From the 1960s to present, the male sex worker, or hustler, is a frequent stereotype in literature and movies in Western countries, and elsewhere, especially in literature, theatrical productions, films, television series, and photography. Sometimes this is with a gay perspective, in which the sex worker may be considered a stock character and falls into common stereotypes. Male sex workers also appear occasionally in popular music, contemporary fashion advertising, and the visual arts.
Stereotypes
The most common stereotype of the hustler is as a sexy but tragic figure. This stereotype reveals both a fascination with the hustler as a sexual object and sadness or disdain with his situation and life-style. This stereotyped male hustler is often an underaged or teenage "street kid" or "runaway" forced to leave home because of his sexual orientation or because of sexual abuse. He is often portrayed as a drug addict or thief.
The plotline frequently focuses on the crisis of leaving the trade or the street ("one last trick"), or on making enough money for an important use (a medical treatment, a gift). The climax often has one of two possible outcomes: the hustler either abandons the trade and re-integrates into society, or he meets a tragic end. This tragic image of the hustler can be contrasted with the stereotype of the female hooker with a heart of gold: instead of being portrayed as someone in control and contented, the hustler is lost, homeless, broke or exploited.
In movies and books that take the point of view of the client or of a boy/girlfriend who loves the hustler, the hustler is often depicted as an impossible love object who will only bring hurt or frustration. The lover may grow jealous of and disturbed by the hustler's work; occasionally the loving boy/girlfriend will be drawn into the lifestyle of their hustler boyfriend. Older clients who fall in love with hustlers are frequently prey to emotional (and sometimes physical) pain; this is especially true in the case of "rough trade" (where the hustler identifies as straight), and this depiction has been reinforced by several famous incidents of violence against clients (such as the deaths of Pier Paolo Pasolini and Rudolph Moshammer).
In contrast to the previous depictions, the male prostitute has also sometimes been portrayed as an idealized rebel living outside the law and free of bourgeois conventions. This almost Nietzschean image of the hustler as moral and sexual outlaw owes much to the writings of Jean Genet, William S. Burroughs and John Rechy (among others).
While less frequent in cinema and novels, the male prostitute with exclusively female clients (the "gigolo" or "escort") is generally depicted in a less tragic manner than the gay hustler (the gigolo is portrayed as older, athletic, well-dressed, etc.), and films like American Gigolo have done much to paint the character as a sophisticated seducer. This portrayal has also led to cinematic satire (the Deuce Bigalow films).
The portrayal of the client or "john" of male prostitution in popular culture is far less codified than that of the hustler and runs the gamut from the lonely married man, the self-hating in-the-closet guy, the exploitative or endearing businessman, and even the serial killer.
The diversity of these stereotypes reveals much about each author's or director's personal view of love, sexuality, power and morality.
These stereotypes may have a basis in fact, but they should not be taken as true in all cases.
The same issues that surround male prostitution (including the financial security and social status of the young "kept" lover, the older lover's obsessions and insecurities with regards to his or her youthful love-object, the sexual freedom or moral indifference of the hustler, etc.) often appear in movies and literature that portray amorous or sexual relationships—without prostitution—between an older man or woman and a younger male lover; for example, in Pasolini's novel and movie Theorem, Harold Prince's film Something For Everyone (1970) and Bill Condon's film Gods and Monsters (1998).
In literature 1890s-1950s Various novels, memoirs, and plays, from the 1890s to 1920s, feature male hustlers as major characters.For 19th-Century French Literature, see Nicolas Duriau, « Prostitués » avant la lettre ? 1783-1922. Écrire les prostitutions masculines au XIXe siècle, Paris, Classiques Garnier, Masculin / Féminin dans l'Europe moderne, 2025, 395 p. One example is Stephen Crane's 1894 unfinished novel, Flowers of Asphalt, said to be about a boy from the country who becomes a hustler on the streets, taken down by syphilis and drugs, which Crane is said to have read to his mentor, Hamlin Garland, who declared that the pages be burned. Some scholars have questioned its accuracy as it relies upon a one-page note by James Gibbons Huneker. The title was later used by avant-garde filmmaker Gregory Markopoulos for his seven-minute 1951 film of the same name. Edmund White, in his 2007 novel Hotel de Dream, had Crane resuming his writing of Flowers to Asphalt on his deathbed, and renaming it The Painted Boy. Crane's first novel, Maggie: A Girl of the Streets, in 1893, would feature a sex worker protagonist, but was a woman rather than a man.
Years later, in 1924, Romanian working class writer, Panait Istrati, published "Kyra Kyralina", his debut short story. Also known as "Chira Chiralina", this novel also featured a male hustler as a protagonist. Scholar Dale Corvino said that the novel features the "earliest depiction" of a male sex worker in "modern literature." He also noted that, in 1926, John Henry MacKay published a novel entitled "The Hustler" which focused on the attraction a young man in Weimar Berlin has to a "homeless teenage hustler."
The 1940s and 1950s brought more novels with male sex workers as protagonists. This included Jean Genet's Our Lady of the Flowers (Notre Dame des fleurs) in 1943. This free-flowing "erotically-charged" novel was written by Genet while in prison, and his debut work, detailing his personal experience in Paris's underworld, filled with "hustlers, pimps, and drag queens." Six years later, Genet published another novel with a male sex worker as a main character: The Thief's Journal (Journal du voleur). Also autobiographical, it detailed his romantic forays and his time as a thief and hustler in Europe during the 1930s. In 1948, Gore Vidal published The City and the Pillar. The latter novel featured lead character Jim Willard supporting himself as a hustler and a "kept boy". The novel was later described by Vidal, in 1995, as one of the first novels about gay characters, and their experience, "to be published by a mainstream New York press," noting that its publication was delayed for "almost two years" by E.P. Dutton, and the mixed reviews when it was released, since it was a "explicitly gay novel." He also said he had written the character in such a way that some even thought that Vidal himself was "a male prostitute" and good at tennis, even though he was neither, describing the book as "a considerable act of imagination."
In 1951, James Jones published From Here to Eternity. In his original manuscript, Private Angelo Maggio acknowledges acting as trade, allowing gay men to perform oral sex on him for money to supplement his Army pay. The publisher forced the excision of these passages. A new edition of the book with the previously censored passages restored was later released by e-book publisher Open Road. Some years later, in 1957, Hubert Selby Jr. published Last Exit to Brooklyn, with a similar protagonist. Scholar Dan Corvino said that the novel, set in Sunset Park, Brooklyn, in the 1950s, focusing on sex work, drugs, sexual violence, and gangs on the streets, and featured a "female-presenting" male sex worker named Georgette.
1960s to 1970s The 1960s brought on additional novels with male sex workers as protagonists. City of Night, by John Rechy, in 1963 was said to be a "breakthrough" novel. Autobiographical in nature, it details Rechy's life as a hustler in Hollywood and New York, noting his longings, and what one scholar described as the "systemic oppression of the gay underworld." A few years later, followed by Midnight Cowboy by James Leo Herlihy in 1965. Later adapted into a Hollywood film, the book chronicles the odyssey of naïve Texan named Joe Buck from his home state to New York City, where he plans on realizing his dream of becoming a male prostitute servicing rich women.
In 1967, Numbers by Mexican-American novelist John Rechy had a similar protagonist, as did My Father and Myself J. R. Ackerley the following year. One scholar, Frederick Luis Aldama, described the novel has taking place in an "ethnoqueer borderland" in Los Angeles, with a multiracial protagonist, Johnny Rio, who goes on a "chaotic quest" to find his sexual identity, as he goes through the "underbelly of society," with sexual adventures and hunts to fulfill his own gratification. Other scholars said that Rechy incorporated his personal experiences as a hustler, and drifter, into the novel, as he did in City of Night in 1963, described Rio as engaging in a "compulsive search for impersonal sexual contacts" and had an attachment to "abject sexual practices and places" as he tries to reclaim his "youthful sexual attraction."
In 1978, author and musician Jim Carroll published The Basketball Diaries. The memoir, later adapted into a 1995 film, talked about his life in New York City in the 1960s, including "urban counterculture" and the book was said to focus on crime, drug addiction, male prostitution, and his other acts of "youthful hedonism." In Zoo Station: The Story of Christiane F. from the same year, Christiane F.'s boyfriend Detlef works as a hustler to earn money to buy heroin.
1980s to 1990s Richie McMullen, in 1989, published Enchanted Boy. It is a memoir of a boy's journey from "abuse to prostitution" in 1950s England, including Richie experimenting with a friend, Pip, whose prostitution excites and disgusts him in equal measure, and he begins to work as a rent boy. The novel's sequel, in 1990, Enchanted Youth, further talked about his journey from "prostitution to love" in 1958, with both books covering issues of prostitution and abuse. The same year, Dennis Cooper published "Closer", said to explore "extreme boundaries of human behaviour and amorality" and focuses on Miles, a character among teens in Los Angeles who "hang out, do drugs, have sex and listen to music." The novel was also said to center around a "group of gay teenagers in the American suburbs."
In the 1990s, many novels featured male sex workers as protagonists. This included two novels by David Wojnarowicz. The first was Close to the Knives in 1991. The first of Wojnarowicz's memoirs talks about his passage from abused kid to Times Square hustler to artist in New York's East Village underground, and it was published a year before he died of HIV/AIDS. Some said the book used intimate, sexual experiences to examine how "political systems work to exclude and silence the unwanted." The following year, in 1992, Memories That Smell Like Gasoline, second volume of his memoirs, published. It was said to include essays about "adolescent abuse, sexual power, societal neglect, and stigmatized death," often rooted in homophobic attitudes toward him. The next year, Dale Peck published Martin and John featured one or both of the characters as hustlers in several of the parallel narrative scenes.