hadn’t said anything to anybody and didn’t say anything to her.

“It was night and day. I had this fear in the back of my mind that I wouldn’t be any good with a girl or that I wouldn’t enjoy it as much as with guys. Even that I wouldn’t enjoy it at all. Oh, wow, like worrying about nothing at all, man! I really dug it to a much greater length than I thought I ever could. Really got completely into it. It made everything else I ever did like black and white, and this was in color. All the difference in the world.

“Ever since that first time I never worried about being queer. And that made me much easier in my mind about hustling, not that I had been uptight previously, but that this took away the only thing that had been bothering me at all.

“Then there was a period of time when I balled what must have been a tremendous number of girls. I would hustle when I needed money but there was usually no sex in it from my point of view. What I mean is that I would prefer not to get excited and particularly not to come, because I wanted to save it for a girl.

“From what I’ve heard, this led to something pretty weird. Put it this way. When I was having sex with a man for money, it didn’t used to matter to me what he wanted to do. Whether he wanted to blow me or the other way around. In the sense of not objecting to either thing that he might want to do, because all of this came naturally to me after two years in slam, so in that sense it didn’t matter. But in another sense, in the sense of what I got out of it, then it would be that I would prefer to be the one who got blown, or the one who did the cornholing, because I got no sexual thrill out of the other side of it while by having a guy blow me or whatever we did, by that I would come, I would have an orgasm, which was pleasurable.

“But once I discovered girls, to put it that way, I preferred to be the one who did the blowing, to put it that way, for the simple reason that I could do it because it wouldn’t get me excited. It was just something you turned your mind off and went and did. Now the usual thing is that a hustler prefers the role that he enjoys, if you can dig it, and I prefer a role that does nothing for me. When I lay it out to people around here like that they can dig what I’m rapping about, but everybody says it’s weird in that for most hustlers it’s the other way around.

“Now my old lady has done a certain amount of hustling. Glory, this is. I didn’t turn her onto it, by the way. Some other dude did. In fact how it started is he more or less told her to go out and come back with ten dollars or he would punch her out. A very hostile cat. She did it and she found out she didn’t mind it, and she’ll do it now and then when we start to run low on bread.

“What she does is she works cars. Say she’ll work the corner of Second Avenue and Eleventh Street, and square cats will pull up to the curb and she’ll get in the car and park around the corner, and she’ll go down on them right there in the car. And she says that’s cool as far as she’s concerned, but she doesn’t like them touching her! Feeling her breasts or her cunt, that she doesn’t care for. Because that sort of thing turns her on and she can’t get turned on when it’s just a matter of turning a trick, so she would rather not be touched like that when it’s doing nothing for her.

“This is off the subject, but it might fit into the book you’re writing. I know a couple of queens, drag queens, that work those same corners. And what they do is give head, which is all anybody ever asks for in the cars, because if you were to get into any actual fucking in a parked car you could have troubles with the cops. And if anybody wants to take them to a room or anything they refuse, so it’s just a case of giving head, and it’s over and done with in a matter of minutes, so the Johns go home thinking they got blown by a girl, when actually they had it from another guy. I bet it would really be like a major mind fuck for a lot of these dudes to realize it. I bet it would really do some heavy things to their heads. And when you think how many times this must happen, and without any of them ever finding out what happened. All these uptight types who think they never had a homosexual experience in their lives, and here they’re treasuring memories of this absolutely out of sight blow job, and they never know they got it off another guy. Really weird, totally unreal.”

I asked Flip how his friends felt generally about his activities as a hustler.

“How people feel in general is that they don’t hassle other people. ‘You do your thing and I’ll do mine.’ That’s a very big thing here. That you don’t criticize somebody else’s thing. You may not dig it but that’s something that is only important in terms of your own head, so you don’t go and lay your trip on somebody else just because his thing is something you can’t relate to.”

“That’s as far as their attitudes are concerned.”

“Right.”

“But how do you think they feel about it?”

“In their own heads? Right. I think for the most part it’s the same as how they feel about a girl who is tricking. That it’s cool. That the money is easy and you aren’t giving anything, and sex in general is a good trip, and if you can get with it and not get negative vibes out of it and make easy bread at it, why not?”

“And you would say that’s the general feeling?”

“I would say it’s a general feeling. I don’t think there’s any one general feeling about most things. It’s like one person will be on a strict macrobiotic diet, nothing but brown rice, and another person will be on a high protein thing, and each one will be completely into his own approach but each one at the same time will respect what the other one is doing as something worthwhile.

“Now in terms of sex, there are a lot of different personal feelings. There are girls I know who are completely into women’s lib to the extent that they think it is morally wrong for a woman to ball a man because of politics, sexual politics. Now how do I relate to that? I think they’re out of their fucking heads, to tell you the truth, but at the same time I can dig that they’re going through some certain kinds of necessary changes. Like what they’re into is insane, but it’s very sane for them to be into this particular insanity at this particular time in terms of what it will do for their heads to be there. I don’t know if you can dig that, if I’m finding the right words to put it into, but maybe you can see what I mean.”

“Yes, I think so.”

“There are a lot of people who feel for themselves that sex has to be part of a love trip. That you can’t just fuck a cunt but that you have to fuck the whole person, and if you don’t have the proper feeling for the person it’s immoral to ball them. I’m not into that but I can dig it, and people who are into it will not necessarily condemn people who aren’t. Almost everybody has the feeling that other people’s scenes may be right for them as long as nobody gets wrecked by it. You would condemn a person who was violent, for example. You will now and then hear some asshole rapping that if violence is somebody’s thing they’re entitled to it, that if some dude is into rape then it’s good for his head to go around raping chicks, but this is bullshit and the person saying it generally knows it’s bullshit. Anything that doesn’t hurt anybody, that doesn’t fuck anybody up, is cool. But after that there’s a line drawn.”

Does it bother him that Glory occasionally turns tricks?

“That she’s balling somebody? No. I honestly don’t care who she balls. If she wants to ball for money, fine. As long as it doesn’t bother her why should it bother me? I’m not into jealousy. And if she wants to ball somebody because he turns her on, also fine. The typical married person, I can’t understand him. He worries that his wife wants to ball someone and that she might actually do something about it. What in hell does he want? He’s supposed to love this woman. Does he want her to take this desire and put a lid on it? To not do something that she wants to do? And is this shit supposed to be love?

“No way.

“Like a few nights ago this cat from next door was over, and the three of us were sitting around smoking and drinking wine, and you could pick up heavy vibrations between this cat and Glory. Neither of us knew him very well but we dug him as a person. I wanted to give them a chance to work it out but I didn’t know him well enough to say it right out front, so I said I had to see a guy over on St. Mark’s Place and I would be back in a couple of hours. And they made it while I was gone, which I would of been disappointed if they didn’t since I didn’t have to meet anybody and what I did was spend an hour and a half walking around doing nothing. But they made it, and he had split by the time I got back, and Glory and I rapped about it and she said how she dug it, and maybe she would ball him again sometime but she was in no big rush, and then as it happened we smoked some more and went to bed, and she said all he really did was make her want me more than ever.

“Sometimes Glory likes to make it with girls. I dig watching that. It’s something I happen to dig. A couple of girls eating each other, playing with each other. It’s pretty to watch. Sometimes it’s exciting but sometimes all it is is pretty and tender and I don’t want to do anything but watch and groove on it.

“When Glory goes out and works cars over on Second Avenue, the only thing that bothers me is worrying about her safety. That she could get busted, which has never happened yet but it’s possible. But mostly that somebody could be violent toward her. That worries me, because she’s small and couldn’t protect herself. But if you think about it, considering the neighborhood, she’s probably safer in some square’s car than walking down the street.

“That’s the one thing that bothers me and the one thing that will make us split from this scene sooner or later. There are so many beautiful people around here but there are also so many people who are out of their fucking heads. We’ve been lucky so far. The place gets ripped off by junkies looking for something to steal. That happens regularly but never when anybody’s home, and since there’s nothing that we own that anybody could possibly sell, all it really is is a nuisance. Oh, maybe somebody steals a few dollars’ worth of grass but what else do we have? That’s the thing, you can’t live in this neighborhood and figure on owning anything, because sooner or later it gets stolen.

“And once some speed freak tried to start up with me, but I punched him out. I got into the habit of carrying this flashlight battery in my pocket. When I lose one I spend thirty-nine cents and get another one. Put it in your fist and when you hit somebody it’s the same as if you were wearing brass knuckles, and it’s perfectly legal, no cop ever arrested anybody for having a flashlight battery in his pocket. I’ve been carrying one around for a couple of years and only once did I ever take a punch at anybody, and that includes all the queers I’ve been with. As violent as this neighborhood can get, that’s as close as the violence ever came to either of us.”

About four months later, I ran into Flip on Third Avenue in the Sixties. He looked just as he had when I had seen him last. We talked briefly on the street, and I suggested we stop somewhere for a cup of coffee.

“Come up to my place, man.”

I said I had an appointment in the area and didn’t want to go all the way down to the East Village.

“No East Village. You didn’t know I moved? I got a place a couple blocks from here. Come on.”

We walked a few blocks, then turned into a new apartment building with canopy, doorman, and plush lobby. He grinned at the expression on my face. “It’s no hype, Jack. This is where I’m at.”

“And Glory?”

“We’re still an entry. She’s upstairs, she’ll be surprised to see you.”

“Did you come into money or something?”

“Just a new hustle.”

The apartment was small but comfortable. It was nicely furnished. Glory was sitting on a convertible sofa listening to soft rock on an elaborate stereo rig. The apartment rental, I learned, was just over three hundred dollars a month.

“We got so we had had it with the neighborhood,” Flip explained. “Quite a change, isn’t it? What happened was we found we were spending more and more of our time just being alone with each other. That we were more and more often getting bugged when other people dropped by. And that we weren’t spending any time hanging around the street. To hustle, but not to hang around and rap with people. So we thought, shit, if we’re going to spend a lot of time in a place, why not make it comfortable? And you couldn’t make the other place comfortable. You couldn’t even have a comfortable place in that neighborhood.”

“But the East Sixties?”

“We figured, do something, why not do it all the way? We were talking about getting out of the city but we realized we’re not ready for that yet. Maybe someday but not yet. So we found this place, and the rent’s a bitch, no question, all this money for what amounts to one room, where we had three rooms before for $62.50 a month.”

“But bread isn’t a problem,” Glory said.

“Yeah, we found a new hustle.”

“Show him the ad, baby.”

Flip handed me a copy of Screw with one of the personal ads circled in magic marker.

I read:

“Beautiful young hippie couple, 19 and 20, will swing with couples or singles for bread.”

“That’s all there is to it,” he explained. “Easiest thing in the world. The first ad said that we were available separately or together. We got so many calls after that that I took that line out because we had enough business without it. So we only hustle as a couple.”

“Which we really dig,” Glory said.

“Which we really dig. Also it got rid of my one worry, which was that somebody could turn violent to Glory and I wouldn’t be able to help her, but this way we’re always together. And it’s not walking streets and working cars for ten dollars at a time. The price is a bill and that’s for all night if they want because we won’t take more than one gig a night. I don’t think there’s been a week we haven’t made five bills. And with no taxes to pay. So you see what I mean when I say bread is no problem.”

I asked what kind of clients they were getting.

“About sixty percent single men. I mean single in that they come alone. Sometimes they want to get involved with both of us. Sometimes they want to watch me with Glory and then ball her.”

“They all have different things,” Glory said.

“Maybe twenty, twenty-five percent couples. Married couples, I suppose. Some of them not too much older than we are but most of them a lot older. In their forties and fifties. One time it was an older couple who had been swinging, oh, for years. With other couples who were more or less their own age. And they had been trying to swing with a really young couple but couldn’t find one willing, and a hundred dollars to them was like a dollar to us. Other times it’s couples who want to get into swinging but are nervous about it, and if they’re paying they can back out at anytime.”

“We also get some single women,” Glory said.

“Right, and that surprised me. I didn’t think it would happen. Not that often. I wouldn’t know if they’re married or single.”

“One of them said she was married.”

“Yeah, but you never know. The thing is, Jack, we’re into a very good thing. And it’s not just that it really pays but that we are really getting into it. With the two of us together, it really doesn’t feel like hustling. It’s a thing we do together and really get involved in and then have it to share afterward. I suppose eventually there will be a lot of other couples getting into the same hustle, but for the time being we have so much action we can’t even start to handle it all. The phone’s turned off right now, for example. Otherwise it would be like ringing constantly. Of course everybody who calls is ready to come up with a hundred bucks, but enough of them are so that we have the phone turned off most of the time.”

“And we’re saving money,” Glory said.

“Saving a lot of money. Isn’t that unreal? But we want to have some money set aside in case we need it. In case we decide to take time off and have a kid, or something.

Glory beamed.

Greg

“Most of my friends — my straight friends and my gay friends as well, they have no idea that I hustle guys for money. This is a part of my life that I keep secret. I would have to admit that one reason for this, one definite reason for it, is that I am ashamed of it. Ashamed of it to a certain extent. Not so ashamed of it that I don’t do it, but to the extent that I don’t want people I know socially to know about it. But it’s not just that I feel that what I do is necessarily bad or degrading. I feel that way part of the time but other times I have different feelings about it.

“But the subject of hustlers will come up in conversations. Particularly with gay friends, because naturally people who are gay themselves are more likely to know about the scene and more likely to talk about it. But if I’m with people who are straight and we pass some very obvious hustler on the street or if somebody is talking about Midnight Cowboy the subject may come up.

“The average person, whether he’s straight or gay, is inclined to be very contemptuous of the hustler. My gay friends always say that they would never pick up a boy on the street and can’t understand why anyone else would. I don’t know if this is true or not. I can see where they would say so in any case, because otherwise it sounds as though they had to pick up a hustler because they couldn’t make it in any other way. And some of them do pay for their sex in another way. They’ll connect with somebody at a bar, and it’s understood by both parties that they’ll pay for drinks and dinner, that they’ll be the one to give expensive presents and so on. It’s like a man who sets a girl up in an apartment and she costs him quite a bit of money, but he doesn’t feel that he’s literally paying for sex and she doesn’t feel like a whore.

“To get back to the subject of how other people think about hustlers, the thing is that they often think it’s a way for a guy to have gay sex without admitting to himself that he’s gay. And they also think that it’s an indication of a terrible weakness to be a hustler. Just as a lot of straight types think it’s an indication of a weakness to be gay. I’m talking about some of the hipper straights, incidentally. The square straights think only completely gay people have homosexual desires. The ones I’m talking about tend to think that yes, everybody has a certain amount of homosexual desire, but that you ought to be able to rise above this...

“What lots of people don’t realize is that for some guys it’s almost impossible not to hustle, the same as it’s almost impossible not to start having sexual relations, and this is because they happen to be the physical type that really turns on homosexuals. A man may pride himself in never having had a homosexual experience, not once ever, and it may very well be that nobody ever asked him, for Christ’s sake. It’s like a virgin priding herself on never giving into temptation, and what it comes down to is that nobody ever made a pass at her, so where was the temptation to give into?

“I know it sounds very dramatic to say I never had a chance. It sounds like I’m saying that here I am, this fantastic sex symbol that every faggot drools over the minute he looks at me. Well, no matter how it sounds, that’s about what it comes down to. It isn’t just that it’s a matter of being good-looking. There are many very good-looking men who are of a type that they may never have homosexuals coming on to them, and there are others who are the type that really appeal to homosexuals. With my particular face and my particular build I was always attractive to them.

“When this happens, you do one of two things. Either you try it or you turn completely in the other direction. There are certain straight men who have a really violent hatred for homosexuals. I think it’s common knowledge that they do this because they’re fighting something in themselves. They may or may not be aware of it, but that’s why they have this hatred.

“Now I would bet that most of the time these are men who are of the type I’m speaking of that they’re very attractive to homosexuals and have been getting constantly propositioned in one way or another over the years. And that bothers them, not only because they have to wonder if these queers know something, you know, and also because it would be very aggravating to anyone to get constantly solicited to do something that’s distasteful to you. A man who doesn’t have this problem may say that he doesn’t mind faggots because they don’t bother him and he doesn’t bother them. But when it’s a case of faggots bothering him all the time, that’s something else, and either he’s going to go along with it or he’s going to want to beat the shit out of anybody who makes a grab for his cock.

“In my case I had this happening all the time. I’m talking from the time I was fourteen, fifteen years old. I would have older guys trying to get to me. I would be on the subway or at a movie or anything and a guy would put his hand on my leg. So I would change my seat or something. I don’t want to make it sound like this was something that happened every single time I left the house. That I couldn’t go around the corner for a quart of milk without getting cruised. But it was a very frequent thing.

“I was also attractive to girls. This is crazy, sitting here and talking about how fucking beautiful and irresistible I am. Like if I were to read this in a book I would say to myself, Now who in the hell does this schmuck think he is that he’s so gorgeous. But I was attractive to girls. I still am. Let’s put it where it’s at. I’m a person that other people consider attractive. Physically attractive. I don’t know if many people like me so much as a person but sexually I tend to turn people on.

“With girls, though, I was always very shy. Well, for that matter I was always shy with everybody. I was sort of a loner in school. I was by myself most of the time, I never had any close friends. With girls I was shy to the point that I hardly ever had a date. They might think I was good looking but I never did anything about it.

“The first sex I had was with a woman. An older woman. As a matter of fact she had a kid two years behind me in school. I knew him to say hello to. So she was old enough to be my mother, this woman, although my own mother was much older than she was. This was when I was fifteen and she must of been I would say between thirty-five and forty, and maybe she was younger because she had a kid thirteen which she could have been eighteen or nineteen when she had him, so she could have been in her early thirties, whereas my mother at the time was almost fifty.

“What happened was that she liked my looks and made a regular play for me. I don’t know whether it was just me or if she had a regular thing for young boys. Were you saying you wrote a book on the subject?”

I said that I had written The Mrs. Robinson Syndrome which dealt with relationships between older women and boys or young men.

“You could of used me for that one. She was on my paper route and whenever I went there to collect she would talk and smile and everything, or give me a glass of milk. She always tipped me a quarter or so. On the entire fucking route I had three customers who tipped. Of course what she was doing was coming onto me, but I never thought. I mean, you know, she was somebody’s mother. Guys would have fantasies of getting laid this way and there were other women on the route, younger ones, that I would have these thoughts about, but not her.

“Finally one day she has me in the kitchen and she’s feeding me milk and cookies, and the next thing I know is I turn around and she is absolutely stark naked. Not a thing on. And huge tits.

“Well, she came over and stuck them in my face and started kissing and hugging me and took me to bed. I went to be with her once a week for I guess four months. I had a summer job in the mountains so I didn’t see her, and when I got back to town she was gone. They moved away, I never found out where. And I really wanted to see her when I got back. All these stories about how you constantly get laid working in the mountains. The older guys got a lot, but I got nothing that summer, and then I came back all ready for her and she wasn’t around.

“The whole thing was unreal because I would still see this kid around school and we would nod at each other, and every Tuesday I’m fucking his mother. Although actually we never fucked, I never once got inside of her. She was afraid of getting pregnant, or that’s what she said she was, but I don’t know whether she was telling the truth or not. What we did was eat each other. She would go down on me first always. She said that was so I would be relaxed and I would take my time with her. Then it would be her turn and she really took control, told me exactly what to do. How long to spend on her breasts and then what to do downstairs. And giving directions all the time until she got her gun. Then I would generally come again, because I would get excited doing her, and then I would put my clothes on and go home.

“Meanwhile I was getting passes made at me by homosexuals, as I said, but I guess I didn’t take them too seriously. I just thought of it as something annoying that I wasn’t interested in.

“Her leaving the neighborhood made a difference. I think I probably would have gotten into the gay thing sooner or later anyway, but I think it made a difference that I didn’t have that once a week to look forward to.

“The first time I ever went with a guy, I was at a movie theater and I went to the john. I think this guy followed me into the john. Well, I took one look at him and I knew what was coming. You can’t always tell but there are some guys who are obvious about it. He looked gay to begin with and there was the way he was looking at me.

“I was washing my hands and he came over and started a conversation. Something about the movie, I don’t know what. Now what I would usually do was just ignore the guy or give him a look or something. Some guys are more persistent than others and you have to tell them to beat it or you’ll call a cop, but most of them, once they know you’re not interested, they cool it. For one thing they don’t want to get into trouble. See, the thing is, when a guy is of a certain appearance, it’s not only that they’re attracted but also that they figure he’s gay.

“In this case for some reason or other I said something, agreed that it was a nice picture, I don’t know what. Then he said something about the actress, that she really looked sexy and he bet it would be fun to fuck her. This was for my benefit. This guy, I don’t think he would have fucked her unless he could have used somebody else’s cock. Oh, that’s not fair, he could have been acey-deucey. You never know.

“Then what else did he say? Something about how I must get a lot of girls, the way I looked. I don’t know what I said. I was getting a funny feeling. I wasn’t getting a hard-on or anything like that. A sort of jittery feeling. You know how you get when you drink too many cups of coffee? It was that kind of feeling.

“He went into this rap about how a young guy couldn’t always find a girl who was willing to do it, and how with girls you had to worry about catching a disease or getting her pregnant. ‘But a good-looking young man like you can always find somebody to take care of it for him,’ he said.

“I said, ‘Look, I know what you’re leading up to and I don’t think I’m interested.’

“‘You mean you can get a girl anytime you’re in the mood?’ he said.

“I said no, not always, which was putting it mildly because I was getting a lot of nothing at the time.

“‘I could make you come,’ he said.

“I told him if I wanted to come I could jerk off.

“‘But it’s not the same thing,’ he said.

“I don’t remember what I said. Then he asked me how I could know what I was talking about if I never tried it. And it came out in conversation that I had tried it to the extent that I had been getting a blow job off this woman. He said most men liked that better than actually fucking. He asked me which I liked better. Now I didn’t want to tell him that I never actually fucked a girl so I said I preferred fucking, but I did admit that a blow job was good and that it was better than jacking off. So he told me he wanted to blow me, and that he would do it better than a woman could, and what was the difference whether it was a man or a woman that did it, since either way all it was was a mouth, so what the hell difference did it make?

“The thing is, I knew why he was saying all this. He was saying it because he was trying to talk me into letting him go down on me. But even so there was a lot of sense in what he was saying. It made sense to me. I could remember the way I felt when she blew me, the woman, and that was always what I used to picture in my mind when I jacked off. Not necessarily that it was her, that particular woman, but that a girl was going down on me. Maybe a girl in school that I particularly liked, but what I would remember was the sensation of having her do it to me.

“So I more or less let him talk me into it. The conversation would stop whenever anyone walked into the men’s room and start after they left. He told me I didn’t have to do anything, that he could come just from doing me. And he offered to give me money. I have to admit that it wasn’t the money that made me go along with it. I would have let him do it anyway. He said he would give me three dollars. I don’t know why that amount but that was what he said.

“By this time I was excited by the conversation. Sexually excited. And I think I had the thought that by taking the money he wouldn’t think I was queer myself. I’m not positive whether I had that thought at the time or whether it was something that went through my mind later in connection with that particular incident, in thinking about it afterward.

“We went into one of the toilet stalls and he got down on his knees and did it. I wouldn’t say that he was better than the woman but he was good at it and I came. This was the first sex I had since masturbation in months, so it was very enjoyable for me. He asked me if I would like to blow him but I said definitely not and he didn’t seem upset or disappointed or anything. He left and went back to his seat but I didn’t watch the rest of the picture. I wanted to get out of there and be by myself.

“It’s hard to remember how I felt about it. Whether or not I felt bad about it. There was nobody I could go and talk to about it.

“One thing I felt was that he must have known something by looking at me. The same way I knew right away that he was queer, he must have known right away that I would enjoy him blowing me. And when I got the same reaction later on, with other fags, I would figure they could tell the same as he could.

“Now there’s a certain point where this becomes true. They may first start coming on that way because you’re the type that attracts them, but when you yourself are aware of it you act differently. You get sensitive about it, and you notice when a man is eying you, and you have to react in a certain way. And this is even greater when you’ve already done something. Thinking back on my own experience, I know I acted differently after I had been with this man the first time. Because I would not only be noticing that a guy was coming on to me, but I would also be deciding in my mind whether or not I was interested, which was something that hadn’t happened before because I never really gave any thought to going through with something like that.

“Did I think of myself as being queer? I guess I must of worried about it some of the time...

“Anyway, my first gay experience was hustling in that I got paid for it, I took money for it. So what happened after that was that when I wanted a blow job, what I would do was go and hustle. I don’t think it was so much that I wanted to take money to prove I was only doing it for the money. I don’t think I ever told myself that. I was doing it for the sex. Maybe I wanted other men to think I was doing it for the money. For my own part I knew better.

“The thing is, hustling was the only way I knew of operating on the gay scene. I didn’t know where else to go. I never thought in terms of finding someone my own age who was gay. Also I was afraid that if I just met somebody not in the hustling scene it would be expected that I would also blow him, which I didn’t want to do.

“So I began coming down to Times Square fairly regularly. I suppose a couple of times a month. Well, before long it was more often than that. Now I did not always take money. Almost always. But not always. Most of the time it wasn’t a matter of having to ask for it. Just being on Times Square they tend to assume that’s what you want, and if they approach you and you just take your time thinking it over, they generally offer you some money. Usually five or ten dollars. It depends on a lot of things.

“As to how I got into hustling, that’s the extent of it. You could say that I always had a choice, that I could have told that guy to fuck off and said the same thing to everybody else who asked. And the chances are that if I met the same guy a day earlier or a day later I would have been in a different frame of mind and nothing would have happened. But sooner or later the right guy would have made the right approach at the right time, so in that sense you could say that I really didn’t have any choice at all in that it was just going to happen sooner or later.

“That’s how I got into it. As to how come I stayed with it, how come I’m into it now, that’s something else again, but as to how I got into it there was nothing I could do about it because it was something that couldn’t help happen.”

Greg does not exaggerate when he speaks of his good looks. His physical beauty is undeniable, and it is of a difficult to define type which is undeniably attractive to homosexuals. He is twenty-two, slim, dark complected. His face is not particularly expressive, and remains much the same handsome mask whatever the tone of his conversation.

I suspect his theory that his looks made homosexual experience inevitable is largely true. It is a rationalization one encounters with some degree of frequency, but this does not entirely invalidate it. While it is certainly not valid to say that those men who never have homosexual experiences are those men who are never asked, it seems logical to assume that there is a correlation between one’s appeal to members of the same sex and one’s propensity to accept a homosexual solicitation.

Greg emphasized several times that his relations with the older woman and their abrupt termination had a good deal to do with his accepting the man’s overtures. It is interesting to note the striking similarities between sex with the woman and with the man. In both instances his partner was substantially older, there was no extra-sexual relationship, and the sex act was oral in nature. On the one hand he felt it was normal and desirable to accept and enjoy relations with the woman. Then, when the possibility of relations with the man presented itself, the points of similarity were such as to help bridge the gap and make this new experience similarly acceptable and similarly enjoyable.

In a sense, one could argue that there was less of a step required between his relationship with the woman and his relations with the man than there would have been for him to seek out and seduce a girl his own age.

Up to his graduation from high school, Greg had no homosexual contacts other than Times Square pick-ups. Almost invariably cash changed hands, and almost invariably the sex act was performed quickly, in a cheap room, in a lavatory, in the darkened balcony of a movie theater.

Shortly before graduation he began dating a girl.

“She really liked me. She was in my class and we had known each other for years, but we started dating and we liked each other a lot. We would make out together a little more every time we got together, and before very long we were giving each other hand jobs. She had done this with other guys she dated. She didn’t actually come out and say so, but when I took her hand and put it on me she knew right away what she was supposed to do.

“Ultimately I screwed her. She wasn’t a virgin, which I guess surprised me. I think it bothered me, too. I don’t know why.

“I enjoyed sex with her very much. I didn’t like having to use a rubber, but otherwise.

“When I used to think about hustling, I always said to myself that this is just something I’m doing because I can’t have sex with a girl. Not that I was really trying very hard to get a girl all this time. But I took it for granted that once I had a girl that I could have regular sex with then I wouldn’t make the Times Square scene because I would have no reason to.

“Then when we were in the hand job stage I found myself going down there now and then regardless, but I would say to myself that a hand job was not the same. And then even when I was screwing her I would find myself doing this. I would say to myself that I just wanted to catch a movie, and I would sit there in the theater thinking to myself that I’ll go right home afterward, but most of the time I would wind up scoring.

“Part of it was I’m sure the money. You know, high school. Five or ten bucks a week is a big difference at that age. I would even tell myself that I was making money hustling that I could spend on my girl. Not that I ever told her or anyone else how I got the money.

“But here I was screwing her and still going with queers, and it came to me that I must like it in a particular way or I wouldn’t continue to do it. I couldn’t say that I had to do it for sexual release because that wasn’t true. I did say that it was because I liked to be blown and she never did that to me, but if that was what I wanted I could have said it to her and taught her how to do it. At least I could have tried to do this to get her to blow me, but I never even hinted at it, and she never thought of it by herself. As a matter of fact it probably would have turned me off if she did it all by herself. It would have bothered me that she would think to do this. I was thinking to myself that I would ultimately marry this girl, and I had feelings that for a girl to blow a guy, it was wonderful, but it was also something a decent girl wouldn’t do. I might have wanted a girl to blow me after we were married, or even before, but if she just went ahead and did it on her own initiative it would be like saying that someone had taught her to do this before, and it even bothered me that she had been screwed by other guys and would have bothered me more to know some other guy taught her how to suck him off.

“What it came to was that finally I admitted to myself that I liked it. The sex part, having sex with a man. Not that I liked it when there was nothing else available but that I just plain liked it. Not that I liked it better than sex with a girl necessarily. But that there was something about it that I definitely liked for its own sake and that it made me keep coming back to it

“The fact that I knew this about myself gradually fucked things up with the girl. Not a matter of ‘Hello, I can’t see you anymore because I’m queer.’ But in the way I saw myself. I don’t know how to explain it, but I just know that we gradually broke up because of my attitude, although it happened as just one of those things, that we argued about some stupid thing and broke up.

“It was either right before or right after the breakup that I finally went down on another man. You would think I would know, whether it was before or after because of it being likely that the two were related, but I can’t remember which it was. Or maybe we were in the process of breaking up, because there was a period of time between starting to have stupid fights and not seeing each other anymore.

“What happened was that this guy picked me up and asked me if I’d like to have a couple drinks. By this time I was old enough to get served in a bar. I was eighteen, which is how old you have to be. The place we went wasn’t a gay bar. It was near Times Square, just a place to get some drinks. Then we went to his apartment.

“It was a nice place, and he was a pretty nice guy. I guess he was thirty or thirty-five. Most of the time when you hustle Times Square you don’t spend any time with your pick-ups. You hardly ever have any conversation. The whole thing is get it over with as fast as possible, and one guy pretends the other is just a cock while the other guy is busy pretending you’re just a mouth.

“With this guy, he was pleasant to be with, and also the drinks relaxed me. I wasn’t used to drinks and I wasn’t falling down drunk by any means but I was very loose and easy about things. We both got undressed and went to bed. Usually you just open your pants but we got our clothes off and got into bed together.

“He didn’t even touch my cock at the beginning. Instead he started making love to me, stroking me all over my body and whispering how beautiful I was. It was common to get lots of comments on how attractive I was, the usual shit, but this was different, it was a case of him really making love to me the way a man makes love to a woman or a woman to a man, and this was new to me. He kissed me on the body, the chest and the legs and all, which felt funny at first. Something about it bothered me but something else said to let go and relax and just go with it, and I did.

“Finally he went down on me and it was really great.

“Afterward I got up to go but he said there was no rush and I should stay where I was, he would make us something to eat and we could have a couple of beers. He made omelets and we ate them in the bedroom and drank some beer.

“We talked a lot about things. Not particularly about sex things. Eventually he said that by just being blown I was missing half the fun. I thought he meant that he wanted me to fuck him and I said I would do that if he wanted but I didn’t really dig it that much and a lot of the time I had trouble staying hard long enough to get it in, which was the truth. But he said that anal sex was banal sex, that was the phrase he used, and it was also the first time I heard the word banal anyway. He said he meant I missed the fun of blowing someone.

“‘You must wonder what it’s like to do it,’ he said.

“Well, of course this was true. I did wonder what they got out of it. How could you help but wonder?

“‘Why don’t you try it?’ he said. ‘You can stop if you want to. Obviously it won’t kill you to have a penis in your mouth. It won’t make you any different. And if it doesn’t jibe with your image of yourself, you can keep it as much a secret as you want. You don’t have to worry that everybody who sees you walking down the street will know at a glance that you like to suck.’

“By talking that way he was taking it for granted that I wanted to try it and that I would like it.

“I said, ‘I probably wouldn’t even know what to do, how to do it.’

“He said, ‘Oh, come now. Think of all the times you’ve had it done to you. You know what feels good when it’s done to you. Just do that to me. Pretend it’s your own cock, silly.’

“So I did it. I liked it. I didn’t get excited doing it but there was something I liked about it. I liked the fact that he was enjoying it. And I liked, oh, the act itself. Having it in my mouth.

“It didn’t even bother me afterward. That I liked it. That I was a cocksucker, because that was the word that kept going through my mind, cocksucker, cocksucker. But to tell you the truth what I felt was relief. A big wave of relief as though I finally went and did something that I had had to do for a long time. Like I finally knew what I was and I could live with it.

“A funny thing, he wouldn’t believe that I hadn’t done it before. After I did it, I mean. He wouldn’t believe that it was the first time for me.

“‘You seem to have a natural talent for this sort of thing,’ he said. ‘It would have been a shame to let such a God-given talent go to waste.’

“I figured he was probably right.”

Not long after having performed fellatio upon a man for the first time, Greg began to have homosexual experiences that were not related to hustling. He began leading what amounted to a double life. On some evenings he would hustle on Times Square, only permitting clients to fellate him. At other times he would go to a gay bar he had heard about, where he would let himself be picked up by someone who appealed to him. The two would engage in mutual fellatio and Greg would wind up staying the night at his partner’s apartment.

He kept both worlds strictly separate. His Johns were told (if they asked) that he only had homosexual relations for money and that he never took an active role. His chosen sex partners were never told of his hustling career. And the girls whom he began to date were never told of either of his homosexual life-styles.

Although there are obvious differences between his hustling and his noncommercial sex, differences in terms of the acts performed and his attitude toward his partners, there are also similarities worth noting. The men who pick him up buy the drinks, pay for taxis, and take him to their apartments rather than returning with him to his own place.

With some of these pick-ups Greg has established friendships of considerable duration, but he has never had a steady love-affair with any of them. He did live with one for a period of a few weeks, but only because he was in the process of finding an apartment of his own.

“I don’t fall in love. I will like certain guys very much, and I may enjoy sex with them very much, but I don’t love them in the sense of not wanting to have sex with anyone but them, or even of wanting to live with them. Some people say this is immature, or that there’s still something in me that holds me back from that kind of thing. Like I won’t admit I’m enough of a faggot to love another man. Well, maybe they’re right and maybe they’re not. But there are plenty of guys like me who just want their sex when they want it and with whoever they want it with, and they don’t want to get involved. Maybe I’ll change but I don’t think so. I could see myself living with a girl, maybe even getting married to a girl, but I couldn’t see myself falling in love with another guy, although I suppose I could turn out to be mistaken about that. There was a time when I couldn’t see myself, you know, going down on a guy.”

Why does he go on hustling?

“The money is part of it, man. I’m always broke. Clothes, everything. Somehow or other I’m always broke and the money always comes in handy.”

But he can make good money about as easily as a model, and does earn a decent living that way. Isn’t it possible that he derives some essential satisfaction from hustling? Some sort of gratification that is unavailable to him in any other way?

“Yeah, I suppose. Oh, shit, there’s no question about it. The only thing is that it’s such a childish thing, you don’t like to admit it.

“It’s a particular feeling, when you have this man who will actually want to pay money for the privilege of sucking your cock. It’s saying to you over and over that you’re beautiful, that you’re worthwhile, that you’re desirable. And I guess I have to have this, because otherwise it’s ridiculous to go through with it. The pleasure, a situation like that, you have an orgasm but it’s no pleasure compared to being with a person you like in a comfortable bed in a clean place. I mean, getting blown by some creep in a toilet, that isn’t pleasure.

“I guess it’s a matter of having a part of your brain that thinks you’re basically a worthless shit, and you need to keep proving you’re not.”

Content

John Warren Wells
The Male Hustler

Introduction

Alan

Brendan

Cary

Derek

Eldon

Flip

Greg