Behind the Story: On the Block

The anthology, Hoboes, Hustlers, and Outlaws: Bad Boys and Macho Men is shipping! My newest novella, On the Block, appears within its pages. It’s a story set in 1979 about a twenty-one-year-old named Nicky, a street hustler from the armpit of Virginia, who’s trying to make a better life for himself, one trick at a time.

Today, I’d like to share a little about the story’s background.

My early sexuality blossomed in the nineteen-seventies in the little Southern city of Richmond, Virginia. It was a decade in which gay sex was still a criminal act. Being detected or caught destroyed families, careers, and lives. Even casting a stray, longing glance in the direction of an undercover cop could land a man in jail and his name in the newspapers.

The effects of Stonewall had not yet reached the South. My progressive parents had a number of friends who definitely were not straight, though no one would discuss or admit it. The confirmed bachelors who lived together in houses full of fussy antiques? Gay. The fashionable aging single men who ‘hadn’t yet settled down’ but would arrive to my folks’ dinner parties bearing a straw-wrapped bottle of red in one hand and in the other, several Blossom Dearie LPs? Incredibly gay. The burly female historian who shared an apartment and a pair of bulldogs with her ‘girl friend,’ who later sold me her gently-used Malibu as my first car? So gay. None of them identified as queer. They would have gone to their graves denying it.

Many did.

It was a decade in which men looking for sex with other men found themselves pushed to the margins; they were forced to seek each other in bars run by an unlawful element, or in parks closed after dark, or along dangerous city streets at night, where nice, normal people dared not venture. In these forbidden spaces, we all were outlaws. We consorted with other outlaws—criminals that the public viewed as menaces to society. If in these spaces we were arrested, or victimized, or beaten, or killed—well, criminals deserved what they got. Right?

Cruising these spaces was always dangerous. We always had to keep an eye and ear out for the approach of an outsider, or the gleam of a cop car in the distance. In the dark, more seasoned outlaws developed an almost supernatural ability to sense the the onset of trouble long before it arrived, so that we could warn our brothers and scamper to safety. It wasn’t an environment for the weak, the stupid, or the slow. Though we looked out for each other when and while we could, once those lights flashed and the sirens started to blare, it was every man for himself.

Most of those old cruising spots of mine still exist, forty-five years later. Open up Sniffies and you’ll see that Bryan Park is still one of Richmond’s most popular hookup spots, though its roads have been reconfigured and entryways changed since the days I would visit by dark. The walks by the James River where I accepted cash for quick trysts along the riverbanks—still active. Cruisers still haunt the shadier, more forested areas of both Maymont and Byrd Parks, where I used to wander provocatively after nightfall.

Despite an abundance of gay bars that certainly weren’t around during my teens and early twenties, despite the apps and the relative openness with which queer people circulate in my old hometown, men still hit up the traditional spots in the hope of finding random dick.

All the spots but one, that is: what used to be known as The Block. It’s the only of my old cruising locations that has its own Wikipedia page. It’s also the setting for my latest anthology story, On the Block, which you can order now at the link below.

The Block survived for forty years before me as a sometimes-migrating small section of Richmond’s downtown area known for male sex workers. In the late seventies, The Block had expanded. It started at the corner of the city’s then brand spanking new public library, two blocks west down Franklin Street to the YMCA, a block south to Main Street, then two blocks east back to the library. By day, the neighborhood was just a number of run-down, anonymous townhouses in an area of the city no one really visited.

After dark, though, the street transformed into the tiniest of gay villages. A handful of queer men rented rooms in the townhouses. Home from work, they’d open their windows and loudly blast disco hits on their turntables. Some hung cheerful holiday lights around their windows, or draped table lamps with scarves and fabric to bring color both to their habitats and to the street below. Men would perch their asses on the townhouse steps, both cruising and socializing in equal measure.

Then there were the hustlers. Summer nights, they’d prowl the streets in scores. Dozens of the most hardcore—or perhaps the hardest-pressed—would still turn out during the city’s mild winters. Down Franklin they would walk, then over to Main and back to the library, treading a rectangular circuit that all the while faced the streams of one-way traffic on those two streets. Every driver was a potential customer.

Who were these men behind the wheel? Mostly white guys from the wealthy West End of town or from out in the county. Some drove in from as far away as Ashland or Fredericksburg. Most sported wedding rings; many were professionals—lawyers, businessmen, physicians—with a little extra money to burn. Some would visit only every few months, when the itch for same-sex contact grew too unbearable. Others were such frequent and enthusiastic patrons that the hustlers would wave at their vehicles and shout their names, as if Norm walked into Cheers.

One of the more curious customs of The Block during my day is how the sex workers segregated themselves by skin color. White hustlers tended to walk the outer perimeter of the rectangle; Black men the inside. One could tell by which lane of the street a car drove what flavor a john, or customer, might prefer. The self-segregation didn’t extend to socializing. During the slower hours, men of both colors crossed over to laugh and joke, or to swap gossip and news about who’d moved on to a bigger city or who’d given up the business altogether, or who was out of commission for a couple of weeks after a visit to the free clinic. Once a pair of headlights pierced the dark, though, back they’d all scatter to their respective sides of the street.

I don’t recall the day I discovered The Block, but by around 1978, when I was fourteen, I was one of the white boys walking its circuits by cover of night. I’d tell my family after dinner I was heading to the downtown library with friends. If they assumed by the stack of books in my backpack that I’d be studying, well, that was my intent. I’d ditch the books in our back yard to be retrieved on my return, take the bus downtown from my leafy neighborhood, and walk The Block for a few hours until I arrived home by ten or ten-thirty with a pocketful of crumpled bills.

Hey, the library was always within sight, when I was stomping the pavement. And I did make new friends.

Afraid of attracting the wrong kind of attention at home, though, I never hit The Block more than once a week, and never stayed late. The action really picked up in the hours after midnight. Yet I was regular enough that I could expect to be greeted by guys from both sides of the street whenever I showed.

There was an essential difference between the other regulars and myself, though—and I’m not talking mere age. My teenaged sex work was an act of secret rebellion. I was the perfect little straight-A best little boy in the world who only took a stand for what he truly was in the city’s forbidden places, among my fellow outlaws. My family wasn’t wealthy and always seemed to be teetering on the brink of financial insecurity, god knows, but unlike every other man there, I didn’t have to support myself. For me, sex work wasn’t about making ends meet.

A lot of the men I knew during those years made their only money walking The Block. A few held down part-time or low-paying jobs during the day that The Block supplemented—there was one occasion when an older men from The Block’s inner circuit showed up as my substitute civics teacher, to our mutual surprise. Some sensed they were ill-suited to retail or office positions; hustling at night let them work when and how they pleased. Several talked big about earning just enough seed money to move on to a bigger city like D.C. or Philadelphia or NYC.

I don’t like generalizing about the sex workers I knew during that period of my life. Regardless of why these men sought or resorted to sex work, I was a mere dilettante. At the end of the night, I had a family who loved me and a warm home I could return to. I didn’t owe any bills. My earnings didn’t pay for groceries.

While my last anthologized story, Sleazy A, was a semi-autobiographical mashup of men I knew during my college years, On the Block is purely fictional, save for its setting. I didn’t base the big blond lunk Nicky (in the story, the poor guy aches to be known as ‘Snake Eyes’) on anyone in particular. I did know a muscly hustler on the edge of forty who always seemed to walk The Block in a tee with the sleeves ripped off, the better to display his bulging biceps; his hair was an amateurish bleached blond and he would bum cigarettes off the other working boys and mumble about how he was destined for better things. Perhaps if Nicky remained on The Block for another twenty years after this story, that’s who he might’ve turned into. I like to think he truly made something of himself in the end, though.

On the Block examines what happens when a stranger inserts himself into The Block’s established ecosystem to push it off-balance. At no point in my youth did I ever run up against a magazine reporter trying to liven up his resume with a seedy expose of sex workers. Every time I exchanged sex for currency, however, I would have to confront the prejudices men held against working boys. Clients would assume I was trash, or dumb as a rock, or that I sucked dick for money because I’d run away, or dropped out of school, or because someone had coerced me into the life. Some johns had dreams of saving me; they’d condescendingly assure me I wasn’t like the other scum on the street and dream of a future in which they would leave their wives and families for a happily ever after with a teen boy.

Thankfully, I was a smart enough to kid to recognize the bullshit for what it was. I learned very quickly that these transactions were rarely as simple as they should have been. Outsiders—whether they’re clients, observers, or enforcers of law—tend to project all kinds of fictional narratives onto the men they hire. To the client, sex workers were rarely people in their own right. They were dimwits who required education, or victims who needed to be saved. They were lost souls to convert, or perverts and deviants to arrest. 

My experience with the men of The Block was pretty much the same as anywhere else I’ve been employed, though. There were certain individuals I was always glad to see and with whom I was friendly, and others I wish stayed in their offices or some other section of the street. Some talked off my ear; others kept to themselves. Some had grand ambitions of advancement or even fame. Most, however, just wanted to get through their work, collect their paycheck, and head home at the end of their shift.

On the Block was a blast to write. The story gave me an opportunity to revisit an old stomping ground through new eyes and to capture its quirks and little beauties as I remember it in the late seventies. As I said earlier, The Block is just about the only old cruising spot of mine that no longer exists; I didn’t know it as a teen, but it had already been in decline before my arrival. The gay bars that had once operated there were only a legend when I first came on the scene. During the eighties and the early years of the HIV/AIDS crisis, johns stopped driving downtown and the rent boys began to vanish. The area was dead when I returned to Richmond in 1985. Today, the townhouses have been converted into genteel law firms and financial advisories and homes, the streets thoroughly gentrified. The buildings are still there, but The Block as I knew it is gone.

That’s what happens far too often with gay history and culture, however. As we are erased, our traditions and lore can too easily vanish. If sex work was my teen rebellion—my way of being seen for what I was—then perhaps this act of pornography is an old man’s insistence that some memories should not be lost.

There is a sweet side to even the seamiest of stories. And men will do a hell of a lot for a little sweetness, as Nicky discovers in On the Block.

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Order your copy of Hoboes, Hustlers, and Outlaws from Amazon