Male Sex Work and Society Read Online Free PDF Page A

men effectively overwhelmed the old effeminate style of streetwalking, joining the soldier prostitute strolls and pushing the remaining fairy prostitutes to more marginalized locations. This transition, which has been identified as occurring in New York City in 1932, marks the final passing of widespread straight cruising of fairy men. Although fairy prostitutes continued to exist, and although some straight men even cruised the new generation of young but “normal” youth, gay men now dominated the client base for the first time.
    Despite their willingness to have sex with men, for some men, ideas concerning gay identity made certain acts more acceptable than others. Most “normally identified” working-class men and adolescents would only take “insertive” roles lest they be seen (and start to see themselves) as “fairies.” Although some working-class youth were willing to submit to “feminizing” sexual acts (e.g., being sodomized) in the late Victorian period, as gay identity became more accepted, the sexual encounters involved nothing more than being orally or manually stimulated by the gay man, or perhaps mutual masturbation at the most. The new restrictions on sexual behavior were not always happily welcomed by clients, and one gay man who cruised both young working-class men and soldiers during the 1920s complained that “those normal young men who request for themselves this form of amusement [oral sex] never offer it in return” (Ackerly, 1968, p. 130). If the rise of gay culture put limits on what most straight men were willing to do, however, it also led queer-identified men to sell sex to each other for the first time. This pattern represented only a small minority, however, and the men selling sex within this new scene were discreetly normative in appearance, not effeminate.
    Although the growing dominance of the homosexual ideology reduced the number of “normal” men who were willing to actively seek out fairies as clients, it eventually cut down on the number of working-class men who were willing to act as trade, even for a price. As the increasing use of the term “trade” to refer more directly to monied exchanges suggests, the pool of available straight men slowly became restricted to undisguised cash for sex transactions with specialists: “street hustlers.” If previously a wide cross-section of the straight male working class had been willing to trade sex for money, by mid-century only the most marginalized were willing to deal with the stigma associated with gay identity. The literature concerning male prostitution in the 1950s, 1960s, and even into the early 1970s, is replete with stories of “deviants” or “hoodlum types” who engaged prostitution as a means of obtaining spending money. Gone for the most part were the “barracks prostitution” and the widespread participation of many working-class youth: the messenger boys and newspaper sellers so common in Victorian-era scandals. In its place remained mostly those “delinquent” youths who, while they generally lived at home and had their survival needs taken care of, nevertheless were unable or unwilling to secure work in the formal labor market and used the cash they obtained to finance their recreational activities, including, for a growing minority, to support drug habits. In the larger cities, these youths were supplemented by unemployed men who relied on prostitution for their survival, by a limited population of straight-identified bodybuilders who posed in muscle magazines and occasionally sold sex to gay men on the side, and by a small but slowly increasing number of gay men who followed the 1920s pattern of selling sex to gay men while remaining somewhat discreet. An even smaller number of cross-dressing fairies also continued, but the field was now clearly dominated by the teenaged “delinquent.” Full-time professional hustlers existed only in the larger cities, but even moderate-sized towns such as Boise,