Although soldiers were not in on London’s infamous Cleveland Street Affair of 1889, post office messengers were. A ready network of young men was established at a particularly aristocratic house through word of mouth among young post office messengers. Eventually, one confused messenger reported his casual prostitution to the police. This young man, (aptly named?) Thickbroom, reported that, after mutual masturbation with a friend and fellow messenger in a public restroom, his friend suggested that Thickbroom could “go to be with a man … you’ll get four shillings for a time.”
70
Thickbroom was thus persuaded.
All the messenger boys involved in casual prostitution in this Cleveland Street house were cleared of any prostitution charges. The verdict was very clear, stating in effect that the messengers were too young to know what they were doing and were preyed upon by wealthy older men. The court was moved to “protect the children … from being made the victims of the unnatural lusts of full-grown men.”
71
English courts and conventional public opinion had little tolerance for upper-class men who solicited sex from adolescents, as Oscar Wilde’s trials a few years later would attest to.
For many male sex workers, though, the situation in Britain could hardly have been better, especially if one were discreet. Discretion also meant sticking with one’s biological gender—unless, I suppose, one could pass for a female sex worker. Transgender people, in fact, were arrested simply for cross-dressing, charged with male prostitution, and often convicted on conjecture.
72
This fit into the subliminal mores of fin de si
è
cle Britain, which punished biological males presumed to be “inverts,” people who acted effeminate or otherwise eschewed their biological gender role.
Male sex workers, on the other hand, enjoyed great social tolerance for their rendezvous with clients. Of course, their economic situation was often unpleasant, which must be seen as why many of them resorted to sex work in the first place. They made a fair amount of money per transaction, and they were not expected to completely give up the rights to their bodies, as Roman slaves had been. Moreover, provided they were straight or closeted, young sex tradesmen had access to other professional work down the line and retained an unhindered reputation. And if they found they were gay, well, they had a ready network of rich and influential friends—that is, if their friends weren’t all in jail.
Oscar Wilde, who was not yet imprisoned, termed this demimonde “feasting with panthers.”
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Mr. Wilde, meanwhile, was making pilgrimages to a Sicilian coastal town called Taormina, where he’d tracked down the first major hustler photographer, who was always open for business.
Color Catalogue: Taormina, 1900
The Baron Wilhelm von Gloeden, a German royal, fled to Italy in the 1880s. The amateur photographer found himself amid deserted ruins and fertile hillocks in the small village of Taormina. He also found himself relatively wealthy and with a good deal of ready models. Along with his nephew, Guglielmo von Plüschow, the baron started training a recently acquired camera on the local male youth. In addition to paying them for modeling and hosting extravagant parties for them and his visiting friends, the baron was willing to form friendships with and to mentor the youth. One young man, identified by an anonymous collector as Pietro Mazza, was reputedly photographed over a 20-year period; the last known photograph of him shows him fully clothed and mustachioed at the top of von Gloeden’s back steps, arms around two white-bearded men.
74
Another model of both von Gloeden and von Pluschow, a youth named Vicenzo Galdi, became an artist in his own right after modeling for some of the baron’s pictures.
Like British sex workers, the baron’s subjects were working class, but they were not urbane. The young men of Taormina were callused, rough, their hair a tousled mess. Roland Barthes observes that their toenails were rough-hewn and their farmer musculature stood out.
75
Nevertheless, they were not shy. As Thomas Waugh contends,
the model’s body is frequently arranged in such a way that the look of the spectator is invited to explore it, penetrate it as erogenous territory. The connotation of prone and supine poses … many of them quite explicit in their passivity, is of availability, access, vulnerability. These “spread” poses are inherited from heterosexual eroticism of the high or low variety and are precursors of the post-Stonewall centerfold. Other sitting and crouching or leaning poses aim for similar connotations: the positions of legs parted or arms raised, or of self-touching, are all standard formulas in the erotic representation of women and the exact inverse of traditional coding of mature men.
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Oscar Wilde obliquely refers to orgies at the von Gloeden compound, and biographer Jacques LeMay hints that the young models were
complaisants
, agreeable to having sex with men who came from far away to visit. It must have seemed to these well-schooled, well-heeled adults that they had just traveled back in history to the early days of the Roman Republic, as old traditions died hard in such isolated agrarian areas. There was great economic disparity between these Sicilian models and their photographers and subsequent patrons, but that does not seem to have prevented them from developing beneficial, humane relationships.
Von Gloeden’s images tweaked the interest of Italian moralists: in the 1930s, Mussolini’s Fascist regime destroyed the photographs it could find and burned the negatives. Nevertheless, the baron and his cousin added a final Victorian ambiguity to hustler iconography at a time when remunerative sex exchange between males, especially those of different ages, was increasingly perceived in the rest of Europe as a serious importunity. Even with all the props used in their photographs, the expatriate Germans depicted male sex workers more realistically, more intimately, and consequently in more complex ways than any artist had for centuries.
The Modern Hustler
What does this all suggest about the historical role of male sex workers in societies around the globe? We can conclude that, since recorded history over a broad range of human societies, (mostly younger) men have found ways to profit from some exchange of sex for money from (usually older) other men.
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Across cultures, these exchanges often have been differentiated from nonmonetary sexual exchanges between men, whether for things such as tutelage or lodging, or only to satisfy desire and/or receive affection. In societies that have been relatively tolerant of sex between men, male sex workers have nonetheless been stigmatized. Although this intolerance may be due to the fact that most male sex workers come from lower-class backgrounds, sex work also can be considered to have inhibited social progress among its participants; for example, by delimiting their preexisting rights, as the Greek case against Timarkhos illustrates. However, in societies that have been intolerant of sex between men, male sex workers have been more or less ignored or have suffered no more than the usual stigma associated with homosexual behavior by the larger society while being iconized by their clients.
78
Counterintuitively, then, these observations suggest that male sex workers may experience better working conditions in societies with a high degree of homophobia than in societies with advanced civil rights for men who have sex with each other.
Where are we now? In the last 100 years in America, we have seen the status of male sex workers decline correspondingly with an increase in acceptance of nonmonetary homosexual sex. At present, while gay people can marry in 14 states and the District of Columbia (as of publication), male sex work is legal in only one. (Of course, female sex work is only legal in one state, too.) The rezoning of former hustler strolls, heightened policing of public sex environments, and shifting social mores among the larger gay and lesbian community have, along with the arrival of the Internet as a venue for sexual assignations, contributed to the relative invisibility of today’s hustler.
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This extra-marginalization appears to have highly negative effects: male sex workers consistently report lower educational attainment and annual income and higher rates of substance abuse, depression, violence, victimization, homelessness, HIV risk, and HIV infection than other men who have sex with men.
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Perhaps the best parallel for the qualified disrespect with which contemporary America views and treats male sex workers, relative to other men who have sex with men, is ancient Greece. Today’s hustler is scorned, stigmatized, and unprotected, and though not a slave or servant, he is not too far removed from that status. Paradoxically, we seem to be right back where we started.
And they deserve better. Men who trade sex have, at least in America, been an essential part of society. They can be linked to our earliest settlements, to the establishment of the first queer urban spaces, and, as other readings show, to the passage of child labor laws and the riots at Stonewall and Compton’s Cafeteria, which sparked the modern gay rights movement.
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Beyond these social movements, male sex workers have served an essential sexual function, as transactional sex for many years was the most feasible sexual activity between men in urban America, to say nothing of the essential function male sex workers have performed as the predominant porn and erotica models throughout the 20
th
century. Male sex workers also have exposed hypocritical congressmen and clergy and worked tirelessly to set up public health programs for their brethren.
What will male sex workers’ lives look like in coming generations? If we see the gay civil rights movement as an exemplar, maybe societies will come to a place where they accept sex work—even male sex work—as a protected, harmless, consensual act that is, for whatever reasons, a necessary human right.
Endnotes
1
Kenneth J. Dover,
Greek Homosexuality
. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1989, p. 20; italics added.
2
Dover,
Greek Homosexuality
, p. 16.
3
Dover,
Greek Homosexuality
, p. 16.
4
Thomas Martin,
Ancient Greece
. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1996, p. 141; italics added.
5
Dover,
Greek Homosexuality
, p. 17.
6
Dover,
Greek Homosexuality
, p. 21.
7
Dover,
Greek Homosexuality
, p. 21.
8
Dover,
Greek Homosexuality
, pp. 21-22. Dover defines
peporneumenos
as a perfect participle of the verb
porneusthai
, to behave like a prostitute (p. 20).
9
Dover,
Greek Homosexuality
, p. 40.
10
Dover,
Greek Homosexuality
, p. 41.
11
Dover,
Greek Homosexuality
, p. 42.
12
Dover,
Greek Homosexuality
, p. 34. Misgalos, as noted before, was an
erastes
of Timarkhos.
13
Dover,
Greek Homosexuality
, p. 29; italics added.
14
David Halperin, “Sex Before Sexuality: Pederasty, Politics, and Power in Classical Athens,” in
Hidden from History
, ed. Martin Duberman, Martha Vicinus, and George Chauncey Jr. New York: New American Library, 1989, p. 50.
15
Dover,
Greek Homosexuality
, p. 27. Athenian fathers and guardians were punished for hiring their sons and slaves out for homosexual use; procuring a person of free status was subject to severe penalties; and the use of force (called
hubris
, or excessive pride) “against a man, boy or woman,
of free or slave status
, also [incurred] severe penalties”; author’s italics.
16
Dover,
Greek Homosexuality
, p. 103.
17
Dover,
Greek Homosexuality
, p. 103.