America’s 250th Anniversary Marks 250 Years of Male Sex Work

Since the nation’s independence, male sex workers have been intertwined with America’s history. Their existence has been reviled, criminalized, and scapegoated, but rarely acknowledged openly. 

Throughout history, both women and men hired male sex workers to act out the desires that they couldn’t safely express in society, including extramarital and queer sex. Their services were also retained for non-sexual purposes, including by women who just needed a male companion in public. 

Tracing this story, as I do in my forthcoming book—Gigolos: An Exploration of the Men Who Sell Sex and The Women Who Buy It—offers an unusual lens into the shifting norms of sexual behavior, sexuality, and gender in the United States over the past 250 years. 

Gigolos, hustlers, and Chippendales dancers won’t get a mention in the official celebrations of the nation’s 250th anniversary, but they’ve been here all along—and their history is American history, too.

Colonists paid other men for sex

Sex work played a role in the nation’s founding. As the famed Virginia colonist John Smith recorded in his diaries, some English settlers sailing to Jamestown in the 1600s survived by trading sex for biscuits with mercenary soldiers on the ship.

Paid sex between men continued on shore, with poor men servicing better-off colonists. Indentured servants sometimes sold sex to wealthy landowners. Anal sex was outlawed in the colonies, but rarely prosecuted. 

By the 1800s, male sex workers were working alongside women in some brothels. Their clients were mostly male, according to George Chauncey, American history professor and author of Gay New York. Paying for sex was often the only way for queer men to get the sexual experiences they desired, as soliciting a stranger could elicit violence. Some telegraph messengers and boot blacks offered sex alongside their day jobs. 

These encounters were usually clandestine. But male sex workers were visible enough in this era that Walt Whitman mentioned them in his 1856 edition of the poetry collection Leaves of Grass, writing: “Let the she-harlots and the he-harlots be prudent! Let them dance on.” 

By the 1890s, most major cities, from San Francisco to Chicago, had brothels featuring men. 

New York City had at least six of them. A Republican state assemblyman sent an investigator to document the scene. He found men “painted and powdered” who “called each other sisters.” 

Moralists of the prudish Victorian era, including the members of a Republican city committee, urged then Mayor Robert A. Van Wyck to shutter the brothels. 

“Do you know that we now have male harlots thronging the streets, who have their peculiar places of resort, which can be found as easily as any saloon can be?” the committee asked. 

For the ladies: Enter the “gigolo”

Male sex work aimed at women emerged around the turn of 20th century, my historic research finds. 

During the dancehall craze of the 1910s, paid male tango dancers who worked at dancehalls called “taxi dancers,” “lounge lizards,” and “gigolos” offered their services—as instructors and sometimes more—to single women. Those who provided sex were known as “orchid crushers,” because they “deflowered” women. 

The term that stuck is “gigolo,” possibly originating from gigue—the French word for “leg,” or gigole, the masculine French term for a “fast woman of the streets.”

Many gigolos were immigrants who struggled to find work in more “respectable”  professions. Most famously, the Italian silent movie star Rudolph Valentino got his start as a taxi dancer in New York in the 1910s.

By the 1930s, male sex work was flourishing. 

As high unemployment during the Great Depression drove more men to seek these jobs, gigolos fanned throughout the country. Upper-class women and working women with access to extra cash could still afford a roll in the hay behind their husbands’ backs. 

In an ironic twist, women also hired male sex workers as companions to access bars and restaurants that barred “unaccompanied women,” because single women in those environs were assumed to be sex workers. 

As Chauncey explains in Gay New York, male sex workers who served a male clientele were more likely to work on the street, in bars, and brothels. In New York City, street male prostitution, often called “hustling,” was based around Times Square. The clients didn’t necessarily view themselves as gay, especially if they were the ones penetrating the sex worker or receiving fellatio. 

In brothels, so-called fairy prostitutes, decorated with rouge and mascara, mainly serviced men, though some “cunt lappers” specialized in cunnilingus.  

The silent movie industry reflected the growing trend of male sex work. One 1931 newspaper declared: “Gigolo Talkies Are the Latest Fad.”

In that “fad,” Scotty Bowers saw an opportunity. As a teen in Chicago in the late 1930s, Bowers sold sexual services to men, women, and couples. He later moved to Hollywood and set up an escort agency to the stars behind the Richfield Oil gas station, where he worked. 

A year before he died in 2019, Bowers told me that women hired him to perform oral sex because their husbands wouldn’t. 

Bowers said that some husbands were “square guys” who wouldn’t go down on a woman because it wasn’t “macho,” Bowers said. 

During World War II, male brothels featured men from the Army and Navy, some in uniform. New Jersey’s Fort Dix was sometimes called “Camp Pricks” because so many soldiers—many of whom identified as straight—sold sex to the locals. 

Sexual revolution forgets male sex workers

By the 1960s, the old-school gigolo industry had fallen apart (though some were still hired to work cruise ships). 

Gay male “hustlers,” however, thrived, in the more permissive atmosphere of the 1960s, as gay rights came to the fore and more gay magazines and cruising guides were published. Alternative weeklies, queer periodicals, and muscle-boy magazines ran advertisements for their services with messages like, this ad for “models” from a September 1969 issue of the lusty Berkeley Barb: “BIG JOHN-Young-Tall-Masculine-Aggressive HUNG * HUNG * HUNG.”

As the sexual revolution grew in the late 1960s and 1970s, second-wave feminists were focused on achieving equal rights and eliminating sexual exploitation for women, not championing male sex workers. They hadn’t yet begun celebrating the “female gaze”—a way of looking at the world that allows women “to adopt the active and objectifying gaze” that’s traditionally linked to the sexualizing view of the “male gaze.”

Moralists of the era, meanwhile, were preoccupied with controlling women’s reproduction and condemning their newfound sexual freedom.

“The image of the ‘whore’ is entirely about women’s gender roles and policing women’s … sexuality,” Kerwin Kaye, associate professor of feminist, gender, and sexuality studies at Wesleyan University, told me. “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.”  

But in 1975, a high-profile prostitution charge brought male sex work into the light. Frederick Doane, Sr., a 31-year-old married father from Brockton, Massachusetts, was arrested after neighbors complained about his many female guests. 

During Doane’s trial, his lawyer argued that he should have been given “three gold stars and a turkey.” Doane’s wife had a new baby, and the family needed money. She approved of his work—so long as it didn’t include intercourse. 

Doane was ultimately acquitted because the state’s anti-prostitution law applied only to women. 

Now, that sexism caught feminists’ attention. 

Rather than call for decriminalization of all sex work, some feminists fought for men to be punished, too. In 1977, they succeeded: Massachusetts’s anti-prostitution law became gender neutral. 

In 1979, the concept of male strippers that appeal specifically to women made a big public splash with the opening of Chippendales, the famed West Hollywood club. Founded by Steve Banerjee, the Chippendales dancers wore bowties above their glistening bare chests and thrust their crotches at screaming women. 

The female gaze was now being acknowledged, and women did more than just look. They fondled the performers during the show. And some had sex with them after, according to former Chippendale dancers I interviewed. Usually the men didn’t ask for payment. But sometimes women would offer it, and they would accept. 

Return of the “gigolo”

In the turbulent gender politics of the 1980s, the gigolo became more culturally prominent. Perhaps it was because women gained more financial power, triggering reactionary fears that they would start (mis)behaving more like men. 

Again, Hollywood reflected the trend–disapprovingly.

In American Gigolo (1980), Richard Gere played a male escort with rich female clients who gets framed for murder. Two decades later, Rob Schneider played male sex work for petty laughs in Deuce Bigalow: Male Gigolo. 

By the 2010s, male sex workers had achieved reality TV fame. The show Gigolos featured real male sex workers from the escort agency Cowboys4Angels accompanying paid actresses (their actual clients didn’t want to appear on the show).

Today, ten counties in the U.S. allow for legal sex work. Bella’s Hacienda Ranch in Wells, Nevada, is located in one of them. The ranch has exactly one male sex worker: Christopher Metzgar, aka Romeo Uncaged. 

A few months ago, Metzgar stood in the back of Bella’s, gazing at the mountain and contemplating his unique position.

“I was thinking … There’s only one [man] that is legally being paid for sex right now, and it’s me,” Metzgar said. 

He’s been working part-time for two years. He charges $2,500 an hour, half of which half goes to the brothel. “A male sex worker is not there just to have sex with beautiful women,” Metzgar said—meaning, his job takes labor. Sex work is work.

Recent clients included a 70-something heterosexual couple. Some clients want to talk to Metzger about their sexual desires and hang-ups. Others hire him to try out sex acts without judgement.  

“We are there to do almost therapy for people. Most of our clients are people who want to try bisexuality, want to try new things,” he said. “They go there for a reason, because they have a medical issue. … or they’re too embarrassed to engage with people.” 

Despite legal male sex work, male sex workers with female clients, like Metzgar, continue to be largely ignored or stigmatized in the 21st century. That erasure trickles down to experts who study sex workers for a living: They typically assume all the clients are male, said Mackey R. Friedman, associate professor at Rutgers School of Public Health. 

Yet in a 2022 study of male sex workers, Friedman, his co-author Christian Chandler, and their collaborators were surprised to discover that over half the workers had female clients, even though the researchers recruited all the men at Black Pride events. 

There’s “a long history of scientific sexism,” he said, referring to the assumption “that women would not be pursuing paid … sexual pleasure.”

Patriarchal societies are designed so men can easily satisfy their sexual desires. But women have always had desire, too—only paired with fewer and less visible options. Sex workers have served everyone, as long as America has existed. 

As far as I can tell, they’re not going anywhere.

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