Rent Boys: The World of Male Sex Workers

Ian C. Nelson, Librarian Emeritus, former Assistant Director of
Libraries (University of Saskatchewan) and dramaturge (Festival de la
Dramaturgie des Prairies).

Michel Dorais (Don’t Tell: The Sexual Abuse of Boys and Dead Boys
Can’t Dance: Sexual Orientation, Masculinity, and Suicide) is a
professor of social work at the Université Laval.

While the specific research for Rent Boys originated with a Health
Canada grant to elucidate the strategies of young sex workers in the
face of HIV, it nevertheless follows on work that Dorais and Denis
Ménard initiated some 15 years earlier, which resulted in the
publication of Les enfants de la prostitution in 2003. To this English
version of that book, Dorais has added a 10-page afterword in which he
discusses the diversity of the current demand for sexual services. He
also distinguishes the individual “entrepreneurship” of the adult
male sex trade (catering to both men and women) from female- and
child-prostitution rings, and he gives more precise expression to his
ideas about the need for social tolerance and decriminalization in the
adult sector.

The study is built on observation and rigorous analysis of the accounts
of a group of 40 volunteer respondents, and its success appears to be
owed to the open-ended questions asked and the particular attentiveness
of the research team to the divulged narratives. Dorais notes at the
outset that of those 40, “seventeen described themselves as
homosexual, thirteen heterosexual, and ten more or less as bisexual,”
thus dispelling at least one stereotype. Of particular note is his
discernment of a hierarchy of sex work, from street hustling through
stripping to higher-on-the-scale escorting. These are juxtaposed with
four life patterns he identifies—outcasts (where prostitution and drug
addiction are conjoined), part-timers (an occasional means for making
money), insiders (whose “family” is within the world of
prostitution), and liberationists (who self-actualize through their
sex-work activities)—each with concomitant imperatives and control
issues. These clear paradigms carry major implications regarding an
individual’s self-esteem, emotional accessibility, and susceptibility
to risk.

Rent Boys is a hard-hitting and compelling study that deserves to be on
all library shelves.