Men Selling Sex to Men: Representations, identities, and experiences in contemporary London

This study seeks to record and document the voices, experiences and representations of men
who sell sex to men in London through advertising in queer media. It examines the diverse
experiences and representations of men who sell sex to men and the roles they have in coconstructing
the meanings of queer, male, and sexual identities and practices. It explores data
triangulated from a queer ethnography of London’s queer scenes, including: semi-structured
interviews with key informants (n=20), samples of escort and masseur advertisements
collected from print media, data from social networking websites aimed at gay men, and field
notes from collecting data within London’s queer scenes. Eighteen of the interview
participants are gay or bisexual men who have used advertising to sell sex to other men in
London themselves. The study finds that classified advertising can be used as a canon of texts
to explore socially constructed records of sexual and economic stories. It details how men
have used promotion strategies and technologies to sell sex to other men in London from the
early 1990s to the present and how those media have evolved in that time. It suggest ways
that sex in this queer, commercial scene is often comparable to more explicit forms of
commercial sex transactions. In turn, shifts are illustrated in how sex work is defined here,
including ways that the socio-economic, embodied, performative priorities of queer men are
interrelated with their geographic and temporal contexts. The study examines ways that
typological models can be limiting to how sex work is understood and proposes an (inter-)
relational model grounded in the data from men who have sold sex, semiotic structures of
analysis, and queer theory. Finally, it argues that these frameworks usefully operationalise
structures of subjectivity in empirical research of human and social sciences.