The Big Questions
How did you start with prostitution and why are you doing it?
It’s like cats. You can see them provoked into exploration across a narrow ledge, focused just to see the other side of a precipitous roof; it’s always been the same for me. If I want to see something from a different angle, figure something out, uncover a certain unknown, there I’ll be, inching out across a drainpipe.
I started as a go-go dancer/stripper. This did not involve prostitution in and of itself, in fact, was probably just as lucrative for me as hooking, even with it’s own set of issues and complications. However, it was my gateway profession. You get propositioned a lot by men in burlesque dance clubs, especially as the blokes get drunker and drunker throughout the night. When you turn them down, they make what they think is a natural assumption seeing as they’ve been paying you to take your clothes off, or as it often happens, have watched other people pay you to take your clothes off, and then start asking you for a price to come home with them. Turning them down becomes reflexive and sometimes stylish, with clever retorts that sometimes take their fuzzy brains a little while to figure out. (“Alright, baby. I’ll charge you to wait outside the club.”) But every once and a while, someone moderately attractive and sexy would ask, and that question would float up: what would be the harm?
So I started by seeking out the answers to questions I was asking myself, mainly what it would be like, who the people were that were asking, and how I would feel about it afterwards; all queries I’m still searching through.
I also like money.
What type of prostitution do you do, for example are you a "High-end" sex-worker?
I don’t know how these distinctions really break down, especially in the gay-male world of companionship-for-pay. The labels are most likely self-imposed past the level of “blow you for a twenty” off the street in Boystown, something which I have never done. I have worked in brothels, I have solicited my own clients randomly from clubs (never planned), and am now booking my services by advertising on the Internet. I price myself at the top end of the scale for the area that I’m in, and below what traveling porn stars and the evidently statuesque body-builders do; but not by much. I seem to be developing a stable of clients who like the fact that I’m educated and speak in complete sentences, and that I’m easy to take out in public. Ideally, I would like to have a few regulars who book me for substantial periods of time, and very little fuck-and-run business, so I guess that this would put me in the Higher-end, but by no means exclusive range.
Gay-male companionship comes with a different set of stigmas and complications than the male/female dynamic. Many of my clients are married, heavily closeted and uncomfortable being identified as a man who desires the romantic or sexual companionship of another man; this necessitates an even greater level of secrecy and discretion than most female sex-workers have to contend with -- it also greatly reduces the amount of business that I might otherwise conduct out in public, as a paid date or travel partner, even though they might like to if they weren’t quite so self-conscious.
What do you call yourself or your profession? Would you consider yourself a prostitute?
I do consider myself a prostitute, and as a man who loves synonyms and his thesaurus, I like to use the whole spicy mélange: garcon de joie, call boy, cocotte, concubine, courtier, hooker, hustler, midnight cowboy, model, party boy, pro, slut, tramp, trollop, whore, working boy.
I never use gigolo. It makes me think of some smarmy Italian fellow with a vulgar preponderance of gold jewelry.
Do you have female as well as male customers?
I don’t; although I know a couple of guys who do.
Do you ever have customers that want to please you, and do you ever get pleased from a customer?
All the time, and often.
Most clients want to feel that you are enjoying the experience together as much, if not more so, then they are, and want to feel desired and skillful as lovers. They are often not terribly desirable and not very skilled, but if you have a knack for it, you can learn to visualise past their shortcomings and start using them as masturbatory aids, thereby helping with the whole fantasy aspect of the work.
But the ratio of genuinely enjoyable johns to not is probably higher than you would think.
Could you ever imagine yourself initiating a private relationship with a customer?
Yes, and I have; but it became very complicated very quickly, and the lines of emotional and monetary commitment became hard to negotiate in almost no time at all. It’s not something I’m inclined to attempt again.
Do you have a partner that you love ( with whom you have sex with)? Does that sex differ from the sex for sale? How?
I have a partner that I’m very fond of and see often, and we’ve been having especially fervent, window-rattling sex lately, so yes, it differs, as all recreational sex differs from that which happens as part of a transaction.
No matter how well I get along with someone, if they’re passing you a stack of 50’s to have you in the room there’s an onus to perform the service you have advertised. If you want to provide a quality service, this informs the decisions, choices and pace you pursue during a session. Unless you’ve developed a rapport, this generally means the sex is not as spontaneous as it might be between two people who are just dying to rip each other’s clothes off.
What is the difference between sex in work, and sex in private or more specific sex with love?
Sex with love bends all reason, light, gravity and electromagnetic force to a super particle of wordless exclamation; and paroxysms that burn with wonder.
Otherwise, outside of love, it runs the rest of the world’s painful spectrum: muddled to mundane, tiresome to terrific, gratuitous to gratifying, yet always an act that refuses to go out of style, despite the fact that it’s hopelessly overdone.
What is love to you?
I could write a book.
What is prostitution to you?
Ignoring issues creative and metaphoric, sex for money.
Do you ever get tired with sex?
Oh, god. Yes.
Is the money a major factor in your job?
Money is the major factor in my job; as it is in most jobs.
If you could choose to be something else that you enjoy making the same amount of money would you do it instead? Is this work just like any other work to you? Is it "only" a work to you?
Prostitution affords me a number of things, but most prominently it gives me free time. Any alternative I could be busying myself with, that would render me a similar annual yield, would not give me that luxury. I will not be at this forever, but as I travel and try to figure out the other aspects of my life which have been burdening me with choices, and not enough room to work them out, it's ideal. It’s work unlike any other; it’s bizarre and exhausting, not to mention dangerous if you don’t keep your wits about you and make your calls cautiously and sensibly. I don’t know if anything can be termed “just” work, as everything a human being involves her or himself with requires different kinds of focus and attention, drains and rewards in its own way, but sex-work is good for me right now. I’m relatively good at it, and it remains engaging as well as profitable. When I reach the point where it tires me to think about it, let alone perform, I’ll be retiring gracefully.
Do you have trust in people? What is your general opinion about humans?
My trust in people is nominal, not because I think most are malicious or out to use others, but because most are hopelessly un-empathetic, self-cantered, obtuse and lazy. Trust is something I consider hard-won, but those I do, I do unreservedly… within reason.
As far as humans go, those clay-formed, divinity-fired pots so full of promise but so easily broken, I don’t know. They make me laugh a lot. They make me weep myself dry, too.
