100 books like Male Sex Work and Society

This is the book that revolutionized the way social scientists think about sex work.

We know that sex work is gendered (more women work as sex workers than men) and at the same time women have made significant gains in the formal labor market. This book sought to answer the question of why sex work continued to be so prominent even though “outside options” were growing for women. 

Sex work integrated itself into the industrial system. Modern sex work has adapted to changing business practices and technology. Why? Because there is still a strong demand for the provision of intimate services and human sexual connection.  

This is the first book I read about sex tourism, which is a growing part of the market for sex work in developing countries. 

This book focuses on the men who provide services to men who are travelling to the Dominican Republic to engage with sex workers. Most of the men in this book identify as “straight” and have to navigate their personal identity and relationships while earning a living providing this service to other men.

I also really like the way this book discusses the health risks and how sex workers use various strategies to minimize the risk to themselves and their partners in an occupation that places them in the cross-hairs of an international market for sex tourism.

In my own work on male sex workers in the US, I found that race played a key role in the market—determining prices and popularity, for example. 

While sex tourism can also play on race and ethnicity and their sexual stereotypes, most countries do not have the American system of race. This book was the one that showed me how male sex workers in another country with racial dynamics similar to those in the US. 

But the biggest takeaway from this detailed ethnography is that sex work is work but also acting—sex workers are providing a service that requires them to play specific roles with their clients, and many times these roles are based on sexual/racial tropes.

Playing into racial stereotypes is one-way sex workers remain in the business.

If you want to know how economists think about sex work (which is, after all, a market transaction) this is the book to go to. 

This is a collected volume, but if you were interested in how economists do work on sex work and what the major findings have been in the process, you would want to read this book.

There are technical issues covered here in terms of data, how research on sex work is different in developed versus developing countries, and the online market for sex work. 

It also contains a great discussion of the public health issues involved and what we know about sex work and its relationship to STIs.  

This novel weaves three unique stories told by three very distinctive gay men who live in London at completely different periods of time. What unites them? Internalised homophobia, something as a gay person I remember from a long time ago. Each character yearns for someone. Each in a distinct way. Rent boy, Jack, longs for his regular client, Oscar Wilde. Lonely artist Colin desires the model he paints while staying closeted in the 1950s. And David’s desire lands him in prison in the 1980s.

Each story travels at the same pace with each character reflecting similar highs and lows. And you don’t have to be gay to identify with this well-written novel.

The search for the self is an act of self-indulgence and that search and that act is on full display in this 60s gay classic. I adore Rechy’s prose, it’s just so different and beautiful, and although this is an old story, much of its loveliness and loneliness and promiscuity has never changed. I read City of Night and reread it for the tender, cracked characters who keep looking so patiently into every dark corner. 

Visiting London at its most coal-caked and financially stratified, The Affair of the Porcelain Dog was Holmes-like in its execution, and pulled me into its mystery from the opening so steeped in the time and place and culture, and then never let go. Ira Adler is so charming a character that even when he was being selfish or spoiled I was smitten. An orphan, street thief, pickpocket, and former rent boy now living in luxury at the beck and call of a crime lord, Ira ends up tasked to recover the titular “dog” statue, which contains a secret that could ruin everything, and bring Ira's comfortable new life to an end. Philip Battley’s narration was so completely immersive, and had me there with Ira, hoping he’d somehow pull it off.

No other book captures the darkness at the dawn of the Thatcher decade with such verisimilitude as David Peace's conjuring of its premier bogeyman, the Yorkshire Ripper, in the third of his Red Riding Quartet.

Perhaps that's because the author used his Goth record collection to transport him back to the places where these crimes were committed, at the time of his West Yorkshire youth. Songs like Siouxsie and the Banshees' 'Night Shift' and The Sisters of Mercy's 'Fix' summon back that fearful terrain, where 'cow' was a term of endearment for a woman and the use of hammers to the head a familiar sign of domestic abuse.

Detectives are revealed to be as deadly as their quarry, priests give benediction with nine-inch-nails and stone angels turn their heads away.

I was a freshman in college and still closeted about my homosexuality when I found Numbers in an LGBTQ+ bookstore. The description on the dust jacket got my blood racing: in an effort to reclaim his youth, a handsome gay man strikes out to see how many sexual conquests he can rack up during a ten-day stay in L.A. I bought the book and read it in my dorm room when my roommate wasn’t around.

I got more than I bargained for. Along with descriptions of sexual encounters, the novel opened my eyes to the ramifications of internalized homophobia and explored the value of sex among an oppressed people who are persecuted for their carnal desires. This novel written in 1967 spoke to me across the decades. It still can.

Stephen Crane is most famous for his 1893 novel, Maggie: A Girl of the Streets, but it is his lost companion novel, about a male sex worker in late nineteenth-century New York, which is the focus of Edmund White’s Hotel de Dream. White moves between a frame story about Crane’s last days with his “wife” Cora and the story of Elliott, the supposed inspiration for the manuscript. I’m a New Yorker by choice so love reading books set in the city and I very much enjoyed this gritty portrayal of love and sex between men in the past. Crane isn’t the only writer who makes an appearance here—there’s a cameo from Henry James too!