J Wells - The Male Hustler

“The pattern I seem to be in now, I’ll go a couple of nights a week. I’ll make anywhere from ten to twenty-five dollars a trick. I rarely go with anyone more than once a night. Oh, you get into situations where you’re broke and the rent is due or there’s something you want to buy. You hustle hard for a brief period, but I think it works out on an average to maybe fifty dollars a week that I pick up. And I can virtually live on that. I don’t live very high. I’m not that thing oriented, I don’t always have to be spending money. And I do take a job from time to time, and of course I get an acting position every now and then, although I haven’t been making the audition rounds as much lately as I did, oh, say six months ago.

“Periodically I decide that I ought to stop this, that it’s degrading. It really is, you know. You just look at Times Square and you can see how fundamentally sordid it is, even without the people, the sex hustle. It’s all compulsive behavior and it’s basically dirty. But I’ve come to the conclusion that I’ll never get away from it until there’s something to take its place. You sit around bored with nothing to do and nobody you feel like seeing, and you’re low on money, and it’s so easy to go out and hustle a few dollars. And maybe I get something sexual out of it, maybe just having an orgasm with another person has some kick to it that I can’t manage to admit to myself. I’m not honestly sure about that. I can see it both ways.

“The thing that keeps me going, not what keeps me going back to the street but the thing that generally sustains me, makes me think that everything’ll work out by itself, is that I know I’ll drop this when something else takes its place, and that something like that will happen when I ultimately get my head together. Which is beginning to happen, because, just as an example, I’ve gone places in this conversation that I’ve never gone before, and I know that if we had had this interview six months or a year ago I never would have been able to open up this much, as much as I have today. I think that represents progress, growth.

“So I know I’m beginning to open up, and I know that if I ever find anything I can really get into, this whole sex hustle will just dry up and blow away. I’m a hundred percent convinced of this. It’s a substitute for something, for being alive, maybe.

“If I really found a girl and related to her, and didn’t stay inside my plastic bag, I’m sure I would never even consider going on the street again. It would just be impossible. And I think sooner or later this will happen with a girl. And another thing, I’ve never done anything on the street while I was acting, while I had a role. I would go back when the play closed, but from the time we started rehearsals I never went anywhere near Times Square.

“Sooner or later something major will come along, whether it’s an acting break or a romance or some new career. It could be almost anything, because I lack direction right now and could find almost any sort of new thing opening up if it was the right thing at the right time.

“So I just regard this as a stage...”

Alan’s attitude toward his clients was a mixture of contempt, resentment, and sympathy. He felt the mutual relationship, such as it was, was mutually exploitative. They were trying to possess him sexually by giving him money, while he was taking their money without giving anything of himself in return. This attitude was not dissimilar to that expressed by a large proportion of the prostitutes I interviewed in writing Tricks of the Trade .

I mentioned as much, and Alan found the comparison an interesting one.

“I think the faggot Johns are worse,” he said. “More pathetic, more compulsive about the whole thing. I can identify a lot more easily with a man who goes to female prostitutes from time to time. It really is a convenience if he doesn’t know women, or if he’s married and can’t run around in public. It’s the same thing, he’s getting non-sex, paid-for sex, but it’s a little less grubby. And it’s more a necessity because it’s difficult to pick up a girl and have sex with her. I’ve never been very good at it myself. The girls I have sex with are ones I know, usually through the theater or through mutual acquaintances. As far as picking up a girl at a singles bar, everything is so guarded, so phony, that I can see where a man might find it simpler to go directly to a prostitute.

“With the gay Johns, though, the situation is different. Before I started making the Times Square scene I never realized how easy it is to have casual homosexual sex. Because Times Square is not entirely commercial, you know. A lot of guys come around here just to pick each other up and swing with each other, with neither one hustling the other for bread. And to get away from the street there are the Turkish baths and the gay bars and everything. If what you want is casual sex, which is obviously what the Johns want, well, it’s all over the city. I can see it now because I’m into this particular scene and I know what to look for. It’s all over the place, believe me.

“The typical John, though, has this compulsive obsession with keeping it a secret. He doesn’t want anybody to know what he’s into. He’s usually married and has children, and his attitude will be that he doesn’t want his wife to find out, he doesn’t want his kids to find out, he doesn’t want his boss or his friends or anybody to find out, and the way to guarantee against this is to find some young stud and pay him and that’s all there is to it.

“Of course he could be just as anonymous at a Turkish bath, but with something like that, that kind of scene, the relationship would be a mutual one, a level one, two guys swinging because they want to. And that would mean that he would have to identify his partner as a human being, and he would be a man having open sex with another man, and he can’t handle that in his head, he’s still too much the closet queen to handle it. So he has to dehumanize his partner, and the easiest way to do that is to put sex on a cash-and-carry basis. In fact he may not just want a hustler, he may purposely want someone who looks like a hustler, so that there’s no human aspect involved anywhere.

“And the act itself is limited to sex. Ninety percent of the time it’s his mouth and my cock and that’s the only contact there will be. He’ll leave all his clothes on, I’ll just open my pants. Maybe he’ll jerk off while he goes down on me. Maybe not. Part of his impersonality is because that’s all the hustler will permit. Like I would freak out if a John tried to kiss me. I couldn’t handle that at all. But the thing is, if that’s the kind of person the John seeks out, that’s obviously what he wants. Or otherwise he would go elsewhere for his sex.

“Of course you do meet different types on the street. Ever since that one I told you about, the one who tried to rape me, I’ve been careful to get things settled in front. I’ll ask a man what he wants to do. If he wants to go down on me or if he wants me to bugger him, all right. Nothing else.

“Most Johns are glad you draw the line. They like that you limit yourself to the male role. That you’re a real stud and not a faggot yourself. Oh, you do get a wide assortment. And they’re not all closet types. You occasionally get an all-out homosexual who happens to be attracted to you and is willing to play the game on your terms. But the vast majority are the closet clowns.

“I sometimes wonder if this sort of scene is a phase for them, too, or if it’s a permanent thing. I could see, for instance, that they might be going through some changes themselves. You could have a guy who’s always been smothering gay impulses, he’s married and all that, and he’s been fighting something within himself, and he wants to find out where he’s at. So maybe the men I see, some of them at least, are coming to the street for a short period of time, and they either work it out one way and straighten themselves out again or they work it out another way and come to terms with the gay scene, going to the baths or developing a full-fledged gay relationship or wherever it turns out to be at for them.