Recently, David Henry Sterry (editor of Hos, Hookers, Call Girls, and Rent Boys) was interviewed by the editors of Lolita Mag; here’s an excerpt of the article.
“…And so, for the following school year, David Henry Sterry worked as a ‘chicken’, a teenage prostitute who was hired out to rich Los Angeles women for $100 plus an hour. His experience at the hands of the steak guy compelled him to insist he have sex only with women, and unlike most gigolos, he was young and good-looking enough to satisfy his pimps on this basis (although towards the end of his career; he did take the occasional ‘non-sex’ job with men, usually freaky types who wanted him to beat them up). Armed with a pager supplied by his ‘employment counsellor’, he punctuated lectures, sports and college dating with agency ‘tricks’, servicing some of the wealthiest women in California. Ironically, almost thirty years later, Los Angeles seems set to make Sterry rich again, with solicitations this time coming from Hollywood’s other big money trade. Now in his early forties, Sterry has written a memoir of his year in the sex business – Chicken: Love For Sale On The Streets Of Hollywood – and film studios are battling for the rights to his story. Published this month by Canongate in the UK, Chicken is a funny, illuminating and disturbing record of the high-rent lifestyle, a tale which belies society’s often one-dimensional attitude towards male prostitution. Its greatest strength is in showing how Sterry’s attitude to his career was (and is) painfully ambiguous – sometimes he thought he was the luckiest 17-year-old in the world, getting paid to have sex with older women, while at others he sensed he was nothing more than a shamefully exploited teenager. More often than not, he was both at the same time…
What kind of things did your clients require from you?
About half the women wanted very specific, fetishistic things. One wanted me to crawl under the covers and service her orally while she never made a sound or moved a muscle – it was like she wanted to reproduce something that had happened in her early life. And then the other half didn’t even seem to want sex – they wanted to talk about their miserable husbands and terrible kids. Most times they wanted me naked, and I think that says a lot about the power dynamic between the sexes in our culture – they wanted to pay a boy to take his clothes off while they remained fully dressed. These were all rich, powerful women who lived in mansions and drove huge automobiles, but they still felt powerless in life and sexually dominated by men. So they wanted to order someone around.
Were they mostly ‘frustrated middle-aged’ types?
I’d guess the youngest was about 30, and then I did have a grandma who’d never had anyone go down on her in eighty years! Someone gave me to her as a present. Everyone always says that must have been gross, but actually I felt honoured, and she was such a sweet, lovely person.
Were you ever unable to get it up for a client?
I always managed to perform, though I can’t say my heart was always in it. But then you’re not paid for your heart, you’re paid for your body. There were many times when I faltered and drooped, but I had this mechanism where I would activate this voice in my head that I called the ‘loverstudguy’. It was like one of those cheesy, corny soundtracks to bad porno with this voice going: (adopts Barry White style growl) ‘Ooh, yeah, baby, you love it, don’t you baby’. That’d make me feel like this sexy guy who could perform.
What did the job teach you about female sexuality?
I was once hired by a hippy chick who taught me how to do tantric sex (one of the greatest jobs I ever had in my life!), and she gave me such a valuable lesson. She said, ‘If you can make a woman’s pleasure your top priority and figure out what makes the woman in front of you happy sexually, then that woman will do anything for you’. They’re just so fucking grateful, because they get so little of it in life. After that, they’re like: ‘You want me to put on the Scuba outfit? Well, OK, honey.’…”
To read the full interview, you can visit the Lolita Mags Website (please be warned, there are numerous explicit ads and graphics, so don’t click from work!).
