New York Hustlers: Masculinity and Sex in Modern America by Barry Reay (review)

The title of Barry Reay's book does it something of a disservice, for the book actually does a good deal more than document the history of hustlers in the postwar period. One could imagine a more accurate, though unwieldy subtitle:"The Persistence of Polymorphous Sexuality and Identity through the 1960s."It is the documentation of the lack of a gay identity by same-sex, sexually active men well into the 1960s, and sometimes beyond, for which the book deserves the most attention. Reay maintains that using hustlers and trade as a case study allows us to see that neither homosexuality nor heterosexuality had solidified as stable identity categories for large numbers of working-class men until the 1970s. He argues further that, through the prevalence of widespread popular culture representing hustlers and trade, this instability of identity was known to the American public. In other words, not only did many men identify as neither primarily "straight" nor "gay" well after World War II, but Americans knew this. The "gay male world," to use George Chauncey's titular phrase, had not been so seamlessly "made" by 1940.¹

The book explores the world of hustlers (men who would, occasionally or routinely, exchange sex for money or material comforts) and trade (men who were masculine in appearance and might engage in paid [in either direction] or unpaid sex with other men) in New York City from the 1940s through the 1960s. Reay's sources are primarily from the Kinsey Institute, and he acknowledges the degree to which he relies upon the archive of Thomas Painter, a photographer, long-time "john," chronicler of prostitution, and loyal informant for Alfred Kinsey. But Reay liberally intersperses the materials from Painter's archives with others in the Kinsey Institute, as well as with movies, novels, memoirs, paintings, sculpture, and interview transcripts. And while the book is called New York Hustlers, there are many references to hustling and sex with trade throughout the United States and Western Europe. As Reay argues, if sexual identities took until the 1970s to solidify in New York, "theoretically the most sophisticated site for developing modern sexualities," then "we are dealing with a wider American phenomenon with a long past" (254, 236).

In five crisp chapters (plus prologue, introduction, conclusion, and epilogue, all well illustrated), Reay explains that the very messiness that other historians have so ably documented in prewar New York (and elsewhere) is precisely what continues through the 1960s in the form of the hustler and his world. He criticizes those same historians for overstating the degree to which our current notions of homosexuality and heterosexuality had solidified by the 1940s as they seek to document the march toward that very solidification. The first chapter after the introduction, "Contexts," documents that messiness and examines the very sources other historians have used to argue for the entrenchment of our own identity categories; Reay takes them to task for reading our world onto the past.

In chapters 3 and 4 Reay makes the case that hustlers and trade defy easy categorization in a number of surprising ways. First, they had sex with women and men both for pay and for pleasure. Second, even in their sex with men, they did not always conform to what was understood to be the masculine role in sex; many regularly performed oral sex and were the penetrated partners in anal sex. While Reay is clear that clients had certain expectations for the sex they might have with trade, those expectations did not always map seamlessly onto reality. Reay also documents a good deal of diversity about who paid whom: while hustlers hustled for money, trade might pay or be paid by another man, depending on the circumstances. And precisely because of the diversity of sexual experience amongst otherwise normal men and the fact that these experiences did not denote a sexual identity, hustling and occasional same...