Read Male Sex Work and Society Online
Authors: Unknown
Tags: #Psychology/Human Sexuality, #Social Science/Gay Studies, #SOC012000, #PSY016000
Male Sex Work and Society (10 page)
This name of
bardassa
… should not be and is in effect not given to boys who out of affection and kindness couple graciously with civil and praiseworthy lovers … The
bardassa
correctly means mercenary and venal
putto
, who sells himself as mere merchandise.
49
It seems likely that street-based male sex work was not an unusual phenomenon in European cities; however, it was stigmatized, feared, and punished, perhaps even more than noncommercial sex between men.
Jeffrey Merrick notes that Parisian law enforcement was inured enough to the city’s sodomites that it typically did not enforce the capital punishment laws; prosecutions from 1715 “fit a predictable pattern of sexual relations between younger males, commonly immigrants from the provinces, who supported themselves or at least supplemented their wages through prostitution, and older males who were willing and able to pay for their services.”
50
Nevertheless, consider the case of Edme Guerin, a 20-year-old arrested in 1715 in Paris, where he had been living for 10 months since arriving from Lyon. Poor Guerin reported that he had “not lived on his prostitution and his infamies”; rather, being new to Paris,
50
Nevertheless, consider the case of Edme Guerin, a 20-year-old arrested in 1715 in Paris, where he had been living for 10 months since arriving from Lyon. Poor Guerin reported that he had “not lived on his prostitution and his infamies”; rather, being new to Paris,
and having met [a man named] Lemur, this wretched man asked him if he would not like him to introduce him to men who liked lads and having parties with them. The respondent, who was at the time in very great need of money and having a lot of trouble surviving, unfortunately accepted the proposal of said Lemur, who procured him the first time to a shopkeeper in the rue aux Fers who deals in buttons … with whom they were in a tavern called The Magpie in the Rue Saint-Denis, where … the worst infamies took place.
51
Guerin served six months in prison for sodomy, which the court euphemized as “do[ing] evil.” He reported that it was “not hard to make the acquaintance of infamous types who prostitute themselves or those who debauch them, since they stroll every day in the Luxembourg [Gardens], where even persons of rank meet. And when they plan to debauch a young lad whom they believe suits them, they accost him by asking what time it is or on various other pretexts.” By the 18
th
century, male sex work had become institutionalized in cities across Europe, replete with understood meeting places and lingual codes to facilitate such activity. Despite the harshly punitive laws in place to stop male sex work, it was common enough that law enforcement systems, if not ignoring it entirely, were beginning to sometimes punish it less severely than, for instance, the ancient Romans.
th
century, male sex work had become institutionalized in cities across Europe, replete with understood meeting places and lingual codes to facilitate such activity. Despite the harshly punitive laws in place to stop male sex work, it was common enough that law enforcement systems, if not ignoring it entirely, were beginning to sometimes punish it less severely than, for instance, the ancient Romans.
Love for Biscuits: The Founding of a Nation
We have learned, so far, of kept boys who have been deified, of saints, and of slaves. We would be remiss in not reminding our readers that there exists a country whose earliest settlers included men who traded sex. As John Smith wrote in 1607 of the first spring for the Jamestown colonists, “[We are] oppressed [by] extreme weakness and sickness … Whilst the ships [from England] stayed, allowance was somewhat bettered, by a daily proportion of Bisket [biscuit] which the sailors would pilfer to sell, give, or exchange with us, for money, saxefras [sassafras], furs, or love.”
52
Unfortunately, when the ships left again for England and the starved colonists could no longer trade things (including love) for food, they were forced to eat wormy barley from a communal kettle before they learned how to live off the Virginia land.
52
Unfortunately, when the ships left again for England and the starved colonists could no longer trade things (including love) for food, they were forced to eat wormy barley from a communal kettle before they learned how to live off the Virginia land.
This offhand report, phrasing male sex trading without bias, would not characterize male sex work in American society today. In fact, America has not traditionally recognized its male sex workers as much more than vectors of homosexuality and/or sexually transmitted diseases; of course, the two are often conflated.
In 1677, young indentured servants named Sam Barboe and Peter Buoll were offered a bushel of corn and gunpowder, respectively, to take off their pants for their master, Nicholas Sension. Sension’s sentence—which did not include imprisonment or hanging, perhaps due to his high social status—contained a proviso that held his estate in escrow until his death, whereupon it would return to his family so long as he didn’t continue “infecting the rising generation.”
53
53
Fast-forward 150 years to the penal colonies on the East Coast of North America, where reformer Louis Dwight noted that certain inmates had “peculiar skin, the strained and sunken eye, the distorted mouth and head, and the general expression of the countenance.” It was, he wrote, “as if God had impressed the mark of the beast upon them, for unnatural crime; … I did not understand, till I learned, that the sin of sodom is the vice of prisoners, and boys are the favorite prostitutes.”
54
Lest you conclude that the good reformer got carried away, a gonorrhea epidemic was discovered in 1886 in a male reform school in Baltimore and attributed to young inmates’ practice of engaging in sodomy with older inmates for “tobacco, candy, or other delicacy.”
55
54
Lest you conclude that the good reformer got carried away, a gonorrhea epidemic was discovered in 1886 in a male reform school in Baltimore and attributed to young inmates’ practice of engaging in sodomy with older inmates for “tobacco, candy, or other delicacy.”
55
By the late 1800s, male sex work in America was no longer entirely relegated to master-servant or intra-inmate relationships. At least in New York City, an emergent gay and transgender community was establishing itself in bars and beer halls. According to testimony given to the City Vigilance League, a reform commission, in 1899 there were “on the Bowery alone … certainly six places” that were “well known as being resorts for male prostitutes,” including Little Bucks and Columbia Hall (nicknamed Paresis Hall, after an epithet flung at male and transgendered sex workers that connoted paralysis thought to be caused by venereal disease) on Bowery and Fifth Street, which was known for “men … soliciting men at the tables.”
56
Said one witness, “I have always observed these degenerate men there in large number, quite large numbers from twenty-five to fifty.”
57
56
Said one witness, “I have always observed these degenerate men there in large number, quite large numbers from twenty-five to fifty.”
57
FIGURE 1.2
Courtroom sketches of boys involved in London’s Cleveland Street Scandal in the late 1800s. When the homosexual brothel in the case was in operation, homosexuality was illegal in the UK.
Similar scenes were reported at The Slide, a beer garden on Bleecker Street, where “a great number of those queer creatures assembled each night, dressed in male costume and sitting for company on the same basis as the others [the female prostitutes],”
58
and at the Golden Rule Pleasure Club on West Third Street, where one was “buzzed” into a room with a table, two chairs, and a young man dressed as, and identifying as, a woman.
59
In Washington, D.C., in the 1890s, African Americans were holding “drag dances.”
60
The rise of transgender sex work was memorialized in an 1894 medical report:
58
and at the Golden Rule Pleasure Club on West Third Street, where one was “buzzed” into a room with a table, two chairs, and a young man dressed as, and identifying as, a woman.
59
In Washington, D.C., in the 1890s, African Americans were holding “drag dances.”
60
The rise of transgender sex work was memorialized in an 1894 medical report:
In many large cities the subjects of contrary sexual impulse form a class by themselves and are recognized by the police … They adopt the names of women, and affect a feminine speech and manner, “falling in love” with each other, and writing amatory and obscene letters. In New York City alone there are no less than one hundred of these, who make a profession of male prostitution, soliciting upon the streets and in parks when they get the opportunity. Physically, many of these men whom I have examined present the stigmata of degenerative insanity.
61
It is unclear from these reports whether the subjects actually identified themselves as women or were induced to cross-dress by social and sex work mores that made it easier for them to have sex with men for money if they presented themselves as women. However, the reactions to such behavior by the powers that be do not suggest that transgender sex workers were any more tolerated at that time than they are today. It is sadly ironic that male and transgender sex workers have been associated historically with sexually transmitted infections when HIV/AIDS has so ravaged these groups in recent decades.
Feasting with Panthers:
Fin de Siècle
Europe
Fin de Siècle
Europe
Across the ocean, a gay underground was beginning to thrive; the 1810 adoption and spread of the Napoleon Penal Code had effectively decriminalized sodomy across Continental Europe, ruled by the French Empire. From Paris to London to Berlin, male sex workers created niches for sexual commerce in such hiding places (or
Schlupfwinkels
) as park tearooms, public gardens, and bazaars, including Berlin’s famous Friedrichstrasse.
62
Public cruising areas were marked by economic dissonance. In pubs, parks, and markets, genteel upper-class fairies were looking for a good time with working-class messenger boys. Historian Jeffrey Weeks writes about London:
Schlupfwinkels
) as park tearooms, public gardens, and bazaars, including Berlin’s famous Friedrichstrasse.
62
Public cruising areas were marked by economic dissonance. In pubs, parks, and markets, genteel upper-class fairies were looking for a good time with working-class messenger boys. Historian Jeffrey Weeks writes about London:
By the 1870s, any homosexual transaction, whether or not money was involved, was described as “trade”… In this world of sexual barter, particularly given the furtiveness, the need for caution, and the great disparities of wealth and social position among the participants, the cash nexus inevitably dominated.
63
Like Rome in the era of early Christianity, Victorian London had a massive split between its wealthy and its destitute. Unlike ancient Rome, however, its social mores were shaped by several hundred more years of strict Church doctrine.
The young working-class males who served as sex workers generally were assumed to take an active, masculine role, while the upper-crust sex solicitors would play the fairy. This represents a shift in social mores, which had until this point in sex work history favored the buyer over the seller fairly consistently. James Gardiner tries to find a rationale for the upper crust’s taste for working-class boys, attributing it to the “idealisation [of] … savages: dumb, anonymous sex objects.”
64
Weeks confers upon this iconography a desire to “cross the class divide,”
65
to see if the grass was indeed greener on the other side. But there may be a simpler reason for these couplings than the theory that opposites attract; for rich older men, working-class guys were simply the young men most available for sex. Economically, the boys needed the cash; socially, they remained straight; as trade, the activity would rarely be looked at askance by the populus, and the straighter the boy looked and acted, the less suspicion the client incurred for consorting with a “toff.”
66
Tolerance works in interesting ways: although society was paying more legal attention to same-sex intimacies, “no one thought it at all odd if a gentleman took an interest in a young lad, the presumption [being] that his motives were philanthropic.”
67
Of course, that presumption might be accurate regardless of whether the gentleman was apprenticing an eager tradesman or giving him head and paying him for it.
64
Weeks confers upon this iconography a desire to “cross the class divide,”
65
to see if the grass was indeed greener on the other side. But there may be a simpler reason for these couplings than the theory that opposites attract; for rich older men, working-class guys were simply the young men most available for sex. Economically, the boys needed the cash; socially, they remained straight; as trade, the activity would rarely be looked at askance by the populus, and the straighter the boy looked and acted, the less suspicion the client incurred for consorting with a “toff.”
66
Tolerance works in interesting ways: although society was paying more legal attention to same-sex intimacies, “no one thought it at all odd if a gentleman took an interest in a young lad, the presumption [being] that his motives were philanthropic.”
67
Of course, that presumption might be accurate regardless of whether the gentleman was apprenticing an eager tradesman or giving him head and paying him for it.
There had also been a tradition of soldier hustlers in Britain since the early 1800s. The impetus for this prostitution may very well have been the poor pay the soldiers received. Gardiner cites Xavier Mayne, who wrote
Intersexes
in 1919:
Intersexes
in 1919:
The price of giving his physical beauty and sexual vigour, even if with no good-will for the act, to the embraces of some casual homosexual client brings him more money in half an hour than he is likely to receive as his whole week’s pay.
68
Seemingly high in demand, the male prostitute once again became a luxury, as pricey as a jar of caviar. Soldiers were prized because they were considered more ethical; that is, less likely to blackmail their clients. By the end of the 1800s, they were active in every British port town, fresh-cheeked and dressed in scarlet. Weeks concludes that a male prostitute had two choices: to act and assume he was straight trade and hope that society and its laws protected him; or to assume he was homosexual and live in a world where hostility and danger were part of every day.
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