Life of a male prostitute article - Financial Times 12/8/06

[delphyne]

I've highlighted the parts that I find interesting:


"All in a day’s work
By Emma Jacobs
Published: August 11 2006 14:42 | Last updated: August 11 2006 14:42

I met Chris last summer. Once past his nerdy passion for The Lord of the Rings, I discovered we had things in common. Both of us had read history at university. Neither had a clue what to do next, so we procrastinated in postgraduate studies. Then our career paths diverged. He became self-employed, pursued riches and took risks, while I got to describe his story as part of my job at The Financial Times.

Now his lucrative job is flexible enough to allow him to take days off if he feels like it: he works mostly from his London home in the West End and has made enough money to build a profitable property portfolio of more than a dozen houses, owned or managed for the rental income. His parents are proud of his achievements and he is well-loved by his friends - he is godfather to four of their children. But there are days when Chris feels utterly alone. He’s not depressed or anything. It’s just that Chris is a prostitute, and his friends and family don’t know that about his career.

This is the story of a man who has had 30 names - Chris is just one of them - and 5,000 clients. Someone who was neither abused as a child nor addicted to drugs. A heterosexual whose customers are 95 per cent men, 5 per cent women and who inhabits a world of chief executives, accountants, judges and the occasional street cleaner. He says he’s had sex with a female pop star for hundreds of pounds and been the object of an attempted blackmail.

Aside from the sporadic salacious headline - most recently “Lib Dems rocked by Oaten rent-boy scandal” - male prostitution receives little attention. When the government announced proposals in January to “reduce the number of women involved in prostitution”, there was no mention of their male peers. Chris’s story uncovers a hidden world and challenges popular assumptions about prostitution, the people and the culture.

Chris and I first met to discuss isolation. Not mine, I hasten to add, but his. The GMB general trade union put us in touch. I was researching an article on people who do jobs deemed dirty. In a bid for new members, the old boilermakers’ union has overhauled its image. Membership peaked at 967,000 in 1979. Today it’s only 575,000. Its regeneration included a new branch for sex workers - strippers, phone-sex workers and prostitutes. Martin Smith, the national organiser for the GMB, explained that joining the union helps people to “legitimise their work psychologically and counter isolation by gathering workers together”.

He warned that my request for an interview was unlikely to be taken up by the sex- worker branch as its members have been bruised by the media. I got one e-mail from an escort. I called “Chris” expecting a woman. As the hour of our meeting approached I became increasingly nervous. I’d never met a real prostitute before, as far as I knew.

I scanned Oxford Circus tube station where we were meeting. I approached the one man who didn’t look like a tourist and who, like me, was blankly searching people’s faces. It was Chris. Sex-ad adjectives - boyish, athletic, handsome, long-lashed hazel eyes - accurately describe Chris, who is in his thirties but passes for much younger. He was also brilliantly, immaculately turned out in an ultra-white shirt and pressed khaki trousers. He looked like the poster-boy for Persil. I gazed down at my own scuffed shoes and spotted a bit of sandwich on my pocket.

Over a drink, we discussed his route from a Midlands upbringing to London sex work. Sex worker or escort is how he prefers to describe himself - it’s “more on-message”.

He is not a crackhead by-product of abuse but a good son from the suburbs. Only a year before advertising as an escort he was an active member of a non-conformist church. But after seven years as a keen churchgoer he became disillusioned. He was directionless and broke. Escorting came into his head. He didn’t know any escorts and was no sexual predator, but he hoped the idea might earn easy cash.

So, aged 23, he placed an advert in the local paper. Male escort, call-outs only.

His first response was from a man who “called to ask if I would have sex with his wife for ?300. He wouldn’t touch me. But he’d watch from the corner of their bedroom. I agreed without faltering.” But outside their two-up two-down, in an anonymous cul-de-sac, he did falter. He suddenly realised he didn’t know what he was doing.

“Inside the nice new magnolia house we had a few glasses of wine. To pacify our nerves, I asked what they did for a living. They showed their ID cards and then handed me the photo of their graduation ceremony - my two clients beamed out at me from rows of shiny-faced police officers in white and navy uniforms. They were police.” His brain bulged with paranoia, convinced it was a set-up. He readied himself for the vice squad to burst out of the kitchen cabinets. But his clients really were just a kinky couple.

His anxiety ascended as they took the stairs to the bedroom. The semi-detached fizzed with the couple’s excited expectation. They felt incredibly naughty. Chris felt incredibly nervous. After 45 minutes he was ordered out of the house by the husband, berated for his lack of performance and left with only petrol money.

He tried to forget about it until he was working in a cafe for ?3.06 an hour, subsidising his postgraduate studies. “I looked out of the cafe window and realised the parking meter had a better hourly rate than me. As I handed the change to a customer, her hand trailed mine. She was trying to flirt with me. Maybe I could try it again?”

Despite his previous debacle, he knew sex could pay. He’d had offers and sometimes flirted in job interviews.

It’s a bit of a jump, I suggested, from fluttering your eyelashes at an interviewer to advertising your sexual services. But at that moment in his life, he was up for anything he could get away with. Money was his main motivation and he was prepared to venture into the unknown to get it. “I felt the rules of society were shaped in such a way that if you don’t have the right connections, then you had to bend the rules to make things happen. If you don’t have the luck, make the luck.”

Chris is a risk-taker. He takes punts on business schemes and has long had an aversion to offices: “It had always seemed unfair to give the best minutes, weeks and years of your life to an employer. I was struck by a survey of people in their eighties. A recurring regret was that they’d wished they had taken more risks. I had that in mind when I placed the ad. I didn’t want to look back on my life with regret and think I’ve given my time to a corporation I didn’t believe in.”

He felt stomach-hollowing, bowel-moving, dizzying anxiety, but this time was determined to see it through. By the end of his first proper day escorting, he’d made ?400 for four hours’ work. Actually, 80 minutes’ work. The men were in his flat for no longer than 20 minutes each. In escorting, nine inches becomes six and 60 minutes just 16.

Two of these appointments became regulars: Roger, an older, overweight telecoms executive who had lived with his male partner for a decade; and John, a secretive married man, wracked with guilt. John looked like a Cotswold estate agent, which is what he was: middle-class and respectable, not a brash, flash suit. Openly gay as well as closeted married men subsequently made up the bulk of his clients.

Chris knew men would call, not women. “Are you sure you’re straight?” I asked. He looked bored: “Don’t you think I’ve been around enough gay men to feel comfortable about coming out if I wanted to?” I later met some of his friends. Some of his best are gay.

Professor Jeffrey Weeks of London South Bank University, who has written on the history of sexuality, says putting people into sexual categories is a recent phenomenon. In the 19th century, homosexuality was “so taboo that there was a more amorphous definition of sexuality. The strange situation was that while there was a tight restriction on homosexuality, there was also less awareness that what people were doing was gay, because it wasn’t discussed.”

Guardsmen had the reputation of being “gay for pay”. These soldiers weren’t tormented by homosexual desires, and neither did they flagellate themselves for dirty deeds. Weeks explains that they didn’t necessarily see a conflict between having sex for extra cash and sex with their wives. “Today we have a clearer dividing line between straight and gay men.”

Chris has rules: amazingly, perhaps, there is no penetrative sex with men.[imagine a female prostitute getting to set that boundary].

I asked how he could compete in a market saturated with men without such boundaries. “People want the forbidden. But not so forbidden it’s actually forbidden,” he explained.

He had thought escorting would be a two-week blip. But he was earning good money. “There was no alternative at the time that paid better. The reason I’ve stayed is that it has given me a good lifestyle. You might criticise me for being addicted to money. But if I was a banker I’d be praised.”

He made mistakes. To start with, he did not get the money upfront. He’d been brought up to think that discussing money was impolite. It soon became his first rule of business.

We decided to keep in touch. I was intrigued why someone with similar chances to me would make such a different choice. There was another reason. He was also good company - open, engaging and entertaining. That is his job. But getting people to talk is also part of mine. Louis Theroux, the documentary maker, said journalism is a bit like prostitution - both employ “professional manipulation” and a “bit of beguiling and seduction”.

My article on dirty work morphed into one on male prostitution. I hoped to uncover Chris’s dark secret. I haven’t.

“People can’t fathom how a respectable, educated man, with no drug problems and healthy, sound psyche could enter prostitution. They want to uncover a problem. They push and push. But too many people do it for it to be extraordinary. It’s a common part of life that no one talks about,” he told me.

His nonchalance was not the inner turmoil I’d expected. Dr Melissa Farley, a psychologist and director of prostitution research and education at San Francisco Women’s Centre, interviewed 475 female sex workers and concluded that two-thirds suffered post-traumatic stress disorder, and that the severity of the symptoms - emotional numbness, recurrent nightmares and flashbacks - was more extreme among sex workers than Vietnam veterans.

Chris’s story does not fit common perceptions of prostitution. Memoirs of ex-prostitutes - Chicken by David Henry Sterry, Valerie Tasso’s Insatiable and Jeannette Angell’s Callgirl: Confessions of an Ivy League Lady of Pleasure to name a few - are sad stories whose subjects ultimately find redemption through leaving the game. He isn’t like them. His happy upbringing offers no obvious triggers. If he could enter this world, then maybe others like him could too?

Until I met Chris I knew nothing about male escorts. I knew a bit about female prostitution from feminist literature. Crudely put, it splits into two epistemologies. Radical feminism argues that prostitution constitutes sexual slavery as it reaffirms the oppression of women, reducing them to sexual objects which can be bought and dominated by men. An opposing view is that prostitution affords women a freedom rarely seen elsewhere within a patriarchal society, giving a woman ownership of her sexual identity and financial independence. Dr Julia O’Connell Davidson, an academic at Nottingham University who has written extensively on prostitution, warned me there was scant research on male sex workers.

Sex scandals apart, there is even less attention in media or political debate. Maybe this is as things should be? Invisibility has its benefits. Most sex workers are women, and visibility makes them easy targets for censure.

Patrick Halpin, who runs a drop-in centre for sex workers in London, says a key reason for male escorts’ low profile is the nature of their transactions: they have sex with men, which is still tainted with taboo. While acknowledging wryly that raising awareness of the “plight of the man” is unusual, he feels it is a necessary part of his work.

I visited him at SW5, the centre he oversees in Earl’s Court, West London. It’s part of the Terrence Higgins Trust, offering help to male and transgender sex workers. There are no signs outside the Victorian terrace to differentiate it from any of the other buildings in the crescent. Its anonymity meant I walked past it twice, but Halpin says this prevents hassle from the neighbouring B&Bs and hostels.

Isolation is a problem for sex workers. Most work alone in flats, unable to talk to family and friends. Halpin told me the clean, comfortable centre with its daffodil yellow walls and corniced high ceilings “lets people connect with their peers and support workers so they can get help with any housing, drink or drug problems.

“But there are lots of other sex workers we won’t see because they don’t have these problems.” The typical person through SW5’s doors is a gay man in his early twenties. But he has seen “a whole spectrum”. I asked if Chris was unusual - a confident, educated straight male. According to Halpin, he’s not typical, but neither is he atypical. Stereotypes are elusive. Every question I asked about who does this kind of work - sexuality, background, psychology, nationality - the answer was “all sorts really”.

“Some people come from poor backgrounds or have experienced abuse. But we also see people with good education, loving homes. It’s the whole spectrum. Some feel coerced into it by partners or peers. They get stuck in this situation and can’t get out. Others weigh up their options and choose to do this work over other jobs. Some feel deep shame about it and keep it a secret, but others are open and happy about their involvement in sex work. Some find it creates problems for their emotional and sex life. Others don’t. They’re as diverse as any other part of the population.”

As are, according to Halpin, their appearances. “Not everyone is looking for a young, muscular man. The internet has created a market out there for people wanting diversity and difference. I recently met a man in his sixties contemplating becoming sex worker.”

The internet has not only created a market for different types of escort, but it has also increased demand for sex workers. Professor Weeks says that, together with the proliferation of the gay press, the internet “increases the volume of sex trade as people’s interest is stirred by advertising”.

If client interest is aroused by the internet, so is that of potential escorts. Halpin says that men who don’t know any other escorts are finding information online. In the past five years SW5 has had a rise in approaches from people choosing prostitution as a profession.

Kerwin Kaye, a researcher at New York University who has written on male sexuality, says prostitution has become more professional. Websites such as hookonline.org, escortsupport.com and swop-usa.org provide advice on paying taxes, coping with police and dating clients. “Tricking all over the world” was the cover article of a recent issue of $pread, the glossy magazine for the sex industry. Chris sells and reinvents his services like an advertising copywriter. At times: “English well-educated, sexy smart.” Or: “Slut, sex for sale.”

Kaye says the professionalisation of prostitution has made it more attractive to middle-class men and women. But you don’t hear about them. The focus of legislation isn’t on bourgeois prostitutes. Kaye says: “The police don’t care that much about things that are hidden. They care about street issues and trafficking. But if you’re working independently and are middle class, the chances are you’ll be safe.” From his own observation, he thinks that 20 per cent of prostitutes working today are middle class. But he admits that he has no hard data.

Chris let me listen to a few phone calls. They didn’t sound wicked or sleazy. They sounded like colleagues from work. I learnt how to spot a time-waster. Some sounded odd - particularly the one who wanted to be dominated by Chris dressed as Caesar in the Coliseum the client had created in his front room. But the majority sounded ordinary - most were male professionals in their forties and fifties.

I had assumed there would be more women. The arrival on WH Smith shelves of Scarlet, the erotic magazine for “sassy, successful and unblushing” women, the proliferation of female sex shops and the growth of “raunch culture” (in Ariel Levy’s phrase) together with the rise of single-occupancy homes and increased earning power suggested that female customers might follow.

It is something Heidi Fleiss, the infamous Hollywood madam, is banking on. She hopes to open her “Stud Farm”, a brothel catering exclusively to women in Crystal, Nevada, early next year. I nervously called, expecting her to be cold and unco-operative. But she was garrulous and unguarded. She’s been deluged by requests for information from women and applications from men wanting work. She plans to have 20 men full-time and 10 men on standby. She knows the idea is ambitious. “It wouldn’t have worked five years ago,” she says. “Women want different things now, they’re more independent and have more money.” Plus, thanks to Viagra, men have more staying power.

Fleiss’s name and reputation will probably pull in customers. But Chris is doubtful whether her Stud Farm can be replicated on a mass scale by lesser-known impresarios. When it comes to actual transactions for sex there simply is not a bulging market of female clients. Professor Stevi Jackson, a sociologist at York University, comments that: “Historically, women have not had the economic resources to pay for sex and sexuality has been something women traded with men, whether for cash or the security of marriage.”

However, just because women’s income is growing it doesn’t follow that they will spend it on sex. Jackson believes that a great deal would need to change, “socially and culturally, to substantially alter the current gendered patterns of commercial sexual transactions”.

Sex tourism, a phenomenon depicted in the Charlotte Rampling film Heading South, is more prevalent among women than prostitution, according to Kaye. European and American women travel to the Caribbean to have holiday romances with “beach boys”, local men who work in tourist districts. Kaye says that female sex tourism is wrapped up in a romantic exchange, to avoid the stigma of prostitution. “Beach boys romance women. It’s in between prostitution and dating. Money is given as gifts rather than cash hand-outs. It doesn’t have the same feeling as paying for sex. Women don’t like to pay.”

I asked female friends if they would pay for sex. All were uncomfortable with the idea. “It would make me feel unattractive,” was a common answer.

Women, Chris says, make bad clients. “Women aren’t used to paying for sex. Men understand the client-escort relationship. A typical booking from a woman is a set of e-mails, long e-mails about how they feel and what they want to do. Whereas men are, like, `Can I see you now?’ They’re in and out. End of story. They hand over the money and go.”

Chris smiles. He’s generalising. Some women act like his male clients. They call, ready for sex, and leave immediately after. These women mirror male clients - middle-class and middle-aged.

Jackson guards against interpreting this type of behaviour as a triumph for feminism: “If women’s sexuality becomes more like that of men this could be perceived as emancipatory; but I am wary of taking men’s sexuality as a norm to which women should aspire.”

Once a month Chris sees a 52-year-old woman at her pastel-walled, deep-pile carpeted suburban Essex home. “She’s beautiful, brash and bleached blonde. She has a husband who comes over once a month for sex. It’s as if she’s his mistress.” It turns out that the woman’s husband knows about Chris. In fact, he pays for their appointments. And here is the rub. Chris has a theory that with most of the women he sees, a man is somewhere in the background. Even if a woman is making all the running when booking an appointment for a joint session with her husband, Chris feels that the man is the key player. But he is circumspect about pushing his theory too far.

“I don’t want to say that I know a woman’s mind more than she does. I am a man making a judgment on a woman, which isn’t right. People might say this is further evidence of prostitution being violence against women: that even when a woman is choosing to see a male escort, she is being controlled by men. I don’t think it’s as easy as that. It’s incredibly subtle. Just because you’re sleeping with a woman doesn’t mean that she’s the one who wants sex. But it also doesn’t mean she’s not enjoying it.”

I push him for a figure. How many women does he think come wholly of their own volition, without a man paying, watching or fantasising? He estimates it is 2 per of all his clients.

Chris used to feel hostile to clients, but now he feels tolerant - and in some cases affectionate. “I’ve had disappointment in my life. You feel less immortal and don’t want to judge other people’s shortcomings so fiercely.”

He used to be married. She was in the business too. They were each other’s only confidants. But when they hit problems, they realised that no one else really knew them. Because the secret was so well hidden, friends’ advice felt hollow. Eventually the deep love developed over a decade exploded in mutual recrimination.

“It wasn’t just the sex industry that caused problems. Like people outside the industry we weren’t compatible anymore. But we agreed on one thing: our relationship wasn’t helped by isolation.”

After his wife left, Chris needed to confide in a few friends about his job. Telling them was like climbing to the top of a rollercoaster and not knowing if the seatbelt would work. He picked his confidants well.

“I’ve overheard other friends talk about dirty prostitutes. I anticipate rejection. I work on the basis that once the dam’s burst everything will fall apart. So I’ve learnt not to tell friends who wouldn’t understand the nuances of my work.”

He thinks his family would ultimately accept him. But he doesn’t want to impose his lifestyle on them. So he’s built a mesh of white lies.

“You have to be prepared to lead a double life. You can’t describe the magician’s sleight of hand that creates the illusion for a client. It’s a skill that few know I’ve got. If you’ve been given a fantastic tip or nearly raped - you have no one to confide in.”

His isolation was most acute during a prolonged episode of blackmail - a professional hazard, alongside stalking.

One day he received an e-mail: “I am a friend of your parents. I’ve seen your adverts and am concerned about you.”

The e-mails became increasingly threatening. It’s not uncommon. They continued for a year: “The day my niece was born, he sent an e-mail saying how awful it would be if she knew her uncle was a dirty rent-boy. Innocent things became tarnished.” Eventually he fed misinformation to a number of suspected clients, relaunched adverts with new numbers and blocked the blackmailer from future contact.

“I think the trigger for the e-mails had been this client’s eventual realisation that I wasn’t going to be his boyfriend. He wanted to punish me for being an escort.”

However, he has also learnt “spiritual truths from supposedly `dirty old men’” and had “preconceptions challenged, prejudices eroded and selfishness exposed in much the same way a church group might facilitate.”

Last month he spoke at the funeral of a long-standing client. Business had been the origin of their relationship but over the years it became infused with genuine affection: “You might think it’s pitiful that a significant friendship is with a person they have paid. But many friendships, if not marriages, are based on needs and boundaries between friendship and need can be more fluid than we like to admit.”

Sentiment doesn’t cloud his single-mindedness when it comes to money. He sees pounds signs in people. Yet I’d expected the warmth to be battered out of a man who trades intimacy. It hasn’t.

There are many aspects of Chris’s life that I found unsettling and even unfathomable - the secrecy, the vulnerability and isolation. It sometimes made me feel protective towards him, until I reminded myself it was his choice. But there were many things I came to admire, chiefly his fearlessness, so different to my own fretfulness.

I asked him recently if he worried about his escorting shelf-life - that his looks could fade and his clients too. He shrugged: “I’ll do it for six minutes, six months, six years or six decades. However long I get away with it.” Then he laughed - pointing out that my question represented a difference between us: between my nervousness and his nerve. “But what then?” I asked. “Whatever comes next.”"

http://www.ft.com/ cms/s/abef537c-283a-11db-a2c1-0000779e2340.html



Even this journalist who has written quite a comprehensive and realistic article has to use the old "choice" canard at the end. Shame.