Every once in a while our bodies have ways of suggesting that maybe it’s time to ease off a bit.  I’ve been going hard this year, getting music projects going, pushing my physique just a little bit further, continuing to build a life with Jesse, trying to keep up with family and friends, and debating my futures — both musical and in adult work.  All of these have necessitated some travel, and as much as I love being mobile, the travel itself and time away from Jesse add to my stress levels.  We won’t even touch on what the political climate in the past year-plus has meant stress-wise; I know that has affected far more of us than just me.  So it’s been a heady year.

When my body decides to drop such a hint, I often don’t get the message until that hint is applied with a sledgehammer.  Sure, I’d seen a few warning salvos shot across my bow; there’d been a spate of curious 24-hour “flu” episodes over the last many months, but they seemed to resolve with a little sleep and a good overdose of multivitamins.  So while Jesse and I were in Australia helping push for marriage equality, trans rights, and approval of PrEP (travel + work = stress), it’s not hugely surprising that in the last few days of the trip my body laid down the law.  It started with fever and chills, and then the left side of my hip started to swell.

A doctor in Melbourne prescribed antibiotics in hope they’d be enough to get me home without getting worse.  After more than 24 hours in transit (and getting very creative with those little airplane pillows to try to be at least a little comfortable) we arrived home, and in a day or so my regular doctor sent me to the emergency room.  I was admitted to the hospital, CT scans confirmed the infection, and that evening I was in surgery.  A three-inch-long and inch-and-a-half-deep incision was made in my left hip and over a cup (>250ml) of fluid was removed from a Swiss cheese of abscesses in the muscle.  In the weeks since I’ve been dealing with a series of wound packings to encourage the resulting aperture to close from the edges inwards.

And it’s been healing far faster than expected.  I was released from the hospital after four days with a wound vac tethered to the sealed dressing, which I’d understood I’d have to carry around with me 24/7 for at least four weeks; this past Monday they deemed it no longer needed after only two and a half weeks.  I’m now just taping an antiseptic pad and sterile gauze over what’s become a very shallow small aperture.  I’m becoming a lot less concerned that this is going to adversely alter my “topography” back there and am starting to almost look forward to seeing how interesting a scar this is going to leave.  Maybe I’ll finally have a good excuse to get a first tattoo?

I know what a few out there are going to say, that those of us in these adult and sex-related industries are disease-ridden and hence this comes as no surprise.  Or that my “gross steroid overuse” must’ve induced me to use unclean needles with bad injection technique.  All of these potentialities were discussed with the doctors, all of whom had reservations about claiming any of these as a cause (as a rule, of course, they all cautioned me away from steroid use); none of them quite fit the circumstances.  The one physician to whom I had to explain the distinction between Pre-Exposure Prophylaxis and Post-Exposure Prophylaxis did raise a good possibility which I’m looking into, that I’ve simply been stressing my system enough that I had some hiccup with my immune system; if that’s the case, everything is working fine again now, but I’m told to be alert.  The doctors do confirm however that the speed with which I’m healing is best attributed to keeping active and healthy, eating well, and staying physically active.

It’s not my intent to make this a political post, but I do note with gratitude that, if this had happened to me five years ago when I had no health insurance, I would either be finding myself owing $90K+ in medical bills, or knowing my own stubbornness and pride, I’d be disfigured when I declined medical attention, or possibly simply dead.  The docs can’t identify a particular cause for this, and “spontaneous” instances of this sort of infection are not unheard of.  Anyone who thinks some manner of universal health care to protect you from unforeseen health issues isn’t as important as universal police protection from crime or universal fire department services to protect you from the next door neighbors you didn’t know had a meth lab in their basement (or maybe you did?) is a heartless hypocrite.

So I’ve been spending the last few weeks simply listening to my body.  Not that it’s been quiet about its demands: I swear for the first two weeks I slept about 75% of the day, and I was ravenously hungry for the balance.  I did start back at the gym gently last week, and am relieved to say that, despite the setback, my body’s only enjoyed a fairly mild slippage into its more inclined bearish form.  I figure by mid-May I should be back to something like how I was when we left for Australia.

The kicker is that I keep essentially two freelance careers, music and porn.  For both careers, payment comes at the completion of a gig.  This was a slow winter for either work for me, then Jesse and I spent a month advocating and representing in Australia which didn’t bring in any income.  I’d been counting on returning home to two immediate jobs, and had to bow out of both.  That happened right at tax time.  And I’m sure I’ve not seen the last nor most scary of these accrued medical bills.  My wallet is feeling mighty slender at the moment!  Hence I’m scrambling on a few projects to hopefully bring in some cash next month.

This weekend Jesse and I had our first public appearance together since my misadventure, at Ghislain Rousseau’s last Montreal party Silver Bear.  Ghislain’s been an amazing friend for years, and we’ve felt ourselves lucky to have been part of a number of his events.  These will be missed, and we were honored to be asked to appear at his last.  It was also good for my heart and psyche to know that I’m not hopelessly maimed, LOL.  In two weeks we make appearances at events in Denver; maybe I’ll be ready to risk a jockstrap by then?

The other suggestion being floated by a few friends relates to the fact that over the years I’ve accrued a lot of •stuff•.  Clothing, books and printed material, leather gear, you name it.  Having moved four times in the last eight years, I’ve been no stranger to donating large boxes of excess to HIV-benefit consignment shops like Housing Works in NYC, Brown Elephant in Chicago, and Boomerangs in Boston.  Some of this stuff isn’t the sort of stuff a second-hand shop would know what to do with, though.  I have three really nice sets of leather bondage cuffs, for instance, of which I only ever really use one.  My buddies point out that many of you might like a little “piece” of me, and maybe I could set up a sale page or an eBay account, and hope that a little cash coming in there might take a bite out of these bills?  Watch this space, lemme think about this.

So as I finish writing this, it’s been a bit over a month since symptoms first appeared.  Reflecting on what I’ve been through, as painful and inconvenient as this has proven, in the end I have to acknowledge my gratitude.   That’s thanks not only to Jesse and all my friends who’ve taken care of me and the fans who’ve known about this and sent best wishes.  It’s gratitude that this happened at all, and that it happened in a time in my life when I could deal with it.  It never hurts to be reminded how delicate one’s place and accomplishments in life are, and how easily toppled they can be.  It never is a bad thing to be reminded that I am not infallible.  But what I’m realizing is that I’ve had the gift of a month to meditate on my perspective in life, the directions I’ve been moving in, on what is important and what is distracting.  The way I was bludgeoning my way through up until now, this reflection was only wanly and half-heartedly being done.  Hopefully I’ll know to indulge this more in the future, and preferably before my body has to slam on the brakes.

It’s been an eventful couple days for Jesse and me.  Jesse’s big event was in NYC this past Saturday night, reading from his contributions to Jiz Lee‘s anthology Coming Out Like a Porn Star alongside such icons of porn Stoya and Lorelei Lee at a packed-to-capacity crowd at Bluestockings Books.  This was Jesse’s first time standing solo at a microphone; he’s much more accustomed to having company on stage when he appears in front of a crowd, and he was nervous.  But being my charming goofball hubby, even when he had a spectacularly funny Freudian slip of tongue moment, he had the audience laughing right along.  Video of Jesse’s segment of the reading can be found HERE.

Right before we went to NYC, though, we were in Baltimore, where I was part of a performance of a relatively new piece of music.  I don’t post often enough, I know, but I wanted to take a few minutes to share some photos and some responses to Friday night too.

The music, a multi-movement piano work titled Tame Your Man was written by Denver-based composer Nathan Hall, and presented by the ensemble Tenth Intervention as part of the New Music Gathering festival held this year at my own Alma Mater, Peabody Conservatory in Baltimore, MD.  In the course of the work, the pianist is progressively bound to the piano, slowly increasing the limitations on the range of his movements and possibly his expressiveness.  Quoting from the printed program notes,

The pianist willingly gives up his power and mobility to the bondage artist. The bondage artist must in turn trust the pianist to communicate limits. Though the work touches on the eroticism of power and submission, these communications of power and trust can be complex, but also quite beautiful.

When Adam Tendler, the pianist, first approached me about performing this work with him, I didn’t need to know ahead of time that the music was as beautiful as it is.  The very theme of intimacy between two performers in an ostensibly dominant and submissive role is a potent one with me.  I’ve written before about the parallels I perceive between making music with other people and making love to them, and to my astonishment, here was a work which took that dichotomy to the next level.  Of course I jumped at the chance!

It doesn’t hurt that Adam’s a good friend, a stupendous pianist, and a handsome man.  Again, I’ve written before about how much easier a porn scene is to shoot when the chemistry between two scene partners happens organically, and doesn’t need to be coerced or simulated.  Most of you would agree that this applies to love and desire as well.  The same is utterly true of making music, and in this instance, where the connection between the two performers is as physical as it is musical, having that trust and connection can only make this musical message (or any musical message) more palpable to the listener.

The work has been performed before, and in that instance there was a difference in opinion between the pianist and the bondage artist as to what the meaning of the piece was.  As I understand, that bondage artist thought the work was about the pianist ceding his voice and will, a highly literalistic and one-sided viewpoint.  Adam and I agreed more that the message is that the music becomes simpler the more bound he is, but that it continues.  For a few movements his wrists are bound together, and the music becomes very densely “localized”; for one movement his right hand is bound behind his back, and he must play the duration with his left hand alone.  At one point his music is removed, and he must perform from memory; then he’s blindfolded, and must find his notes on the keyboard by feel.  The last movement in fact has the pianist with his hands tied at the furthest extreme, at the piano endblocks; he can only play notes at the extreme ends of the keyboard with his fingers.  The performance directions at this point ask the bondage artist to assist the pianist to play clusters of notes in the middle of the keyboard with his chest, pressing against his back.  While the other performer saw that as his voice finally coming through, Adam and I understood this as the final joining of our voices, him trusting me to play through him, and me understanding that despite the restrictions placed on him, he is still able to play.  The music in this segment becomes rarified, simple, trancelike; there’s a luminous peace to it.  After the frenzy of many of the earlier movements, there’s a calm, an ease to it.  We didn’t hear a squelching of anything in these sounds; much more, it felt like the final release.  Indeed, in Adam’s notes, I was pleased to see him call this “aftercare”, which for anyone with any versing in BDSM, will mean volumes.

We must have done something right, as we’ve had some splendid responses from friends and strangers alike, a few of which I’d like to share:

Good morning Jesse and Dirk, the show was… strangely I have no words to express what feelings it brought out from me. It was very sensual and to see Dirk in touch with Adam and the trust between them the whole time was… again no words. In regards to Adam Tendler, he is an amazing pianist, he has so much emotion when he plays.

–Lyne Beausejour

From one of Jesse Jackman’s fans:

The way he loses himself in the music. It’s like he’s ready to fly away and Dirk’s restrains are the only thing keeping him grounded. Beautiful. He’s soaring…

Taking a deeper tone, here’s a response from one of the attendees and a fellow composer, whom I’d the pleasure to get to talk to at length after the performance:

[The] 20-minute piece Tame Your Man was one of the most moving and important performances I’ve seen in years, not to mention gorgeously resonant with NMG [New Music Gathering] ideals. Perfect concept perfectly realized, with a depth of maturity, expressiveness, and beauty I’ve never seen in any other piece of concert music directly engaging sex/kink topics.

The performance is radical on a few levels. The surface level is deceptively easy to describe (a ritual fusion of music performance, rope bondage scene, and minimal poetic narration), but the meanings and experience for the audience run deep. One key example: the focus throughout on both the top’s and the bottom’s creative agency/voices and perspectives – a stunningly elegant and non-didactic articulation of how the scene depends on intense mutual focus and co-creation, *shared* creative power and agency (as opposed to virtually every other depiction of bondage in either pop culture or high art contexts).

And the resonance of that new lens with the broader NMG ideas of radically reclaiming the power of cooperation with our colleagues / resisting false, externally imposed notions of competition and hierarchy.

This performance was so beautiful and so joy-infusing I couldn’t focus on anything else after it. (And that’s a lesson I’m still learning: at a transformative moment, you really can just let go of adding other stuff that won’t fit meaningfully into that moment – even stuff that would be incredible under other circumstances. ‘Fear of missing out’ has to concede to ‘joy of sustaining and building on the moment.’)

—Kala Pierson

And from a good friend in the Boston area, an author and novelist, who caught Jesse’s live stream of the event:

I struggled to find the words to express my appreciation for your art, and I’m still processing… but I wanted to let you know I was profoundly moved by your elegant performance last night with Adam Tendler. Even watching through the lens of live stream, I could feel the pull of the ropes and the subtle brush of your hand against Adam’s back and smell the rich, creaking leather as you moved gracefully around the stage.

For me, one of the most stunning elements of the piece was the perpetual motion of the bound performer. We’re used to seeing the submissive held down, unable to move, while the dominant is responsible for the forward motion of the scene. Here, with Adam producing the music while you puppeteered from behind (…below, above…), the submissive was fully engaged in the artistic creation. Your depth of understanding and respect for Adam’s needs were met equally by his deep trust in your skill, and the resulting performance evidenced the tremendous power in such a talented pairing.

The end brought tears to my eyes. When you mounted the bench behind Adam, your clothing melded with the leather upholstery of the bench and became a part of the instrument; when you bent over Adam, you two became one musician, and then both of you dissolved into the piano itself, taking the poetry and music with you, leaving a single, unified element to represent the whole work.

Just wanted to thank you both for a brilliant choreography of music, eroticism, and poetry I will not soon forget. Coincidentally, I was writing the end note to a m/m BDSM story, where trust and respect are highlighted as the driving forces in the relationship. Nothing like a master in leather to inspire!

—Kaye P Hallows

I’ve been trying to find a good way to express these parallels — between sex, BDSM, and music — in words myself, in some way that perhaps a reader who has never played a musical instrument in an ensemble or has never dipped their toe into BDSM however lightly might comprehend.  I can’t begin to say how lucky I feel to be part of the performance of a work of music that conveys exactly these sentiments.  Thank you, Adam, Tenth Intervention, and New Music Gathering for inviting me to be part of this.  And watch this spot and my Facebook page, as there’s talk of further performances in other cities for us.  If so, I can’t wait!

Hey, everyone!  Just figured it was time for some happy news, after the ugliness I’ve been dealing with on my FB page.  And it was just time for an update of any sort here…

So the money was raised.  The piano was acquired.  Jesse and I have both been so happy with this addition to our household!  And again, thank you from the bottom of our hearts!

As part of that, we got the CD’s compiled and printed.  We printed copies of scores, and I spent an afternoon happily signing my autograph on disks and booklets I think well over four hundred times.  These CD’s and scores and manuscript pages were put in the mail, and with only a few minor mishaps (and if anyone else’s frame arrived in shards and haven’t told us, please do? we want to make that up to you) all of these arrived in your hands.

So that leaves only one set of donor gifts to come, the music I’d said I’d compose for those top-level donors.

So the biggest reason I haven’t posted here in ages is because I’ve been writing, just not writing text.  I’m happy to report that, especially while I was working in Berlin these last couple weeks, I got a LOT of writing done, and I’m now editing and polishing the music while I prepare the engraved copies on my laptop.

There are still a few aspects of this which I think could just a bit more perfectly express my gratitude and I’m still tinkering with them.  However, I REALLY hope you like the final result!

And…  There’s possibility already of a good friend of mine, a pianist in NYC, might just make a recording of these for us.  He’d play them SOOO much better than I would just yet.  More on that as more is known…

So I haven’t forgotten.  Progress is being made!  Just wanted to give you an update.  =]

Last Friday I had the honor of doing an interview with Dan Savage on the subject of the Rentboy raid early that week. He had noted an earlier blog post of mine in which I encapsulate my feelings about and responses to the raid, and wanted to talk to me about my perspective as a rentboy.

That interview went live today on The Savage Lovecast; the full podcast is found HERE.  The segment involving me starts at just shy of 48 minutes in, or about two-thirds of the way through.

But Friday I nervous as all hell. How many of us remember Caitlin Upton?

Ms. Upton is not stupid; she’s intelligent and articulate. In calmer moments on the Today Show, being interviewed by Matt Lauer and Ann Curry, she showed herself to be educated and well-spoken. She’s demonstrated wit and brains since. She however is never going to live down one moment of nerves getting the better of her.

That’s what happened to me on Friday.  Dan would ask a question, I would know exactly what point I needed to make, and I simply could not cohesively string words into sentences. I had written materials in front of me to refer to, I’d spent the morning rereading and refreshing my memory of what I’d written and what other folk had written, I’d eaten two meals already; I should have been ready. Partly I’ll blame my hiccuping delivery on my ADHD; Friday turned out to be a particularly mentally manic day. Add nerves to that – it was Dan Savage interviewing me after all – and an increasing degree of frustration with myself through the course of the interview, and I set down the phone at the end of it worried I’d not made a terribly good showing.

I’m happy to report that I don’t think I sound like a moron in the podcast, and for that I can only thank Dan or someone on his staff for being a magician of an audio editor!

SO. As it’s possible that some of you are coming to my blog for the first time after wondering “Who was that blithering idiot Dan was talking to?”, I wanted to expand on my Reflections blog post, and commit to writing the points I was trying to make.

I am going to speak in masculine language, using masculine pronouns for instance, through most of this post, as my milieu and best vantage point to speak from is that of a gay male escort. This should not be construed as meaning that I don’t think anything that I write here applies any less to women in the industry; often it applies significantly more.

First off, let’s be clear about the heart of what Rentboy provided. Rentboy was a website on which men advertised themselves to meet with men interested in spending time with them. That it is time which is the commodity being bartered for is an important distinction, very carefully monitored on the site. There was never any mention of exchange of particular actions for money; transactions were expressly for the escort’s time only. This is the vital loophole that made Rentboy and other similar websites legal, and is possibly what enabled Rentboy to operate rather transparently and even prominently visibly worldwide for eighteen years in the heart of Manhattan before the authorities shut them down. Now to call a spade a spade – was there some expectation that perhaps sex might happen during the time spent with an escort? I shouldn’t need to provide the answer for that question. But if sex happened between the escort and the client, it was sex between consenting adults. And there’s nothing illegal about that.

It’s the public-at-large’s conflation of prostitution with escorting (I’m going to be finicky about the distinction) which is part of the problem. Prostitution is viewed by polite society as the last resort for the indigent and desperate. The belief is that in exchange for money they are forced to part with something special, sacred, something which most christian folk think should be saved for marital and procreation purposes only. And what moral person would allow themselves to be denigrated to such a base state? Hence the idea persists that prostitution must be something a person is forced to do. Sex against a person’s will does happen in our society, but that’s rape, not prostitution. Similarly there’s the belief that prostitutes are indentured to agents, “pimps”, who claim all the profits and essentially keep their wards in sexual slavery. This does occasionally happen also, but this falls under the aegis of human trafficking. Conflating coercion of either sort with prostitution as a profession practiced by thousands is a complete fallacy. These forced situations do not reflect the state of the vast majority of sexworkers, especially escorts advertising on such resources as Rentboy. Most sexworkers enter into the profession of their own free will, knowing full well what they’re getting into. No man composed a Rentboy profile under duress; no man posted photos of himself at knifepoint. Admittedly most who enter the field do so out of economic necessity, which it could be argued is duress, but no man doing so hasn’t had other options, unlike victims of rape or trafficking. He just felt that this was his best option.

This public perception is further tainted by a wan version of reality which is influenced by … that very public perception. Sexworkers hear the world say that they are disease-ridden. I won’t be the one to suggest that STIs never happen among prostitutes; they do there just as regularly as they do in the general population. To be cleared of any infection requires being tested regularly and frequently. If a sexworker is afraid to go see a doctor because he is worried that if he is honest about what he does for a living the doctor might react badly or give less than full attention to the issue, the chances he will seek the needed help diminish. Sexworkers are similarly believed to be a drug-addled population. Knowing the shame society heaps on sexworkers and the worry of what people will think and say if they find out how one makes his living, is it any wonder that a few do perhaps turn to drugs to manage their feelings? But if you demonize a profession because a few practitioners turn to substance abuse, what profession in the world doesn’t deserve similar disdain? And yet we don’t hear about psychologists largely being alcoholics or Hollywood producers all being coke addicts; they’re not, at least not many of them. If sexworkers are somehow more prone to these behaviors, it’s this public stigma which is at least in substantial part to blame.

Sex work IS work. Anyone who thinks sex work is easy money has simply never tried it, and if it were so easy, a lot more folk would be doing it. That’s more than just getting past the physical attraction hurdle. Admittedly the vast majority of clients I’ve seen have been middle-aged or older men whose perhaps worst physical defect was being a tad overweight, but there is indeed occasionally the client who frankly offers more of a challenge. Perhaps he has a physical infirmity, perhaps he is hampered by an awkward personality. I once arrived at an assignation and upon walking in had to sniff and then say “Let’s go take a shower.” Another client turned out to have taken drugs before I arrived, and a few minutes after my arrival slipped into the most bizarre grand mal seizure I’d ever seen; what was meant to be an hour’s companionship turned into me caring for him long into the night.

Work and diligence doesn’t end outside the actual time spent with a client, either. An escort has to keep his body in shape to stay competitive, meaning for most of us a dedicated gym regimen. Grooming takes time. A good escort has to keep constant tabs on his health; it’s entirely possible to become an STI Typhoid Mary, even for those of us who insist on safer sex at all times. This means routine testing and blood draws. Health also includes emotional health; you can’t come into this field without confidence and a strong sense of your own self-worth, and that takes energy. But the biggest thing overlooked is that this is like any other sort of self-employment: you have to actively market yourself, and you have to engage your potential clients outside of time spent in their company, often involving texting or phone calls rather extensively before actually finally meeting. And like any freelance career, your income is still income, and you have to track it; paying bills generally requires depositing cash income into a bank account, which means that money is traceable by the IRS even if there’s no W-2 or 1099. Accounting and taxes also take time. This is a job, make no bones about it, and if you don’t do it reasonably well, like any other job you won’t be doing it for very long.

Sexworkers are not an inherently indigent class. Admittedly some don’t have the educational resources and hence the ability to hold a career-track job or any job which might move them above poverty. Many are younger and lack familial support having been thrown out by their parents for being gay, or are fleeing an abusive home life. Of sexworkers in the States, LGBT youth are the demographic most susceptible to some form of human trafficking, but they are not the majority. Some sexworkers are students, again perhaps lacking the parental assistance so many count on for tuition, who chose a means of sufficient income that won’t impinge on their studies. Among adults, many are indeed educated and have held other careers; some still practice those careers and just need to supplement that income. One British study of 240 UK sexworkers noted that 34% of them held a college degree, and 17% an advanced degree. That may not sound like much to an American, but remember that college degrees are far less ubiquitous in most of the rest of the world than it is in the USA. Read a bit further, and you find that that 97% have their GSCE’s, the British equivalent of a high school diploma, and A-levels or their equivalent, which blows holes in any notion that prostitution is the recourse of scholastic dropouts and failures. And finally, many have held “real” jobs at one point, or work at one and rely on sexwork to supplement that income. Over two thirds of those worked in fields such as social work, health care, education, or child care. These are fields we respect and understand to require skills that have to be studied, and yet so often are underappreciated financially. The other third was comprised almost entirely of retail workers, again a field requiring a lot of hours but not generally paying particularly well. So it cannot be said that sexworkers are too lazy or are simply incapable of holding a “real” job.

Yet sex work is scorned. That results in more dangers for escorts and for clients. I’ve already mentioned the possible increased difficulty in finding equitable medical attention. Sexworkers are far more likely to experience some degree of battery or assault than the average person; authorities are sometimes as likely to harass the sexworker making the complaint as to pursue the offender, so far more of these offenses also go unreported. Similarly, particularly in places where the client is prosecuted (the “Swedish Model“), johns might hesitate to report an assault if it involves revealing that he’s hired an escort for fear of harassment or embarrassment, just as escorts hesitate to report crimes themselves. And the social ramifications of that societal bias can prove deadly; in an essay entitled Prostitution Law and The Death of Whores, anthropologist and sexwork authority Laura Agustin writes:

Murders of sex workers are appallingly frequent, including serial killings. In Vancouver, Robert Pickton killed as many as 26 between 1996 and 2001 before police cared enough to do anything about it. Gary Ridgeway, convicted of killing 49 women in the 1980s and 1990s in the state of Washington, said, “I picked prostitutes because I thought I could kill as many of them as I wanted without getting caught.” Infamous statements from police and prosecutors include the Attorney General’s at Peter Sutcliffe’s 1981 trial for the murder of at least 13 women in the north of England: “Some were prostitutes, but perhaps the saddest part of this case is that some were not.” He could say this because of a ubiquitous belief that the stigma attached to women who sell sex is real — that prostitutes really are different from other women.

This deals with the murder of innocent people. Yet the murderers and the authorities expected to halt these crimes all acknowledge that society devalues sex workers’ lives. The law reinforces this stigma, perpetuating the idea that sex workers must be doing something fundamentally wrong.

This misconception is societally pervasive; we hear it from our childhoods, about how low such people have sunk, how worse than death it would be to become a prostitute. Even the strong among us still shirk at it a bit. I was in the locker room at the gym just last week with my husband Jesse Jackman when he brought up the subject of the Rentboy raid and specifically referencing my own experiences as an escort, and I caught myself glancing around the room to see who was within earshot and what their response was. I am aghast at the response even within the gay community, either utterly blasé or joking derisively, or simply “they had it coming.” The very complaint against Rentboy uses such lurid, sex-phobic and homophobic language that it can only have been written to capitalize on a general public’s “eew!” sense. There is no mention of any injury done, whether to any individual or to society at large; no victim of Rentboy’s perdition is ever even alluded to. The writing is sensationalist at best and malevolent at worst, and it was unarguably composed to play on and confirm the general public’s worst misunderstandings. Homeland Security’s official press release about the raid is no better, referring to Rentboy as a “international online prostitution ring” and a “global criminal enterprise.”

But every last bit of this boils down to one question. What exactly makes sex suddenly so utterly immoral once money exchanges hands for it? What is it that distinguishes this from any other sexual encounter? Sex is not a commodity which comes in limited quantity; it’s not as though you only had so much and needed to save it. The only limitation males of our species face sexually is the need to rest a bit between sessions to recharge our batteries. Nobody has yet to demonstrate that sex is the absolute barometer of love and fidelity; while I’d love to think we all do have sex with the person we’ve grown closest to in life, I’ve every sense that humans are capable of employing sex to express all manner of affectionate bonding. And humans bond in so many other ways: friendship, colleagues, business associates. We know these intertwine with regularity. And yet, once business and sex pair, we send up the red flags. How does this arrangement intrinsically hurt anyone? Is it the escort, who has found a means of income? Is it the client, who has found a means of acquiring the fun and comfort he craves? Is it society that is somehow taxed by the fact that people are fucking and people give each other money?

Better question, and easier to answer because there is an answer, is how would such an arrangement as legal prostitution benefit anyone? Studies have shown repeatedly that regular sex is beneficial to your health, not only physically but emotionally as well. It has benefits for your heart, liver, and brain; it’s shown potentially to increase life expectancy and decrease the rate of aging. If sex isn’t readily available for someone by conventional means, why should it not be available for purchase? Even just physical but nonsexual contact has benefits. It has not been an uncommon occurrence with clients that sex has taken only a small portion of the time they booked; many of these fill the time just lying around, cuddling, talking. Often this is as rewarding for both of us if not more so than the actual sex. Many have hired me again, and asked if it would be okay if we didn’t have sex, just curled up and chatted for our time together. Humans are social creatures, like dogs; we are meant to sleep in piles and we don’t generally like being alone. Modern culture sets up so many limitations on how we acquire the intimacy we need to thrive, from time constraints related to work and other obligations to societal constraints about how we meet and what we do together. Why ban a perfectly useful and utterly harmless means of acquiring this?

The strongest empirical argument in favor of decriminalization is that it will improve safety and health, particularly for sex workers but also for clients. The National Bureau of Economic Research published a paper in 2004, detailing that rates of rape and gonorrhea dropped dramatically after Rhode Island decriminalized indoor prostitution in 2003. In that year a state court ruled that an old law had decriminalized prostitution in the state, and it took until 2009 for RI lawmakers to plaster that hole shut again. In those six intervening years, however, there was a statewide 31% decrease in rape offenses and 39% fewer cases of gonorrhea. There was no extraordinary drop in other kinds of crime; the reduction in rape offenses was not representative of a drop in crime in general or indicative of better reporting and policing.

Researchers were hard pressed to explain the phenomenon of the drop in rape, though there were a few theories. One, decriminalization possibly gave sexworkers a stronger bargaining position relative to their clients, making them more comfortable with seeking help from the police if something should go wrong. Another, a more troubling explanation for the drop in rape offenses might be that men with inclinations towards such violence perhaps substituted rape with prostitution. The market for prostitution decidedly expanded following decriminalization; more accessibility and the lack of any criminal penalty may have allowed otherwise would-be rapists to shift away from sexual violence and instead simply buy sex. This is partly borne out by further research showing something similar when rape-inclined men subsume their urges by watching porn instead. It is also seemingly confirmed by a 2015 study of decriminalization of prostitution in the Netherlands, published by the Institute for the Study of Labor. In 1994 the Netherlands allowed communities to authorize prostitution in set districts. In the Dutch cities that did this, researchers found a 30% to 40% drop in sexual abuse and rape during the first two years. There was also a substantial decrease in drug crimes, but no change in the rates of other crimes, including violent assaults and possession of illegal weapons, again suggesting that the crimes most closely related to prostitution were the ones affected by the legalization of prostitution.

Especially as gay men, we’ve fought for years to get the world to understand that sex is something that happens between consenting adults. It took riots in New York City at the end of the 1960s to start abolishing sodomy laws in the nation, though the final repeal was as the result of a Supreme Court decision in 2003. The most recent vindication of this was the Supreme Court mandate that gay marriage was legal nationwide in 2015. That’s a span of over fifty years, and sometimes I wonder if we’ve forgotten what it was to be gay way-back-when, when society had such a base opinion of gay men, and how that stigma manifested in almost systemic violence against fags. Sexworkers still labor under that dark cloud, needlessly. Feminist activist Yasmin Nair reminds us that sex work and sexual freedom are thematically and historically intertwined in her article “On Rentboy, Sex Panics, Feminism, and More”:

Allow me to also remind us of important bits of history: that sex work has been as integral to queer history as to feminism. The history of women’s right to earn their living independent of patriarchal economic systems has included more than a few blowjobs and paid nights, and mainstream feminism has forgotten or willfully erased that history as not respectable enough, not feminist enough, or just too sleazy to be remembered (Mindy Chateauvert’s book is an important reminder of that history). Similarly, the history of rentboys – of various genders – making their way out of often oppressive situations and mapping different literal and metaphorical geographies of desire and safety has also been a part of queer history of, again, blowjobs and street trade and hustling that was, to be sure, not always idyllic but was at least for some/many a ticket out.

The Rentboy raid is an attack on us as gay men. We cannot forget that this happened, we must not fail to appreciate what it means, and we cannot let it go unaddressed.

Coming back to a more personal question which I know is going to be asked of me: if I have income from more “legitimate” sources, why would I myself need to escort?

The answer is that I’m working hard to make music again my career. I’m seeing some success; roughly half of my income in 2014 came from music, which is a substantial improvement over 2013. It’s still an artist’s living though – I’ll never get rich doing this – and I’m a 44-year-old man with 44-year-old-man bills and expenses. Porn accounts for about a third of last year’s income, but the work isn’t reliable; I sometimes go for two or three months at a time without shooting for anyone, which means no income. Furthermore, in a few more years you all are going to tire of watching my saggy ass on screen, and it’ll be time for me to rest on my laurels before they wilt. If I took a more conventional job, a full-time position perhaps in sales or service, or even if I managed to land a career-sort office job with my rather eccentric college degrees and equally eccentric professional résumé (a C.V. which focuses on my music career, of course), the result would be forty hours and perhaps more a week. And for that week I might earn $1000. Escorting allows me to pull in that sort of cash with only a few hours of investment. That leaves me time to focus on building my music career, to do the writing needed to build a portfolio of music, to do the networking and self-marketing needed to promote a music career, and to chase down further music work. If I had to show up at a job forty-plus hours a week to make ends meet, I’d never be able to make any progress building what really should and will be the career that takes me into my dotage. Escorting is not forever; it’s just to get me through the thin spots for a little while longer until music covers all my expenses.

And through escorting I’ve met some amazing men I’d never have met otherwise. There’s the emergency room physician from Florida with whom I’d bonded over talks about Saint-Saëns and the history of syringe needle manufacture. There’s the opera impresario I shocked with my knowledge of Bruno Walter operas; we discussed how to roast garlic during a superb dinner in Paris. The businessman in NYC from whom I had one of the most lucid explanations of how the USA economy tanked in 2009. The architect who loved that I love Gaudì and with whom I had a long post-coital heart-to-heart about how Calatrava buildings stand up. The social media director in Chicago who just proved to be so much fun. And the graphic designer in LA who wrote to me four months later to tell me that something I had said in the course of our conversation awakened a realization in him and spurred him to reach out to his estranged boyfriend; they had been back together for 12 weeks at that point, and never happier. I could go on, as could many of my colleagues. Many of these men have become friends; some are still occasional clients, some are not. But these are the ties that build our community, regardless of how that bond is made. And if enabling and legitimizing that bonding isn’t a good argument for the legalization of sex work, I don’t know what is.

One of the best articles I’ve read on the argument for the decriminalization of prostitution was written by German Lopez in Vox. I’m much indebted to this essay, as I drew tremendously on information gleaned from there and from the sources he cites to write this blog post.

So the piano was delivered a week ago, and I’ve barely been able to pull myself away from it.  I haven’t lived with a piano in my own space in some six years, and even then, when I lived in NYC the Steinway in the apartment actually belonged to my flatmate, a professional pianist, so my access was not 24/7, let’s say.  But as I’d bashed my head against walls since my late teens to make my biggest passion and worst habit my career, to not have this basic tool to do what I do has been a serious handicap.  Just to be able to sit and play, other composers’ music as much as my own, keeps my own creative juices flowing.  And while porn may sustain me another couple years at best, music is for life.

Some of you have asked what exactly it is I do when I’m not making porn.  You know I’m trained as a composer, having studied at Peabody Conservatory in Baltimore.  I’ve written for small ensembles, like this set of four Cuban-inspired Dances for clarinet and piano:

You can hear that movement here:

At the other extreme, works for large orchestra; this ensemble would require about eighty performers on stage:

Besides piano many of you know already that I play tuba.  I also sing bass and countertenor, and I’ve dabbled in a number of other instruments.  However, most of my work has been performing what I best refer to as “music preparation”.  Generally this means working with material that already exists, editing it or arranging it or just copying it.  It’s a tiny little niche in the rather small world of classical music; I also dabble in jazz and broadway/cabaret, but to less of an extent.

The simplest of variants of this is simply taking a composer’s manuscript and making the fine engraved copy that can be sent to publishers and put in front of performers.  This will include incorporating rehearsal marks, cues in parts, and other critical marks that ease performance, as well as simply identifying and correcting errors in the musical text.  Sometimes this is quite easy.

Sometimes its much more difficult.

Sometimes it involves transcribing into modern notation an older means of notating music, or one of the experimental means of notation that composers dabbled with in the 14th and 15th centuries, and which modern musicians are not accustomed to deciphering.

More involved, I arrange and orchestrate works.  There is an operetta by the late nineteenth century German composer active in Vienna, Oscar Straus, called Tapfere Soldat (commonly translated as The Chocolate Soldier), loosely based on Shaw’s play Arms and the Man.  Straus had a gift for melody, and every tune in this work is something you walk away from whistling.  He enjoyed great popularity in his time, but fell from fashion at the turn of the century, and was largely forgotten by the time the Third Reich started actively destroying any materials of German Jewish composers they could get their hands on.  As a result, despite there being many piano reductions of the score, we were having trouble coming up with any published orchestral score.  And the couple recordings I listened to involving orchestra were remarkably “flat” sounding anyway, not terribly interesting.  We came to realize that the orchestrations used in those recordings were made recently from the piano-vocal score, which had a bare minimum of accompaniment.  As the piano-vocal that was widely sold and hence survived would have been published so amateur musicians could play the songs at home, they were kept simple.  Examining similar works by Straus’ contemporaries whose works we have better representation, like the Strauss brothers (not related to Oscar) Josef and Johann Jr., Emmerich Kálmán, Franz Lehar, and Franz von Suppé to name a few, we confirmed that the original full score would have incorporated countermelodies and muscial gestures not reflected in the piano-vocal.  As this more complex orchestration no longer seemed to exist, whether due to Nazi obliteration or later neglect, we decided to recreate what might have been, matching the style of the day as much as possible.  This orchestration, for twelve instrumentalists, was used in a fully-staged production at the Bard Music Festival for three weeks in 2010.  I’ve prepared a full script for the musical, calling it Arms and the Man to distinguish it from mere translations of the Straus original, drawing dialogue directly from Shaw’s play and making new translations of the German lyrics for the songs to match.  And now I’m sending this around to operetta companies in the States to try to get further performances of what has proven to be a really charming and funny play with some super music.

After the success of that work, the following year Bard decided to do an adaptation of Noël Coward’s musical Bittersweet.  Coward, writing this in the 1930’s, set the frame of the story in Paris in the years coming into World War II, following an elderly lady’s reminiscing of her youth in a gilded age of the 1870’s and ’80’s.  His style hence straddled the jazz era of the 1930’s and the waltz era of the fin de siecle.  Our director thought it might make the story stronger if we updated it, setting the framework in 1960’s cold-war Europe looking back on the 1920’s & ’30’s as the gilded era.  As such, we had to recast a lot of the music into a more apropos style.  As many of the characters are in fact musicians, and stage instructions often call on them to “improvise a jazz version of such-and-such a tune at the piano” or some such thing, many of these improvisations had to be created essentially from scratch.  The great tune of the musical is a waltz tune “I’ll see you again”; at the end of the musical, back in the 1960’s, one of the younger characters creates a modern version of the song, completely missing the meaning and point of it.  The original version suggests he makes a foxtrot, but as that made no sense in a 1960 setting, here’s the original, and my piano “improvisation” drawing on the Beatles’ Michele, Ma Belle as the model.

Again, this required not only the rearrangements for the entire show, but again orchestrations to be prepared for a pit of 12 instrumentalists, as well as writing parts for the actors on stage to perform as well, and of course doctoring those to the actual ability of those actors to perform on a given instrument!  All of these folks can sing, but when stage directions call for specific ones to play piano, violin, concertina (okay, we managed to make the accordion go away)…  This was a challenge!

More involved are projects where music has to be reconstructed.  For every work of classical music we have a full set of materials for, there are hundreds which either fell from fashion at some point and have yet to be rediscovered.  Remembering that before the advent of photocopiers, music either had to be engraved and published, an expensive prospect only lavished on the few works publishers knew they’d be able to sell, or had to be copied out by hand.  If you wanted a set of opera parts, you usually had to hire a copyist somewhere in proximity of an extant score to copy the score and parts out, one at a time.  Hence many works only existed in one or two copies, many of which are in somewhat ratty condition considering how much use they may have endured in their day, or how they may have been stored in the meantime.

The Viennese composer Franz von Suppé wrote over a hundred operettas, most of which are completely forgotten.  Indeed, Suppé himself is really only remembered today for two overtures, the ones to Poet and Peasant and Light Cavalry, both familiar to anyone who watched Loony Toons cartoons in their childhood.  A few of his musicals were about earlier composers still popular in the 1860’s, notably one based on Mozart in 1854.  These musicals not only had stories very loosely based on biographical parts of the subject’s life, but also incorporated the most popular tunes written by that composer.  His musical Schubert, written in 1864 and based on the music and a very spurious biographical legend around the early nineteenth century composer Franz Schubert, enjoyed huge popularity for ten years after its premiere, but then faded.  Again, the only part of the score which was published publicly was the overture; the rest of the score and parts were put in a trunk, stuck in the theater’s attic, and forgotten about.  So when the Bard Music Festival wanted to perform this operetta, there was a hunt for the score.  It was found, but after a century of neglect, it was rat-eaten, water-damaged, faded…  And further, I wasn’t given the original but a really badly-done photoscan.  From this I had to make a full performing edition.  Pages were missing, pages were illegible.  I at least had the full lyrics and dialogue (in German), so I was generally able to identify when I was missing music, and as many of the tunes were familiar Schubert melodies, I was almost always able to reconstruct exactly how much music was missing in any of these holes.  Having copied out as much as I could, I spent weeks combing through and filling in the voids.  The result was performed at the Bard Music Festival to acclaim in August of 2014, and a recording of the performance is on Spotify.

So that’s what I do to earn my keep.  And I’m only looking to broaden that…  Not only writing more music and increasing my performances, but also perhaps picking up a new instrument or two.  I’ve always wanted to learn to play theorbo.  I want to play bagpipes again; I haven’t played since my teens.  And along the lines of bagpipes, while the Great Highland bagpipes are what most folk think of (and are a distinctly outdoor instrument!), I’d also love to learn to play the Northumbrian Smallpipes, a much sweeter and softer instrument, better suited to indoor use and playing with other instruments.  All I have to do is come up with one to start learning on…  Anyone know of one for sale?

No?  Well, thanks to you all I’ve got this absolutely amazing piano, and after years away from one I’ve finally started playing daily again.  Jeese, seems I can use the practice!

At the end of March Titan finally actually invited me out to their site in Palm Springs to film.  Jesse has been in the industry a shorter amount of time, but had already filmed there two or three times, and I was starting to feel some envy.  I ended up staying a few extra days just to enjoy the California sunshine; Boston is still a bit bleak at the end of March, after all.  And while we were there, I got to be part of two just amazing scenes with two amazing guys.

The first was a scorching scene with a man who not only is one of the models of sexiness for me but is also a really good friend, Hunter Marx.  This scene isn’t released yet, but I’ll definitely let you know when it comes out!

The second scene was with a relative newcomer to porn, Dallas Steele.  Why this man has taken this long to answer this calling is beyond me.  He’s hot, he’s sweet, he fucks like an animal, he takes a brutal fucking, and that dick…  Curved exactly right to hit what it has to.

The film, Blue Collar Ballers, has had some stellar reviews.  To wit:

From our buddy Gay Comic Geek

From our friends at ManNet.com

There’s a great interview with Dallas HERE and he writes further about his first time on the Titan set HERE. You get to find out what a smart, humble, and rather devious man he is.

And of course Jesse posted about it on his blog, HERE.

The preview of the scene can be seen HERE.

The full trailer can be found HERE.

Some viewers have noted a resemblance Dallas has to my boyfriend, Titan Man Jesse Jackman.  And I have to say, they’re not wrong.  They’re both well over six foot tall, they’re both massively muscular and have those “superhero” torso-to-limb proportions, they’re both furry.  Really, about the only difference is that Dallas has a tattoo or two more than Jesse does, and that Dallas has hair.  That aside, though, is it any wonder that our on-screen chemistry is incendiary?  Just wait, though…  There’s a scene coming out in the next several months with Jesse and Dallas.  THAT will be one to watch out for!

It is worth noting that, even after having filmed that whole scene, Dallas and I still had more exploration to do with each other after the cameras were put away.  Yet again, thanks to TitanMen and the quality of men they work with, I’ve made another really excellent friend both on and off set.

Also on the film, hot scenes from my buddies Eddy CeeTee and Nick Prescott, and a really sexy friend of mine from Chicago, Hugh Hunter.  And Hugh gets to work with my god among men, of course, Jesse.

Later in the week, Hunter Marx and I got to do a little more exploration, as we were asked to testdrive some of Titan’s new lines of toys.  Much fun was had!

So among the lots and lots of supportive comments my blog post from yesterday about the Rentboy.com raid has received, there are two standouts for being rather the opposite.

Sidewinder says “Aren’t you satisfied with the brand new piano your gay faced BF begged for? Go “compose” something or “share your gift”. LOLOLOLOL!! BOTH OF YOU, STOP TRYING TO BE RELEVANT. You come across as a real pain in the ass. You’re a hooker, your BF is a hooker. JUST BE ONE. And please tell your better half that article about telling is mom about his “adult life” was creepy, inappropriate, and downright strange.”

Gay man With Degree writes “This is being sent around by gay men to other gay men as a gag The Idiotic ramblings of a narcotic corrupted brain. Who other than a dope with a brain functioning lower than that of someone with Down’s syndrome would compare slavery laws to prostitution law’s? And saying there’s no other employment opportunities in the world for young gay men is laughable and a pathetic attempt to justify your laziness and retardation Get a life looser”

I couldn’t have asked for better examples of exactly the sort of stupidity I’m talking about, not even looking at the misspellings and faulty punctuation, or the sophomoric handles and email addresses.  Here are two gay men, one of whom has to trumpet the fact that he has a diploma to give any weight to his statements.  These guys have swallowed the societal misconception, hook, line, and sinker, that there are classes of people who should be treated like animals.  And they’re just the men to do it.

Here’s the thing.  I know people are going to disagree with me on the Rentboy events and the nature of sex work, and that’s fine.  But it seems if you have a good reason to disagree with me, you might present such an argument.

These two gentlemen have only taken the time to find my blog and post, certainly, but all they’ve done is call me names.  Perhaps they lack the ability to formulate a reason to disagree with me, but I suspect it’s just laziness.  Anyone with any intelligence who wants to see progress would say “But wait, mightn’t such-and-such be true, or don’t you think…?”  Instead all they can do is cast insubstantiatible aspersions on my character, of which the majority people will only see evidence to the contrary.  I’m sorry, but if someone hasn’t got a good argument for his position, regardless of whether he’ll ever recognize it, he has lost the fight.

The sad thing is that these comments are couched in such a disparaging, condescending tone.  If these men had a real argument, they would have presented one.  Lacking one, but still feeling some compulsion to beat me, they’ve resorted to slinging monkey shit.  If either of them felt secure in their work, in their sexuality, in their life, they wouldn’t feel like they need to place someone, anyone, into a lower position than they feel they are.  Being a porn star and a public figure makes us prime lightning rods for this sort of abuse, but it means nothing.

Are we relevant?  Are these gentlemen going to be our relevant voices, with this negativity and contempt?  Is this what we want for ourselves?

This insecurity in our ranks is what poisons us as a demographic.  If the world at large has a low opinion of us, it’s because this is the sort of respect with which we so often seem to be treating ourselves.  It’s not unique to gay men; of course this sort of need to find someone to disparage to make one’s self feel better happens across all divisions of society.  However, we as gay men are particularly broken folk.  Many of us spent our formative years hearing repeatedly how these feelings and inclinations which are so inherent to our beings are vile, evil, and depraved.  Is it any surprise that the less thoughtful of us would internalize these criticisms?  Of course lots of us have such low opinions of ourselves.  This is a malaise we need to find a cure for, and soon.  As long as we continue to turn against ourselves out of a misguided sense of self-preservation, the rest of the world is going to look down on us for our infighting and fractured front.

Realizing I’m preaching to the choir with most of you, this really is a plea to those few of you who would post such a comment.  Grow some balls.  You’ll be happier.

 

A quick addendum.  Hope you get as big a laugh out of this as I did.  Anyone want to translate what the second half of this means?  Not that I’m terribly worried about it.  The first half of the comment makes some assumptions about my finances he can’t possibly know and which my accountant will find scoffable.  However, anyone who uses “Bye Felicia” as a fake email to hide behind and yet still can’t spell “bye” or “Felicia” correctly is probably not much to worry about.

Okay, so perhaps it isn’t quite so surprising that in the days following the mandated legalization of gay marriage that there might be some pushback against any freer expression of sexuality in our society.  Indeed, in the States we seem so hellbent on denying that a little physical affection is so necessary to our well-being individually and societally to the point of actually demonizing those needs that those who refuse to utilize those resources available to them hence feel they have to refuse that right to everyone else.  Misery does indeed love company!  Thus we have laws which regulate our morality instead of protecting us from criminal activity, and morality is subjective.  How long did we labor under legal constraints that precluded any sort of non-missionary non-heteronormative sex or even social engagement?  How long was it legally codified in our country that folk of African descent were less citizens than those of European descent?  As it has come to be understood that these laws were injurious to one demographic and did nothing to protect any other, they have been overturned.  And there have been objections from “moralists” to these changes every step of that way.

It is not enough to call something criminal simply because there is a law against it.  If that law exists, it is in place (or should be) to protect someone, perhaps many of us, from becoming a victim.  Rape laws are in place to prevent unwanted sexual intercourse.  Theft laws are in place to prevent people from taking our personal property.  Laws outlawing murder are there to deter folk from taking away our lives.  In all these instances, there is a victim in the crime, someone who loses something, life, property, dignity.  Anyone wishing to deprive us of these basic rights is indeed a criminal, and their capture and punishment should be the aim and objective of the criminal justice system.

Who exactly is the victim of escorting?  Is it the escort, who has entered into the arrangement of his (or her) own will and on his terms?  Has he been somehow forced into the seraglio, indentured as a sex slave?  Or is he an entrepreneur, who identifies a resource he has, and has entered into a business venture to share this resource with a public who has something to offer in return?  Is the victim the client, who understands the nature and terms of the transaction before he signs on?  Is he somehow being deprived of his money in exchange for something of no value to him?  Or is he perhaps a person desiring some company, perhaps some physical affection, and somehow lacks or hasn’t the time to pursue the normal societally-accepted means of coming by that?  Or is the victim society in general?  Does escorting bear some corollary criminal behavior the same way the inner-city drug trade is closely allied with organized crime and gang warfare?  Does providing individuals with company, and if company is of an intimate nature then providing that behind closed doors, somehow corrupt the morals of future generations any more than any other societal norm we exhibit?

Prostitution laws were enacted to protect what was viewed by the upper ends of society as a weak, victimizible class, specifically women of poor means.  The idea was that women were being forced into prostitution by unscrupulous men for the man’s profit, and hence these women needed protection.  Never was there any acknowledgement that perhaps this was the woman’s only means of survival in a world where men refused to give women the same rights to education, to run a business, to start a household.  Nowadays we have more specific laws to protect such classes of folk: we call this human trafficking, and this is a vile and horrid practice, with lots of victims of the sorts described before.  Prostitution in the meantime, having spent so much time lumped into society’s understanding of what we’ve come to call human trafficking, has only seen confirmed the veneer slapped over it by society that anyone who would sell their sex and companionship must be morally corrupt.  Folks who are sexworkers are constantly called whores and leeches; people accuse them of being too lazy to hold a “real” job, and too dishonest to declare their income to the IRS; they are told they are disease-ridden like vermin.  It is possible that examples of any of those can be cited, but I’d challenge anyone to produce evidence that the gross generalization proves true.

Similarly, it’s not the clients hiring these escorts who are victimized.  Escorts do not show up, take the cash, and just leave; these men were approached for something the client in fact needed, be that amatory or just companionable.  And judging by the number of men who have returned to hire an escort again, often the same escort, it’s certain that in fact it works for them.  Many buddies of mine who escort will say that, not unlike being a bartender, there’s far more therapy involved in many meetings than anything else, even whether sex happens or not.  Most clients simply need some physical affection, someone to listen to them talk, someone who will reassure him, despite not having someone in their life who will hug them, curl up with them, listen to their problems, or give them someone to go with to do things he enjoys, that he is still loveable.  Escorts do exactly this.  To suggest that this carries less meaning because they are paid for it is to also suggest that the comfort therapists provide is suspect because they charge, or that a doctor’s Hippocratic oath is rendered violate once he accepts payment, for instance.  Where do we draw the line?

Reading through the accusations in the complaint, not once is there any mention of any nonconsensual practice.  No instance is brought forth of a single human being being harmed, even tangentially, by letting men pay for sex with other men. Contrast this with the often exaggerated claims of trafficking and human slavery that are used to justify cracking down on heterosexual prostitutes, treating willing female sex workers as default victims: this complaint doesn’t even bother with such niceties.  The complaint’s objects are portrayed just as sickening depraved faggots violating New York’s prostitution laws, and the only apparent reason the Department of Homeland Security needs to get involved is because it involves interstate commerce.  I mean, really; that men have sex with each other and instead of one buying dinner for the other that there happens to be an exchange of cash is somehow a threat to our American borders and freedoms?

Rentboy.com has been in business for a whopping eighteen years.  They have always protected their interests by insisting that all transactions are for the escort’s time, never for the services involved.  What happens in that time is something determined between consenting adults.  Indeed, perhaps sex is expected, perhaps sexual qualifications are included in the advertisement, but the pay has never been for sex.  Rentboy has hardly operated under a veil of secrecy in that time; indeed, beyond offering the company of men they have also been quite visible in their advocacy for sex workers.  They have been public advocates for sexual health and mental well-being, not only of their advertisers but also for the gay community at large.  They have supported education programs, notably the separate nonprofit HookOnline, founded and run by sexworker advocate Hawk Kinkaid, and offering classes and podcasts to help improve safety and social image for escorts without judgement and without overtones of “we’re here to rescue you.”  Rentboy has offered events celebrating our gay culture, dance parties under the HustlaBall aegis and the Hookie Awards.  And recognizing the sheer number of young men in their ranks who are using this means as a way to subsidize an education, they just started a scholarship program (happily still taking applications).  Why exactly are they being targeted now?

Follow the money, is the answer.  Rentboy has grossed well over $10 million; if the prosecuting bodies can make three citations stick and invoke RICO laws, those assets are deemed forfeit, and are divided up between these bodies.  Nice little money grab, no?  Some are suggesting that this is the principal reason the Department of Homeland Security is involved, and I agree that I think it unlikely that the Rentboy records are going to reveal the name and address of the next Paris train gunman.  The other clue may be in the unsubstantiated mention of money laundering in the complaint, and the only thing documented therein which might possibly fall under this heading is a single mention in item 58 of a line item expense in Rentboy’s records, a line item that says “Sean — Viagra”.  On one level, that might be an attempt to confirm that Rentboy was in the business of sex, not of companionship, but I wonder if someone didn’t see that as a use of corporate funds for non-corporate use.  It’s tiny, but if the authorities only after 18 years of legal hunting finally found this one little crack to wedge their crowbar into, the timing of the raid might make sense.  It would explain the multitude of national and state organizations involved in the raid, as the only true legal justification they had was financial malfeasance and potential money laundering, and thence they’re just praying they find the proof they need in the seized records and data from the Rentboy offices to make the rest of the accusations stick.

Even we in the gay community who live on the better side of the tracks tend to forget that lots of us come from far more difficult circumstances.  There’s a host of LGBT youth with no welcoming homes and families to return to and no resource for education or social improvement.  Studying at the university level requires funding beyond the means of most student-age men; for those with parents lacking or unwilling to help with these expenses, how is such an education to be acquired?  The sort of legitimate jobs available to such students don’t begin to cover the expense unless they take up all the student’s time.  I find myself wishing I’d had this as a financial resource in my own college days: I would have saved myself and my parents a lot of financial embarrassment.  Further, the history of sex work is inextricably tied in with both the feminist movements and gay struggles for equality; to turn against these escorts is to turn our backs on a public that has been our support for decades, if not longer.

There are some great minds weighing in on this.  Read columns by feminist Yasmin Nair, one by gay sex-positive columnist and advocate Dan Savage.  Florida attorney and South Florida Gay News editor Norm Kent posted a scathing critique published by Str8upGayPorn.  Scott Shackelford wrote a really smart column for Reason.com, some of which I’ve drawn on in writing this post.  He makes this statement, which I want to quote:

The larger gay community and gay leaders need to jump on this and get loud, fast. We’ve been fighting for the right to define our relationships as we choose, not allowing the government to decide what is legitimate. Marriage recognition is just part of that fight. We are not free as long as the government is dictating the terms of our sexual interactions. I expect to see outrage from every major gay and lesbian organization at the callous disregard shown toward those men who seek to sexually connect on their own terms.

Addendum of Sept. 1, with a few more awesome things written or that I’ve found since writing this post:

Three entries in the Gay Voices section of the Huffington post, one by Matt Baume, one by JamesMichael Nichols (the deputy editor of Gay Voices), and one by Matthew Ebert.

David W. wrote of his experiences on his Facebook page.

An anonymous writer contributed this smart narrative to The Guardian.

Justin Vivian Bond, writing on his Facebook page about the statement he was asked to make to the New York Times and then cited by Dan Savage.

The New York Times published an editorial looking total askance at the Rentboy raid.

There’s this awesome argument for the legalization of prostitution by German Lopez.

And for those who don’t like to read (why would you be here, reading my logorrheic prose, though, I’d wonder), there are these two amazing videos.

One by Matt Baume again:

And one produced by Jake Jaxson of Cockyboys, featuring an powerful narrative by Rob Yeager, well known to the porn, sexwork, and BDSM worlds.  This video was originally posted to YouTube, but was reported for inappropriate content and was taken down.

And can I say…  My day was made yesterday evening when it was brought to my attention that this very blog post was cited by no less than Dan Savage.  I’m just floored. 

What’s my own personal involvement in this?  Of the seven men arrested, three have been close friends for years, one (Hawk) nigh a brother to me.  One cannot work in porn and not know dozens, possibly hundreds of colleagues, friends and folk one cares about who have been or currently are escorts.  These men have done nothing to hurt anyone, are merely capitalizing on one of their own personal assets, and have just found their income slashed.

And me, I’ve escorted, and make no secret of it.  After years of a successful career in music working at the top of the field in New York City, the economic “wisdom” of a bunch of greedy bank owners toppled the economy.  Want to catalog victims?  Folks lost their savings and their homes.  Businesses tightened their belts, and cut back on philanthropic outreach.  Arts organizations, long dependent on corporate sponsorship, withered and died.  My work went from more than I knew what to do with to nil.  And as a quarter of the rest of the workforce was suddenly finding themselves jobless too, I found myself confronted with competition from people with MBA’s and law degrees for mere Starbucks posts and bartending gigs, let alone career-track jobs.  In the succeeding two years I went from living comfortably though not luxuriously on the Upper West Side of New York City, having savings, and being able to travel a little bit, to being sorely in debt, under investigation by the IRS over the complexity of my many years of tax returns, and unable to find an apartment I was able to afford to move into when my lease ran out.  Just in case it has never entered your thoughts as to how such things transpire, this is how homeless people are made.  At the risk of sounding like the stereotype of someone forced into prostitution through desperation, it was putting an ad on Rentboy that saved me, at least making it possible to move to cheaper living conditions in Chicago for a few years.  It has in a few tight moments since kept me in rent.  It has in a number of ways made possible my slow but steady return to my music career in these succeeding years.  Without it, I think it quite likely I would have been forced into being one of those poor grubby smelly folk on the New York City subway, begging for change, and enduring the turned-up noses of all those folk who are already turning their judgemental noses up at the fact that I’ve been a whore.  Truth be told I would never have let it come to that; of the options available to me, I’d have chosen a tombstone instead.

Hence the real victims are the guys who are legitimately offering a business arrangement on this website.  Thanks to a society that demonizes sex, they find their job made substantially more difficult, and possibly more dangerous.  It is the world’s oldest profession, so closing Rentboy.com won’t stomp it out of existence; it will resurge again.  But if we let this go by unchallenged, we know that they will inch that moralistic line back further.  How long until we find some personal freedom you and I value has slipped over that line?  If they are willing to push back, we also need to be.