A Consumer's Guide to Male Hustlers (7 page)

Donald enjoys prolonged jack-off sessions. That suits his partners well. They regard these sessions as a throwback to their boyhoods when they jerked off with the other kids. They do not permit any "funny" stuff, such as kissing or going down on each other. Just "boy-to-boy" stuff, while watching heterosexual porno. Nothing queer about that!

After a few encounters, when they feel more comfortable with Donald, some will ask him to buy a dildo and use it on them. (Of course, they cannot keep one at home.) More encounters take place, and then they want to be screwed, penetrated as macho men: no affection, no kissing, or any other romantic nonsense. Donald is not crazy about this development because he really does not want to screw them, but he needs to keep his supermasculine hustlers happy. Then, inevitably, they have a "surprise" for him. Somehow, they contrive to get hold of the cutest drag outfit, and wouldn't he just love to see them put it on? Donald hates it! He is into macho men, not drag queens. But, to keep his blue-collar hustlers interested in the game—they do not really need his money—he permits them to perform their ritual a few times a year.

Or take another illustration. In San Juan, Puerto Rico, many of the hustlers are bisexuals, often married with children. They hang out around gay hotels and make a fair amount of money off the tourists. (Most of it, unfortunately, goes for drugs and booze rather than to feed their children.) In the line of duty, they are very versatile and often extremely passionate. This is OK—they are just doing their job. Done recreationally, for free, it would make them the worst
maricones
on the island.

In the self-justification category, the next group are young guys who need to have sex with older men. To a certain extent, all successful hustlers must be comfortable with older men because the majority of their clients (definitely not all of them) fall into this category. But I single out here young men who have a psychological and physical need to have sex with "mature," or even old, partners.

These young guys who lust after "mature gentlemen"
¹
are usually not "public" hustlers. They do not want to be intimate with all sorts of clients but rather with carefully selected older men. The financial arrangement creates the illusion of doing a job, which helps them justify conduct for which they have no explanation, and which is regarded as perverse, at least by the gay community in the United States. (Other societies, e.g., Japanese and Latino, are less uptight about May-December male relationships.)

1. There are plenty of young guys who are interested in senior citizens solely as sex objects. Theirs is a fetishistic fascination with old age. I wrote an article about this phenomenon. See "Dirty Young Men," Joseph Itiel,
Chiron Rising
, #66, 1995, p. 11.

Interestingly, in this group are many bisexuals with girlfriends their own age. They are completely mystified by their sexual need for older males in addition to their young girlfriends. The money they earn from the geriatric hustling helps them cope with this puzzlement.

One cannot dismiss this behavior, or even a monogamous "sugar daddy" arrangement, simply as an exchange of money for sexual favors. The younger guys must perform sexually: get a hard on, ejaculate, screw, and so on. It is inconceivable that they would be able to fake their own sexual excitement over a period of years!

The last group in the behavior-justification category are hustlers who practice S/M. For two practical reasons, most of them (not
all
) are sadists rather than masochists. First, because the demand is uneven: for every master there seem to be ten slaves. Second, a masochistic hustler puts himself in an extremely vulnerable position.

There are quite a few hustlers who advertise themselves as "masters, spankers, tough punks," etc. Only occasionally does one see ads offering hustler service as a "slave."

Clients are willing to pay for special services (such as being spanked or whipped or pissed on) and hustlers can gain financially by what they enjoy doing in the first place.
²
The masochistic client benefits greatly by establishing the ground rules for the paid scene, rather than taking his chances with an unpaid sadist who may get carried away and inflict serious damage.

²
. The roles of "master" and "slave" are not always as rigid as they appear from reading the ads. For instance, the spanking hustler, once he trusts the client, may become the spankee. The sexual encounters between master and slave are choreographed to suit the verbalized and the hinted-at needs of each party.

Here, too, the vocation enters the picture. Not all hustlers are willing or able to play the role of a sadist. Since S/M is a game, reinvented by the players with each encounter, a reluctant hustler who does not appreciate the complexity of the scene will destroy the illusion by inappropriate behavior.

THE GREAT ADVENTURE

For practical reasons hustlers who advertise their services in newspapers operate their businesses under fictitious names. When they receive phone calls they know immediately whether the calls are personal or business-related. When they run more than one ad, offering different services (e.g., massage and "modeling"), they sometimes use more than one fictitious name.

Even when they are not confronted by such considerations, if, for instance, they are street hustlers, they are likely to operate under a fictitious name. By taking on a name of their choosing and assuming a different identity, they liberate themselves symbolically from the "baggage" that comes with their given name. This is how the adventure starts.

Alfonso, a handsome young Chicano student, would dress sharply when making out calls to the Fairmont and other swank San Francisco hotels. Sometimes, after turning a trick, he would walk boldly into a function room, pretend to be one of the invitees, and treat himself to a free dinner.

I am sure that for Alfonso, AKA Joseph Martinez, the free meal at the Fairmont had great symbolic value. He was born in Salinas, California, into a poor Mexican family, and was unhappy with his Hispanic appearance. Many times in his life he was made to feel very uncomfortable by his brown skin. Once he was even checked out by the Immigration Service, which suspected him of being undocumented. As Joseph Martinez, a sophomore at San Francisco State, he had no business at the Fairmont as guest or invitee. As model Alfonso, he had just finished "conferring" with a Fairmont VIP guest, and his dropping in on another function for a bite to eat raised no eyebrows.

Joseph, qua Joseph, was a nobody to the Fairmont crowd. He had worked at an ice cream parlor before he started his hustling career. At the Fairmont, all he could possibly have been was a busboy. Model Alfonso received (in 1976) $50 plus a generous tip for an hour's work!

Or take another example: Jerry Elgin, a very tall and exceptionally attractive guy, had been a member of the Mensa Society (for people with a high IQ and a large ego) for two years when I met him in 1975. He was a college student and had taken two semesters of French. He planned on visiting France during his summer vacations. Being short on funds, he decided to earn a few francs by hustling in Paris.

Jerry became sexually aroused by just talking about his plan. I said to him once, "Jerry, even if you had $10,000 in your travel fund, you would go through with the hustling plan." He thought for a moment and said, "You're right. It will test my French, that's for damn sure."

He did hustle in France and he was pleased with his Parisian clients, with whom he conversed in French. The few nights he hustled in Paris were the most exciting experiences of his trip.

In what other profession do people work under a code name, and lead a double life? When they are secret agents of some kind. Just as in spy movies, there is sex, adventure, and real danger involved in hustling. For some, this adds to the excitement.

IN-BETWEEN-JOBS HUSTLERS

Almost all full-time street hustlers start hustling as a last-resort or between-jobs measure. For many of them, the last resort becomes a decade-long occupation.

Hustler Andy is a good illustration. He was one of the first hustlers I met in San Francisco. Andy plied his trade from the corner of Market and Mason Streets, which was not as elegant a hustling location as the Geary Street side of the St. Francis Hotel.

Andy, twenty-three-years old at the time, was of Italian descent. He would have been dark and handsome had his nose not been broken and never healed properly. Even with the awkward nose, he was winsome. He certainly had a vocation for hustling, and was always a good sex partner. As a matter of fact, he
enjoyed
hustling.

I will have more to say about the incongruities and idiosyncrasies of hustlers that make them such interesting characters. Here I'll just mention that Andy would have made Miss Manners proud. He tolerated absolutely no swearing in his presence, not even using the "D" word. He traveled and lived with an allegedly straight pool hustler, whom he supported out of his meager earnings.
³
The pool hustler had a lot of free time on his hands, and spent it reading—what else?—the Bible.

³
. A street hustler supporting a partner who is a poor wretch is not uncommon. Often it is a nonsexual friendship. It is almost like saying to the world, "You think that I am a loser? Just look at my sidekick."

When I first met Andy he told me that he had been looking for a "real" job since arriving in San Francisco a few months earlier, but had not been able to find one. In those days, I still believed that any "honest" job would be preferable to hustling. I tried to help Andy find a job. I spoke to the manager of a car-wash business, who was an acquaintance of a friend of mine, and obtained a note from him that Andy could start working there the following Monday morning at 8 a.m.

Proudly, I told Andy the good news. He looked at me as if I had uttered a string of four-letter words. "I was not born to be a car washer," he told me disdainfully.

I suppressed the logical follow-up question: "Were you born to hustle?" Instead, I asked him, "What job would be acceptable to you?"

"Oh, I don't know. An office job, maybe something in sales..."

It took a while before I pieced together the truth. Since graduating from high school in Chicago, Andy had not held any job. He was an itinerant hustler, moving aimlessly from city to city. It was true that jobs in San Francisco were difficult to obtain. But even if jobs had been plentiful, Andy would have been a poor candidate. He had no skills or experience to offer a potential employer. The car-wash job was a good choice for him.

In theory, he could have done better for himself than washing cars. He was always clean and well-groomed, and could easily have started out, for example, as a busboy, working his way up to becoming a waiter. In practice, he would have been fired from any job requiring a good attendance record.

Andy had a lot of trouble keeping his appointments. Bad things always happened to him. At the beginning of one week, he spent twenty-four hours in jail for contributing to the delinquency of a minor girl. (He had been on the premises when his neighbor, at his transient hotel, offered alcohol to a young girl. The charge was dismissed.) In the middle of the week he spent all of his rent money, plus the money he earned for selling his blood,
⁴
to buy an ornate frame for a painting he had been given by a client. At the end of the same week, he got locked out of his hotel room for not paying the rent, and had no change of clothing.

⁴
. Before the AIDS epidemic, hustlers would sell their blood or plasma on a regular basis.

There is an irony in all of this. Andy was an excellent hustler. Had society left him alone, all he would have needed to worry about would be the same issue that, say, a professional boxer confronts: What will he do with himself once he grows too old for his present profession? (The difference is that boxing is about hurting, whereas hustling is about nurturing!) But, of course, society, including the law, would not leave Andy alone. He had to make, or pretend to make, feeble attempts at finding a regular job. There was no way that he could feel happy just doing what he did best.

The "in between" hustlers take different roads to retire from their hustling careers. The more intelligent ones, or the ones who are not so intelligent but are in charge of their lives, gradually get out of full-time hustling, and, eventually, find a regular job and/or go back to school. I will discuss in the next chapter why getting out of hustling is usually a gradual process.

Some wait until they are forced to retire from hustling due to their age. They end up working in baths, sex clubs, adult book stores, and, in recent years, as caregivers for people with AIDS.

Until the Welfare Reform Act of 1996, one way out was to qualify for Supplemental Security Income (SSI) benefits. These were usually granted for mental problems due to drug-related conditions. How this will play out with the new rules for SSI benefits only time will tell.

While writing this chapter, I have had a paranormal experience of sorts. I have been thinking about a hustler I have not seen for some nine years. I was sure that by now he had died of AIDS, a drug overdose, or another Polk Street mishap. (For instance, during my time in San Francisco, there have been a disproportionate number of gruesome murders in this location.)

I was introduced to Roland through another hustler when he arrived in San Francisco from Seattle, at the age of eighteen. He was a plain-looking Samoan, short, a bit on the chubby side, with a round face full of youthful acne. Roland was a nice guy, but his extreme shyness and his drug habit made him very difficult to converse with. His sexual performance depended on the type and quantity of drugs he had taken earlier in the day. As a result, Roland was an unreliable hustler; a sexual experience with him could turn out to be excellent or very poor. With his drug habit and lack of skills, hustling on the street was the best he could do. For a while, I kept tabs on Roland through the hustler who had introduced me to him, in whose apartment Roland would crash from time to time. Eventually, I lost contact with all street hustlers.