by John Rechy
“MALEHUSTLERS.… DRIFTERS, tough, street-smart. And smarter, but pretending, sometimes, to be dumb. Students and middle-class youngmen, though on the rough streets not as many as, briefly too, become callboys (the callboy faction being safer, more ‘conservative’—only muted revolution there). A precarious existence—you're new one day, old another. The clients remain, the sellers are pushed aside; a fresh wave of hustling outlaws flows regularly into the city.
“The customers.… The myth says they're all middle-aged or older, probably married, shy. But that's not true. Those exist, yes, abundantly; there are, too—though far, far fewer—the attractive and the young who merely prefer to pay, especially among those who want to cling to the myth that masculine hustlers are ‘straight.’”
I'm speaking about male streethustling to a group of eminent California psychiatrists and psychologists who meet irregularly. I sit at one end of the table and face about twenty men and women. Occasionally they will whisper briefly among each other.
With as much defiance as honesty I say:
The world of streethustling holds great power over me, and the others in it, a world we love; I've experienced it-survived it—for years—much longer, I'm proud to say, than most. It's a world clouded in generalities. Hustling is one of those activities that has to be experienced first-hand to be fully understood; sociology doesn't work.
The first man who picked me up while I was hustling—the very day I arrived in New York—approached me with these words: “I'll give you ten and I don't give a damn for you.” That was a good street price at that time. His words— and, as it turned out, he did give a damn; a very moving, tough man—opened up a world of sexual power through being paid, and they took me to streets in New York, Los Angeles, San Francisco, New Orleans, Chicago, St. Louis, Dallas—even, to smash my sheltered childhood, in El Paso, my hometown, where I was picked up by a junior-high teacher of mine, who didn't recognize me.
Even when I had good jobs, I was on the streets recurrently, pulled back as if by a powerful lover. Even when City of Night was riding the best-seller lists. I've seen copies of my books in the houses of people who have picked me up anonymously. At times just the offer of sexmoney is enough. Those times I don't need, actually, to go with anyone.
There is a terrific, terrible excitement in getting paid by another man for sex. A great psychological release, a feeling that this is where real sexual power lies—not only to be desired by one's own sex but to be paid for being desired, and if one chooses that strict role, not to reciprocate in those encounters, a feeling of emotional detachment as freedom—these are some of the lures; lures implicitly acknowledged as desirable by the very special place the malehustler occupies in the gay world, entirely different from that of the female prostitute in the straight. Even when he is disdained by those who would never pay for sex, he is still an object of admiration to most, at times an object of jealousy. To “look like a hustler” in gay jargon is to look very, very good.
One of the myths of the hustler is that he is actually looking for love. Perhaps, under the surface, deeply. On the surface there is too often contempt for the client, yes, at best pity—sometimes, seldom and at times only fleetingly, affection; yes, I have felt that. The client, too, at times resents the hustler because he desires him. I think of the hustling streets as a battlefield; two armies, the hustler and the client, warring, yet needing each other.
Outside of a busy coffeeshop where hustlers gather in clusters throughout the night, an older man in a bright-new car parked and waited during a recent buyers' night. Youngmen solicited him anxiously in turns, stepping into the car, being rejected grandly by him, stepping out, replaced by another eager or desperate youngman. Smiling meanly, the older man—one of that breed of corrupted, corrupt, corrupting old men—turned down one after the other, finally driving off contemptuously alone, leaving behind raised middle fingers and a squad of deliberately rejected hustlers—some skinny, desolate little teenagers among the more experienced, cocky, older others; skinny boys, yes, sadly, progressively younger, lining the hustling streets; prostitutes before their boyhood has been played out, some still exhibiting the vestiges of innocence, some already corrupted, corrupt, corrupting—an increasing breed of the young, with no options but the streets—which is when it is all mean and ugly, when it is not a matter of choice; wanted for no other reason than their youth, their boyhood.… And yet, later that very night, I met a man as old as the contemptuous other one—but, this one, sweet, sweet, eager to be “liked,” just liked, desperate for whatever warmth he might squeeze out, if only in his imagination, in a paid encounter, eager to “pay more”—to elicit it—simply for being allowed to suck a cock.… Hustling is all too often involved in mutual exploitation and slaughter, of the young and the old, the beautiful and the unattractive.
The standard street price is twenty dollars—but this fluctuates; you ask for as much as you can get (and designate what for). You go for less depending on your needs—bartering is not rare. Another lucky day you'll go for more—$25, $30, more. Like the stock market, streethustling has daily highs and lows.
The relationship among masculine hustlers is a very delicate one. It relies on repression. A fantasy in the gay world is of two street hustlers making it with each other. There's the notion that today's hustlers are tomorrow's payers. Both concepts are largely inaccurate. Many masculine streethustlers still think of themselves defensively as “straight,” a role those attracted to them expect, even at times demand, they play. Often girls hang around necking with hustlers on the street until a client for their boyfriends appears. Though some hustlers may move back and forth into a cruising area for an unpaid contact of mutual attraction, in hustling turf among other masculine hustlers they must remain, rigidly, “buddies” (like Paul Newman and Robert Redford).
Now about hustlers becoming payers later on: Perhaps that's true of callboys with notoriously less hangups. I'm talking about the masculine, straight-playing streethustler; he knows, from his vast experience and those shared by others like him, of the hustler's contempt, pity—at times even hatred—for the client. It would require a psychic upheaval for him to be able to shift roles masochistically. And the malehustler is a proud creature, though less so now.
A few years back, he was almost without exception masculine; it was almost always assumed he would “do nothing back.” Within the past few years—drugs, gay liberation—two other breeds have thrived—the masculine bisexual and the androgynous, usually willowy but not effeminate, young hustler. Of course, the queens have existed since the time of the dinosaurs.
Street techniques vary, but there are general aspects. The hustler usually stands on one of several known corners, or walks idly along the streets, or mills with other hustlers outside known food stands, coffeeshops. Steady hustlers have their favorite corners. A client will stop his car and signal a hustler. Depending on his style or lack of it, the hustler will then stand by the car until the man speaks first or will just hop in.
Fantasy is important on the streets. If a client asks whether you're married, you say yes if you're smart, because he wants that. If he asks if you've been in the marines, or the army, or the navy (curiously never the air force), yes. If he asks if you've ever worked in a carnival, or posed for pictures, or been in a rodeo, yes, yes, yes.
Danger of course is always present, a constant factor. Plainclothes cops offer money, make the entrapping proposition, then bust. There are the marauding gangs of hoods who raid hustling streets. And the psychotic figures attracted and repelled by hustlers.… The psychic danger of constant loneliness.
For many drifting youngmen, hustling is their only means of experiencing worlds otherwise totally locked to them. For moments their desired young bodies are the keys to those worlds. Their fleeting youth is their one bid for attention. Beyond that, their lives will fade. But during those moments, hustling, they matter, importantly. The drabness lifts.
Postscript
Recently Time magazin
e created a new style of male-hustling. A story on “pornography” referred to the thriving heterosexual massage parlors lining the south side of a certain Los Angeles boulevard, and to the male prostitutes hustling on the north side. The latter was not true. There had existed, yes, a “limbo” section on that thoroughfare, where one stood or hitchhiked along certain blocks or lingered outside an all-night coffeehouse. Although occasionally you might find a client there, it was not a hustling area, more mutual cruising than anything else. Days after the Time mistake, the area conducive to hitchhiking was suddenly converted into a hustling turf rivaling that on Selma—at a time when the arrests were decimating hustlers on that street.
Now, on weekends, malehustlers—thumbs held out in varying personal styles—stand at virtually every parking meter along the newly thriving thoroughfare, sometimes so busy now you have to walk for blocks to find a place for yourself. Cars drive around the blocks slowly, choosing.
This new style has the advantage that you're there legally—hitchhiking, not “loitering” (though cops have already begun their jealous harassment). The disadvantage is that you often get a ride from someone who doesn't know, or more often pretends not to know, that the hitchhikers are hustlers—a situation that has given rise to a breed of men who get off simply on giving hustlers a ride. You will see the same hustler a few minutes later hitchhiking back to the first turf—two small islands at the end of a stretch of a mile-and-a-half of street.
In summer especially, the heavy influx of drifters creates a sad spectacle. Goodlooking anxious youngmen—a whole spectrum, from the slender and blond to the tough and dark—wait eagerly, even signaling cars on slow nights, buyers' nights—eager youngmen being driven up and down the same street and hoping for a firm connection for the night.
And another change, this one internal—call it the subtle stirring of the radicalization of the malehustling contingent. Existing on the fringes of the gay world, male hustlers have always been dual outsiders, outlaws from the main society, and outcasts within the main gay world of hostile non-payers and non-sellers. Desired abundantly, and envied, they are nonetheless the least cared about. Routine mass roundups of hustlers occur with no outcry, virtually no manifestation of concern within the vast gay world—while a comparable gay roundup anywhere else will see mushrooming conferences called by ever-ready gay “spokesmen” before television cameras. An attorney points out that, compared to non-commercial gays, a disproportionate number of arrested hustlers will actually be jailed—because few can afford to pay for representation—hustlers are easy spenders, living from day to day—and because hustler arrests bring no free publicity for the lawyer who might defend them.
Still, during a gay parade on Hollywood Boulevard, groups of malehustlers of a breed notorious for their posture that they are not gay—“just hustling for bread”—cheered marching contingents of open homosexuals. When three hustlers were arrested for popping firecrackers near invading cops, a pressurized anger stirred palpably among the others. That very night on Selma, a group of girls sped by in a car and yelled, “Queers! Queers!” at the masculine, toughlooking hustlers milling about on the streets. Only a few years earlier that breed would have answered with a ball-wounded, “Come back and I'll show you who's queer!” Not that night. There was an almost total indifference. One of the most masculine of the streethustlers southern-drawled at the shouting women: “Yeah, we queer, so what?” It was as radical a statement as had ever been voiced on that street.
Concurrently, the camaraderie—an increasing camaraderie—among hustlers is easing in its strict role-playing, slowly but perceptibly. Unacceptable before—disastrous to one's masculine hustling image—comments are now lightly exchanged routinely admiring of each other's attractiveness or specialty—muscles, handsome faces, unique clothes style, even reputed cock size. There is still the uneasiness, the sexual uneasiness, among masculine hustlers, but more and more cross turfs back and forth, from hustling to mutual cruising of other males; indeed, a type of non-hustling, non-paying goodlooking youngmen now roam the hustling streets attracting equally goodlooking malehustlers, not with money but with their own good looks.
What remains unchanged are the lurking dangers of cop entrapment—and the brevity of the life on the hustling streets. A hustler's life is brief. Some hustlers begin in their young teens. New hustlers still arrive almost daily and find favorite spots nightly, on Selma or on the new turf Time created. The first weeks you won't wait around long, stepping in and out of cars friskily, waving back at your friends still waiting. Abruptly, the time of waiting stretches, the number of rides diminishes. You meet each other on the street and one of you asks, “What's happenin?” and the other answers noncommittally, shrugging, and asks back and the answer comes, “Not doin too good tonight, slow night,” Even as you speak, fresh competition hops into cars, waving back at you. There is the awareness—perceived as yet by only the two of you—that on the street you're becoming a has-been before you ever were, really a “has.”
On Selma late one night a young hustler, there week after week, passes, nods in the easy camaraderie that happens among street hustlers recognizing each other. “How's it goin?” “All right-with you?” He shrugs, “Could be better,” and adds quickly, boosting himself, “Just made five bucks, the guy just played with my cock for a couple of minutes in his car, said he didn't have no place, I didn't even have to take my dick out—yeah, I made five bucks in a couple of minutes,” spotting the same man still driving around the block choosing, “five bucks for a couple of minutes, can't beat that.”
He was right—you couldn't beat five bucks for two minutes, that's $150 an hour! Right up there. More than psychiatrists make, at least now.
Unfortunately his clients, and the world that crowns youth only briefly, will make it impossible for him—unlike psychiatrists—to hook his clients for years.
Another night. Another corner. And a young hustler comes by; perhaps eighteen, wearing that beauty that exists only because it is eighteen. But wait: the special street-youthfulness is tattered. He's perhaps nineteen; perhaps even twenty. He recognizes me from other streets. “Hey, man, can I ask you a question?” I pull back in panic. I know what he's going to ask, he's already verbalizing it: “How old are you?”
I lie outrageously—but even the fake age makes him react—in implied admiration, yes, of my street survival, but his reaction wounds anyway, deeply: “Wow!—and you still got a good hustle.” He's congratulating my survival, perhaps even envying it a tiny bit: For him at that age, what? “Am I dressed okay?” he asks me abruptly, nervously opening his shirt an extra button. “I mean, I'm not making it like I used to. I've been hanging around three hours today—and nothing!”
I'm still wounded by his question, his reaction—the specter of age is floating under the street light. But I feel wounded for him, too. I have my body cunningly constructed for street survival, and I have options—but he, at nineteen or twenty, the freshness of his youth is already tarnished. He's a thin, no-longer-boy.
Exploited? Oh, yes, unquestionably. Just as later tonight he may exploit; he may rob and beat up the next man who picks him up, or—but this is less likely—be robbed and beaten up himself. Most probably, both will make a bargain and go through with it.
And the influx will continue, the new faces and young bodies fresh among the straining older ones; an influx created at least in part—and hypocritically—by grotesquely bloated cop reports issued periodically and aimed, despite disclaimers, at making all homosexuals look like rich predators luring innocent youths. Because: A twelve-year-old boy can earn up to $1000 a day as a prostitute, a recent, incredibly absurd cop report—front-paged rashly without questioning by Los Angeles newspapers—claimed (imagine!— a new upper-class!—aging rock stars and twelve-year-old male prostitutes in Gucci gear!); a report issued in the wake of a sex scandal involving underage scout girls and cops and in the face of threats to cut the vice division's budget. A thousand dollars a day, hustling! That means th
ere are many rich perverts just waiting to molest your little boy unless you give us a lot of money to bust them wherever they hang out, the insidious message is conveyed.
Left out is the fact that most of the men who pick up the very young on the streets (and unlike many who prefer the older ones) do not belong to the so-called “gay community” of upfront homosexuals, those who frequent gay bars, parks; no, they are loners, closeted victims of repression, quite often married, having children of their own, leading otherwise “straight” lives.
A thousand bucks a day hustling, man!
So dozens of boys line the streets, going for ten bucks on a slow night, even less when you're desperate for a place to sleep; finding kindness sometimes, yes, often, but just as often finding contemptuous men; and realizing that, finally, it's a buyer's market on the streets because the number of men who pick up hustlers remains relatively stable—they own cars, homes, have jobs, businesses, do not form a floating group—whereas the hustlers arrive in waves; new ones for the same buyers, the “older” hustlers thrust aside in as little as a few weeks.
Old youngmen and boys haunt the streets.
Then the cops raid the hustling turfs.
Netted, trapped, the youngest and most frightened of the hustlers will tell their captors whatever they want to hear. One thousand dollars a day? Yes, sure—a lot of rich fags out there. (But you have no money to get a lawyer.) A customer every fifteen minutes? Oh, yeah. (But the familiar corner became your enemy.) Thousands of customers? Yes— and all rich, famous, powerful, on TV. (But you can't call one to bail you out.) And so the terrified boys are offered up in sacrifice to exaggerated reports and shrieking headlines: HOMOSEXUALS PREYING ON INNOCENT BOYS!
Getting attention. These often lost, pitiful youngmen. Getting attention only when they're busted—and in order to whip up the frothing homophobia whenever the cops need it. Only then. Not before—or even after—when the options might be opened by genuine official concern for the young—the money-sucking agencies, bureaus, divisions, departments vomiting rancid sociologese and pieties; spewing nonsense; extending no real options to these boys (if they want options—because choice must be respected—and the psychic lure of the streets is strong, the life even glamorous in its trashy way, and you're a special, desired survivor—if you last) against whatever existence may bring about—un-happiness and exploitation, whether in the farm fields, dingy restaurant kitchens, or on the mean hustling streets.
