Mark - not his real name - has just turned 17 and has been working as a rent boy for about seven months.
Table of contents
An examination of the lives, needs, troubles and hopes of prostitutes in Thailand, Bangladesh and Mexico.
You meet all sorts in this line of work
A romance between a soldier and a country boy, wrapped around a Thai folk-tale involving a shaman with shape-shifting abilities. Claude and Ellen are best friends who live in a not-so-nice area of New York. They're involved in the subculture of 90s youth, complete with drugs, live music, and homophobia. Although the film features different people, it focuses on the lives and loves of a few key men. They have been chosen to reflect the immense diversity of the boys of the Santa Monica Strip. The pieces are slickly grouped to cover certain themes; such as their first john, gay for pay, homelessness, drugs or the reason that they began to work as a rent boy.
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It also explores the variety of insiders' opinion on subjects such as; how a rent boy should dress, speak, act, think, give head, receive head, increase cash flow, keep safe, walk, eat, smoke, and flirt. Over the course of two years, producers and directors Fenton Bailey and Randy Barbato interviewed one hundred two male prostitutes who worked in West Hollywood, exploring their backgrounds, private lives, and attitudes toward their work and paying each fifty dollars for their time.
It was and remains extremely controversial.
Confessions of a rent boy
The explotational edge is apparent in the title itself, which implies a certain sexiness; in that interviews are conducted in various hotel rooms which might be used by prostitutes and clients; in that the filmmakers have no qualm in encouraging their subjects to drape suggestively across bed; in that the filmmakers pay their subjects and very deliberately photograph the subjects accepting the money.
By doing so, Bailey and Barbato essentially make both themselves and the viewer complicit in an act of prostitution. The irony is that in most instances the act of prostitution is not so much physical--nor can it be; we are distanced by film--than it is both spiritual and psychological. We are not paying for physical touch but for the right to invade the mind of the subjects in ways they would not normally give a client. The result is often unsettling, to say the least, particularly when one considers that Bailey and Barbato apparently have no problem in engaging in it.
No less so are the various subjects.
The majority of the men involved are essentially street hustlers who have been recruited from Santa Monica Boulevard, men who range in age from their early twenties to late thirties; some are remarkably handsome; some are distinctly haggard. They tend to share backgrounds of physical abuse as children and current drug abuse. Even so, they are remarkably diverse and often very articulate and occasionally unexpectedly clear-eyed about their profession and the toll it takes on their lives.
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A handful are clearly upscale in nature, far removed from the streets; these tend to regard their work as less a matter of a life style into which they drifted than as a business they often enjoy. Now and then certain individuals pop with their extremes.
Perhaps the most disturbing is a man who enjoys physical pain, almost casually putting out a cigarette on his chest and later and quite shockingly putting out a cigarette on another part of his body in demonstration of his thought that "pain is good. In many respects the men are indeed what you might expect, but in each instance they show, perhaps unintentionally, their humanity.
They are indeed considerably more than the flesh and bone rented for a few hours by their customers. There are different types of rent boy. Some are very young, slim and smooth.
They are called twinks. I see men of all different ages and backgrounds. I meet lawyers, businessmen, all sorts. I see a few politicians, too — from the House of Lords and the House of Commons. One has a nice car and he collects me, then drives me back to his flat. He has a house outside London but he uses the place in London for dangerous liaisons. I watch Question Time and the news. I met one member of the House of Lords, a man who used to be married many years ago. Before he was ennobled he was MP for one of the poshest London constituencies.
He told me he was in the closet then. He was married and had a son.
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Now he is a grand-father and open about his sexuality. He was more into wrestling. Lots of my clients are far less nervous of Aids, and want unprotected sex. Those who do say yes are either HIV positive or-desperate for the money — often because they are on drugs. I am gay and Muslim and I was an-asylum seeker in this country.
I came here because some of my gay friends were killed back home. While the two previous films covered different topics, the cinematography and general style is the same as in Rent Boys. The interviewees discuss a variety of aspects about the U. Self-identity and sexual orientation come up, with several of the men being " gay for pay ".
Personal life challenges such as substance abuse and periods of homelessness are talked about as well. Each hustler has a large card that describes the number with which he got assigned during the film-making. Additional examples of subjects broached include a Latino rent boy being a former gang member , a performance artist in heavily fetishist regalia operating in the BDSM scene , and a prostitute who is transsexual. While the outfits worn and states of dress vary from person to person, nudity briefly occurring, the film itself contains no sexual activity. Variety ran a mixed review by film critic Dennis Harvey, who argued that the men interviewed "are there more to be tallied than truly fathomed.