Male Sex Work and Society by Unknown Read Free Book Online Page A

the film received an X rating. 10

     
    FIGURE 3.3
    Andy Warhol created this movie poster for Querelle . He tied a shift in how male sex workers were represented in highly acclaimed art films produced outside the United States to the New York underground film scene, and to his own work in particular.
    Reproduced with permission from the Artists Rights Society, licensor of the Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts. Copyright © 2014 The Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts, Inc./Artists Rights Society, New York.
     
    This opportunity to present subject matter that was previously unacceptable did not go unnoticed at the time. Expressing his frustration and jealousy about Midnight Cowboy , Warhol (Warhol & Hackett, 1980) argued that what he and the New York underground film scene originally had to offer
    was a new, freer content … But now that Hollywood—and Broadway, too—was dealing with those same subjects, things were getting confused … I realized that with both Hollywood and the underground making films about male hustlers—even though the two treatments couldn’t have been more different—it took away a real drawing card from the underground.” (p. 353)
     
    “Perverse” Hustlers
     
    Midnight Cowboy , which starred Jon Voight and Dustin Hoffman as two sex workers living on the streets of New York, reflects a complex understanding of male sex workers, presented most often in flashbacks to Joe Buck’s (Voight) past. Yet the film also reflects the sense that homosexuality is perverse, which echoes the medical and sociological writings of the 1930s. Midnight Cowboy is a dramatic break from My Hustler , in that it presents the male sex worker in a way that he had never been seen before—as a central character in a Hollywood film—while maintaining much of the stigma that had surrounded the male sex worker for decades.
    It is noteworthy, then, that the sociological and scientific discourse on male sex work during the 1960s and 1970s also had an interest in specific case studies of male prostitutes. Whereas Midnight Cowboy presented the face of male sex work as Joe Buck, John Scott (2003) notes that much of scientific discourse from the same period “was composed largely of individual case studies that sought to extract specific details concerning the aetiology of male prostitution and the identity of the male prostitute” in a way that “understood male prostitution in terms of sociopathology” (p. 186). Midnight Cowboy engages the subject of male prostitution similarly. By focusing on one specific sex worker, the film acts as a sort of case study, and through its use of flashbacks to childhood and adolescent trauma, Midnight Cowboy works to get at the etiological roots of male sex work. By using flashbacks to childhood trauma in moments of present trauma, the film creates a link that posits Joe Buck’s past traumas as the inciting events that determined his current occupation.
    Like Joe Buck’s childhood and adolescence, homosexual sex (both in sex work and, more generally, in its characters’ lives) is a complex and difficult subject in Midnight Cowboy . Joe Buck comes to New York with the dream of becoming a male gigolo paid to have sex with women, but when times are tough and his career as a gigolo seems to be failing, he resorts to sex work for male clients. These encounters, which, in the words of Benshoff and Griffin (2006), are presented as “sick and pitiful” (p. 135), always end poorly for Joe. In his first homosexual encounter, Joe allows a young man to give him oral sex in the balcony of an old, run-down movie theater. The encounter ends in failure, as the boy has no money to pay Joe and Joe leaves empty handed. In his second homosexual encounter, Joe prepares to have sex with an older gentleman whom he “gratuitously beats … senseless” to get money to buy his friend a bus ticket (Benshoff & Griffin, 2006, p. 135). Joe does not appear to murder the client, who is speaking to