Male Sex Workers Have Been Part Of America Since Before It Was A Country
This weekend the United States marks 250 years since the Declaration of Independence. Historian Hallie Lieberman has a timely reminder for the party: male sex work has been part of the American story the whole time, from Jamestown to OnlyFans.
Writing for Rewire News Group, Lieberman argues that male sex workers have been “reviled, criminalized, and scapegoated, but rarely acknowledged openly” by the historians who shaped the national story. Her forthcoming book Gigolos digs into a trade that is older than the republic itself.
It started on the boats
Lieberman traces American male sex work to the 1600s, when some English settlers sailing to Jamestown reportedly survived by trading sex for biscuits with soldiers on board. Once ashore, anal sex was illegal, but the ban was rarely enforced, and poorer colonists made money servicing wealthier landowners.
The brothels history skipped
By the 1800s, male sex workers were nearly as common as women in some brothels, and their clients were mostly closeted men who found paying safer than cruising in public and risking violence. Lieberman says that by the 1890s most major cities had at least one brothel with male workers, and New York City alone had at least six.
Poet Walt Whitman clocked the scene, writing “Let the she-harlots and the he-harlots be prudent!” in the 1856 edition of Leaves of Grass.
Why the gigolo got remembered and the hustler didn’t
When paid male companionship for women took off in the early 1900s, the word “gigolo” entered the language, all dance lessons and dinner dates. Men who serviced other men were pushed onto the streets, into a trade that became known as hustling.
As the straight gigolo faded after the 1960s, the queer side grew alongside gay magazines and cruising guides.
So why do we remember one and not the other? Kerwin Kaye, who teaches gender and sexuality studies at Wesleyan University, puts it plainly.
“Even if men were taking money for sex at an earlier historical time, they’re not [considered] prostitutes in the same way. So they’re really not part of the history.”
At DNA, we reckon 250 years of it is worth a mention. Happy birthday, America.
