Is It Less Of A Taboo To Be A Gay Sex Worker

29th August 2011

I’ve never had a negative reaction to being a gay male sex worker. No one has ever labelled me with being a “prostitute”……well not to my face anyway and anyone who I have told in the past has been more fascinated than appalled.

There isn’t a huge network of my friends who know. I do have another part time, home based job, so certain family members just think it’s a highly paid full time position and think I’m incredibly lucky to be able to work from home and get a good salary.

One of my female friends was an escort in the past. She’s now retired from the work and lives outside of the area. She has had negative reactions when people have discovered what she was doing for a living and that’s what got me wondering. Is it less of a taboo to be a gay sex worker ?

Gay men tend to have numerous sexual partners and it’s the norm in many gay relationships to have an open arrangement. Both partners being free to shag who they fancy, when they fancy. Is that why being a gay male sex worker isn’t as much of an issue. Do others think in the back of their mind “Well good on him because he’d probably just shag about anyway”.

I am not your typical sex worker, I don’t have dependants, I don’t have an agency looking after my appointments (I am registered with one but get very little work from them), I am not flitting about from working flat to working flat, I am always available when I say I am and I don’t change my name every five minutes. Many female escorts change their working name like they change their knickers, they move from agency to agency with a new persona, however I’ve always been me, I’ve never felt the need to change. Yes…..I’ve breaks from the work and thought hmmm I wonder if I should just start afresh but everytime I returned, I came back as me.

I was recently at a social occasion, sat with a couple of very close family members and a couple of friends. They all know what I do for a living. One of my family members spotted a very rough looking lady at the bar, you can picture the type I am talking about, thigh length boots, leather skirt, leopard skin top, stereotypical working girl attire, forced down our throats from the likes of Band Of Gold and Bad Girls. He immediately said “One of your camp over there Steve”. Yes we did have a laugh when he said how he’d have asked for a refund if he’d have knocked at the door and she’d answered but he immediately formed an opinion on the woman, yet he doesn’t form an opinion on me. I’ve never heard him say “Steve, that’s proper working gear you’ve got on”.

A lot of my clients ask about the work, how I got into it, did I feel used, do I enjoy it type of questions. Nearly all say, “Good on you, I wish I could do it”, yet female escort friends when asked the same questions often get a comment made along the lines of “Well you know there are other options” or “Are you just doing this because you’ve got no other way of making money”.

I actually enjoy the work. There’s always at least one appointment a week I am not too keen on, either the guy reeked of cigarettes as he walked through the door or his knob wasn’t the freshest I’d seen but on the whole I like what I am doing and I’ve never witnessed anyone putting me down for it. Maybe it’s because I am gay that people don’t see what I am doing to be wrong whereas they might think a women is being coerced into doing this work and that they’re doing it as a means to an end.

Who knows !