GoingRogue. We’ve been traveling on my bike town-to-town, and we’ve been busy as all hell. I take Andrew with me because he was once a major whore. He raked it in.

But drug dealing is more money.

Like I care. As if. 

Andrew projects the tone of authenticity. He can look the boys we deal with right in the eye. I’m different. For one thing, I think sex work is a system that makes it okay for rich men to exploit poor boys – who are by virtue of their caste – required to face hunger, poverty, severe depression, no health care, abuse, discrimination at public health, sexual abuse and humiliation at public health, and no legal way to obtain meds (which is about parental permissions where there is no parent involved with the kid in any way whatsoever and a duplicitous set up to be put into a jail system hypocritically called detention which is where most boys who get raped get raped), and I have not been silent about what are atrocities that are enabled by supposedly decent, whatever the fuck that means, middle-class, bourgeois homo sapiens who are about as deep as an emotional and intellectual vacuum).

Fuck me.

We have been doing sexual workshops for young boys who do sex work. I do NOT know how this works, but I stand amazed at the lack of understanding that covid and HIV will absolutely kill them, and it isn’t pretty.

The question asserts itself: How Are You Going To Survive.

I get a lot of shrugs. It cums down to food, shelter, bonding with one another, the law whatever the law is in their various locations, mental health where so many of them live at the eternal edges of suicide. Parents who track them down to punish and abuse them and to keep them quiet.

I have never met a young male sex worker who has not been visciously abused.

To be hunted down like animals and abused for being abused.

They get guns and they put those guns in their mouths and bite it. They hang themselves. They cut their wrists vertically. They overdose. They are alone. They are hungry. They do not set the stage for fucking around. The trick does that. They are afraid. They are hard. They can be mean. They do not believe in anything. They do not read because they have never been taught to read. They pushed education away because they fail and they fail and they fail.

I am not a safety net. Living with them can be rock solid hard. There are so many rabbit holes they are adept at falling down.

They are frequently addicted.

I give them facts. The rest is up to them.

And don’t come to our workshops without a mask.

“Yes, but what if they won’t fuck me and pay me if I don’t take off the mask because they want to see my face while they slap me around. I want to wear a mask but they won’t let let me.”

Time to find another trick to trick with, kid.

I know one dude who writes with magic marker on his mask: The Mask Stays On.

“Sometimes they want you to put your tongue in the trick’s mouth.”

“Why would you do that.”

“They will pay you more.”

They Will Pay You More pretty much defines their existence.

They talk to Andrew about money. How to get the trick to pay up before the sex. Tricks will knock you around because their own rage permits it. “I carried a gun,” Andrew tells them. “Drug dealing is less dangerous.”

Exactly what other skills do they have.

I take a count. “How many of you have been raped. Location is irrelevant. Small towns. Big towns. Farm towns. The middle of nowhere.

This is America. No one gets validated in sex work. Crawling, begging through the gates of beautiful as chilren no matter what these boys call themselves. They hurt. And they deserve better.

I think we will continue doing these workshops. They do give these boys a lot of information. Even if the stallions in the barn make a lot of noise. It’s not about the barn. It’s not about the community making noise. It’s not about religion (we are allowed to do our workshops in certain church basements). It’s not about the eteral abuse. It’s not about public health. It’s about validating (my new word of the day) children who are hanging on by their wretched fingernails.