Male Sex Work and Society (18 page)
Read Male Sex Work and Society Online
Authors: Unknown
Tags: #Psychology/Human Sexuality, #Social Science/Gay Studies, #SOC012000, #PSY016000
My Own Private Idaho
works similarly to interpolate and rework history as a part of its narrative. In one scene, a cowboy walks into an adult bookstore lined with porn magazines. As the fluorescent bulbs wrapped in pink gel flicker in the seedy, overpacked store, the camera tracks along the magazines, all of which have men on the cover. The camera finally lands on one called
Male Call
, and Scott, wearing a cowboy hat, his naked torso and unbuttoned pants made visible, adorns the cover. The magazine cover reads, “
HOMO ON THE RANGE
.” By utilizing the trope of the cowboy and recoding it within gay culture, Van Sant works to explode the mythology of American masculinity that is “inextricably bound to the image of the cowboy” (Kauffman, 1998, p. 108). As Scott explains his dreams of being a male model, he begins to have a conversation with Mike, who is the cover boy of another magazine,
G-String
, which is on the rack above Scott.
works similarly to interpolate and rework history as a part of its narrative. In one scene, a cowboy walks into an adult bookstore lined with porn magazines. As the fluorescent bulbs wrapped in pink gel flicker in the seedy, overpacked store, the camera tracks along the magazines, all of which have men on the cover. The camera finally lands on one called
Male Call
, and Scott, wearing a cowboy hat, his naked torso and unbuttoned pants made visible, adorns the cover. The magazine cover reads, “
HOMO ON THE RANGE
.” By utilizing the trope of the cowboy and recoding it within gay culture, Van Sant works to explode the mythology of American masculinity that is “inextricably bound to the image of the cowboy” (Kauffman, 1998, p. 108). As Scott explains his dreams of being a male model, he begins to have a conversation with Mike, who is the cover boy of another magazine,
G-String
, which is on the rack above Scott.
In the cover photo, Mike is wearing a white loincloth, his body draped over a vertical wooden pole in a position that recalls popular renderings of the Jesus figure. This posing of Mike has resulted in numerous critics deeming the cover “G-String Jesus” and noting that Mike’s pose “[evokes] the crucifixion” (Breight, 1997, pp. 307-308). The rack of magazine covers combines past and present in a way that “unites Rome, Renaissance England and modern America in a bizarre politico-sexual triad” (pp. 307-308)—a notion that the caption on Mike’s magazine, “
GO DOWN ON HISTORY
,” reinforces.
GO DOWN ON HISTORY
,” reinforces.
Both Scott and Mike (especially as portrayed by their magazine covers) draw on types of men that are summoned time and time again in the visual memory of heteronormative culture. The biblical reference to which Mike’s cover alludes, with his hands fixed up above his head and his nude body leaning backward (ribs protruding), recalls, recodes, and sexualizes the image of the nude body of Christ for homosexual consumption. Not only do these images of Mike and Scott suggest the homosexual potential in traditional icons, they make an explicit link between the male body, homosexuality, history, and male sex work.
New Queer Cinema did much more for the representation of the male sex worker than simply allowing him to be gay without being pathologized; it allowed him to be queer, and it suggested that he always had been. These films exhibit a notion of the queer body that, according to Michele Aaron (2004), sees queerness as
represent[ing] the resistance to, primarily, the normative codes of gender and sexual expression—that masculine men sleep with feminine women—but also to the restrictive potential of gay and lesbian sexuality—that only men sleep with men, and women with women. In this way, queer, as a critical concept, encompasses the non-fixity of gender expression and the non-fixity of both straight and gay sexuality. (p. 5)
Whereas one would assume that all male sex workers (even
American Gigolo
’s strongly heterosexual Julian) would exist outside of heteronormativity and would, therefore, on some level be considered “queer” under Aaron’s definition, pre-NQC cinematic representations of male sex workers (especially in
American Gigolo
and
Midnight Cowboy
) depict a world where male sex worker protagonists are as far from a notion of queer as possible. The most revolutionary element of NQC in relation to the depiction of male sex workers, then, is that the characters of films such as
My Own Private Idaho
and
The Living End
are not simply gay gigolos and they are not merely inversions of the traditionally acceptable male sex worker attempting to provide a positive image of a type of homosexual: they are queer individuals in a way that the protagonists of earlier films could never be.
American Gigolo
’s strongly heterosexual Julian) would exist outside of heteronormativity and would, therefore, on some level be considered “queer” under Aaron’s definition, pre-NQC cinematic representations of male sex workers (especially in
American Gigolo
and
Midnight Cowboy
) depict a world where male sex worker protagonists are as far from a notion of queer as possible. The most revolutionary element of NQC in relation to the depiction of male sex workers, then, is that the characters of films such as
My Own Private Idaho
and
The Living End
are not simply gay gigolos and they are not merely inversions of the traditionally acceptable male sex worker attempting to provide a positive image of a type of homosexual: they are queer individuals in a way that the protagonists of earlier films could never be.
The liberation and aggression with which these NQC films approached their subject matter, however, was not without controversy. When Araki described his work as not having “this propagandistic ‘It’s great to be gay’ outlook” in a 1992 interview in
The Village Voice
(Chua, 1992, p. 64), Adam Mars-Jones (1993), in a review for
The Independent
, saw this break from the desire for positive representation as a poor decision, given the timing of the AIDS crisis. “More than anything,” writes Mars-Jones, “it has been the catastrophe of AIDS, and the urgency of the despair it has brought with it, that has sparked ‘queer’ politics, and put patience out of fashion,” but, ultimately, “the AIDS crisis is a poor moment to pick quarrels” (p. 16).
The Village Voice
(Chua, 1992, p. 64), Adam Mars-Jones (1993), in a review for
The Independent
, saw this break from the desire for positive representation as a poor decision, given the timing of the AIDS crisis. “More than anything,” writes Mars-Jones, “it has been the catastrophe of AIDS, and the urgency of the despair it has brought with it, that has sparked ‘queer’ politics, and put patience out of fashion,” but, ultimately, “the AIDS crisis is a poor moment to pick quarrels” (p. 16).
Interestingly, both Gus Van Sant and Gregg Araki have dealt with the male sex worker in their later films, too, but in strikingly different ways. While Van Sant has gone on to alternate between directing mainstream films for major studios and his own independent works, he has continued to be the executive producer of films that explore queer identity.
15
Incorporating the gritty aesthetic and aggression of the NQC,
Speedway Junky
(Perry, 1999, Van Sant executive producer) follows the story of a young man named Johnny (Jesse Bradford) who wants to become a race car driver as he falls in with a group of hustlers in Las Vegas. Gregg Araki’s
Mysterious Skin
(2004) poses a striking contrast to
Speedway Junky
. The film, which works through a narrative that could have been lifted straight out of an NQC film while appropriating a mainstream aesthetic, is about two teen boys, one of whom is a gay hustler, who are struggling to piece together their lives after their baseball coach had sex with them.
15
Incorporating the gritty aesthetic and aggression of the NQC,
Speedway Junky
(Perry, 1999, Van Sant executive producer) follows the story of a young man named Johnny (Jesse Bradford) who wants to become a race car driver as he falls in with a group of hustlers in Las Vegas. Gregg Araki’s
Mysterious Skin
(2004) poses a striking contrast to
Speedway Junky
. The film, which works through a narrative that could have been lifted straight out of an NQC film while appropriating a mainstream aesthetic, is about two teen boys, one of whom is a gay hustler, who are struggling to piece together their lives after their baseball coach had sex with them.
Post-NQC, the use of the character type of the male sex worker has flourished and become dramatically fractured. While major studio productions
Deuce Bigalow: Male Gigolo
(Mitchell, 1999) and
The Wedding Date
(Kilner, 2005) work to sanitize the gigolo, maintaining strict hetero-sexuality and presenting homosexual sex work as abject,
Mandragora
(Grodecki, 1997),
Speedway Junky, Lola und Bilidikid
(Ataman, 1999),
L.I.E
. (Michael Cuesta, 2001),
Sonny
(Cage, 2002),
Mysterious Skin
,
Breakfast on Pluto
(Jordan, 2005), and
Boy Culture
(Brocka, 2006) all have worked to push the male sex worker in a variety of other directions.
Deuce Bigalow: Male Gigolo
(Mitchell, 1999) and
The Wedding Date
(Kilner, 2005) work to sanitize the gigolo, maintaining strict hetero-sexuality and presenting homosexual sex work as abject,
Mandragora
(Grodecki, 1997),
Speedway Junky, Lola und Bilidikid
(Ataman, 1999),
L.I.E
. (Michael Cuesta, 2001),
Sonny
(Cage, 2002),
Mysterious Skin
,
Breakfast on Pluto
(Jordan, 2005), and
Boy Culture
(Brocka, 2006) all have worked to push the male sex worker in a variety of other directions.
Mandragora
and
Lola und Bilidikid
both grapple with male sex work in a way that echoes the work of the NQC. Robin Griffiths (2008) sees a strong parallel between the aims of
Mandragora
, which follows the rise and fall of a teenage hustler in Czechoslovakia, and the aims of the NQC. “Grodecki,” writes Griffiths, “was just as ground breaking in his unwavering yet ambivalent commitment to destabilize and subvert the heteronormatively inclined moral narratives, imagery and subjectivities that governed the more established tropes of Czech cinema and cultural production: confronting its entrenched stereotypes, assumptions and taboos even as he problematically re-inscribed them” (p. 139). While
Mandragora
ends tragically and ultimately works to reinforce notions of sex work as perverse, it deals with the AIDS crisis in a very visceral way.
and
Lola und Bilidikid
both grapple with male sex work in a way that echoes the work of the NQC. Robin Griffiths (2008) sees a strong parallel between the aims of
Mandragora
, which follows the rise and fall of a teenage hustler in Czechoslovakia, and the aims of the NQC. “Grodecki,” writes Griffiths, “was just as ground breaking in his unwavering yet ambivalent commitment to destabilize and subvert the heteronormatively inclined moral narratives, imagery and subjectivities that governed the more established tropes of Czech cinema and cultural production: confronting its entrenched stereotypes, assumptions and taboos even as he problematically re-inscribed them” (p. 139). While
Mandragora
ends tragically and ultimately works to reinforce notions of sex work as perverse, it deals with the AIDS crisis in a very visceral way.
In a scene of
Mandragora
in which Malek (Miroslav Caslavka), the film’s protagonist, and his friend David (David Svec) hire two female prostitutes to have sex, Malek is asked if he would like to have sex with or without a condom (there is a price difference). “You’re not afraid of AIDS?” Malek asks. “We’ve all got it anyway,” replies his companion. Where AIDS (and disease more generally) is never a concern for
Deuce Bigalow
or
The Wedding Date
’s Nick (Dermont Mulroney) and where
The Living End
’s Luke and Joe, in the height of the AIDS crisis, have been diagnosed with a death sentence,
Mandragora
’s sex workers are always already implicated in the AIDS crisis as a simple fact of their profession. While issues of abject morality foreground many of the films that, either explicitly or implicitly, deal with male sex work pre-AIDS, films since the AIDS outbreak have fractured, dealing both with the moral implications of sex work and, frequently, concerns about health and disease. Where the dirty, run-down spaces of
Midnight Cowboy
historically symbolized abjection in regards to cinematic representations of male sex work, the bodies of the hustlers in
Mandragora
and
The Living End
have become a new site of concern.
Mandragora
in which Malek (Miroslav Caslavka), the film’s protagonist, and his friend David (David Svec) hire two female prostitutes to have sex, Malek is asked if he would like to have sex with or without a condom (there is a price difference). “You’re not afraid of AIDS?” Malek asks. “We’ve all got it anyway,” replies his companion. Where AIDS (and disease more generally) is never a concern for
Deuce Bigalow
or
The Wedding Date
’s Nick (Dermont Mulroney) and where
The Living End
’s Luke and Joe, in the height of the AIDS crisis, have been diagnosed with a death sentence,
Mandragora
’s sex workers are always already implicated in the AIDS crisis as a simple fact of their profession. While issues of abject morality foreground many of the films that, either explicitly or implicitly, deal with male sex work pre-AIDS, films since the AIDS outbreak have fractured, dealing both with the moral implications of sex work and, frequently, concerns about health and disease. Where the dirty, run-down spaces of
Midnight Cowboy
historically symbolized abjection in regards to cinematic representations of male sex work, the bodies of the hustlers in
Mandragora
and
The Living End
have become a new site of concern.
FIGURE 3.4
Mandragora
’s sex workers are always implicated in the AIDS crisis as a simple fact of their profession during the period of time in which the film takes place.
’s sex workers are always implicated in the AIDS crisis as a simple fact of their profession during the period of time in which the film takes place.
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