Male Sex Work and Society (3 page)

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Authors: Unknown

Tags: #Psychology/Human Sexuality, #Social Science/Gay Studies, #SOC012000, #PSY016000

—DR. JO PHOENIX,
Chair in Criminology, University of Leicester, UK; Author, Regulating Sex for Sale: Prostitution, Policy Reform and the UK
 
MALE
SEX
WORK
AND SOCIETY
MALE
SEX
WORK
AND SOCIETY
EDITED BY
VICTOR MINICHIELLO
AND
JOHN SCOTT
Copyright © 2014 by Harrington Park Press.
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be used, reproduced, or transmitted in any form, by any means, graphic, electronic, or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, taping, or by any information storage retrieval system, or any other means, without the prior written permission of the publisher.
E-ISBN 978-1-939-59403-7
Harrington Park Press
Box #350
511 Avenue of the Americas
New York, NY 10011-8436
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Male sex work and society/edited by Victor Minichiello and John Scott
pages     cm.
Includes bibliographical references and index
ISBN 978-1-939594-00-6 (hardcover: alk. paper)
ISBN 978-1-939594-01-3 (pbk.: alk. paper)
ISBN 978-1-939594-03-7 (electronic book)
1. Male prostitution. 2. Male prostitutes—Social conditions.
I. Minichiello, Victor.
HQ119.M35 2014
306.74’3—dc23
2014008715
To my lifelong partner, Terrence, who has always supported me.
Victor Minichiello
To Dr. Raymond Donovan, who introduced me to new ways of thinking, for his integrity and deep dedication to the craft of teaching.
John Scott
CONTENTS
 
John Scott and Victor Minichiello
 
Mack Friedman
Kerwin Kaye
Russell Sheaffer
 
Allan Tyler
Trevon D. Logan
 
John Scott, Denton Callander, and Victor Minichiello
Thomas Crofts
David S. Bimbi and Juline A. Koken
Juline A. Koken and David S. Bimbi
Christian Grov and Michael D. Smith
Mary Laing and Justin Gaffney
 
Paul Boyce and Gordon Isaacs
Travis S. K. Kong
Linda M. Niccolai
Victor Minichiello, Tinashe Dune, Carlos Disogra and Rodrigo Mariño
Heide Castañeda
Paul J. Maginn and Graham Ellison
Victor Minichiello and John Scott
Every author or volume editor would like to think of his or her work as timely, and we are no different from every other person who has had a good idea for a book. However, the idea was not entirely the editors’ own. Back in 2010 we were contacted by an enthusiastic publisher in New York City about several journal articles we had written on male sex work. The publisher, Bill Cohen, had cofounded the Haworth Press in 1978, building it from scratch to carry over 200 academic journals, including eight in LGBT studies, and several thousand monographs and textbooks in the behavioral and social sciences, health care, business studies, and many other fields. Bill sold the Haworth Press to Taylor & Francis/Routledge in 2007, but he retained the trademark to Harrington Park Press, a Haworth imprint, which specialized in LGBT topics, particularly psychology and health care. After some further correspondence with Bill, we agreed to develop this volume, which we hoped would capture some of the new understandings of male sex work that have emerged in the 21
st
century.
Bill had eyed a noticeable gap in a field he knew well, and it is fair to say that we are fortunate to have a publisher who is as enthusiastic about the subject matter as we are. To provide but one example of his commitment and enthusiasm, a week hardly passed during the first 12 months of this project when Bill did not forward to us newly published peer-reviewed journal articles pertaining to male sex work, as well as several new dissertations. So, while an investigation of the subject matter is indeed timely, so too were the circumstances that led to this book’s publication.
Saying something new about male sex work is a challenging task, as there is only a small handful of scholars researching this topic. Moreover, as a subject area, researchers tend to dip in and out of male sex work, thus it often is seen as a sideline in the broader study of sexual health, gender, or sexualities. Providing the sort of comprehensive coverage of the topic we aspired to was not easy; apart from the paucity of research to draw from, much of the existing research contained significant gaps.
Since emerging as a socially troublesome population during the 19
th
century, men who trade sex for money or other compensation have assumed many roles in research and popular culture, most notably, as psycho-pathological agents, vectors of disease, and, most recently, as sex workers. This is an exciting time to be researching male sex workers (MSWs), as new understandings of male bodies and masculinity have emerged in recent years that have allowed us to reassess what we thought we knew about male sex work.
On another level, advances in telecommunications have transformed the way male sex work has been structured and organized during much of the modern era. Two immediate effects of this transformation are that male sex work is now part of the global economy, and that the strict demarcation between public and private space—which had previously structured the sex work environment—has been eroded. However, just as new communications technologies have expanded the reach of male sex workers, they also have provided new opportunities for researchers of this stigmatized activity, making it easier to contact a broad range of MSWs and their clients, as well as to disseminate their research and make contact with each other.
This book is one example of the opportunities new technologies provide, as it would have been almost impossible to conceive and assemble even 20 years ago: the research that forms the backbone of this book simply did not yet exist. The research at that time focused largely on the health of street-based sex workers in Western urban settings. While the research in this book does not ignore that group, it also explores the other spaces where men sell sex. Moreover, although this compilation does not ignore the impact sex work has on the health of MSWs, the contributors are also more broadly interested in how the health of these men is impacted by contemporary social, cultural, and environmental forces.
So where to begin with such a book? From the outset we wanted this book to be distinct from any other writings on male sex work and sex work more generally. For one, we thought it curious that much of the literature on male sex work failed to capture the erotic and physical nature of its subject matter. There seemed to be a near palpable gulf between the sex-charged popular cultural representations of male sex work and the drier academic literature, which in striving for objectivity often made the male sex work encounter seem sterile and mechanical. Reading such works, it is difficult to comprehend why anyone would want to be employed in such an industry, let alone pay money for such services. And yet the industry was growing, and MSWs were increasingly telling researchers that they had chosen their work and enjoyed what they did. Furthermore, the clients of sex workers were increasingly being presented in studies as a broad cross-section of the male population, rather than as the deviant subpopulation that had characterized their presentation in the past. Therefore, we were prompted to consider the male body as an object of agency, pleasure, and desire.

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