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

I cannot recall anytime during my childhood when I answered “a whore” when asked what I wanted to be when I grew up. It also never occurred to me that I may actually be one until recently, when another website referred to me as such. My interest in the word, which I despise, was furthered when a local “client” felt compelled to e-mail me and tell me he could not believe what a whore I had turned into. Greg, the client, is a married man with a child that I saw a couple of years ago while he was here in Atlanta on business. He has since relocated to Atlanta where he will occasionally e-mail me with demeaning comments which I am pretty sure are instigated by the teams of bitter old men with no lives on the HooBoy message boards.

Anyway, when I first received his email I was amused, but my amusment turned to outrage the longer I pondered my response to him. Normally I can just shake off his negativity but this time was different because I know another complete psychopath that has it out for me also posts on the HooBoy message boards. To me it is all just a little too coincidental that out-of-the-blue Greg feels compelled to e-mail me, calling me a whore when he hires “whores” to fuck him, and to top it off, he is married. I have to wonder who his “sources”/instigators are, ya know? In the end, I did not respond to Greg this time but I couldn’t shake the fact he had called me a whore. The word and all of it’s implications consumed my thoughts, so I decided to see exactly what it was about the word that bothered me so.

As an escort there are certain things you just don’t think about. The things you do certainly do not include thinking of yourself as a whore. You can’t allow yourself to think, you just act. You detach from the reality of what is happening and if you don’t, your mind will eat you alive. You have to stay focused on the end result, which of course is the money. Even the guys who hire escorts don’t think about it. They do not consider what is actually taking place (which I will get into in another column).

Let me break it down for you. I rent out by body for an hour. I allow my body to be used for another man’s pleasure as a service, like a pair of bowling shoes at a bowling alley - lots of different people use them and when you put your foot into them, you don’t think of all of the people before you that have used them. Think about it. Think about all of the people whose feet have been in those shoes. Let’s go a step further and think about the people themselves. I dunno about you but in my mind, it is not a pretty picture.

So why do it? Why be a whore? No matter what title you attach to it—escort, masseur, companion—almost every one you ask will give you a different answer. But no matter what, it will always revolve around the idea of ease and money. Consider this: I make as much money, if not more, in one hour than a lot of people by working two days in a full-time job. One hour, people. Logic, or lack of self-respect? A whore is a man/woman who engages in sex acts in exchange for money. Period. Calling someone a whore says nothing about their character, nothing about their personality, and is most often used out of ignorance in a demeaning way. By definition and trade, a whore is the equivalent of a customer service representative in a retail store.

I am not praising the fact that I am a whore. I simply set out to acknowledge whether being an escort and porn model makes me a whore. And what do you know? It does. But allow me to illustrate my point with a final thought: Lets say one day while working, you are distracted from what you are doing and you subsequently put a pen, pencil, or some other desktop item in your pocket. Forgetting the item is there you go on about your day and don’t think about the item in your pocket until later that evening when you have arrived home. Now, by definition, you are a thief. You have taken an object from someone that does not belong to you. No big deal, no one will suffer with one less pen around, no one will probably even notice. I mean, after all it’s just a pen right? You are no less of a person because you stole, right? No one will call you a thief, or think less of you because of a pen, right?