Male Prostitution/Social Attitudes in London and Nagano 1901-2

[powdered_opium]

I figured that whilst you're all staying so helpful, I'd throw out queries I have about some of my other fiction projects. This is concerning a novel set over the course of three years in three different countries: London, England 1901, Nagano, Japan 1902 and Paris, France 1903. Character A is a seventeen-year-old male prostitute working and living

Comments

[duckodeath]

Honestly, the whole premise sounds unlikely to me, especially the part about catering primarily to the middle class and having women clients (and even being in a brothel in the first place) but I will defer to anyone with information to the contrary.

Here are a couple of links that may be useful:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cleveland_Street_scandal

and a previous little_details post from 2009 on a similar subject that goes into the difficulty of finding information on male prostitution in London in the late Victorian/Edwardian period..

[powdered_opium]

I probably should have mentioned this but -- it isn't a majority male-staffed brothel. There is A and another boy who work there in a majority-female staff brothel and, in cases of raids, pose as clients. The fact they are male prostitutes is an open secret in that clients learn of them by word-of-mouth as opposed to the advertisement booklets that would be distributed among discerning gentlemen at that time

[duckodeath]

I kind of have to wonder what makes A so very special that he is worth so much money to hire? There was no shortage of male prostitutes and a middle-class person looking for a nice bit of rough wouldn't have had to rely on word of mouth to find a young man to pay for sex and certainly would not have needed to pay shocking amounts of money unless something very unusual was going on.

[powdered_opium]

I kind of wanted him to be similar to Sugar in The Crimson Petal and the White: fairly expensive because he will do pretty much anything that's asked of him, has an atypical appearance and is keeping money back from the brothel by charging more than he's supposed to and pocketing the extra. You seem well-informed, so I'll defer to you on this one. What sort of price range would you perhaps suggest would be plausible for the novel?

[duckodeath]

I would think keeping money back from the brothel would be an excellent way to get himself killed. You have to ask yourself, where would he keep the extra money without it being stolen? How could he possibly think the brothel keepers wouldn't find out since that's exactly the kind of thing they want to prevent? How could he even charge more when the keepers set the rates? I can see him getting tips, but again, where is he keeping it

[powdered_opium]

Actually, for the purposes of the story he needs to be found out and have to leave in a hurry to protect himself. In response to your questions