When no answer is immediately forthcoming, the boyish-looking young man who calls himself Cliff decides to prove the point with cold hard cash. After a brief struggle to get his hand into the pocket of his tight, fashionably distressed jeans, he finally extracts a thick wad of ten- and twenty-dollar bills representing that night's labor--about $150 for two hours' "work."
Flashing an engaging smile worthy of a Disneyland tour guide, he says, "If you don't burn people or get in over your head, this can be a very profitable business." And for the time being, at least, he's living proof.
A FULL MOON HANGS above the intersection of Second Street and Portland, casting eerie shadows over the nocturnal netherworld that is the heart of the Valley's homosexual cruising district. Probably because of their proximity to two gay bars, the palm-studded streets of this inner-city residential neighborhood offer a convenient meeting place for young men selling sex, and older men in the market for same. Says one former lamppost Lothario, "When you see guys driving through the hustler strip, they're out there looking for men--they don't want tuna."
Although you won't find the "Fruit Loop" (as it's known in some circles) listed in any Chamber of Commerce literature, the hustler zone is one of the city's worst-kept secrets: For more than a decade, a national guidebook for gays has euphemistically heralded the area as a good place to pick up "hitchhikers."
This night, cars slowly prowl the neighborhood, their drivers intently eyeballing the young male merchandise. Languidly lounging against street signs, palm trees, fire hydrants and any other backdrops that lend themselves to provocative posturing, about ten of the back-street brigade are on hand to return their gazes with come-hither looks. It's a street corner named desire and, for as long as many observers can remember, its denizens have always depended on the kind of strangers willing to drop $20 or more for some easy action in a poorly lighted parking lot.
By all accounts, those strangers are exclusively male. Asked whether he's ever seen (much less serviced) any female customers, a 21-year-old hustler named Steve laughs sardonically. "You kiddin'? A woman can go all sorts of places and pick up a guy. She doesn't need to come down here. Besides, it's too dangerous." He should know. A self-described heterosexual "burn artist," the unemployed cement finisher claims that he simply robs anyone unlucky enough to invite him into his car.
"I'm in a desperate mode," says Steve, who moved his family to Phoenix from San Diego more than a year ago in anticipation of a job that never materialized. The sole support of a wife and two children currently holed up in a Van Buren motel room, he says, "I play it off until I get that cash in my hands and then I jump out of the car. I've jumped out 45 miles away from here and hitchhiked back. If I see some totally junked-out homo with a big old rope of gold on his neck and I'm hungry and broke, I'm gonna snag that gold. I'm straight--I'm not going to touch these punks. I've got my wife and I can't bring nothin' home to her."
Although his ethics leave a lot to be desired, Steve's loot-'em-and-leave-'em technique at least sidesteps one of the biggest perils of this risky business.
"There's a lot of denial and rationalization going on out there," says Mari Murrin, case manager for the Arizona AIDS Project. So much, in fact, that since January, the organization has operated an outreach program in the area, using an unnamed bar as a distribution point for condoms, educational literature and frank talk about AIDS prevention. Although Murrin claims that the Valley's hustler community has been receptive to the program, she admits that her work is often frustrating. "They're thinking, `It's not going to happen to me.' Or, being junkies, some of them are so sick that they just don't care." "We laugh at people who are trying to blame AIDS on the gays," reports 23-year-old "John," a part-time bag boy who supplements his meager income by servicing the parade of "fat, balding little trolls" who he says solicit his services. "Their wives won't give 'em what they want, so they go find a little boy who will," he explains. "You know, some cute young guy who'll give 'em a quick blow job and make 'em feel like a man. Basically, you make them feel wanted, like they're worth something."
A hustler for the past five years, John began working what he calls "the wrinkle patrol" right around the same time that AIDS first started making headlines. "It was like `AIDS KILLS QUEERS!'" sneers John. "Well, as we now know, it was never a gay disease to begin with."
Grudgingly admitting that he is, nevertheless, part of a high-risk group (as is anyone who indiscriminately has sex with multiple partners), John doesn't appear particularly concerned that he may well be committing personal and professional suicide by refusing to make his customers wear condoms when he performs oral sex. (Contrary to prevailing street wisdom, the Arizona AIDS Project says there is medical evidence indicating that the virus may be spread through fellatio and cunnilingus.) "You have to remember that I've been around the block many times," says John, cavalierly boasting that years of experience have enabled him to determine exactly when someone is on the verge of climaxing in his mouth. Pointing out that "condoms are not 100 percent fail-safe, anyway," he blithely dismisses the subject by joking that he "can't stand" the flavor of prophylactics.
If the hustlers who spoke to New Times are any indication, safe-sex techniques are shrugged off by more than a few men currently working the streets.
"A rubber? Hey, that's takin' everything away--you can't feel anything." So says Tony, a 26-year-old drifter who merely shrugs when asked about the occupational hazard that could someday cost him his life. "I think about AIDS, sure, but it doesn't scare me--nothin' scares me," he answers in a thick New York accent. "If I die that way, that's the way it is." Besides, he rationalizes, "there's really nothing you can do about it. You're gonna stop nature? You can't stop nature because it's all a part of life." Pause. "I can't stop what I'm doing. I gotta survive somehow."
For what it's worth, Tony takes some consolation in the fact that he's what he calls a "straight" hustler--one of the few people on the street who won't "suck dick." If someone is willing to pay $40 to perform that same service on him, well, that's a different story altogether.
"Those people on the street laugh at me when I tell them I'm straight," says Tony, who dreams of the day when he can "settle down and have kids and pass on my name." He asks, "Does it mean I'm gay just because I let guys suck my dick? I don't think so. A lot of people don't like their jobs."
Currently homeless and battling a long-term drug problem, Tony recently thought he'd found salvation when a businessman he met in a bar invited him to move into his apartment. "I thought he was just going to let me live there, get my shit together," recalls the weary hustler, who soon learned otherwise. Waking up in his new digs one morning, Tony found a note from his benefactor explaining that he was eagerly looking forward to being sodomized by his new roomie that evening.
"What'd this guy expect from me?" asks Tony. "I'm supposed to fall in love with him or something?" Evicted by the apartment house security guard several days after he refused to play ball, Tony found himself out on the streets once again. After nine years on the pavement, Tony "thanks God" that he's "still sane." "I'm a very religious person and I believe that a person who doesn't have God in his life has nothing," says Tony. "There's a lot of people out there in the streets who don't believe in God, and them people are dead to me."
The high school dropout says he began his descent into the sexual dead zone at age seventeen, after trailing a pregnant ex-girlfriend to Georgia in hopes that they would reconcile, get married and raise a family. Upon discovering that the girl no longer wanted any part of him or his baby (an abortion had taken care of that), Tony claims he went "off the wall" and into a drug-fueled tailspin that eventually led to a suicide attempt. Broke and stranded, he began strutting the streets of Atlanta after a buddy steered him toward the flesh-peddling district.
"I was making two-hundred, three-hundred bucks a night, easy," he says, recalling salad days long since wilted. "I guess I looked really good back then because I was making fifty bucks, sixty bucks, up to a hundred bucks a pop. Haven't made a hundred bucks in a fuckin' while, though. I think it's my age, man. These people out there want chickens, but I'm not lyin' about my age. If they don't want me for what I am, they can go straight to hell."
Instead, most of those unsatisfied customers will simply take their business down the street, a harsh reality that unleashes yet another torrent of introspective angst from Tony. "I'm really getting a bad attitude lately and it shows," he confesses. "Sometimes I hardly make any money at all--maybe it's the vibes, the look on my face, the way I talk to people when I get in the car, whatever. I don't know how much longer I can keep doing this because it's making me sick. Those faggots are really tearin' me up with all these games they play." Still, because of the economics of the street, hustlers like Tony frequently find themselves playing right along. "I've been involved in some pretty weird shit in my time," he admits. Shaking his head, he describes how he once donned a surgical glove to rectally "fist" a john, a service that he reluctantly performed in return for $175.
Even more unpalatable was his encounter with a Fort Lauderdale masochist who begged to have his scrotum nailed to a coffee table. "Man, I really didn't want to do that. I was afraid I'd hurt the dude or something." But those fears evaporated the instant Tony noticed evidence of previous genital crucifixions: The coffee table was peppered with nail holes. "What the hell?" he remembers thinking. "It wasn't like this was the first time he'd done this." Pause. "Let me tell you, there are some really fucked-up people out there."
He'll get no argument from Cliff, a fellow hustler with five years' experience under his belt. "The average person working down here is someone who has a lot of problems," theorizes the well-spoken 23-year-old. "Basically they just don't care too much about themselves. They can't decide what they want so they'll use drugs to help them decide. Most of them are hurt. They can't find a way out of what they're in."
Making it clear that he doesn't consider himself the average hustler, the self-confident Cliff portrays himself as a "professional." "I know what I want," he says. "I want everything. I want to be a millionaire--yesterday."
Or at least that's what he wants today. Confessing that he has a "dual personality," he chalks up a lot of his problems to his sexual orientation. "The gay lifestyle is so much harder than the heterosexual lifestyle," he complains. "Finding someone who will love you as much as you love them and still be able to handle the discrimination going on around the both of you is really special. Nobody can deal with a gay lifestyle unless they've got somebody to hold on to."
His line of work certainly hasn't made coping any easier. As a gay hustler, Cliff claims that he is a double outcast, someone who is accepted by neither straight nor homosexual society. "If I were to walk into one of the classier gay bars and tell people that I'm a hustler, most of those people would walk away. They don't want to be seen talking to a hustler--the gay community looks down on us." Vacillating between the need for acceptance and the necessity of making a living, Cliff, by his own admission, is highly indecisive. "One minute I want one thing, the next minute I want something else. Right now I want a million dollars. Last night all I could think of was my ex-lover."
In his current mindset, Cliff talks enthusiastically about hustling up enough money to become a real estate czar--and he thinks he knows where to get the financial backing to do it. "I don't have a problem going to bed with older men," he says. "In fact, I prefer older men. If I present myself right, if I act properly, eventually I will get more money from that person than I could ever get from anyone down at the bank." If Cliff seems to harbor a particular disdain for members of the financial community, that might have something to do with the fact that his father, the psychological villain of his life story, is employed at a bank in the Central Corridor.
"I hate my father," he hisses. The animosity was evidently mutual--at the age of ten, Cliff was shuttled out of the house and put up for adoption. While hitchhiking across the country as a fourteen-year-old runaway, he quickly learned that there were men who'd pay for sex. The enterprising youth then returned to the Valley, where (unbeknownst to his adoptive mother) he operated a gay escort service while attending Sunnyslope High School. Although business reportedly boomed, he was forced to close up shop two years later when the Internal Revenue Service caught wind of his extracurricular earnings.
Eager to distance himself from the prying eyes of the IRS, Cliff dumped his stable of studs and decided to go solo in the downtown cruising district. Five years later, he proudly brags that his "clientele" includes nearly twenty steady customers, most of them well-to-do professional men. Some of his clients, he says, even take him along on business trips.
Quizzed about the threat of arrest, Cliff claims that he is on good terms with several police officers who occasionally patrol the area. "Let's just say that I am providing a service and I'm keeping it as legitimate as possible," he says. "Hustlers generate revenue for the businesses down here--people do benefit from us. The owners of the local shops and bars want that money; they're not going to complain too much." ("That area has not been ignored," counters Sergeant Andy Anderson of the Phoenix Police Department. "As time allows, we take enforcement action on all types of vice crimes. But there's no doubt that as a police department, we're spread thin.") Yet for all Cliff's polished patter and self-proclaimed business smarts, he naively minimizes the deadly downside. Almost defiantly, he announces: "AIDS doesn't rule out anything." "Of course," he adds, "I'm very selective about who I go out with in the first place." He explains that he has developed a screening procedure to identify those he perceives as poor health risks.
"If a person isn't driving a car that's an '86 or newer, I won't even get in," he says firmly. "And if they try to take me to someplace like the Fantasyland Motel down on Van Buren, forget it."
Asked if he truly believes that AIDS and wealth are mutually exclusive, Cliff waffles slightly but stands his ground. "If someone has enough money to take me to, say, the Hyatt, I'm willing to take my chances."
"Their wives won't give 'em what they want, so they go find a little boy who will."
"I think about AIDS, sure, but it doesn't scare me--nothin' scares me," he answers in a thick New York accent.
"What'd this guy expect from me?" asks Tony. "I'm supposed to fall in love with him or something?"
"Sometimes I hardly make any money at all--maybe it's the vibes, the look on my face, the way I talk to people when I get in the car, whatever."
"Right now I want a million dollars. Last night, all I could think of was my ex-lover."
