Confessions of a Sydney Sex Worker
This feature is a brutally honest account of the life of a Sydney sexworker who learnt to stop worrying and love the bomb.
When I was driven hastily from my parent’s house, I found that Centrelink provided me with no option but to turn to sex work. The federal government’s ridiculous restrictions and requirements exclude anyone but the neediest beggars from procuring what should essentially be every student’s right. Yet even the beggars are left to survive on a pittance valued far below the poverty line. So to maintain a lifestyle that allowed me to study, party and subsist with a decent level of comfort near my university, I became a whore. What follows is not an incitement to sex work (I don’t need any more competition) but an account of what it is to be a rent boy in Sydney in 2008.
I got into this line of work when I was browsing a gay personals site, some seedy old guy offered me 120 bucks to blow him. I was short on cash, and I wanted to go out that night so I agreed. He wore track pants, smelt like cigarettes and spoke with a broad Australian accent. I doubt it was possible to find anyone more detestably Bogan. Aside from the taste, it was the easiest (quickest) $120 I’d ever made.
I crossed the road after, bought a can of coke, and promptly threw up.
Not that I’d let a little detail like that stop me.
Most male sex work in Sydney is done in two ways; privately or through an agency. There are two male agencies in Sydney one boasts mostly, but not exclusively, big muscular boys (we’ll call this one X), while the other caters for the younger, more boyish, twink/pretty boy market (Y).
Pay is structured by the half hour/45 mins/hour and is roughly the same at both places, where the house takes about half. In return they provide you with rooms, sheets/towels, showers, and chill out spaces with couches, cable TV and some measure of safety and security. Y makes sure that there is food available so that even if you’re not earning, you still eat.
While there is more waiting space in Y, as well as a pool table, there are no windows, which makes it kind of dreary and timeless, like a casino. Y is also the only trans brothel in Sydney, so you share it with transsexual workers, who can get a bit bitchy. You can smoke inside though. The boys there, I found, were generally more drug-fucked than those at X.
X is run by a plastically enhanced body builder who appears nice on the surface and delegates all his dirty work to the other managers, who are absolutely charming. While there is only one room for the boys to hang out in; it is modern, well lit and opens onto a courtyard. From the top room there is a magnificent view of the city. All rooms have a never-ending stream of porn sent to their televisions. There is timed parking on the street outside, but parking inspectors never come through.
The process is pretty much the same on both sites, a customer comes into a welcoming room and one by one we are paraded through. After the client has seen us all, he makes a decision as to who he wants to hire. Sometimes they hire more than one boy at a time, which can be fun.
The boys offer different services. Some are tops, some bottom, some are versatile (they do both), some offer blow jobs only with a condom on. Generally speaking, the more you are prepared to do, the more likely you are to be hired, but there is a consensus that nobody offers unprotected sex. Though I don’t know how often that is dishonoured.
If the client chooses you, he pays the house and you separately because technically the relationship between you and the trick is that of a contract. That way the house is not responsible for you and you can get away with avoiding tax. I set an alarm so that I don’t have to watch the clock, though some boys (at Y) used to reach over during sex and tap a button on the top of the digital clocks that skipped the time ahead a few mins.
As far as the sex goes, you can either enjoy it or hate it. If you hate it, it will feel like it lasts much longer than it does and you are less likely to get a repeat client. If you let yourself enjoy it (because after all, it is sex) or if you at least learn to fake it convincingly, you may just win yourself a regular customer or an extension on the time period.
Personally I can’t deal with these people longer than a few mins so I focused on getting them off and getting them out. Not ideal for repeat business but at least I keep my sanity.
Those who stay for protracted periods of time tend to want to talk. Which drives me crazy because when I interact with adults, generally I expect a level of conversation higher than what I get from dealing with idiots my own age, but alas, they never fail to bore me with the details of their mundane lives; either they have a wife who they cannot share their desires with or they are from an area or a time hostile to homosexuals and never had the opportunity to be with another guy.
Which is sad and expected, but boring once you’ve heard the story a million times. What’s worse is when they expect stories from you; about first sexual encounters, why you haven’t got a boyfriend, where you go dancing, as if you would tell them anything even slightly resembling the truth.
We do provide a valuable service though, we allow them to fulfil fantasies that would otherwise hurt more innocent members of society. That is, I and those who I have worked with, have noticed a disproportionate number of clients who want to pretend that they are sleeping with young boys.
Considering that paedophilia is the last major taboo in this society and that the moral panic surrounding it is the hot ticket for the tabloids, Bogans and philistines at this moment, this isn’t really that surprising. I like to think that by providing them with an outlet we can divert their attention away from attacking an actual child. Of course they could always hire a street walker, but they are seen as somewhat more dodgy than those who work through an agency or privately.
Agencies however have their drawbacks. The house takes half your money, you work in shifts which means hanging around all day waiting for work to walk through the door, which has been slowing recently as more and more boys and clients use the internet to hook up.
The other boys you hang around with tend to be less than interesting, hardly ever educated and specialise in inane conversation you’d rather avoid. Brothels tend to attract pretty people though. While I was working (I tried my luck at both parlours) there seemed to be a culture that looked down upon boys sleeping with each other (for fun) for reasons I couldn’t figure out. Naturally I ignored such social mores and latched onto whatever happened to walk past (without letting the others know what was going on, it keeps things more interesting that way).
When the work in the brothels started to become scarce, I switched to private work full time.Private work can be advertised in either newspapers or the internet but like agency work, newspaper advertising is a thing of the past. There are a number of escorting sites one can advertise on, none of which I will mention. Also many working boys find that they can work ‘unofficially’ by harassing older looking men on dating sites.
For those who want to experiment with sex work; on Gaydar Chat there are usually a number of men who offer money in return for favours, they tend to indicate this with multiple ‘$$$$$’ signs or an absence of information in their personals field. There may be some sex work available for men who seek women as clients, but this is very limited and there are not any websites or agencies that deal with this.
Many hetero boys consent to homosexual sex in order to make some easy money. This I think is commendable; I have a special spot in my heart for anyone with flexibility and an ability to overcome the idiotic morality of the popular mentality that restricts sexuality but also creates so much work for us.
Working privately means you only do the jobs you want, you don’t have to wait around for work to show up, you can charge what you like, how you like but you do not have the same level of security as you would with the agency. Private work is unregulated which means that you can easily be screwed over. Some clients may not be at the location they say they are, leading you to waste time travelling out, some may try to screw you out of money, and others may try to harm you physically. I received death threats after I bailed on a client who was way too creepy. You should always trust your instincts in these matters though there are a couple of tricks.
The first is not to deal with anyone who wants to negotiate prices. If they want to treat you like a commodity then they probably are not safe or reliable people to sleep with. Do not undervalue yourself just to get work, you’ll end up feeling shit about it later, start hating yourself and end up out of this business pretty quickly. The second is cultural/racial profiling. While this may not be a very ethical way to do business, our own safety has to be our top concern. Finally, you should never give out information to a client that could lead them to find you, no matter how nice they seem to be. If you’re taking incalls, don’t do it at your home. Its just a really bad idea.
ACON offer a sex workers outreach program which provides you with free condoms and lube (I like the idea that my tax free work is helped out by government funding), there is free STI/STD testing available at the RPA and at the clinic in Kings Cross. I’d also recommend taking the free Hepatitis A&B vaccinations.
Drugs are an issue among sex workers for a couple of reasons. Easy access to large sums of money, coupled with an industry that is located geographically and culturally close to the illicit drug scene, makes pretty much anything very easily accessible. Clients will sometimes offer you free drugs and sometimes offer drugs as payment. It’s up to you whether you accept them but personally I don’t accept payment in any form other than cash or a bank transfer.
There are many people out there who are either ignorant or afraid of drugs and so they push for zero tolerance and scare campaigns. The truth is that if you have a little self control and keep yourself informed about what you are taking, you most likely won’t end up becoming the stereotypical street walking, drug injecting, HIV+, university drop out.
There is still a lot of stigma with regard to prostitution, so generally I keep it pretty quiet that I do this sort of thing, however those I have told, have generally been very accepting and in some cases very interested in the gory details. I found an opportunity to make some easy money in an unregulated industry. I’m glad I took it because it’s given me relative independence and a mostly stress free lifestyle.
Disclaimer: The editors of queer honi, QuAC, and the Executive and council of the SRC do not endorse the views and opinions expressed in this article.