Race, pleasure, and ruin : transatlantic oral histories of black queer men who do sex work

Abstract

It is now over two decades since the premiere of 101 Rent Boys. The 2000 documentary shows a group of one hundred, mostly white Santa Monica Boulevard hustlers (one underage interview was deleted), each given $50 to detail the hits, innumerable misses, assaults, and addictions that define them. In the “Uncut” version, several masturbate when left alone with the camera for five minutes. Such self-satisfied trauma porn would be laughable if it did not reflect the field of male sex work documentary in the late twentieth and early twenty-first century. Within scholarly, documentary, and artistic treatments of gay male sex work, the white worker has remained central. This marginalizing of the Black subject within discussions of male and masculine-identified sex work avoids vital considerations of race as(in)formative of the erotic and the sexual, especially within theories of (sexual) identity, desire and labor.