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B. Ruby Rich (2004) in her canonical essay, “New Queer Cinema,” participate in a significant discourse that has worked to question historical understandings of the male sex worker in a way that marks a drastic shift from the films of the 1960s, 1970s, and 1980s.

     
    FIGURE 3.1
    American Gigolo presented one of the first widely accessible images in American cinema of a male prostitute who serves women. The main character nearly turns to homosexual sex, but only when his circumstances become dire. Reproduced with permission from Paramount Pictures.
     

     
    FIGURE 3.2
    The Living End , which follows the road-trip adventure of a spontaneously violent, macho, and newly diagnosed HIV-positive hustler and his lover, is described as a film of “almost unbearable intimacy.” Reproduced with permission from Strand Releasing.
     
    To a certain extent, the male hustler was a character type in cinema decades before Midnight Cowboy , but not in the way the term has come to be defined. “Hustler” currently applies most often to men who “[engage] in homosexual behavior” for pay (Steward, 1991, p. xi). However, if we understand the term “hustler” as someone who hustles and is “looking for something, and who sooner or later finds himself pretending to be something he isn’t, or thinks he isn’t, or wishes he were, or doesn’t realize he wishes he were” (Lang, 2002, p. 249), we raise the possibility that a hustler may be hustling for any number of things—clothes, a place to stay, or money, for example—and may exchange other services, like time or company, without explicitly selling sex. In this way, characters who may, for all intents and purposes, be gigolos could be passed off in code-era Hollywood as “kept men.” The hustler as a kept man applies to any number of characters from 1940s-1950s Hollywood, such as Joe Gillis (played by William Holden) in Billy Wilder’s Sunset Boulevard (1950) or Jerry Mulligan (Gene Kelly) in Vincente Minnelli’s An American in Paris (1951).
    Sunset Boulevard provides a particularly interesting example because it toys rather explicitly with the content restrictions of the Motion Picture Production Code. On the surface, Sunset Boulevard figures Joe as a kept man who—in Ed Sikov’s (1998) words—“survives by smoothly humoring his patron” (p. 297) by writing for her, dancing with her, and living in her home. Even though the film never shows a sex act between its characters, the implicit notion that Joe also has sex with his benefactress is made relatively clear, as various commentators have noted. Sikov, for example, explains that Joe survives “first by writing a part for [Norma] in a movie that will never be made, and then by making love to her” (p. 297). Joe explains his relationship with Norma Desmond (Gloria Swanson) to his young love interest, Betty Schaefer (Nancy Olson), by saying, “It’s lonely here, so she got herself a companion. A very simple set-up: an older woman who is well to do, a younger man who is not doing too well. Can you figure it out yourself?” Even though the ban on the topic of prostitution was lifted from studio pictures in 1956 (Pennington, 2007, p. 110), Sunset Boulevard could never have made explicit any sexual relationship between Norma and Joe, since on-screen sex was still unacceptable under the code. Instead, the film asks the viewer to connect the dots, essentially posing the same question to the audience that Joe asks Betty: “Can you figure it out yourself?”
    Tennessee Williams’s The Roman Spring of Mrs. Stone (Quintero, 1961) and Sweet Bird of Youth (Brooks, 1962) posed interesting complications relative to the code’s strict guidelines for Hollywood films. Both Mrs. Stone and Sweet Bird feature characters who, with only a small a mount of interpretive license, are gigolos satisfying older women in order to make a living. Sweet Bird of Youth , much like Sunset Boulevard , follows a young man, Chance (Paul Newman), who is