One of my dominatrix clients is a businessman in his early 50s who likes to be treated like a whore and forced to eat his own cum. We’ve been doing sessions together for a year now, and over time we’ve become pretty good friends. Sometimes we hang out casually, just to chat. Like for example we’ll go have sushi and talk about Rihanna, and then afterward we’ll go back to the dungeon and I’ll ride him around like a horse. My sub (let’s call him Cum Slut) is always fun to talk to because he has endless crazy sex stories, starting from back when he first immersed himself in NYC’s S&M scene in the early 80s. Something I didn’t know about Cum Slut until recently, however, is that in his 20s he worked as a male escort. Edgy. I recently interviewed him about his prostitution days, and you can read the result below.
Slutever: So you were a male escort?
Cum Slut: Yeah, when I was in my twenties.
How did you get into doing sex work?
I worked as a parking lot attendant at a sex club on 34th Street called Plato’s Retreat. You should look it up some time. That place was like ancient Rome. They threw crazy swingers parties, there was a pool inside, all the rooms had beds in them, and one night of the week would be S&M night. While I had that job, a couple different times people who hung out at the club propositioned me, and those were my first experiences with prostitution.
Did you like working at the club?
Not really. I had to do a lot of clean up stuff, which wasn’t fun. One night somebody set a fire in one of the beds and the employees had to put it out. It was started a husband who was mad at his wife for fucking a bunch of guys. He wanted her to stop, but she wouldn’t stop and he got upset about it. She stopped when the fire broke out.
What year was this?
This was 1984, 85.
It’s weird that people were fucking strangers so freely during the height of the AIDS epidemic.
Yes, it was scary. Everybody was using condoms though.
So how did the people proposition you?
Well there was this one woman and her husband who I saw come into the club a few times. I was friendly with them, and the guy didn’t feel uncomfortable around me. One night they showed up and I parked their car and they tipped me $80. Now back then, that was a lot of money. And then at the end of the night when I bought their car back the woman just said, “So do you want take us home?”
That’s a good line.
Yeah it was. And off we went. The the next time they showed up they tipped me over $100 for parking–it was kind of like a ‘wink’–and I went back with them a second time.
How did you get further into prostitution from there?
Well after that I met this other woman named Anna. She was an escort, and she asked me if I would be her driver and security guard. How it usually works with escorts is that their agency sets them up with clients, and then they’re driven around from job to job by a bouncer type. In this case the agency actually provided the car as well. So I told her yeah, I would do it.
What was that like?
Basically I had a beeper that would tell me what addresses to take her to, and I got $25 an hour to drive her around for the evening, and I spent most of the time just waiting in the car on my own. For the first ten minutes that she was inside with a new client I’d have to be ready to jump, or to call the cops if something went wrong, but nothing ever went wrong. The agencies have this stuff on pretty heavy lock-down. Even back then they were screening the clients. Guys would have to show a drivers license and give information about where they worked–stuff like that. It was pretty worry-free. Or at least it was with this agency, I’m not sure how everybody else did it.
You never had one single problem?
No. I had a couple girls walk out of places. If they felt like a situation was weird, they would just leave and come back to the car. When the guys are weird or freak you out, you just have to trust your instincts and get out of there. But anyway, I ended up being the driver for this woman for like a year and a half, and at a certain point I started to go in and do scenes with her sometimes, if the client requested it. Or sometimes the client would be a couple and they’d want another couple, and that’s how I got back into sex work.
What was your role in the scenes?
I was the bull. The Dom. Amazing how things change, right?
Do you like being dominant?
Yeah, I’m a switch.
Wow, I would have never guessed that from the sessions you and I do together where you beg me for cock and ball torture. I’m a switch too.
You wouldn’t know from what I’ve told you. I would have guessed that you are a switch though. Also, I guess that’s pretty evident from your blog.
Lol true. So with Anna, was it a mindfuck that you spent so much time with her and were fucking each other so often? Did you end up liking each other?
Yeah we did. We ended up having a two month thing where we thought we might actually like each other, but because we were working together so often, something about the relationship was just off. I can’t explain it, I think there was just too much familiarity. When I first started driving her around all I wanted to do was fuck her. I would get sort of jealous when she would go in and see other guys. Then when our affair started, for the first couple weeks I thought I was in heaven, but it wore off fast because we always had to go back to work.
What was she like?
She had great taste and wore amazing clothes. Her winter coat–I’ll never forget it–was the most beautiful shearling wool winter coat I’ve ever seen. It was like what Vikings wore. It must have cost at least ten grand, and that was in the 80s. She once talked to me about how she did business, and she said, “I never talk about money. I just only go after the guys who I know have it.” Basically she would leave it up to her clients to decide how much to leave her, but she would never discuss money with them, because talking about money is awkward. That’s really what you’re striving for if you’re working as an escort–you want your clients to be the type who you know will treat you well, without you having to ask.
How long did you work with her?
About three years. But I ended up working on my own sometimes too.
How much did you make?
Back then it was like $175 an hour. I’d get $75 and the agency would get $100. I didn’t like splitting the money obviously, but I liked that it was safe, and that the agency would sort everything out and all I had to do was show up.
What else did you like about the job?
I looked at it like opening magic doors at night, where I would always see or hear something new. And getting head from guys was cool.
Why, are they better at it than girls?
Most are. In purely physical terms, anyway. Men just know what they’re working with. But for me, when I’m getting head from a woman, there’s the additional element that I might like her, which makes the sexual interaction better. I don’t have love for men in the same way that I do for women.
Do you think prostitution is a good job?
It depends how it’s done, like anything. But I think it definitely has an expiration date. I would see it taking a toll on some of the women over time. The job can result in a lot of compulsive behavior. Smoking and drinking especially, and drugs―all the things that are ‘the devil’ [laughs].
Well I can imagine that fucking a series of strangers is not the sort of thing you want to do sober.
Right, exactly.
And lastly, why do you think you are drawn to these extremes of sexuality?
Well, I listened to this really great interview on Howard Stern the other day. He was interviewing this gay man who’s now found God, but at one point he was doing really hardcore sex stuff–bondage scenes, pissing, lots of gangbangs, being punched in the face and knocked out, etc.–and the man was saying that he ritualized sex in order to learn about himself, that sex was about self-analysis. And I really understand that. I find sex very illuminating.
So what has sex taught you about yourself?
Well in an obvious way it’s taught me what turns me on, and what scenarios excite me. But to go deeper than that, I would say I’ve learned that I have a certain capability for compartmentalization. And that applies to things in my life far beyond sex. I’ve learned that as people, there are important aspects of ourselves that are always present, yet are not always evident.
Photo by Susan Meiselas
