ABSTRACT
The practice of recording one’s sexual experiences in the form of diaries, memoirs, or private correspondence became by the twentieth century an important means of self-expression for sexual minorities. Sex workers rarely wrote these works, but they were their frequent subjects. In fact, numerous sexual records examined by historians as narratives of queer sexuality can be equally seen as the testimonies of sex workers’ clients.
In this fascinating chapter, the diaries of two singular men who hired male sex workers are brought to the fore. Thomas N. Painter and Samuel M. Steward produced remarkable testimonies of their renegade sex lives, which consisted of numerous money-based relations with hustlers and other working-class men. They not only described their own sexual encounters with sex workers but also tried to analyze and interpret them for themselves as well as for presumed readers. Their shared point was that sex with hustlers, however dangerous, expensive, frustrating, or unsatisfactory, was an indispensable part of a certain segment of queer life and possessed its own social, emotional, intellectual, and physical pleasures. In them, we see that the power dynamic between hustlers and their clients was complicated. These diaries offer a rare insider’s view into the world of male sex work.
Painter’s voluminous diary depicts an archaic system of gender identities and sexual roles, grounded in a homophobic model that fetishized heterosexuality and working-class virility. But it also documents a moral and ethical struggle and reveals the complex admixture of intimacy and commerce enabled by urban capitalism. The tropes and formulas of consumer capitalism and the service economy provided a blueprint for a variety of semi-underground networks and connections that enabled commercial sex between men.
