HOOK: E-zine By, For, and About Men in the Sex Industry

Standing at the very unusual and fascinating Sexworker Soirèe in New York, David Sterry and I are meeting for the second time - half a million mails (and miles) it seems between. Energetic and bright, the humor he infuses into his writing seems to naturally emanate from his stance, his voice, and his eagerness to make contact.

We are immediate friends - and eventually sit down to talk over the success of his memoir as a heterosexual boy pimped out to rich women, curiously called Chicken. Still sitting on the NY Times Bestseller list as we talk, Sterry holds nothing back in talking trade and the truth about the hidden industry.

HOOK: Do you think more women want to pay for sex but don't? What do you think stops them?

David Sterry: I think a lot of women fantasize about hiring men to sex them. During one of my shows, a pert thin blond woman raised her hand and said, "Why would a woman hire a man to have sex with her? It's so easy for women to get laid, all she has to do is snap her fingers." Sitting next to her was a beautiful fiftyish woman who just happens to be a large gal. I thought this Rubinesque beauty was gonna punch little blonde in her yellow head. Afterwards, the zaftig woman confessed to me that she loves to get down and get funky, but because of the prejudice in our culture against large women, no one wants to fuck her, and she would gladly pay some handsome, intelligent, charming, sensitive studmuffin with a body that just won’t quit to sex her if she felt safe about it. But because of the power dynamic and safety issues, she felt she could not do this without putting herself in danger.

HOOK: Did men ever ask to hire you? How did you handle that?

DS: I was asked over and over and over and over and over by my employment counselor/pimp to have sex with men for money. He told me I could work 24/7 if I worked with men, which given the nature of the work, I think would be quite exhausting. I just kept saying no. Remember, I was raped by a man, right before I started in the Life, and this trauma absolutely precluded me from this kind of work. And I only worked in the business for one school year, retiring at the ripe old age of 17. Most of the other young men I worked with worked with men, and some worked with anyone who paid them.

Eventually through my pimp, I got offers from men who offered to pay me $500 (1974 money) to physically and verbally abuse them. I did not find this sexual, although they did. For me it was a way to release my rage, and frankly, I took to the work a little too well for my own good. These were often men in positions of great power, like judges and captains of industry, “straight” (whatever that means) men with wives and kids.

HOOK: Other advice for straight guys looking to enter into the gigolo business?

DS: Again, I haven’t worked in the business for years. My impression is that it is really really hard to make much money as a man being hired by women, but I would go about it like any other business: do your google search, call escort services, take out a hot ad in your local paper.

HOOK: Top five things the sex industry taught you?

DS: When I started in the business, my pimp, like some ‘70’s ‘Enry ‘Iggins, laid out the rules to me:

Those seem like pretty good rules for any business.

5 things the sex industry taught me:

A lot of times women paid me to take off my clothes, and listen to them talking about their miserable husbands, ungrateful children, and horrible love life. Five years later, I was hired to be a marriage counselor, doing some of the same work, only completely clothed, and being paid much less money. And yet, in our culture, if you say, “I’m a marriage counselor,” at a party, people look at you a lot different than if you say, “I’m a whore.” Believe me, I know, I’ve done both. And of course, in our culture, we don’t equate marriage counselor and sexworker as performing some of the same functions.

HOOK: Do you think being in the industry changed your view of sex with women?

DS: Yes, absolutely. It taught me so much about women, because I was the person they came to for that itch no one else in their life could scratch. I think a lot of women don’t get what they want from their husbands or lovers. Some of them don’t know how to ask. I think women in our culture are taught not to have sexual desires or appetites. And it seems many women are apparently married to insufferable, conceited, inconsiderate jerks. Some women who hired me wanted to see me naked and order me around, and watch me touch myself, and listen to me talk about all the different kinds of sex I had. It seemed like these women, who lived lives of luxury, had little power in their own lives, and they enjoyed having it over a 17-year-old boy. And a lot of them seem to just want to be listened to by a man, considered, told they’re pretty. Many also do seem to want a man with a slow hand. I feel like I learned how to pay attention to the idiosyncratic rhythm of the woman in front of me. One of my clients introduced me to tantric sex, taught me how to climax and orgasm without ejaculating, so you can have sex for hours and hours and hours if you want, and get to the point where you’re just one big throbbing orgasm. Wot fun!