Hustle and grow: Texas gay candidate Tom Malin was undone by the revelation of his past as an escort. Why do so many young gay men turn to hustling? And why does sex work remain the unforgivable sin?

Few people knew about Tom Malin's past as an escort until the morning of February 17. Then there it was, on the front page of The Dallas Morning News, above the fold: CANDIDATE WORKED AS PROSTITUTE.

The revelation derailed Malin's thriving campaign for district 108 of the Texas house of representatives. A well-spoken, good-looking 37-year-old, Malin had been running as an openly gay candidate in the Democratic primary against fellow gay man and local gadfly Jack Borden. Malin had the right stuff. He was a Dallas native, a community activist (having served on the Dallas Citizens Police Review Board), and a successful businessman. As a sales director for Mary Kay cosmetics, he'd even earned one of the firm's highest honors: a company lease on a pink Cadillac. He lived in a prominent high-rise and showed up on the society pages in photos with his partner of three years, an out philanthropist and investor in his mid 40s.

Although he was a first-time candidate, Malin had secured endorsements from the Dallas Stonewall Democrats, Dallas Tejano Democrats (a Latino political group), and the Morning News. He talked about school financing, crime, the economy, tax and ethics reform.

But after the story broke that he had been an escort on and off until 2001--mostly while a struggling actor in New York and Los Angeles--Malin's campaign never recovered. On March 7 he lost the primary to Borden, 55% to 45%. Barely 1,000 of the district's registered Democrats even bothered to go to the polls.

"Sex sells, and we love scandals in Dallas, and so this became a sensational story," Malin says. "The campaign became about rumors and innuendo and not about the issues at hand." (It was reported that Borden, a retired salesman whom Malin terms a perennial "squeaky wheel" in local politics, was evicted from three different Dallas apartments for nonpayment of rent. He's not expected to represent a serious challenge to two-term Republican incumbent and George W. Bush pal Dan Branch.)

Most upsetting to Malin is that he believes the tale of his escorting reached the press by way of gay Democrats in whom he had confided. "[The story] became about two things: [One,] can someone redeem themselves and go on to be a productive member of society? Two, why would the gays eat their own?"

Despite the loss at the ballot box, Malin says, "we've won, because we've seen one man's journey, one man standing up and being responsible and being honest and looking at the upheaval and the fear that [it] stirs up in the community. That's a huge story. Why are people afraid of someone being responsible, someone being honest?"

Why indeed? Even among many gays and lesbians--and certainly in mainstream culture--sex for pay remains the irredeemable sin. The president can be a recovering alcoholic with a DUI arrest; the vice president can accidentally shoot a man--all is forgiven. But if a person takes money for sex, the taint may be inescapable. Forget about running for office. Forget about a high-profile business career. Forget about acting, modeling, or MTV. It's over. Even many gays will prefer that you take a hike.

That leaves a huge number of gay men with limited options in life. Because among men who have sex for money--whether in front of video cameras or behind closed doors--most are probably gay men like Tom Malin. Gay men who were young and needed money and validation, finding both in a career as a hustler or in porn (which Malin did not do). Young men who collide with older, affluent men like atoms in a superheated gay culture that seems to peddle sex with every club invite, bar rag, and DVD release.

A culture that shrugs, "What's the big deal?"

"I did what other struggling actors were doing," Malin says.

Then a New York University grad student, Malin says a fellow student introduced him to the lucrative potential of erotic massage when he was running short of cash. Massages inevitably led to better-paid, more intensely sexual encounters. Malin became "Todd Sharpe," complete with personal Web site and client reviews.

He moved to Los Angeles, hoping to leave hustling behind, but his clientele followed. After a year in California, he moved back to Dallas.

In 2001 he stopped escorting.

"I made a choice--good, bad, right, wrong, indifferent. It was a Choice that I thought was appropriate for me at the time," he says. "I did make a lot of money. I was able to support myself. I also felt that I was in control. I felt empowered. I felt like--where I've always wanted someone to hold me and tell me that they love me--I felt valuable, I felt wanted, I was a commodity."

"It's just a transaction," says one 24-year-old who was a New York escort for two years. "I tried to count [clients] one time, but I couldn't. Conservatively, 400, and top end would probably be 650.

I mean, one time I saw 14 in two days. You just kind of get into this frenzy."

"Dustin" (not his real name) is a cute Louisiana native who started his career by saying yes to a Thai sugar daddy on a post-college backpacking trip. He stopped four months ago, after pocketing some $120,000. "It's not like you wake up one morning and say, Hmm, I think I'll be a hooker. It starts small, and then you realize that there's demand, and that's what really drives it. I don't think it's young men attracted to the business so much as older men driving the demand."

In a city like New York, that demand adds up to big business. Although no verifiable statistics exist, the number of active escorts in New York at any given moment may be as high as 1,000 or more, according to Tom Weise, cofounder of the nine-year-old Rentboy.com. If the site's over 36,000 escorts in 121 cities world-wide each turned one trick at the going rate (in most U.S. urban centers) of about $200 an hour, that's more than $7 million right there. Two hundred tricks a year? More than a billion dollars for the taking.

At one point Dustin was sitting on $20,000 in cash in a lockbox in his apartment. Within a month after settling in New York, he was a fulltime hustler, advertising on more than one escort site. "I would have a month where I wouldn't do much, just a few here and there, then I would have some where it was 100 in a month," he says. "It was just outrageous."

As with many young gay men who escort, Dustin's New York life was the polar opposite of his isolated childhood. "I think that as a gay kid, especially one growing up in the sticks, you don't really under stand that you're a sexual object, or you have the potential to be," he says. "And when that veil is lifted and you do it once, that's it. [Hustling] was affirming, and it was a turn-on to have guys really into you. It was like a compulsion."

It's a situation that New York psychotherapist Dan Bloom has seen before in his West Village practice. He recalls counseling another 20-something escort who was putting himself through graduate school. At first, Bloom recounts, "it seemed like a very natural extension of the general sexiness in the world. He always had the sense that one of his reliable sources of power was his attractiveness."

Hustling by gay men, Bloom says, is often a consequence of growing up amid a barrage of antigay sentiment: "Every gay man was once a pre-gay boy who discovered to his own shame or horror that he's an alien in the culture--who's despised--and it's very common for gay men to sexualize this need to be accepted."

The child of divorced parents, Malin grew up in an abusive household. "I'd show the [school] principal the open wounds from the beatings, and he did nothing," he says. "I woke up every single day not knowing whether I was going to live through the day. How horrible to be in the third grade and to have that sense of impending doom."

In school Malin was the nelly kid bullies loved to pick on, a cycle of harassment immortalized in his 11th-grade high school yearbook, where his class photo is labeled "Tammy Malin." Even in elementary school he got into trouble a lot, drank a lot, watched his dad's porn. As a teenager, Malin says, "I would skip class and go across the street to the Town East Mall." There he'd have sex with much older gay hairdressers and store clerks who were soon offering him money and gifts. "I'd cruise the mall and have sex for money as a kid in high school. I'd come home with bags full of clothes and sunglasses that I'd either shoplifted or someone would buy for me."

He moved in with his grandparents--who "loved me unconditionally"--but his alcoholism continued. At the University of North Texas he was popular and prominent in many campus activities, but he was still drinking, doing drugs, and getting into trouble. He dropped out, cleaned up, went back to finish his degree, and then fell off the wagon. He cleaned up again and headed to an internship in hotel management at Wait Disney World, where "the old demons came back." He headed back to Dallas, cleaned up, got a hotel job, started drinking again, and stole $120 from his employer. He was arrested.

"That," he says, "was my wake-up call."

He struck a deal to have his record wiped clean if he paid back the money and stayed out of trouble for six months, which he did. He then headed to New York to make a new start. But his self-esteem had not caught up to his sobriety, and he sabotaged a relationship with a man he believed was "the love of my life. Nothing I could do could quiet that anxiety, that panic inside of me--that Oh, my God, I'm not good enough, he's going to leave me, I can never keep up." Sure enough, he wore down his boyfriend who told him "You're exhausting me"--and wound up looking for solace as an escort. "People liked me, and I didn't have that sense of panic and that sense of impending doom," he says. "It was a quick fix."

Like any temporary balm for deep wounds, it's a fix that must be repeated endlessly. Escorting, says Dustin, is a career steeped in "extreme loneliness. Desperation. Most of the guys were just fundamentally lonely people."

Young gay men with wounded self-esteem like Dustin and Tom get stuck in a kind of negative feedback loop. The hypersexual phase that other gay men grow out of "is endlessly repeated," says therapist Bloom, "because they don't quite believe that there's no reason to be ashamed." Throw in financial need, an alluring sugar daddy, or a sweet-talking "filmmaker" and it's no wonder so many young gay men turn to escorting or porn work.

"The sex industry is a huge element in gay culture," says Shane Luitjens, a former escort and porn actor who in 1997 founded Hook, a grassroots organization offering support and advice for sex workers. "In a sense, to be a part of this community is to be enveloped by the sex industry, whether you like it or not. That's who we put on our magazines, that's who we pay attention to. It's the dominant identity."

Says Malin: "If you're trying to prove to the world 'I am a viable member of society and I want your respect,' you have to respect yourself first, and we're not doing that as a community."

He notes that gay culture's glorification of porn stars can exist side by side with the condemnation of sex work. In the same issue of the Dallas Voice, a gay newspaper, that reported the outrage over a reformed escort running for office, a worshipful full-color feature was devoted to reformed porn star Tom Katt, now a heterosexual seminary student.

"They're glorifying him," Malin says, just pages away from quoting gay leaders who are "vilifying someone who's practicing [the reformation] that he's preaching."

That glorification frustrates Steven Fales, a Utah native and former escort whose life story is the subject of the current one-man off-Broadway show Confessions of a Mormon Boy. "Where do we start growing up as a gay community in relation to sex work?" asks Fales, who escorted in New York for six months before bottoming out on crystal meth and self-hate. "There's this mixed signal: 'We'll make [gay porn star] Mark Dalton the gay pride parade marshal.' It's either Paris Hilton or some porn star!" As for escorting, he says, it's just "understood that once you're an older gay man and you're rich, you just have all these different boys that you pay for."

Fales says he "was looking for my father's love and money in the penthouses of New York." Once he figured that out, and thus could put a halt to it, "it was like night and day."

To help current escorts make the same break, Fales is hoping to found a nonprofit called Possibilities. "Wouldn't it be extraordinary to have an organization and a Web site that didn't just tell you how to [hustle] safely and how to save your money as an escort but how to transition [out of sex work]?"

Like many escorts who quit, Dustin didn't go cold turkey but rather found himself booking fewer and fewer "dates." Along the way he landed an office job offered by a former client. Finally, he stopped escorting. He's now preparing to move into his boyfriend's apartment in a different city. "I don't think that I'll ever really understand it; I think I'll just have to put it behind me," he says. "It just happened, and that was that. I escaped relatively unharmed, and I'm on to bigger and better things."

So is Tom Malin, whether he chooses to run for office again or to return to one of his business ventures. The disclosure that's been forced on him only makes him stronger, he says. "How can you be a mortally wounded soul and not tell the truth? In order for you to heal and recover, you have to be honest with who you are. You must go back and clean it up in order to move forward.

"It takes a courage to change," he continues. "Most people fall into this conspiracy of mediocrity: 'Don't go over there and be successful. Stay over here in the La-Z-Boy recliner and we'll eat some Lay's potato chips, and you stay poor, I'll stay poor, we'll all stay poor together.' And everybody buys into this crap that you can't be successful or that you can't step outside of the mold. You can't move on and do something with your life."

Malin also cites his own renewed spirituality as a source of his courage. He recalls sneaking off to a local Baptist church with a friend as a child, since his dad never went, and he is a proud member of Highland Park United Methodist Church, George W. Bush's hometown congregation.

"I know that I'm a perfect child of God, and in God's grand scheme of things, he's created me exactly the way I am today because there's something I'm supposed to do," he says. Since that February 17 news story--reprinted, by his count, in at least 157 newspapers within 24 hours--he's helped one friend get on the road to sobriety and another to get out of an abusive relationship. And when a stranger sought his help in quitting the escort business, Malin came through again. By talking to The Advocate, he's hoping to reach out to young gay men who are still hustling, to give them hope and encouragement to find help.

He knows he's doing God's work. "I ask him every single day, 'Please use me to your highest good,' and I walk out the door and say, 'After you, sir.' And whatever's supposed to happen is because God has willed that is what is supposed to be that day."

As for the sniping of Dallas gays who wish he'd disappear, and for the rescinded friendships of Dallas socialites, Malin quotes what a seventh-grade teacher wrote in his elementary school yearbook: "Tommy, don't let the insensitivity of others get in the way of your success."

RELATED ARTICLE: Gay sex and political scandals.

1964 Walter Jenkins, President Lyndon B. Johnson's chief of staff, is arrested on a "morals" charge: oral sex with another man in a YMCA bathroom two blocks from his White House office. He resigns a week later when the story becomes public.

1978 New York Democratic congressman Fred Richmond apologizes for "bad judgments" after his arrest for soliciting sex from a 16-year-old boy. Charges am dropped after he seeks counseling; he is later reelected three more times.

1980 Maryland GOPer Robert Bauman, "pro-family" and antigay, loses reelection to the U.S. House a month after admitting that alcoholism and "homosexual tendencies" led him to solicit a 16-year-old boy for sex.

1981 Mississippi Republican Jon Hinson resigns from Congress after pleading no contest to charges of attempted "oral sodomy" in a House bathroom.

1983 Facing punishment from Congress for a 1973 relationship with a 17-year-old male page, Rep. Gerry Studds of Massachusetts comes out. Though censured, the Democrat is reelected six more times before retiring in 1996.

1989 The Bush administration is caught amid controversy after a federal investigation reveals GDP lobbyist Craig Spence took male prostitutes on a late-night tour of the White House. In November, Spence commits suicide in a Boston hotel.

1990 The U.S. House reprimands but does not censure out gay Democratic representative Barney Frank of Massachusetts after it surfaces that a hustler he had hired in the mid 1980s had run a prostitution service from Frank's home.

2003 Brent Parker of Utah's house of representatives resigns while facing charges that he offered to hire an undercover male officer, who was posing as a hustler.

2004 New Jersey governor James McGreevey, a Democrat, resigns and comes out, acknowledging a gay affair. His lover, said to be Golan Cipel, allegedly sought to extort millions from him, though the governor procured numerous private- and public-sector jobs for Cipel.

2004 Facing allegations that he used a gay phone personals service, conservative Republican congressman Ed Schrock of Virginia announces he will not run for a third term.

2005 Jeff Gannon (ne James D. Guckert) gives up his White House press pass and resigns from his post as a writer for a partisan blog site owned by a GOP activist, after liberal bloggers reveal his past as an escort.

2005 Spokane, Wash., mayor Jim West is recalled by voters from office after being accused of enticing young men on Gay.com with offers of internships and other favors.

2006 Dallas candidate Tom Malin admits to having been an escort until 2001. On March 7, he loses his bid for the Democrat nomination for a seat in the Texas legislature.--Don Romesburg

Steele is editor in chief of The Advocate. Kennedy is a New York City--based journalist.

Bruce C. Steele and Sean Kennedy Photographed by Allison V. Smith/World Picture News for The Advocate