Originally shot as Melrose Boys for Flamboyant Magazine in May 2010

Photos: LORENZO MARCUCCI

Styling: RICCARDO SLAVIK

Models: THEO HALL & MATEUS ROSA

The sexy, careless style of sex workers, shorts and sweaters, skin, is IN. Holes and puffer jackets, a semi improvised styling where a lack of clothes meets the eternal fascination with the 80s and 90s Los Angeles porn and hustler scene as immortalized by Bruce laBruce’s seminal Hustler White movie, starring that icon of 90s sex-sleaze male model toy-boy allure, Tony Ward. Sometimes a lack of something can become a THEME, something practical turns into a style decision, into a MOOD. Improvisation and chance, something wrong, something missing, that’s Fashion too.

R.S.

dream boy by JUSTIN DUCHARME

“I transform for pay, the boy I become isthe boy who holds space in my dreams


bought, not
with knowing how to explain himself orapologizing for things he cannot control
bothered


cool, calm,
collected


the ideal rent this boy – at times his bones ache from the pressure



that is transforming people, while
transformed


he remembers this body is medicine, curingconfused white men who think I need them



more than they
how do you distinguish love from sex?
need me.


he asks, I
sex fills me up & love reminds me
it’s okay to be empty”

“BEHIND THE THIN shroud of smog, the California sun scorches coldly white. Hollywood Boulevard is crowded with tribes of outlaws—hustlers, sexhunters, queens.
Jim hugs each desiring glance on his shirtless body. Leaving the movie arcade earlier, he suddenly needed to sell his body.
“What’s happenin?”
The blond hustler stands outside the Gold Cup Coffee Shop.
“Not much-with you?”
“Making it, making it.”
The announcement of continuing survival.
Smiling, they separate. Ignoring a man who looks too much like a cop, Jim moves on to Selma.
”

The Sexual Outlaw
John Rechy

“He’d look at me and turn his bratty-boy face around like he was trying to feign ambivalence, eventhough he only had three looks on his face he could successfully pull off a really happy grin, like he’d just been fucked in the ass by an ice cream cone with sprinkles on top; a don’t-fuck-with-me look that simultaneously scared off and attracted scads of people; and a puffed-out-lip look in the middle of sex,
like this was the most mind-blowing experience he’d ever had. He did the last one too well and too often for it to be real I think he just created it for tricks, to make them think it was a really good blow job or something, and then his face just naturally made itself up that way during any sex. For a while, though, I thought it was just for me, cuz what we had was so special and all that shit, and it was one of the things that made me fall for him. But anyway, even if his face was kinda unformed and hardwired and could perform only three looks successfully, Derek still tried to show a range of emotions”

Champagne Tastes on a Crystal Budget

Gary Rosen

from
Tricks and Treats
edited by Matt Bernstein Sycamore

“The playwright, director and screenwriter Arthur Laurents recorded that when he first arrived in Los Angeles, Vidal had told him he’d love it there: the hustlers on Santa Monica Boulevard were only $15 before six o’clock, “and that’s when I like to have sex anyway.”

In Bed With Gore Vidal
Tim Teeman

meet me by mars? by JUSTIN DUCHARME
“$100 to suck you off”
meet me by mars?
“if you’re hot, sex work comes to you in concrete metropolitan cities”
meet me by mars?
the request is that I get naked immediately after the door locks
meet me by mars?
don’t comment on the apartment or the view
meet me by mars?
i say cash up front—he says dick first
where the fuck is mars?
if I had known he lived in the penthouse maybe i’d have asked for more

“Yes, on the streets I disguise my feelings, I play distant, tough, a role which attracts and alienates at the same time—as defensive, I suppose, as it is arrogant. I keep my two “selves” apart—the writer and the sexhunter; confusing when the boundaries meld. Like recently in Griffith Park when a man in the arena told me someone had written a book about me—called Numbers. A few days later he brought me a copy of my book, not knowing I had written it. He inscribed it: “To Johnny Rio—…” My character.”

The Sexual Outlaw
John Rechy

“Will there be anything else, sir?” I asked.
He nodded in the direction of the group. Speaking very softly and in a carefully honed American yet very British-sounding accent he asked, “That boy over there, he a friend of yours?”
“Which one?” I responded.
“The tall one, the blonde,” he replied.
I looked over at my pals.
“How old is he?” he asked.
I began to suspect where all this was going. I told him that the guy was twenty and asked him whether he would like to meet him. He nodded as he handed me the money for the gas, not taking his eyes off my friend. Then I went over to the group and pulled my buddy aside, walking him over to an area where no one could see or hear us.
“Want to earn some cash tonight, pal?” I asked.
“Sure thing,” he said. “How?”
I wandered back over to the car. The driver was clearly anxious to hear what I had to say and seemed a little nervous.
“He’ll go with you,” I said. “But it’s going to cost you twenty bucks.”
The man said nothing. He immediately pulled out his wallet again and started counting out some bills.
“Oh, no, sir,” I said. “Not for me. For him. You can pay him later.”
He looked at me and nodded. I went back to my blonde friend. I told him to get into the car with the guy, go with him, and do whatever he wanted.”

Full Service
Scotty Bowers

“There is really no difference between memory and sight, fantasy and actual vision. Vision is made of subtle fragmented movements of the eye. These fragmented pieces of the world are turned and pressed into memory before they can register in the brain. Fantasized images are actually made up of millions of disjointed observations collected and collated into the forms and textures of thought. ”

Close to the Knives
David Wojnarowicz