It’s the dilemma nigh-every attractive, cash-strapped city boy faces in a tough economic climate: is it wrong to sell it on-the-side to get by?

Every megalopolis has its resident Red Light Land, the bounds of which are not limited to a compartmentalized Times Square, The Castro, or Santa Monica Boulevard. There are uptown and downtown hookers, some gypsies, some tramps, some thieves; some you can spot on a dime, others you’d never guess were on the stroll.

Every time I have a Fanny Hill moment — you know what I mean if you’ve ever experienced someone offering you money for something sex-related — I always wonder just what clicks in someone’s mind that gets them to cross that line. I can’t say I have any big moral outrage against prostitution, but empirically I have cautions about how healthy it is, not just physically, but mentally and emotionally.

I never feel like Catherine Deneuve in Belle de Jour when it happens. I get something more akin to the sensibility espoused by Strangers With Candy‘s Jerri Blank (“When you walk ’til you limp, and you give a cut to a pimp — you’re a street whore.”), and that’s not the sexiest mindset ever. Sex work in all its various incarnations is just something that not everyone can sign on for. Just the term “sex worker” gives me the ick because it sounds like the nadir of voodoo capitalism wherein everyone has to be “productive” and even a basic biological act has got to turn a profit.

When the just-paroled-from-the-klink-looking bouncer/owner/whatever of one of the few remaining male joints on 42nd street would offer me a job on the pole when I would pass the place during college, I said “No…but thanks.” Then when he’d try to give me a free pass to some kind of come-one-come-all orgy apparently taking place inside (the lone condition being that I had to wear a condom), it just wasn’t my thing.

In the gym I frequented in Lincoln Square, I quickly determined the difference between older, well-funded men trying to pick me up with casual conversation and those guys who weren’t regulars and were instead trying to augment their clientele. Gyms are hotbeds for hustling, and lack of regular attendance is the tip-off for spotting those who are on-the-take. Many will operate under the guise of being personal trainers, which I guess would put them in the same league as those real estate agent bimbos or chicks in “sales” whose job duties for some reason require them to have huge bolt-on racks.

At my Hell’s Kitchen gym a few years later, I picked up on the fact that all the people chatting me up in my first month there were feeling out whether I was your typical 90210 type of ho’. I can’t blame them — the place was within a stone’s throw of The Gaiety and Show Palace, and the dancers/escorts/porn stars who were flown in for bookings there would take advantage of one-off nightly memberships. The sexy motherfucker with a porn ‘stache who’d flash his great tits at me when I asked him to would always point out the working boys to me. Most had some sort of accent and their sneakers were always pristine and unscuffed from wear.

The recognizable porn stars who were in town for appearances or the local high-end tricks were always my faves, often for height comparison. Billy Herrington — he of the knee-knockingly hot Long Island intonation and Japanese cult following — was unshaved and fucking massive, while ’90s hot piece Marcello Reeves was so diminutive that I could have carried him off if I’d wanted to.

I encountered Rod Barry at a magazine promotion at some club. He was approachable and looked like he could be my brother. I met Anton Michael (opening photograph) — star of straight porn, gay porn, and terrible Cinemax movies — when I went with a friend to a hetero porn convention for kicks. I thought he was so unconventionally stunning, like Ming The Merciless’s son (I would feel compelled to scream out “No! Not the bore worms!” in bed with him), so I bought his poster, and he was so gracious that he gave me his underwear, no small token when you consider what that sort of stuff sells for online.

Ultimately, they all make me ruminate on what a commodity physical beauty is and what an incongruity it is to dole out something that rare and prized to anyone willing to meet your price. When I lived for a time in Las Vegas, men — sometimes a carload full of them– would just roll down the window and flash green at me. I flipped out and promptly had a Vanessa Lutz from Freeway fit by way of “I’m not gonna spread for no roses!” when one skel offered me ten fucking dollars, as if I’d even get off the curb for less than two hundred. I’m no puritan, but when a place’s tag line involves encouraging out of towners to let all their filth fly, that’s the scene you end up with.

Economic downturns always incur an upswing in sex work, so it’s a given that the young and struggling are estimating their street value. It’s a sector that really favors women over men, and that’s reflected not only in adult films, but in Hollywood too, which could account for a greater stigma being attached to male whoring.

Movies about male prostitution are less common, and titles like Midnight Cowboy, Flesh, Looking For Mr. Goodbar, My Own Private Idaho, Hustler White, Johns, The Basketball Diaries, and Star Maps offer up a bleaker and more nihilistic tone than ones about working girls.

1970′s The Meatrack goes so far as to have its slab of beef set upon by a host of johns like a gazelle by a pride of stalking lions in its closing reel, and this is after he’s forced at knifepoint by two drag queens to make a porn loop.

Only American Gigolo comes to mind as glamorizing or sanctifying male whoring in the way that female-themed movies with their damaged daddy’s girls and saintly streetwalkers do. I’m less inclined toward the disturbing and exploitive likes of Pretty Woman and Breakfast At Tiffany’s (yes, she’s a slut) than I am toward more personal and poignant entries like Butterfield 8, New Wave Hookers, and Butt Sluts of The Castro.

Anyway, I’m convinced that were I to dabble in sluttony, it would all go terribly awry and end with me captive in a scenario lifted from Ilsa, Harem Keeper of The Oil Shieks or Models, Inc.‘s immortal “Hooker Hell” denouement. And that would suck hard.

So the realities of “escorting” (I’m not sure if that’s one of the all-time greatest euphemisms or misnomers) are too lurid, mechanical, or depressing to depict and must therefore be transformed into a picaresque misadventure, a compromise HBO’s Hung has accepted. The obvious appeal of studly Thomas Jane aside, the series has some practical stumbling blocks: the ideas that a male escort can have a clientele made up exclusively of lonely-hearts women, be able to reject a score because he’s not attracted to them, and not have to deal with any freaks are rather glaring.

It’s a double standard, but I do think men are harder to sexually exploit in the same put-a-girl-on-the-corner-so-you-can-make-a-pile style because most of us will admit that deep down we’re all total hogs, yet we still have our limits. The job can be tough on your body — top-billed gay porn stars who escort often turn three to four tricks a day. Men can’t fake arousal, so your dick must almost have to become mechanized as you dissociate mentally and allow your physicality to become a rented space. Even the idea of becoming a consort for rich men does nothing for me because I’ve never been attracted to wealth or power.

Even sex work has taken a hit financially as of late, meaning escorts are having to drop rates, engage in higher risk acts, and make multiple mid-priced gigs in place of a single high-paying one. Sites will tell you that you don’t need to be affiliated with an agency, but are you then sacrificing safety that way? Others claim you don’t have to look like a knock-out, which I’m deeply doubting. Then add the perils of drugs, STDs, and vice stings on top of it all, and you can deal me out.

Some things just shouldn’t be all about the Benjamins.

Photo credits: Opening image of Anton Michael by Justin Monroe.
Middle image: Unknown.
Bottom image: Pornstar Colby Keller by Colby Keller

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