“I’m Not a Faggot, I’m a Man”. How Male Sex Workers Doing Masculinity Talking Sex.

Our being sexual varies according to the rituals and performances in which we are involved as part of our daily lives. Such is the case any time we perform a role to communicate our identity to one or more audiences from communicative, expressive, aesthetic, and verbal points of view. Our being sexual is more likely something we do, a doing (oneself) sexual(ly). It follows that, like other spheres of social life, sexuality is based on a performative imperative, whereby we must necessarily appear to others, or at least a competent and plausible sexual(ized) social actor. Male sex workers, especially those from specific and different cultural contexts (such as the South of Italy where the authors have conducted their fieldwork), are particularly interested in the use of excuses, justifications, and, generally, motives talk that are useful to neutralize their own sexual conducts. The reflections on the construction of such discourses about the different identities that are present in male sex working are particularly useful to understand how all the masculinities involved re-adapt themselves to the normative gender order that requires the femininization of men who have sex with other men and the constant flaunt of a masculinity that is both defiant and revanchist. This discursive construction, although sustained by the erotization of sex work demand, used as a dramaturgical device that fetishizes a particular type of violent and normative identity and, at the same time, it defends from the threat of homosexuality and of polluted homosexual.