A Consumer's Guide to Male Hustlers (12 page)

Somehow, he managed to communicate to me that he was a visitor in Tokyo from Nagoya. During our long and very passionate sex session, I did not entertain the notion that Watanabe and I would become boyfriends, or even see each other again. I am sure he was equally clear about this. We "passionated" in the present, with no thought of the future. Because we were
completely
and
mindfully
involved in our present pursuit, there was a Buddhist spiritual element to our lovemaking.
³

³
. See
The Miracle of Mindfulness: A Manual on Meditation
, Thich Nhat Hanh (Boston: Beacon Press, 1975).

The memory of my first sexual encounter in Japan is etched in my heart. It was affectionate, even loving, motivated solely by lust. With our bodies, we transcended cultural, linguistic, and ethnic barriers.

Watanabe was not a hustler. As a matter of fact, I have been with only one hustler on my three visits to Japan. But the same kind of lustful yet meaningful encounter
is
available from hustlers and models. For the rest of this chapter I will be comparing cruising for casual sex with the utilization of hustlers' and models' services.

* * *

Of the various cruising venues, I am most familiar and comfortable with personal ads. I have written personal ads and responses to such ads, for myself, and for many friends and hustlers, going back to Toronto in 1963. I once taught a course on writing and responding to personal ads. All of my students were straight. Their experiences with ads were similar to those of gays.

Until fairly recently, a personal ad listed an address where respondents could get in touch with the advertiser. Most of the time respondents gave their phone number in the introductory letter, and things picked up from there. (The ones who did not give their phone number usually turned out to be frivolous.) Nowadays, personal ads are a big business for many newspapers and magazines. Advertisers generally can place ads free of charge, and respondents must use a 900 toll number to get in touch with them.

The written word is much more powerful than the spoken one. The advertisements as well as the letters of response are taken very seriously. A lot of thought goes into the phrasing of a brief ad (long ads are very expensive), and a lot of energy is expended on answering an ad. Also, an awful lot of money is spent on the toll calls. The publications where the ads appear make sure that even the briefest of messages will run into costly minutes!

When so much energy is expended on writing or answering an ad, one takes it for granted that the ad itself, and the correspondence it generates, will be read, ideally with great care, by all parties. This is often not the case at all. For instance, a friend of mine was an innovative ad writer, who placed ads in various gay publications on a regular basis. One day he asked me to drive him to pick up the responses, which were held for him at the publication. That particular ad elicited sixty-two replies. He was told that it was the most any ad had garnered in one week. I wondered how he would handle such an enormous volume. A few weeks later I asked him about it. "Oh, I just tossed all of them."

"Why did you do that?"

"I didn't feel like dealing with them."

The bunch of letters he tossed represented some one hundred hours of wasted energy by the sixty-two respondents. (Over the years, I have found out that throwing away replies is not all that uncommon.) It also left questions marks in the minds of the respondents.
Was my phrasing at fault? Did I write too little or too much? Should I really have written that I was not well hung but always got compliments on my screwing? Would he have answered my ad had I not mentioned that I was HIV positive?
They will never know the answers, and will have to agonize again over the same questions when answering the next ad.

Many advertisers and respondents are complete flakes. Men who want nothing more than a roll in the hay will advertise under "relationships" and refer to themselves as monogamous types. Respondents who are wan and haggard will describe themselves as trim and fit. Men in their fifties will respond to an ad seeking "youthful." Many flakes consider the process of responding to ads an exercise in creative writing, and feel little obligation to deliver what they have so eloquently promised in their letters. This flakiness is even more noticeable on the Internet. However, the energy invested in composing the perfect ad for an electronic bulletin board, and an e-mail as a witty response, is probably less than for a publication.

In view of the above, why should anyone spend time, money, and energy on answering ads? As with bars and baths, the ads sometimes achieve results. I know three couples who met through ads and have lived together, more or less happily, for many years. I know a number of people who found permanent sex buddies through the ads. Like all other gay venues, personals cannot be dismissed as entirely ineffective.

Since I am comfortable with personals, I advertise constantly and, on very rare occasions, have done very well for myself. These days, I place my ads in semi-straight publications. The bisexuals and straights who respond all claim to have young girlfriends and seek a much older man for gay sex. (I cannot explain this phenomenon, and have not seen much research into the subject.) A number of young, cute, and horny guys have made cameo appearances at my home. Nothing lasting has ever developed.

I can afford the expenditure of energy on this hobby. When it works, I have more sex and see fewer hustlers or models. When the cameo appearances stop, which is most of the time, I have models whom I genuinely like, and with whom I have excellent sex, waiting for my call. This allows me to have control over my sex life. If I had to depend solely on the results of the personal ads, I would live in a state of permanent anxiety.

* * *

I like the sexual openness of gay bathhouses. The many games that are played there are all meant to culminate in getting laid. Baths are egalitarian institutions. There, one's education, wisdom, character, and wealth count for nothing. A person's physical attributes, from the color of his hair, the girth of his waist, the size of his biceps, to the shape and length of his penis, are all that count.

In the thousands of hours I walked through the corridors of scores of bathhouses, like a nomad in the desert desperately seeking an oasis, I ranted against cruel fate. By baths standards, I have never cut a popular figure. In the presence of beautiful queens and magnificent hunks, I have always felt like an insignificant supplicant, waiting to be recognized. That I have been chosen at all at baths in Honolulu, Vancouver, San Francisco, Mazatlan, San Juan, Amsterdam, Zurich, Munich, Barcelona, Tokyo, Manila, and many points in between is a testimony to my stubborn perseverance in the face of indifference and rejection. If I had to rely on the baths as a permanent sexual outlet, I would have thrown in the towel long ago.

Time in baths also counts for nothing. Most establishments will let you stay eight hours, and quite a few patrons extend that period by paying again in order to find a partner. The night I met my future lover at the baths was very successful for me because, atypically, I scored three times. Still, I remember running into a friend there and complaining that I was wasting my time. I had already spent two hours trudging up and down stairs, seeking a sex partner.

The problem is not only my lack of patience. Since most of the time I do not do well in baths, the time waste cannot be justified. The ambiance at the baths borders on the hostile. As a rule, patrons who are not interested in you sexually are barely civil when they reject you. Even though they are at the baths to solicit sexual advances,
you
happen to be the last person on the face of the earth they want to be solicited by. At times, this message gets communicated with a hissing malice. Sometimes, management deliberately creates a stressful environment. For instance, in some baths, on Saturday nights music is played extremely loudly to discourage patrons from staying the entire night.

In its heyday, San Francisco had some very spectacular baths.
⁴
In the basement of the Ritch Street Baths, for instance, was a restaurant with good food, next to a large Jacuzzi. On that floor there was also a substantial gym, and for relaxation, a patron could watch tropical fish swimming in large aquariums. The first floor had lots of clean, private cubicles; the second floor, in addition to cubicles, featured elaborate mazes to have sex in, as well as a porno theater.

⁴
. The gay baths in San Francisco were closed in the early 1980s to prevent unsafe sex. This was done through legislation. A few years later, sex clubs, not covered by the same legislation, started opening up there. These clubs lack the intimacy that could be achieved in the private, lockable cubicles of the baths. In the San Francisco Bay area, only two gay bathhouses remain: one in Berkeley, the other in San Jose.

The baths present an artificial
Fantasy Island
environment, with no carryover into real life. Most of the time, the great sexual encounters in the baths do not continue on the outside. But all of these visits cost a fair amount of money and
enormous
chunks of time.

Sometimes I suspect that the bathhouse trysts are meant not to carry over into real life. For a while, at the Berkeley baths, I would meet a man, Nelson, who was always there on Thursday afternoons. I made it my business to try to be there on Thursdays to connect with him. When we did, we always had a terrific time. Like me, he drove all the way from San Francisco to the Berkeley baths. As a matter of fact, he lived almost within walking distance of me. "Why don't we meet in San Francisco and save both of us the time and money?" I asked him once.

"I told you, I have a lover."

"But we're getting it on here on a regular basis, so why not at my place in San Francisco? What is the difference?"

He refused to meet me anywhere other than the baths. By a tacit convention, the baths are usually emotionally sterile. The sexual bonding that takes place there dissolves upon departure. This is an emotionally safe space to cheat on your lover.

To meet Nelson, I went to the baths on Thursdays. When that was over, I went to the same baths at the same time but on different week days. I spotted quite a few of the men I had seen on my Thursdays with Nelson. For all I know, they spent each afternoon of the week at the bathhouse searching for sex partners.

For many years, I forced myself to go to the baths. I did not have much money to spend on hustlers. Also, I was (to a certain extent I still am) brainwashed by gay society. I thought that it was better psychologically if I did not pay for sex, even if I had the money to do so, and even if the sex at the baths was markedly inferior to what hustlers could offer me.

Ultimately, it boils down to managing the scarcest resource we possess: time. For me, cruising time at the baths is a complete and unjustifiable waste. All the more so because it does not guarantee that there will be any compensation, that is, that I will find a suitable partner. It is also psychologically damaging to expose oneself deliberately to negative energy in the form of repeated rejections, a topic I will discuss later in this chapter. A good hustler can give me the same, or much better, sexual satisfaction. In the process of being with a hustler, I do not spend precious time frustrating myself.  The time is spent on lovemaking. To me money is cheaper than time.

* * *

I have been told by many bar mavens that San Francisco's bars are notorious for the "attitude" of the patrons. With my limited bar experience, I, too, have noticed that gay bars outside my city tend to be friendlier. My bar observations, based on my San Francisco experience, are probably the worst-case scenario.

Bars have some advantages over baths. Men who go to baths do it for sexual, not social, reasons. If they do not connect sexually at the baths they have a negative experience. Bar-going is an acceptable
social
activity. Not picking up anybody at a bar does not mean that the visit was a total failure. People who live in dingy apartments or with too many roommates can, for the price of a drink, be in more congenial surroundings. Although bars, at least in San Francisco, can be as hostile cruising grounds as the baths, a regular at a bar is bound to meet some buddies there and won't feel as forlorn as at the baths. Bars are also a much more fertile ground for starting a dating relationship.

For a variety of reasons, in terms of wasting time and money, bars are much worse than baths. In the latter, if you are patient enough,
something
is bound to happen. In the bars, after many hours of drinking (an expensive and unhealthy pursuit) nothing might happen.

I know, I know, some readers will complain about me, "This author has nothing but sex on his mind. Normal people go to bars to drink, dance, chat with friends, and relax." Good for them. They are doing great, and should continue to frequent the bars of their choice. I happen to know a lot of gays—some of whom were my clients when I worked as a hypnotherapist—who go to bars to cruise, even though they loathe the loud music and the smoke. To be successful in their cruising, they need to drink heavily. In the end, they may waste a lot of time and money, flirt with alcoholism, experience rejections and frustration, and leave the bar without a date.

I prefer to meet my friends for cappuccinos in a cafe at 1 p.m., rather than for martinis in a bar at 1 a.m. If I go to bars at all, I would like to go to places where I can pick up suitable partners. Makes sense? Apparently not...

In the 1960s I found a bar I liked: Bligh's Bounty. As far as I know, it was the first bar in San Francisco to feature go-go dancers. It was racially completely integrated. For a wonder, I was popular there. Every other time or so, I would manage to pick up a go-go dancer and take him home. This impressed me so much that I shared the news of my good fortune with friends and acquaintances. My friends, aware of my sexual predilections, shrugged it off. My acquaintances were horrified. I was told it was a low-class bar catering to the worst elements. They urged me to go to bars where I would rub elbows with gays who were on the "A" list. In my naïveté, I thought that one went to bars where one could find eager partners. When it comes to bars I can't win for losin'.