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Prostitution , published by the Eugenics Publishing Company in 1939, William Sanger (a medical doctor from New York) discusses male prostttution in only one short paragraph. Sanger writes:
    This hasty classification of the Roman prostitutes would be incomplete without some notice, however brief, of male prostitutes. Fortunately, the progress of good morals has divested this repulsive theme of its importance; the object of this work can be obtained without entering into details on a branch of the subject which in this country is not likely to require fresh legislative notice. But the reader would form an imperfect idea of the state of morals at Rome were he left in ignorance of the fact that the number of male prostitutes was probably fully as large as that of females. (p. 70)
     
    This near negation of the mere existence of the male sex worker is a stream that runs through many writings on and histories of prostitution that appeared during the early 20th century in the United States. 1 In Sanger’s work, male prostitution, understood to be a “repulsive” act that is fundamentally linked to the Greeks and Romans, is said to have been eradicated by society’s “good” morals.
    Occasionally, an author such as George Scott (1936), in his History of Prostitution from Antiquity to the Present Day , discusses male prostitution at some level of historical depth (although even this “depth” is still only 11 pages of a 231-page book). 2 Scott’s history, published two years before Sanger’s, chronicles the male prostitute’s role in society via biblical writings and thus is also highly influenced by a moral hierarchy, in that, for Scott, the bulk of male prostitution is fundamentally linked to homosexuality and savagery. Unlike many of his contemporaries, however, Scott repeatedly attempts to qualify and nuance his discussion of male prostitution in relation to male homosexuality, breaking down the demand for male prostitutes into subcategories. 3 In much the same way Sanger discusses male prostitution as something that must be named but is relatively unimportant, Scott brings in a discussion of the gigolo, a male prostitute who is not a homosexual and whose sex acts, therefore, hold “no criminality … and no perverse practices” (p. 186). Scott’s discussion of the gigolo, who has sex exclusively with “sex-starved women” (p. 187) for pay, is simply a note in passing; he is a prostitute, yes, but only by definition, and he is certainly not characterized by “perversion,” as is the homosexual male prostitute.
    Two things become strikingly apparent from these early histories of prostitution: (1) that male sex workers have been severely under-discussed in histories of prostitution; and (2) when male sex workers are written about historically, the “problem” of male sex work is fundamentally linked to the “problem” of homosexuality. These two elements are crucial to understanding the dominant representations of the male sex worker in American cinema before the emergence of the New Queer Cinema movement in the early 1990s.
    Male Hustlers in Cinema
     
    While films such as Midnight Cowboy (Schlesinger, 1969) and American Gigolo (Schrader, 1980) presented some of the first widely accessible images of the male prostitute in American cinema, 4 the characters of these films fall exclusively within the realm of the gigolo. These gigolos openly acknowledge and embrace the idea that homosexual male prostitution is abject in a fundamentally different way than heterosexual male prostitution, capitulating to homosexual sex only when their circumstances become dire.
    New Queer Cinema, informed by the AIDS crisis and the U.S. government’s poor response to it in the late 1980s, provided films that presented new ways of seeing gay characters—including the male sex worker. Two films in particular, The Living End (Araki, 1992) and My Own Private Idaho (Van Sant 1991), both deemed a part of the New Queer Cinema movement by