Discontented and Jack of all trades: Revisiting male survival sex workers through modern sex work lenses

A turn toward agency and sex work as a career in sex work research

What I refer to as an agentic and career-focused lens is a broad theoretical and methodological trend in scholarship that has developed over the past several decades in response to previous narrow and limited understandings of sex workers as victims and social deviants. It emphasizes an empirical understanding of sex work and focuses on centralizing the lives and viewpoints of sex workers themselves. Here, I sketch the contours of this lens and discuss the gaps in our understanding how it may or may not fit the lives of lower-class sex workers, particularly men of color.

The term “career” traditionally invokes the idea of a profession which relies on specialized training, reliance on scientific principles, and elite respectability through which people engage in skilled labor in relation to an established organization or set of organizations (Freidson, 1999). Given the fact that sex work is extremely varied and often illegal, or at the very least stigmatized, and subject to censure throughout the Western world, this traditional conception of a “career” does not describe the circumstances of most sex workers. However, modern conceptions of careers are changing and require more adaptive understandings of work and labor (Iellatchitch et al., 2003; Snyder, 2004). Iellatchitch et al. (2003) argue that in order to account for the many realities of modern work, we must recognize structure, restriction, and agency simultaneously. They conceptualize careers as “career fields” which are:

… the social context within which individual members of the workforce, who are equipped with a specific portfolio of field-relevant capitals, try to maintain or improve their place in the given and unfolding network of work-related positions through a patterned set of practices which are enabled and constrained by the rules of the field and, in turn, contribute to the shaping of these rules (p. 732).

This conception understands people moving through careers as social actors who possess certain skills performing some kind of compensated work through a field which follows particular norms, practices, and rules. Their conception allows that careers may involve those working long term for a traditional established organization but also forms of labor that are becoming increasingly common such as self-employment, in which people direct their own work, and manage their own clientele. Thus, the essential elements of a career in this more adaptive framework are some form of compensation for labor, and a social actor working in a field of expertise which involves certain common understandings and rules of engagement. In the career fields framework, a “professional” is thus a skilled social actor who attempts to “move through” or work within one of these fields (Iellatchitch et al., 2003).

Although the literature on sex work has yet to explicitly adopt the career fields framework, this more dynamic understanding of career-based work mirrors the efforts of many scholars to describe modern sex work as agentic and populated by skilled social actors. This work has arisen to address two particular issues in previous literature on sex work: a lack of representing sex workers as multifaceted individuals and a lack of framing sex workers as agentic social actors (Bernstein, 2007; Showden and Majic, 2014; Weitzer, 2010). In the past, the limited amount of academic attention paid to sex work swung between two extremes: viewing sex workers as social problems bringing deviance and/or disease or viewing sex workers (particularly women) as helpless victims of sexual exploitation (Beloso, 2012; Luckenbill, 1986; Lutnick, 2014). More recently, scholars argue that neither of these approaches explain the full reality of sex workers’ lives and circumstances (Agustin, 2007; Bernstein, 2007; Koken and Bimbi, 2014; Weitzer, 2009). Some have pointed out that this limited understanding of sex work is a logical consequence of focusing only on the most visible, poor, and disadvantaged sex workers while ignoring others (Bimbi, 2007; Weitzer, 2010).

By focusing on sex work across a broad universe of sex workers and types of sex work, scholars have made important strides toward addressing these limitations. Although the authors do not draw explicitly on the career fields framework, much current literature focuses on the components of a career field described above: skill/knowledge, sex worker’s own collective and individual understandings of their work as a “field” and financial compensation. Further, many particularly emphasize understanding the autonomy and choice sex workers wield as essential markers of both skill and the fact that their work is a job rather than mere exploitation. Recent scholarship is dominated by projects that diversify the type of sex work studied in academic literature particularly focusing on high-end sex work, such as escorting, as well as diverse or emerging forms of sex work, such as camgirls, sugar babies, sex hotlines, erotic dancers, and male and LGBTQ sex workers (Brewis and Linstead, 2000; Frank, 2007; Logan, 2014). While no single description of such a broad array of research can capture all its nuances, some general themes about modern sex work have emerged. First, it is increasingly online (Bimbi, 2007; Tyler, 2014). Second, it is often chosen by sex workers for its many benefits such as flexibility, autonomy, and good pay (Bernstein, 2007; Tyler, 2014). Third, it is often described as a pleasurable or enjoyable line of work (Brewis and Linstead, 2000; Kontula, 2008; Walaby, 2012). Fourth, sex workers adopt numerous strategies to market their services and manage their interactions with clients that can be conceptualized as work-based skills (Bernstein, 2007; Brewis and Linstead, 2000; Logan, 2014; Tyler, 2014; Walaby, 2012). And, fifth, many sex workers understand their sex work collectively and engage in activities to create collective meanings, mutual support, and standards (Comella, 2010; Wolkowitz et al., 2013).

Last, researchers particularly emphasize the question of how much autonomy a sex worker has over their circumstances which encompasses both choice and control over entering sex work and over their encounters and activities as sex workers (Brennan, 2010; Weitzer and Ditmore, 2009). This is crucial for righting the wrongs of past research by not assuming sex workers are dupes or victims (Agustin, 2007; Luckenbill, 1986; Lutnick, 2014; Weitzer, 2009). In one sense, all sex workers in Western nations such as the United States which criminalize sex work can be seen as disadvantaged because their work is subject to extreme interference and censure from law enforcement and government suppression (Bernstein, 2007; Pliley, 2014). However, by emphasizing internal legitimacy, researchers are still able to theoretically describe how sex workers orient themselves toward their work in a manner which mirrors current dynamic understandings of skills and norms-based career fields. While many parts of the “field” of sex work are not formally recognized by the government, they are internally recognized by those who populate them.

But what sex work counts as an agentic career?

By centering the point of view of sex workers themselves, work on diverse and technologically advanced types of sex work has coalesced around an agentic career-based lens, but current research on poor, more traditionally visible populations of sex workers, such as street workers, tends to focus on their material and social hardships rather than viewing their sex work from a professional or career viewpoint (Koken and Bimbi, 2014; Mai, 2016; McCabe et al., 2011). This practical emphasis is a reasonable response to the circumstances these sex workers face as well as to the unfair and stigmatizing way they have often been portrayed. Low-end street workers and survival sex workers suffer from poverty, homelessness, violence, and illness at alarming rates (Koken and Bimbi, 2014; McCabe et al., 2011; Porter and Bonilla, 2010). These difficulties are often further compounded by structural disadvantages such as discrimination based on race, ethnicity, sexuality, and a host of other factors (Agustin, 2007; Koken and Bimbi, 2014). In addition, scholars want to avoid returning to emphasizing disadvantaged workers as “disease vectors” and social outcasts as an excuse to stigmatize all sex work (Luckenbill, 1986; Weitzer, 2011). Even Weitzer’s (2009: 218) foundational piece, which rejects the notion of an exploitation versus empowerment dichotomy, acknowledged that poor street sex workers are the “population best characterized by the oppression model.” Is it really fair to talk about poor and oppressed sex worker’s work as a career over which they exert control?

Yet, while current scholarship continues to document the exploitation, disadvantage, and hardship faced by poor sex workers, some researchers have cautioned against ignoring the autonomy they may still exercise (Agustin, 2007; Bernstein, 2007). The divide between the “exploited” and the “empowered” is challenging to draw even among the most obviously disadvantaged as both autonomy and disadvantage can exist simultaneously in sex worker’s lives (Agustin, 2007; Bernstein, 2007, 2019; Sharma, 2005). By failing to consider how poor sex workers fit into the sex-work-as-career lens, and instead primarily emphasizing their material hardships, we may miss important aspects of their lives and sex work.

Male sex work: Survival, race, and unanswered questions

It has been especially difficult to draw boundaries around exploitative and nonexploitative sex work in the lives of poor adult male sex workers in the West and in the United States particularly. Despite recent scholarly efforts, this population has still received less overall attention compared to others. However, the research that does exist suggests that the exploitation they face is less obvious and more difficult to define (Minichiello and Scott, 2014). For instance, researchers have found that compared to female street sex workers, male street workers are less likely to be controlled by pimps or sophisticated organized crime (Allen, 1980; Bimbi, 2007; Van Der Poel, 1992; Visano, 1991). The relative independence of poor male sex workers makes answering the question “who is exploiting them?” more difficult and ambiguous. This ambiguity surrounding the work and potential exploitation of adult male street workers makes them a particularly intriguing case for exploring whether and how an agentic career-based lens applies to poor sex workers’ lives.

This is not the first article to consider the nature of male sex work. While the career and professionalized understandings of sex work did not exist as theoretical tools in their current form, in the eighties and nineties, a spate of researchers did attempt to investigate and catalog the types of male survival sex work in the United States and other Western nations. Bimbi (2007) offered an excellent summary of these endeavors, describing this time period as one in which “a fuller picture of male sex work emerged” (24). These small-scale and qualitative studies looked at various populations of mostly young male sex workers and attempted to categorize the types of male street-based sex work including a distinction between sex for mere survival (for drugs, or basic needs) and more consistent, autonomous “professional” sex work. Based on how often men engaged in sex work and where they solicited clients, Bimbi (2007) concluded that poorer, younger, street-based and straight sex workers were less likely to orient themselves toward their work as a “profession” but a temporary or supplemental way to make money compared to older, gay, indoor workers (Allen, 1980; Bimbi, 2007). More recent work often relies on similar understandings and assumes that male sex workers do not conceive of themselves as “sex workers” or orient themselves toward their work as a profession based on how often and where they engage in it (Sanders, 2007; Tyler, 2017). It is certainly true that one does not need to identify as a “sex worker” in order to sell sex (Morris, 2018); however, this practical distinction between professional and nonprofessional is different from the modern career and autonomy-based lens. As I have described, it includes an understanding of how sex workers themselves define the work they do, what practices and expertise they bring to bear, and how much choice or autonomy they are able to employ (Bernstein, 2019; Showden and Majic, 2014; Weitzer, 2009).

These previous conclusions about the categories, circumstances, and work conditions of survival and street-based male sex work and what constitutes a “professional” and career-based sex worker have been largely unexamined since they were originally drawn. Further, while this work acknowledged the race of the men involved, it mostly focused on white men rather than men of color. We must continue to build on the strengths of current literature that understands poor male street workers as individuals experiencing a myriad of material, economic, social, and health challenges (Koken and Bimbi, 2014; McCabe et al., 2011; McNeal, 2020). However, while recognizing these realities, there is also room to revisit the question of how we characterize the work done by poor male street workers. Not only should we consider whether conclusions drawn thirty and forty years ago still ring true, but we also have new theoretical tools to apply to the case. Can an agentic career-based lens help us understand the lives of male survival sex workers? If it can, then perhaps we need to expand and clarify our application of concepts like agency and career-based sex work in framing the realities of disadvantaged populations.

Methods

I collected data for this project as the head researcher on a team using a “community-based participatory research” approach, or CBPR (Belone et al., 2016). After our initial project was complete, I received permission to further analyze the data we collected to understand what it revealed about respondent’s conceptions of sex work. The main focus of a CBPR project is to involve representatives of the community being studied in shaping and conducting research. Community-based participatory research and similar research designs have become increasingly popular among researchers looking at disadvantaged or hidden populations (Bowen and O’Dohetry, 2014; Lutnick, 2014). It helps ensure that members of a vulnerable community benefit from and have some control over the research process, and it allows researchers to gain access to more expansive and accurate data about hard-to-reach populations (Bowen and O’Dohetry, 2014; Lutnick, 2014).

The overall project was sponsored by a nonprofit agency that provides services to male survival sex workers. Our goal was to understand mental and physical health outcomes among a population of African American survival sex workers in a large Midwestern City. As a CBPR project, each of our three-member leadership team was chosen for their expertise in one of three areas: research, professional service provision, and lived experience. Thus, the team consisted of a head researcher (myself, a white woman), a representative from a partnering service agency that worked with the target population (an African American man), and a team leader with lived experience in our targeted parameters (an African American man who had sold sex for survival in the city). We also recruited and trained four other African American men who had lived experience with survival sex work and/or living with mental illness to help construct and proctor surveys. They not only offered us their knowledge about male sex work in the city as we planned our target areas for recruitment and formed our questionnaires but also allowed respondents to feel more at ease answering questions as they administered surveys. We conducted both surveys and focus groups and analyzed the data to understand health outcomes and challenges. For this particular analysis, I then received permission to independently study the data we had collected regarding how respondents viewed their work and its relation to the exploitation/empowerment paradigm.

As stated above, previous research has either focused on white men or had little to say about race. However, our team members with lived experience reported that African American men seemed to be a disproportionate portion of male survival sex workers in the city. We wanted to learn about the health and challenges of this population all over the city as well as get a more in-depth understanding of their lives. Therefore, we recruited through many target locations in different parts of the city and conducted both surveys and focus groups. This two-pronged approach allowed us to get information from a broad and sizable population across our target city as well as in-depth qualitative information from focus group discussions (Frith, 2000). While it is rarely possible to get a representative sample in the true scientific sense of the term when studying “hidden” or transient populations such as street sex workers (Bowen and O’Dohetry, 2014; Lutnick, 2014), we wanted our survey to be as reflective as possible of the city as a whole. This way, our insights were not limited to a single small geographic area or close-knit social group.

We divided the city into four quadrants and targeted places in each where our team members with lived experience thought we were likely to find African American male survival sex workers. Some recruitment locations were public places, such as parks and libraries. The bulk of our participants were recruited from nonprofits who allowed us to recruit at their locations, such as food banks and health service providers. We invited potential participants to complete a brief screening survey which asked questions about their gender and whether they had sold sex for basic needs, as well as a number of decoy questions to protect the privacy of men who qualified. If men qualified, we invited them to participate in the full survey and ended up with 194 completed surveys. We did not exclude non–African American participants but did target recruitment locations to maximize our chances of including African American men as our target population. We allowed respondents to select all race categories that applied to them. As a result, our sample was over 85% Black/African American. Almost all identified specifically as African American while a few selected both “African American” and “Black.” We included anyone who self-identified as “male” in the screening survey, whether cisgender or transgender. 95% of participants identified as cisgender men. We offered respondents gift cards for participating in the survey and additional gift cards for participating in a focus group. Focus group participants also received transportation compensation to get to and from focus group meetings. We conducted 200 20–30 min surveys and had 194 participants to complete them. Fourteen men (all African American) signed up for focus groups, and we had five and three people show up to our two focus groups. Most were middle-aged and none of these focus group participants were in the youngest age category we surveyed (18–25). Each focus group lasted about an hour.

Because focus group participation was available to everyone who took the survey, these groups consisted of all African American men who lived and worked in different parts of the city and who were not well acquainted with each other. Themes that arose collectively from these groups were thus more likely to represent this population across the city rather than a small subset. However, the small size of both focus groups afforded an easy, conversational tone to the discussions, and participants felt comfortable talking to and responding to one another in addition to answering direct questions asked by the moderators. This allowed us to assess areas on which they all agreed versus comments particular to only one person. As a relatively young-looking white woman who grew up outside of the city, I was cognizant of the fact that I did not look, talk, or appear as someone who could understand the world these men operated in. However, since I conducted this research with collaborators, we were able to leverage both my apparent outsider status and my collaborator’s insider status, and focus group members appeared comfortable answering and discussing questions among themselves. For my sake, they often took care to explicitly explain words or phrases an outsider might not understand.

Our data regarding health outcomes was compiled into a report for the main partner agency and a co-authored publication. I then received permission from the agency, my research teammates, and my institutional IRB to conduct further original analysis on the raw data we collected. I pursued this research to understand how respondents perceived and defined their sex work. I used descriptive statistics to look at trends in the survey data and inductive grounded theory analysis to examine the focus group responses (Galletta and Cross, 2013; Glaser and Strauss, 1999; Stinchcombe, 2005). First, I read through transcripts and coded general themes. Then I read them looking for patterns across participant responses. I paid particular attention not only to direct responses to interviewers but also to the way respondents created meanings and responded to questions posed by one another. Thus, I treated themes that were recurring throughout the discussion and those that received consensus and collaboration among focus group participants as indicative of general meanings likely to represent a broader consensus among the population (Frith, 2000).

Findings

The data revealed three ways participants framed their sex work that shed light on whether we can understand that work as an agentic career. I refer to these narratives as the Hustlers, Survivalists, and Entrepreneurs frameworks. First, sex work was often a supplemental and intermittent way of making money. However, this did not mean that respondents did not conceive of themselves as sex workers and their sex work as skilled sexual labor. Rather, mastering the intermittent and uncertain nature of the sex work they engaged in was seen as an essential piece of behaving as a professional in their context. Second, they acknowledged the very real disadvantages associated with their work but emphasized that they were able to mitigate, survive, and sometimes move beyond those challenges. Third, while acknowledging the many drawbacks associated with their work, they simultaneously found it a source of pride, accomplishment, and self-esteem, discussing their skill, knowledge, and expertise. All three narratives coexist in the complex way they understand their sex work.

Discussion

If we use the concept of agency and the focus from much current sex work literature of sex work as an agentic career as standards to ask: Does the hustling these men describe require specialized skill or knowledge? Do these respondents share common understandings and standards of what their “career” is? Do they exercise autonomy in their sex work? the answer is a complex both “yes” and “no.” Based on their own understandings of their sex work, we can frame their work through this lens only if in doing so we simultaneously recognize the many external and internal hardships associated with their work. Yet, in expanding the idea of “professional” sex work to include what these men do, we are able to challenge previous conclusions and boundaries drawn around them and their work.

Respondents did not describe being good at what they did as being adept at any particular type of sexual service or customer satisfaction. Rather than focusing on one type of way to make money, a “true hustler is supposed to be a jack of all trades.” Being a hustler might even involve other illegal means of making money when necessary like “robbery or stealing.” However, focus group respondents agreed that this very broad, adaptive, and entrepreneurial outlook was precisely the skill set necessary to be an effective hustler. Being a good hustler was not about providing the best sexual services. Rather it was about being able to survive, to hold one’s own against, manage, and sometimes take advantage of their johns.

Respondents were well aware that their lives and choices were limited. Often their sex work was a way to support a drug habit, and they saw moving on from drugs as a way to move on from sex work. They also struggled with mental illness and stigma associated with their profession and the same-sex activity involved. This is consistent with previous research on street-based populations (Koken and Bimbi, 2014; McCabe et al., 2011). However, recognizing these realities did not prevent them from also seeing even occasional or opportunistic sex work as work that required know-how and client management and about which they shared collective mutual understandings. Further, it sometimes gave them a feeling of pride and accomplishment and was seen as superior to other potential income sources. The same men who disliked sex work and only participated in it occasionally might also conceive of that same sex work as skilled “work.” Thus, their sex work can be described as something they chose to participate in and something they saw as work and exemplified expertise in.

Previous research suggested that occasional male survival or street-based sex work should not be understood as a professional endeavor and that men themselves do not orient themselves toward it as such (particularly when heterosexual). While it is very likely true that the men who engage in the type of sex work described here create different standards and definitions and value different skills compared to other types of sex work, this does not mean that standards, collective understandings, and skill are absent from these respondents’ work. Nor did the fact that it was not always their sole or primary way of survival mean that they avoided thinking of themselves as sex workers. They did not use the term “sex worker,” but the preferred term “hustler” very definitely meant someone who would engage in sex work and was skilled at being a survivalist who managed client interactions and adopted an entrepreneurial approach.

Conclusion

By centering these men’s own perception of their sex work activity, it is possible to view that sex work through an agentic and career-based lens prioritizing their own collective understandings of what they do, the skills they demonstrate, and the autonomy they wield. To do so, we must allow the men themselves to define what those understandings and skills consist of rather than applying a preconceived standard for which skills choices and circumstances are “legitimately” professional or career-based. Of course, saying that we can apply this lens to their work is not equivalent to demonstrating that we should. What do we gain by seeing these poor survival sex workers through a lens of agency and career-based work? This approach offers two key advantages. First, it allows us to complicate previous boundaries drawn around male survival sex work in a way that better captures the nuance and variation of the men’s lived experiences. Second, it allows us to address the problem posed by the empowerment/exploitation dilemma in the context of their complicated circumstances.

These men do not represent all survival sex workers. However, their perception of their sex work should make us cautious about assuming that what fits for a population in one particular time and place will apply elsewhere. It should also encourage us to remain vigilant about paying attention to how sex workers themselves define their circumstances. For these respondents, the distinction between where and how often they participated in sex work or whether or not they themselves identified as straight or gay were not important factors in defining their work. Comparing sex work based on longevity and participant characteristics may continue to offer researchers useful insights, but we should not assume that these categorizations are particularly meaningful to sex workers themselves.

Further, with this epistemological commitment in mind, applying an agentic career-based lens to these men’s work can actually help reconcile the tension between the importance of autonomy/empowerment and exploitation. Working in the “career” of sex work in their context does not require that they only experience free choice and contentment in their work. Indeed, it would be quite rare to find an individual employed in any occupation or profession who could say as much! For these men, seeking choices and exercising control was something they were able to do despite their circumstances. The exploitation they described was primarily external to their sex work or due to the confining circumstances of their health issues. Yet, they described finding agency, resilience and even pride in those same circumstances. Sex work itself was both a product of poverty and addiction and a way to make the best of a bad situation—allowing men to govern their own work circumstances and exercise some control and choice in the midst of limiting factors. I do not wish to downplay the many hardships these men described in their lives. In order to accept both the reality of the forces that constrain them and to recognize them as agentic actors despite these constraints, I argue we accept the men’s own conception of sex work as a hustle: simultaneously “running around in madness,” “what they had to do to survive” and also a “9–5.”

Future work should continue to interrogate how complex and sometimes opposing definitions and circumstances manifest in the lives of male survival sex workers and impoverished sex workers in general. The three simultaneous narratives about sex work I discovered simply arose organically as men described their work and health challenges in interview and focus group settings. Further work could seek to understand how these narratives work in praxis and interrogate whether other groups of impoverished sex workers develop similar or unique understandings of their own particular work.

For these men, sex work, or “hustling,” requires an opportunistic and entrepreneurial approach to surviving difficult circumstances. If we incorporate sex work as a hustle into our pantheon of career-based sex work, we can shift the emphasis from primarily defining male sex work based on sexual orientation, geography, and longevity—typologies that may shift over time and place or have little meaning to sex workers themselves. Instead, just as more privileged sex workers, we can frame them as people attempting to exercise skill and control in the midst of constraints. The fact that these constraints are more severe for them compared to many others does not preclude them from understanding and defining themselves in a professional sense. Their participation in sex work as a career is not defined by institution/legal constraints, or the approval or framing of outsiders. Rather, they define for themselves and understand the work of a “true” hustler as a survivalist and entrepreneur who defies current professional/empowered and amateur/disadvantaged categorizations.