I don't want to give too much identifying information about myself, but I will say that for a long time I worked in California in a job that assisted drug addicts, homeless people, sex workers, impoverished people, etc, helping them to get their life back together. Like I said, I don't want to get into too much detail. In this job, I met a lot of sex workers, both male and female, and I will tell you about some of the male sex workers. Yes, some of them were indeed gay, but more often they were straight. (About 35% gay 65% straight) many of them were either homeless or couch surfing, most of them were below 25, and a big chunk of them were "18-19" and I put that in quotes because I believe an equal amount were underage claiming to be 18-19. And others were older but claiming to be 18-19 because that's what the customers like. At least 80% of them were on drugs, as bad as heroin and meth, not so much cocaine, they all used pot. A lot of them, the minute they made money they ran to their dealers to score.

Many of these homeless youth had been approached by predatory men who offered them money to film videos. One kid got gang-raped on camera and didn't get any money afterwards. Another kid was luckier, he got to shoot some fetish videos where he was naked except for some combat boots and he had to jerk off onto the boots. He got paid $500 cash. Another kid got paid $250 for some guy to piss in his face and mouth. These were all straight guys. All addicted to heroin. They were told the videos would not be shown in America, but in Japan/Europe. One of them was super-proud of this and kept joking that he was a famous pornstar in Japan. He was in so much internal pain that he had to choose to laugh about it instead of crying. I have dozens of stories like this.

There was an area in the place where I worked called "the fruit loop" which is where these kids found customers. The straight boys usually just did blowjobs, to get just enough money to buy themselves pizza and drugs, the gay boys were the ones more likely to go all the way. The gay boys always seemed more angrier than the straight boys to me and less likely to be on heroin/meth. A lot of them had the "I ran away from home because my family is homophobic" story. Like really, they all had the same story, all their stories would blend together like they were the same person.

One gay boy found himself a "sugar mama" this (very unattractive, according to him) middle aged woman took him home, gave him a shower, clean clothes, food, with the expectation that he would get in her bed and sexually pleasure him afterwards, and they had this disgusting arrangement. This gay boy had to eat this nasty woman out every night if he wanted a safe clean home to live in.

I have hundreds of stories like this. When you're hungry and desperate and addicted and nowhere to go, sex work isn't work, it's survival. And it's not sexy, romantic, or empowering. It's slavery.

If it was a perfect world where people had money and a safe place to live and no addictions and sex work was just an option and they could pick and choose their customers, then fine. But this is not what I saw. I did meet many women sex workers who tried to act like this is how it was for them "high class call girls" but sooner or later once they trusted me more they started venting about how creepy and disgusting their clients were. One girl broke down in my office crying about how this rich businessman bit her breast (it was bruised with teeth marks) and then just kept holding her down and spitting in her face over and over again. This is not okay. I can't even tell you how many of these women got raped during their "work." It's not safe.