A SURVEY OF EIGHTEEN NEW YORK BOY PROSTITUTES, 1968

The following account is from Boys for Sale. A Sociological Study of Boy Prostitution by Dennis Drew & Jonathan Drake, New York, 1969, pp. 168-83.

Though published the next year, it is part of a wider study of New York boy prostitution which describes boys' circumstances as "present" in 1968.

NEW YORK CITY BOY PROSTITUTES

We have interviewed boys in certain correctional institutions as well as boys in several American cities. If it were possible to interview all boy prostitutes, the results might have been different. Even so, we found the following tabulation interesting and very much to the point. This is a sample of boys in the New York City area.

The letters in “I” represent the boys interviewed
The figure in column “II” is the present age of each boy
‘III” is his age at his first mutual masturbation
“IV” is his age at his first passive fellatio
“V” is his age at his first active fellatio
“VI” is his age at first passive anal intercourse
“VII” is his age at first active anal intercourse

                                         A SAMPLING OF NEW YORK CITY BOYS

HOW BOYS TURN PROSTITUTE 

The predominance of two major factors was made clear by our interviews. Primary motivation was the youngsters’ desire for money — more money than is usually available to boys in their age bracket. This seemed to be the subject most frequently referred to. The other important conclusion we could draw concerned the actual introduction to prostitution that these boys had. They were led astray principally by schoolmates — slightly older experienced boys — who “wised them up” to the utilization of their bodies for money.

Of the cases cited, 3 out of 18 had had previous sexual experiences with adults: one with an employer, one with an uncle and the last with a schoolteacher. Not one of these three cases was ever approached by a “stranger” — although, from what we know, judged from other sources, this has been known to happen.

When asked why they decided to enter prostitution, the boys invariably replied, “I wanted the money.” Poverty must be rated as a major factor, true, but not a necessary one. Some of the boys were from good families whose standard of living reflected above average income. We found boys who were happy living at home with their parents, yet prostituting themselves at every available opportunity just to earn money for extras like records and presents.

A majority intended to make themselves available only for passive fellatio and they reported that they enjoyed it and returned again and again for “fun.” The table shows how often passive fellation was their earliest mutual sexual activity with other boys in their own age bracket. Many did not intend to become involved in anything else but it is inevitable that the young prostitute — for money, curiosity, or under various pressures — gradually succumbed to the lure of variety.

The dominance of money as a prime factor was further illustrated to us by an interesting fact not indicated in the table. All but one of those interviewed claimed that there were certain types of sexual acts in which they would never engage. Some said no passive sodomy and a dozen of them drew the line at analingus. All but one changed opinions when larger sums of money were suggested. For example, one boy who said he would never under any circumstances perform analingus, later agreed that he would consider it for the sum of $75. Another who said he would never submit to passive sodomy because he had tried it once and found it painful, later agreed that he would for $200. Prices may vary, but a uniform characteristic of the young male prostitute is that he is for sale. There seems to be nothing that he will not do if the price is right.

On the streets, these boys associate with other male prostitutes and pimps. Many of the pimps are petty gangsters and so are the men who operate several of the “gay” clubs and restaurants. The youngsters congregate at these spots — outside of course. They lend and borrow  money freely and pass much of their time in movies and arcades or “just hanging around.” They appear in Times Square quite rarely because they are bothered by the police once they are recognized for what they are. Only those “new” to the trade and a few “occasional” prostitutes frequent Times Square. The same is true of Third avenue, and of 72^nd and Broadway — once centers of boy prostitution. Amateurs ply their trade openly but professionals have a routine that renders them invisible to the police. Although they tend to harbor resentment towards certain relatives, police, exploiting pimps or teachers, these boys regard most of the other members of society as being much like themselves. Their motto is, “Everyone is for sale. Wall Street bankers sell themselves one way, others another”.

All boys assume that they are in the “profession” for a short time — until their youth and beauty fade. They talk about saving money to go to Florida and California. A few dream of meeting a “rich John” who will adopt them. Most of the youngsters love to travel and do travel around with men a good deal — to Atlantic City, Miami, California, Mexico and occasionally even to Puerto Rico and Europe. A high percentage who had resolved never to give in to passive anal intercourse, succumbed on their first trip with a man. Indeed, all the young amateurs understand that this is one of the “terms of the trade,” and that an invitation to go out of town on a trip is also a request for a period of regular sodomy.

They all pimp for each other and many, as they grow older, end up as pimps for younger boys on a  full-time basis. A man, interested in young or virgin boys, quickly learns that an 18-year-old is the introducer of the 15-year-old — the 15-year-old in turn will lead one to a 12-year-old and, if one wants even younger boys, the customer will be led to them by the 12-year-old.

An overwhelming ambition of every one of these boys is to have an apartment of his own. When he has it, he may begin to pimp by making it available for men and boys. He often takes in younger boys and pimps for them because he finds runaways and strays with no place to stay. The number of teenage boy prostitutes sleeping regularly with younger boys whom they are “mothering” is impressive.

It is difficult to generalize about the type of life these boys lead so we will report specific cases which we believe to be typical. Most of the boys referred to, sleep in the daytime, and work at night — unless they live at home. The youngest boys are exceptions. Letters correspond to the cases mentioned in the table on page 168.)

CASE HISTORIES

C — works from 10 p.m. through 5 a.m. at the soft drink bar of a “gay lounge” where men come to meet young boys. By 5 a.m., he has always made a deal with one of the customers to go home with him. The customer is  usually so aroused by a night of flirtation at the lounge that he is ready for immediate sex. They get to sleep by 8 or 9 a.m. In the middle of the afternoon, there is usually a second round of sexual activity. C often stays with his customer until time to return to his job the following night. Sometimes, he gets kicked out by mid-morning and goes back to the lounge to sleep. In the late afternoon, he goes to the bus station or somewhere else to meet one or two customers for fellatio. He is now 16 and has been in this routine for well over 2 years — the pattern seems well established.

E — lives at home in New Jersey and comes to New York in the late afternoon. When he began his routine at 12, he often hustled in the transportation terminals in New York and New Jersey. Now, he has a regular cycle of customers who date him up in advance. He may have two fellatio customers at 4:30 and 6:30 p.m., then go to sleep with a man for passive sodomy at about 8 or 9 p.m., going home around midnight. His widowed mother knows vaguely that he has some kind of work in Manhattan. He was once arrested while performing active fellatio on a man but the customer bribed the policeman and E was allowed to go home with a reprimand.

F — works at a newsstand and many men stop to flirt with him when his employer is not around. The newsstand, on the upper East Side, stocks a great deal of homosexual literature. F allows someone to perform  fellatio on him every day. He wants to quit his job and go into prostitution full time, but he knows that in so doing, he must eventually submit to anal intercourse. He tried it once and found it uncomfortable so he is dilating his anus each night in the hope that he will soon be ready. He plans to leave home and “live in a hotel”. He knows a prominent luxury hotel where several boys rent rooms and serve the guests, sharing their profits with the manager and the bell boys who bring them customers.

G — is a runaway boy from the Michigan farm district. He himself worked on farms as a young orphan. He gets a bath only when a customer gives him one because he lives on the streets and has no permanent home. He has been to a reformatory twice. Each time, he has escaped and returned to his haunts. He tends to serve lower-class, uneducated men and his passion is for passive anal intercourse. He begs and pleads with his customers and usually gets what he wants, to his great enjoyment. He may earn $20 a night and gamble it away before morning — leaving himself nothing for food.

K — is a twelve-year-old who was talked into leaving his Brooklyn home by a pimp. During the day, he sleeps and stays in the pimp’s apartment looking at television. At night, the pimp stays in a 3^rd Avenue restaurant where customers come looking for him. Usually, in the evening, the boy is taken to a movie by an accomplice and by 10 p.m., he is delivered to his first customer. He is usually passed to from 3 to 5 men a night, most of whom want  “69” or passive and active fellatio. Because K is young and delicate, the pimp will allow only one or two anal connections per week, usually on dates with wealthy clients willing enough to pay extra sums for the privilege.

M— is a Spanish boy of 13 who lives at home most of the time but is sorely neglected. He is understandably frightened of the police because of a narcotics violation. His location is always known to several amateur pimps operating in the Times Square area. They split fees with him from customers they locate. He used to perform lots of fellatio in certain theatres until he was caught — now he insists upon customers’ having a room.

O — was seduced and practically raped by an attendant at his orphanage when he was only 5. But, he says, “I was quite large for my age.” The attendant trained him sexually for several years, peddling him to many neighborhood men for passive fellatio, when he was very young, and for passive sodomy, by the time he was 9. When the attendant left the orphanage, he took O with him to Atlantic City where they lived on O’s earnings until the boy was 14. O then ran away to New York to work for himself. He works nights as bus-boy in a restaurant and sleeps with the boss when he has nowhere else to go. The boss allows him to leave his work to serve customers, from time to time. He spends his afternoons at the public library. O loves to read and finds that he meets a nicer class of men among fellow booklovers.

P — is a runaway from a correctional institution in Massachusetts. There, he had fallen under the tutelage of an older inmate who “peddled” him to other boys and to members of the staff in exchange for favors. At 12, he ran away from the reformatory, going first to Boston, where he worked nightly in the Washington Avenue area, and then came to New York with a man who helped him to find work as a waiter at certain stag parties. At these parties, the waiters gradually undressed until they were stark naked. For $100 an evening, he waited tables, served drinks, danced and slept with the host afterwards. (The host is still a prominent television personality.) These parties took place once a week and P used to run through his money as fast as he could get his hands on it. Now, he gets work at $20 a night as a “guide” for tourists. Other nights, he simply hustles on the street. He fiercely denies being homosexual, but freely admits that he enjoys passive anal intercourse. “Strictly physical,”is what he claims his pleasure to be. The other waiters at these parties are mostly amateurs from suburban high schools.

Q — is a New Jersey boy of 12 who maintains that he “won’t do anything except be spanked.” He enjoys being spanked and has a special clientele of men who like that sort of action. A number of his regular customers are prominent, well-known citizens. It is true that he will not submit to passive anal intercourse for he suffers from hemorrhoids. But he will deliver his 9-year-old, beautiful, somewhat less intelligent brother, who, Q  claims is “so stupid, he will do anything”. The two brothers live at home. Both have been in a Jersey City training school where they were introduced to prostitution. The two brothers go into the city three or four afternoons a week. There, they have their regular clientele of sadists who do such things as spank them, or urinate and defecate on them. Q will not be tied up, but he allows his younger brother to be tied, pricked with pins for blood-sucking, and submitted to other minor acts. Both boys are in school — Q is an honor student.

HOW MUCH THEY CLAIM TO EARN AND HOW THEY EARN IT  

Page 178 is a table of earnings of the boys first mentioned on page 168. The amounts declared in the table are the boys’ own figures. They frequently explained that their earnings and expenses were “up to” the figure printed which explains why gross income does not always equal total expenditures.

Column “I” identifies the boy
“II” is his estimated weekly income
“III” is money banked or given to parents
“IV” represents petty gambling losses
“V” is the pimp’s weekly take
“VI” what the boy lives on

[B and L no reports]

                                              DISPOSITION OF WEEKLY INCOME

                                                           (figures are in dollars)

WHAT BOYS WILL DO AND WON'T DO

Their living costs include expensive clothing, gifts, school supplies, meals, transportation and miscellaneous articles. They also frequently turn over a packet to their families. When they have “mad money,” these boys are quite generous in treating their friends. (Gambling, in the table, refers to money spent in the arcades and in bets made with their buddies.)

It is notable that a good looking boy can earn huge sums — this adds to the temptation of his friends who would like to emulate him. When a boy, like K, is completely under the control of a pimp, the profits to the pimp are enormous — much larger than for a girl. But, so is the prison sentence he can get if he is caught. Many pimps simply make rooms or apartments available in exchange for half the fee — as in the cases of M, Q and R.

A few of the more passive boys are very low-charged sexually. They have little emotion or feeling about their work, submitting to it with as much enthusiasm as they would devote to brushing their teeth. The majority, however, are highly sexed and nearly all admit to great pleasure from passive fellatio and active sodomy. Most will emphatically deny that they are homosexual in the least. At the same time, they will say: “Sex is sex, and a man’s ass gives the same feeling as a cunt.” By homosexual, therefore, they must mean someone who enjoys passive sodomy and active fellatio.

Most of the professionals and many of the amateurs will always begin by denying that they will ever engage in active fellatio or passive sodomy. In the  privacy of a customer’s room, far from the proximity of friends, the situation is quite different — especially when money is produced. The only ones who really won’t indulge are those with painful hemorrhoids, or who have been seriously injured in previous attempts at anal intercourse. It is not at all uncommon for an amateur to be raped. Some novice may go off with one man and then find himself in an apartment with a dozen others. This can easily result in physical harm to the boy, especially to a young virgin. Negro men often treat white boys in this manner.

They employ a white pimp to pose as a customer. The pimp delivers the boy into the hands of a bunch of sadists who enjoy “making him squeal.” Groups of clean-cut athletes, as well as various underworld groups, have been known to employ such methods “for kicks”. The young amateur is not entirely unaware of this hidden danger but, with characteristic optimism, thinks that it will never happen to himself. One trip to a garage loft with half-a-dozen tough characters will either make him or break him.

Of our 18 major cases, only 3 really admit to enjoying passive anal intercourse, and then only occasionally. An often overlooked sidelight is that the boys who fear being sodomized most are the ones most morbidly obsessed with the idea. They seem almost eager for it, in spite of their denials. Those who enjoy experiencing pain, enjoy an intense sexual pleasure in submitting to sodomy. They speak of an “itching in the rectum” — of the heart beating faster and the breath becoming shallow and difficult — of being fascinated by  the desire of the customer. “I enjoy every minute of it, until he actually begins” said O. Another boy, G, said: “When I find out that that is what he wants, I begin to get woozy and I feel that I will faint.” Even little K said that he was “almost hypnotized for hours by a man’s penis,” once he knew that anal intercourse was on the evening’s agenda.

In performing fellatio, a good many will not only refuse to swallow the semen but will insist upon ejaculation occuring outside of the mouth. Regular customers will know enough in advance to make a special point of bickering over this, but many one-time or first-time customers are often duped. Most of the boys admitted that they had become indifferent to active fellatio, taking it as a matter of course. Others, after having had an unpleasant experience with passive anal relations, found themselves a lot more receptive to fellatio. E was “really crazy about it”, and little K “...really like it but some nights, I get too much.” K always swallows the semen for he fears a spanking if he does not. He admits, however, that he was never forced into swallowing nor was a spanking ever threatened.

THE CUSTOMERS

Who are the customers of boy prostitutes? Apparently they make up as diversified a group as that which patronizes female prostitutes. Since generalization tends to mislead, we can only offer a small cross-section of the world of boy prostitution — that represented by our table. The reader is left to draw his own conclusions.

A — A picks up business men at cocktail lounges. Many of the men are lonely out-of-towners. His business is very similar to that of the average female prostitute.

B — has for years made the acquaintance of prominent New Yorkers in the hotel, bar and night-club businesses. Many of these are family men but promiscuous and searching for variety. They turn to boys for “sport” once in a while. B is popular with them as he recruits other boys as well as making himself available. He maintains that he has found permanent young lovers for a number of famous names.

C — C’s customers are single, older men. Many are no longer sexually competent except in a passive role. Seeking to recapture lost youth, they go to gay bars. The charm and radiant health of barboy C make him a natural target for them.

D — His only regular customer is the policeman on the beat by his newsstand. He claims to be approached frequently by truckers and cabdrivers who buy their papers and magazines from him.

E — His customers are single men in their 30’s, employed in offices. Most of come up out of the slums where they were initiated into various sexual practices at early ages. They tell him that they will sleep with him only until they can get married.

F — His clients are tourists out looking for kicks. He also accomodates slightly older streetboys of his own class. Other customers are rough, uneducated men, too gross to make other connections.

K — K’s clients are wealthy men in the professions, in business, and the theatre — most of them are from “international” society.

M — M attracts shy, feminine little men from the suburbs and occasional tourists. Sometimes, teenage high school boys, looking for kicks, or wanting something more “sophisticated”, will look for M.

N — specializes in college men, especially athletes.

O — O finds customers in the restaurant. “All kinds,”he says, “rich men, poor men, old and young, married and single, gay and straight — they all get up interest sooner or later. I get to talking with them until I can find out if they are sexy or not. If they seem hot, and most of the time they are, I just ask if they’d like to make it with it me. When they say yes, we go....”

P — services dancers, actors, movie and theatre personalities. “They’re all a bunch of bastards,” he says.

Q — attracts primarily people who belong to a “sadist society. ” Those who go for him are middle-aged married men who, on the surface at least, appear quite normal.

R — “works” Greeks who hang around a Greek restaurant.

Comments

If you would like to leave a comment on this webpage, please e-mail it to greek.love.tta@gmail.com, mentioning in the subject line either the title or the url of the page so that the editor can add it.

Mr. Smith,   10 April 2019

To say the little boys who most fear sodomy are the ones who really deep down want sodomy is the most irresponsible dangerous statement I have ever read or heard on this subject. How the fuck can he know that, and this man an academic, shame on him. I have no doubt in my mind, as this book really got around, that because an academic report said this, some men would have taken this as a green light to administer to some lovely lad, physical pain total humiliation the like of which even his cautious fears could never imagine.

Vince,   28 September 2021

I have always been easy to approach. I guess that is why Eddie, a 10 year old hispanic, opened the door to my car as I sat and ate my lunch at the city park. Cute and very outgoing, young and maybe a bit on the wildside. I can't really understand why so many times I find myself being tested like this. Unfortunately, I failed the test every time. I was 17 he was well (they) always young.