Personal Essay: “How Books Shaped My Life as a Gay Escort” for Prism & Pen

In the 2012-2013 academic year, I probably made more money than any of my friends who had majored in English literature. I moved to New York City at 22 and applied to over 300 jobs. With no connections and gargantuan naïveté, the best I could do was a series of demeaning retail jobs in asbestos-lathered basements.

After a month, I had $48 in my bank account. I dreaded having to return to my home state of Alaska as a failure. I had done everything a good student was supposed to do to find decent work after graduation, but as I was quickly learning, merit had little to do with job placement. When someone approached me about an escorting gig, I was desperate and, even more so, curious.

I became a big reader in middle school, and the habit had positioned me to always root for the underdog, which included the figure of “the prostitute.” When I finished undergraduate studies, I could think critically about human suffering, especially its causes and obfuscations. I knew how to analyze situations through the lens of Michel Foucault, Gayle Rubin, Gloria Anzaldúa, and Michael Warner.

In the hundreds of works of literature I encountered, I started to wonder why ‘whores’ rarely narrated their own stories. It always seemed like someone else was speaking for them: in Evelina, the protagonist freaks out that prostitutes can afford finer clothes now and she may be confused with one; in 100 Days of Solitude, the only access we have to the interiority of a 15-year-old prostitute is through the eyes of Colonel Aureliano Buendía. The figure of the whore is used to prove a point about the cruelty of inequality (Les Miserables) and to exemplify the inevitable route to redemption (Moll Flanders).

The whore was rarely the author of his own story, rarely an end rather than a means.

For me, sex work became a way to prove a point: if society wasn’t going to give me a decent job with access to healthcare, I would find my own way, even if that required climbing what the sociologist James O’Kane called “the crooked ladder.”

I also wanted to act on my belief that consensual sex work between adults should be, much like homosexuality, decriminalized. Finally, I wanted to be one of those whores who would (one day) become their own author.

Working through Hourboy and Rentboy opened doors to different classes I normally would never have access to. I met provosts and presidents, B-list celebrities and national journalists. I flew to Palm Springs and received oceanfront massages in Oahu. One client gave me books every time we met. Through him, I encountered Javier Marías, Rita Dove, Anthony Marra.

Most importantly, I had my time back to read and write. In one day I could make as much as I had made in one month. On a whim, I dropped $300 in Boston’s Oscar Wilde Bookshop. I negotiated a steep discount with one regular if he bought me a BILLY Bookcase from IKEA and drove it up to my apartment in Upper Manhattan. While my friends spent their days as receptionists and mail boys, I re-read The Color Purple and A Visit from the Goon Squad.

I became familiar with the less glamorous parts of escorting, too: the retired custodian who saved up for one special night a year with a “treat”; the depressed Broadway composer who layered his townhouse with pee pads for his poodles; the recently divorced man blaring Fox News in the background who didn’t want to pay up. I became my own marketer, agent, accountant, security, and quality assurance team. I learned that sex work is, indeed, work.

Before 2012/13, I had caught glimpses of gay male sex work in Memoirs of a Geisha and My Private Idaho, but now, I looked for work that better reflected my experience. John Rechy’s novel City of Night described a world of hustling that no longer existed in the digital age, same for the only memoir on gay male sex work I could find, Assuming the Position by Rick Whittaker. Chicken by David Henry Sterry remains one of the best memoirs on sex work I’ve read, but Sterry only worked with women.

The more readily available accounts of sex work were always heterosexual and tended to be glib (The Happy Hooker, Secret Diary of a Call Girl) or painfully moralistic (Paid For). These accounts were written for mainstream audiences, and to deflect the opprobrium on sex work, their authors had to pick a side on the pro/con ban and stick with it. They did not make room for the nuance I regularly encountered.

But some queer works did. There’s a sugar-mommy situation in Rubyfruit Jungle by Rita Mae Brown, and I recognized the sort of mentorship I at times experienced with my clients who gave me job advice and feedback on essays. I saw my relations in the Manhattan-grit of Mary Gaitskill’s short stories where menace and kindness are always mixed. In life and in literature, I learned that queer experiences are constantly engendering new forms of love, or as Adrienne Rich observed in Necessities of Life — “lust too is a jewel.”

Ultimately, my time as an escort was empowering, but it was also brutal on my self-esteem. I stopped (mostly) by the end of August 2013. In the following years, I looked to literature and film to understand what had happened. “Tangerine” (2015) captured the joy, humor, and betrayals of sex work. Garth Greenwell’s What Belongs to You (2016) perfectly articulated the emotional landscape between clients and escorts.

I found more and more works that dared to ask about the complexities of queer life, how sex work intersected with consent, aging, love, abuse, obligation, sacrifice: The Romanian by Bruce Benderson; “Mysterious Skins” by Gregg Araki; Moonstone by Sjón. These works helped me understand my own experience as an escort, as well as the many distinct experiences of sex workers at large.

In my world, sex and literature are inextricably linked. When I learned about one form, I learned about the other.

My favorite example is when a client took me to The Algonquin Hotel on Thanksgiving. We ordered drinks at the Blue Bar. I asked why he chose this place. He replied that my profile said something about wanting to be a writer. He asked if I had heard of The Algonquin Round Table. I shook my head.

He told me about Dorothy Parker sitting at this very table spinning out witticisms. Someone once challenged her to use ‘horticulture’ in a sentence. Her reply was one of his favorites and, in time, became one of mine, too: “You can lead a horticulture, but you can’t make her think.”