J Wells - The Male Hustler

“I can relate to that easier than to someone who does this as a permanent thing, maybe because I see myself as going through my own set of changes.

“I can’t imagine myself ever turning gay. I just can’t picture myself in that position. I can’t believe I could really get involved in homosexuality in any real way, that I could dig being blown by a man, for example. I mean in the sense of really digging it, not going through the motions as I do now. And I’ve tried to imagine myself going down on a guy, or any of those things, and I can’t. The entire idea is completely foreign to me.

“The thing is, from everything I’ve heard and read, it’s supposed to work that way. Either you become a hustler because you’ve got those impulses within yourself or, and this makes even more sense, the whole hustling scene makes you curious about what the Johns are getting out of it, what it is that they dig, and you can’t help thinking about it a lot until it becomes some kind of an obsession with you, and ultimately you try it and maybe you dig it, and so on.

“This is something that’s supposed to happen all the time, that you start off a hustler and wind up a genuine faggot. I can’t picture myself in a sexual relationship with another guy, and I certainly can’t picture myself becoming a John. God, I can’t see that at all. In fact after the time I’ve spent in this racket I could never go to a female prostitute. I would just be too conscious of how completely sterile and phony and empty it all was.

“One thing I will say is that I’m sure I tend to think things through more than most of the street hustlers. And that’s not an advantage as far as the racket is concerned. The more deeply you think about it, the harder it is to keep coming back to it. Which is why I’m not too hung up about what I’m doing at the time being, because I can already see clearly that I’ll be out of it before very much longer.”

“I was in therapy for a little over a year. I gave it up about eighteen months ago for the usual reasons. The cost, for one. I was going twice a week at twenty dollars a session, which is quite reasonable compared to what some people have to pay, but even so it was forty dollars a week, week in and week out, and that’s an enormous amount of money to pay just to hear yourself talk. And also I kept having the feeling that I wasn’t getting anywhere positive. I would go and lie there and talk, and the therapist would repeat phrases of mine and point things out, and I would get insights. Do you know, that in itself can become a habit, rehashing the past to death, getting high on these periodic insights. I felt after a certain amount of time that none of these breakthroughs were doing anything for me. They were something I went through twice a week, and sometimes the insights were gratifying at the time, and for that matter some of them would stay with me and make sense later on, giving me a new way of looking at certain aspects of myself.

“But I suppose what bothered me was that I was still me. You go into something like that looking for a change. The bullshit aspect of therapy is that most people who go into it really think they are going to make major changes in their basic selves. I don’t believe that ever happens, do you? I have any number of friends who have been in intensive Freudian analysis for years and years, an hour a day five days a week until the end of time, and they’re so addicted to this that God help them when the shrink takes two weeks off in the summer — they become absolutely paralyzed and just live on Librium until the great man returns. And they will insist , so many of them, that it’s doing them worlds of good. That they have changed, that they are different people now. But if you look at them objectively you see the same people with the same hang-ups. They say they understand their hang-ups now. Well, marvelous, baby. I mean, it’s like understanding you have terminal cancer. You can understand the hell out of it, but that don’t make you get better.

“What I’m getting at, though, is that about six months or so after I stopped therapy, I then began to realize that it had helped me after all. Not by eliminating hang-ups or changing them but by teaching me to be a fundamentally analytical person, which I very definitely had not been before then.

“Do you do grass? Well, do you know how, when you smoke, you can hear music in a new way? For example, one of the first times I smoked I listened to some Vivaldi chamber music, which I’ve always absolutely loved, but for the first time I was able to concentrate on what the various instruments were doing all at the same time. I could follow different polyphonic tracks in my head all at once. I gather people who are really involved in music do this as a matter of course, but it was an enormous change for me. But after that, I found I could always listen to music that way, whether I was stoned or not.

“In much the same way, therapy taught me to listen to my own self on a new level, and that ability stayed with me after I discontinued it. As a matter of fact it intensified, because I had to do all the work myself instead of having the therapist to point things out for me. And they say that analysis is always an individual project, that you have to do the real work by yourself...

“So I’ll think back to various aspects of my childhood, and think of ways in which I always saw myself as an essentially feminine person, and at the same time I’ll see ways in which I always found it necessary to have a particular male identity. As I said, this didn’t banish any of my hang-ups. In fact there were times when it seemed to intensify them. You know, the idea that self-awareness is the ultimate answer, that’s a very dangerous theory. So often after an enormous insight, an enormous emotional breakthrough, people become desperately depressed. Even suicidal. I’ve known of an appalling number of cases of people who have gotten into the encounter group scene in a very intense way, and suddenly one day they are bubbling all over the place telling everybody that they have really opened themselves up as never before, and the next week they commit suicide. It’s scary to shine lights into all those dark places, baby. You can’t always live with what you find there.

“In my own case, I like to think that I’ve come to terms with some of my hang-ups in fairly sane and healthy ways. For example, for a couple of years I was seriously considering a sex-change operation. Of having them cut off the family jewels and tuck them away in the vault. There was a period of time when I felt enormously ambivalent about my penis. I’ve been cross-dressing for years and with my build and features and everything else I look more like a girl than most girls do. I can make my voice nice and butchy-deep, but I find it just as easy and natural to talk in a sexy female contralto. So when I got all dressed and made up and set out to cruise, the one constant reminder that I wasn’t what I looked like was this hunk of meat down here. I would hitch it back between my legs to hide the damned thing.

“So in that respect I hated my genitals, I felt they were male organs attached to a basically female body. But at the same time, they were what I got my kicks with. I would come by ejaculating through my penis, and the idea of cutting that off, of removing that pleasure part of the body — well, it was a conflict. I never did go to Denmark but I never entirely stopped thinking about it.

“I could never go that route now because of things I have learned about myself. I know that I am a woman in certain very important respects, but I also know and am able to accept that I am a man in other respects, and an operation would take something away without giving me anything in return. If you’re familiar with the operation, you know that they build in an artificial vagina. They create folds in your flesh surgically. If that’s a real vagina, then you can get milk from a bull’s tits. I mean, love, it’s nonsense. A woman is more than something with a hole to stuff a cock into. A woman is ovaries and tubes and a uterus and all sorts of subtle plumbing which no doctor can install in a male body. Oh, for heaven’s sake, a clitoris is the female version of the penis, right? So a transsexual who has his cock removed is brilliantly turning himself into a woman without a clit. There are so many ways in which the whole thing doesn’t make sense. You give up your manhood without getting womanhood in return, and you turn into, I hate to say this because I’ve known transsexuals and hate to put them down, but you turn into a nothing ! Neither fish nor fowl. Nothing!