Breaking into Male Sex Work and Society, Representation in Comics

Have you lifted the 500+ page Male Sex Work & Society? The 2014 textbook is something of a staple in gender studies programs around the country, but the publishers got some flack from the sex worker community for relying on researchers and excluding the voices of, you know, actual sex workers. A funny thing happened after my interview with sex worker Bryan Knight and artist Dave Davenport—collaborators on the Velvet Collar comic series depicting the 2015 federal raid on rentboy.com--posted on Tits & Sass, the long-running sex worker blog with the tag line ‘service journalism by and for sex workers.’ Some time after the post ran, I was approached by Harrington Park Press, the book’s publisher, and asked to contribute to their follow-up title, Male Sex Work: Culture & Society, volume 2. I buckled down and wrote a whole damn chapter on the wide breadth of representations of male sex workers in comics, starting with Seven Miles a Second by artist David Wojnarowicz. So yea, we can represent ourselves, and we can also talk about representing ourselves. 

Tits & Sass, currently on hiatus, has also reviewed the work of Canadian stripper and writer Jacqueline Frances, known as Jacq the Stripper. Her crowdfunded graphic novel Striptastic! is a satirical look at the world of strip clubs. The author’s ear for the dark humor in interactions with choice customers, and the banter between strippers, is well-served by her irreverent, stripped-down (pun intended) drawing style. Striptastic! skewers male patrons’ sleaziness and turns the judgey things civilians say (“How can you do this job and call yourself a feminist?”) back on them, all while paying tribute to strippers’ backstage camaraderie and sisterhood.

But back to my assigned topic, representations of male sex workers in comics. There are not that many examples, so I endeavored to consider them all. Seven Miles a Second, which dates back to 1996, is pretty dark. Its narrator/protagonist recounts his origin story as a teen street hustler in New York’s Times Square circa late 70’s. From the outset, desire is entwined with violence and degradation; his first customer goads him into watching a female sex worker service her customer through a peephole, while the narrator is serviced by his customer. In a graphic frame, the woman turns to reveal extensive slash marks on her torso. The teen’s intro to sex work couples voyeurism and violence. In subsequent panels, artist James Romberger illustrates the protagonist’s apocalyptic rage against the cruelties of the universe—in particular the U.S. government’s indifference to gay mens’ suffering during the AIDS epidemic. As a comic book figure, Wojnarowicz’s superpower is his ability to transform suffering into art. 

Seven Miles a Second demonstrates that for sex worker creators, comic books can infuse our narratives with requisite emotional depth and complexity. A level of artistic control is possible, keeping the work and the narratives in our hands. It’s an accessible, character- and action-driven medium for bringing stories based on true experiences to a receptive audience—without risks of disclosure.

Despite the fact that representations of male sex work in comics covers a brief 25-year period, the works I examined track the general migration of sex work from analog spaces like Wojnarowicz’s Times Square to online spaces like rentboy.com and locative apps such as Grindr to the present reality of increasingly scrutinized (and prosecuted) online platforms—  from street trade to SESTA/FOSTA. In subsequent posts, I’ll review Velvet Collar to assess how it tackles the latter period.  

*The book project has since changed publishers, and will be brought out as Handbook of Male Sex Work, Culture, and Society from Routledge Press (UK) this April.

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Former sex worker and activist Dale Corvino’s short fiction and essays have appeared in various publications, including online at the Rumpus and Salon. He won the 2018 Gertrude Press Fiction Chapbook contest with a trio of short stories; Worker Names was published in 2019. Recent publications include a reflection on Chile’s massive populist uprising and the legacy of queer writer Pedro Lemebel for the Gay & Lesbian Review and an essay on growing constraints on adult online content in Matt Keegan: 1996, from New York Consolidated/Inventory Press. He lives in New York City. https://dalecorvino.com