Street trade gay

All with the intention to eventually convert them. Over time, it evolved into a descriptor for the type of guy you’d “trade” with, with a bit of swagger and straight-acting appeal.

Think of it as coded language. Queer men offered straight-identified men something women weren’t socially expected to provide:open desire, praise, sexual attention, and body-worship without shame.

I read “City of Night” later. Not necessarily straight, not necessarily working-class.

48 HILLS I know this book has had a long gestation, from way back in the 2000s when you were a Bay Guardian intern! But sex has always been more feral than fixed. If you’ve ever been a bit puzzled when someone drops “trade” in convo, you’re definitely not alone.

So grab your phone, and let’s talk about what trade means, where it came from, how to use it, and of course, the funniest ways it pops up online (because memes make everything better, right?

In all Rechy has written 14 novels about gay or Chicano life and struggles.

While in Los Angeles he was arrested at Cooper Do-nuts, a gay hangout. Hurles recorded the kind of men mainstream gay culture preferred to deny: rough, working-class, tattooed, dangerous, straight-identified.

Hurles once said: “No man alive ever came out to go to bed with gays. When he arrived, he passed himself off on the streets as an illegal Irish immigrant, and he used that persona for at least a decade.

By the mid-1900s, “trade” tilted toward masculine men—often working-class—who slept with queer men, sometimes for money, sometimes for fun, sometimes because a good-looking man was a good-looking man, and human bodies don’t always follow political scripts.

From there, queer communities refined the term into variations: street trade, rough trade, military trade, commercial trade, DL trade—each tied to its own economy of desire, danger, class, and proximity to “respectable” masculinity.

Trade wasn’t limited to straight-identified men.

On Polk Street and in the Tenderloin, a family of hustlers and priests

Sex work is big and—unfortunately, yet again—controversial news in San Francisco at the moment, as the city fruitlessly attempts to shut down Capp Street’s thriving trade with actual concrete barriers. I would go day after day into Divas bar, order drinks, and chat with her.

Now, go forth and spread the slang knowledge—because everyone deserves to be in on the joke (and the flirting!). All the bars and clubs were closing, and the people left there were being further marginalized and criminalized. I loved dancing in the bars, and hanging out with the people there, the feeling of it.

Another fascinating interview was Coy Ellison.