Working Boys: Hustler Story

By Kirk Read, San Francisco

San Francisco, Saturday, 9:30PM, Polk Street. It’s a quiet night at Reflections, a bar where hustlers and johns meet over drinks or just to pass the time. Three TV sets are tuned into a golf match while Sheryl Crow’s “My Favorite Mistake” plays over the sound system. A working boy paces furiously, holding a skateboard. He stops in front of the 'No Smoking' sign and lights a Marlboro. The other patrons, oblivious to him, stare into their drinks or talk to friends.

Outside, three boys hang around Frank Norris Alley. All of them look ragged and strung out. Every now and then a car slows down, but as the boys approach, the driver speeds off.

Derek, 31, says heroin has killed Polk Street’s hustling scene. He has been working Polk Street since he was 16 and has had an on again off again relationship with heroin. He ran away from an abusive working class home in the Northwest, only to find himself on the streets of San Francisco. Both his father and stepfather molested and beat him. "I already knew how to have sex with men. I was a German boy with a big dick and I needed money.”

“When I first got here, my best friend (Angie) was a transvestite hooker who taught me how to work a trick, jack (steal from) a trick, and collect the coins to pay rent. She was my street mom.”

Derek’s typical day consists of being out of his hotel by the 11AM deadline and working the bars by noon, where he drinks sodas to avoid being asked to leave. As far as customers go, “It depends on the day. Sometimes I wait for hours.” Once he pulls a trick, he gets food and, if he has the money, a room. After a trick, he has a drink or smokes pot “to get chilled out.”

Derek says nothing makes him angrier than “some queen from Twin Peaks who’s so cheap he wants to get fucked by a hustler for $40. He probably pays $2000 in rent. The rich guys are lame with their drama, and prices have gone down because street hustlers are used to being with cheapass dates.”

Derek describes his typical client as "fat, bald, and over 50," and says, "usually they want to be sucked off. When they want to suck us off, we have to cum in their mouths. For sucking dick, no one uses condoms."

Derek says he is HIV negative and that he doesn't accept requests for unprotected anal sex. "We come up with the main motif of what they want in the beginning and stick to that. It keeps the drama down."

Derek says he is tested for STDs every 3 months at the Tom Waddell Clinic, but hasn't been to a dentist since he was 16; "I've had crabs, but that's it. I use condoms with guys I date, too, because I don't want to put guys I like in jeapordy."

When he's not working, Derek hangs out at South of Market bars and favors guys 25 and up. "Most times I keep work a secret. It's not for them to make a judgment call about what I'm doing."

Not having a phone or an address has made dating difficult, he says. "Guys figure out my story sooner or later, and they're either fascinated or freaked out. Or both."

Derek is couch surfing at the moment because he says a john stole his savings out of his residential hotel room while Derek was in the shower. "I was all set to move into an apartment. Now I don't have nothing. Most hustlers don't have nothing."

Like many of the Polk Street workers, Derek lives like an itinerent worker who disappears from time to time, heading for Seattle, Portland, or L.A. for a change of pace. “Sometimes you need to go where you can make more money, away from the same tired old trolls.”

Derek insists that “as soon as I find a place to stay, I’ll get out of this life.” One wonders how many times he’s made such a promise.

Male prostitution in San Francisco, by all accounts, has changed dramatically in the last twenty years. When the gay community’s center of gravity shifted from Polk Street to Castro Street, the kind of boys working Polk changed as well. Jameson, a longtime john, said, “Back in 1982, you could get a variety of hustlers. The more decent types are gone. Polk Street is dry. It’s just a dream now.”

"Everything’s trash here,” said Robert, another john. “Who’s gonna pick up a pimple-faced kid on drugs who hasn’t had a bath in four days?”

Jameson is a 58 year-old white accountant who has been hiring street hustlers on and off since 1978. He likes aggressive hustlers around half his age and is accustomed to paying $75 for a date on the street. He says he's brought hustlers to his home, usually without a problem.

"The kids used to be a lot less dangerous. Sometimes they lived in the suburbs and came into the city on weekends to make some extra money. Now all those guys have ads in the BAR."

Lately, Jameson has been seeing escorts in the BAR, whose rates are higher. "It's worth it," he says. "They're safer and I don't have to worry as much about what they'll swipe when I go to the bathroom."

Jameson has had a number of relationships with hustlers and occasionally spends an evening at a diner on Polk Street where johns swap stories, warnings, and updates about "the boys." When he talks of the boys working Polk, he seems parental.

"This one kid that I just broke up with, we were seeing each other for over a year. My landlord eventually told me either he move out or I lose my lease. He was stealing, I guess."

"I really wanted to help him," he said, taking off his glasses to wipe away a tear. "But in the end, he was just too strung out. I couldn't do anything for him."

There is a discrepancy between what street hustlers and clients say is the going rate for sex on Polk. A hustler can expect to receive anywhere from $20-$100, depending on the sex acts requested.

Keith, a ten-year veteran of Polk street, says “It’s $20 if they want a handjob, $40 if they want to blow you, $60 if you blow them, $80 to fuck them, $100 if they fuck you. That’s with condoms. If they want no condom, it’s twice as much.”

For hustlers who are desperate to score drugs, the temptation to have unprotected sex is strong.

“If I’m high, I’ll do anything to stay high,” he says. “Ain’t nothin’ about Polk Street’s safe, whether there’s rubbers involved or not.”

Marcel Miranda, a STOP AIDS Project outreach worker, says that between 30-40 hustlers work the Polk during the summer, and scoffs at how the boys, most of whom are teen runaways or twentysomething drifters, have been scapegoated as the neighborhood’s worst problem. “The boys, in some way, are responsible for the Polk Street economy. They attract johns to the bars where johns spend money.”

One bar manager, whose business is frequented by hustlers and johns alike, vehemently denies the suggestion that he runs a hustler bar. “We’ve done everything we could to run them out,” he says.

Clint, who owns a convenience store, complains of shoplifting, violence, and drugs. "It's gotten worse in recent years, with the drugs," he says. "People are desperate and will do anything to get what they need."

Clint says he has had to call police on dozens of occasions and that for brief periods of time, he has hired in-store security at his own expense.

Paul, who has lived in the Polk for 12 years, says he has never experienced any problems. "You just get street smart. You learn when to cross the street and how to stay out of other people's drama."

"Sure, the drugs here are a big mess," he says. "It's not really the hustling, it's the drugs. Most people don't make that distinction."

Miranda estimates that 90 percent of the boys working Polk are shooting up. “Needle use here is about survival, not recreation,” he says. Heroin is relatively cheap, but maintaining a habit costs a bare minimum of $20 per day. Other costs include food -- often single slices of pizza -- and residential hotels, which range from $50 per night to around $200 per week. Hustling on Polk, like needle use, is about survival.

"For many of these boys, this is the only thing they know how to do," says Miranda. "Once they get into living on the street, it's a vicious cycle. You have to make enough for food and a bed. If you don't even have a warm coat, chances are you're not going to have clothes for a job interview."

Miranda spends his days doing outreach to the boys on Polk, most of whom know him by name. When he walks the streets, many approach him for sodas or coats. "They know not to ask me for money," he says. "For some of these boys, offering sex is the only way they know how to say thank you."

One of the boys who approaches Miranda for a soda is Ryan, a 21 year-old who seems to be on speed. Ryan's blue eyes race lock straight ahead as his dirty fingers tap a drumbeat on the cafe table.

"I've been clean for 9 days," he proudly tells Miranda. At different points in the conversation, he says that he has been drug free for 12 and 17 days. He'd just left a treatment facility in Santa Cruz, he said, where he learned.

Upon his return, Ryan tried to make some extra money by enrolling in a city-sponsored study on men who'd been to a circuit party in the past six months, but was told he was ineligible.

"What in the hell is a circuit party?" he asked Miranda.

For transgender street workers, the stakes are even higher. In addition to food, shelter, and addictions, some of these folks struggle to maintain hormone therapies and save money for reassignment surgeries.

The Tom Waddell Clinic opened its doors as an HIV harm reduction service for the Tenderloin, but has evolved into a critical resource for transpeople. Mark Freeman, a nurse practitioner, says that 75% of the clinic’s 400+ clients are male to female (MTF) transpeople, some of whom are sex workers.

The clinic offers free hormone therapy for transpeople, administered with pills for MTF people and injectables for female to male (FTM) people. Orally administered hormones, Freeman says, are safer for MTF people, while injectables are safer for FTM people.

Many MTF workers want the injectables because the results are more pronounced and immediate. Some MTF workers purchase black market estrogen and silicon injectables, which Freeman likens to motor oil from Mexico.

“The injectable dose is higher than any female’s estrogen levels and hits harder,” said Freeman. “The extra hormones can’t be used by the body but can cause dangerous side effects.”

“Not that any of the girls have insurance, but even if we did, hormones and surgeries aren’t covered,” said Cynthia, an MTF street worker who uses black market injectables. Cynthia estimates that she spends several hundred dollars per month to maintain her therapy. The various surgeries involved in a physical transition can add up to tens of thousands of dollars.

Cynthia says she is in her 30s and that she has been hustling in one way or another for most of her life. "I left home at 17 and hustled on the Christopher Street piers. I was a pretty boy then. Then I started being a pretty girl. It's not like this overnight thing, child."

Cynthia lives in the Tenderloin with three roommates, one of whom she calls "my drag baby." Sometimes, he works the phone lines as a male sexworker, but Cynthia says "more and more, he's coming out on the street with me."

Cynthia quit heroin cold turkey in 1994, she says, "before it got all glamorous. That shit is the devil, baby. And I danced with Crissy [crystal meth], but not for long, cause Miss Crissy is too speedy for my world."

"It's hard," she admits. "You can't cope with all this shit without a little help. Sometimes it's drugs. Lately, for me, it's been good friends."

"These johns look at us like this is all we do," Cynthia says, taking a long drag off her cigarette. "But lots of the girls have families and kids and drag kids and husbands. Well, most of us wish we had husbands, anyway. But that's another story, baby."

The majority of transgender street workers are male to female. There is a small number of female to male workers, both on the street and indoors.

Terry, an FTM worker who advertises in a fetish publication, says that when he was on the street, he was subjected to daily harassment and violence.

“When johns find out you’re not the kind of boy they thought you were,” he says “they freak out. I’ve been hit I don’t know how many times. Who are we going to tell, the police?” Terry, who now works indoors, says “Nowadays my clients know exactly what they’re getting, and with a phone I can make sure they’re clear about who I am.”

Cynthia has similar war stories about life on the street. “Most of these guys know they’re getting a tranny when they pull up to the sidewalk, but sometimes they lose it when they get up close. What they really want scares the hell out of them, and we end up paying for that.”

San Francisco author Kirk Read's work has appeared in publications all over the country.