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Mark Field: Need for a good school now |
Confessions of a male escort: ‘It’s not just sex and money. But on a good week I earned £5,000’
After 10 years working ‘in the industry’, one sex worker is ready to lay bare life as a paid lover
A 23-year-old virgin who had flirted with a career in the clergy, Andrew Rosetta placed an advert in his local paper: “Male Escort – out calls only – Robert 078779xxx000”.
Five years later, the son of born-again evangelical Christians, with two degrees to his name, was earning thousands of pounds a week, living an over-sexed double-life as an escort in Covent Garden.
Andrew (not his real name) has just written a book, Whatever She Wants: True Confessions of a Male Escort, laying bare the highs and lows of a 10-year career in the sex industry that has seen him bed everyone from 80-year-old grandmas “who just want their hair stroked”, to a gangster’s wife and even a married couple of senior police officers.
At 29 – “Every escort knocks off five years and adds an inch,”
making him 34 and well-endowed – he has called time on escorting.
But his retirement is not due to a moral awakening (he has very few regrets) but because he wants “something different” from life.
“I have been told I must have very little self-respect, or some sort of false consciousness,” Andrew told the West End Extra in a candid interview held near his Covent Garden flat.
“But my view of the sex industry is that while it’s not something I would promote to my children, it is something we should accept.
“The cliché is that escorting is work for the downtrodden. When I started, it was about the money. On a good week I could make £5,000.”
For most men, the physical side of the job would be daunting – at one stage Andrew had five mobile phones to field the hundreds of calls he was getting every week – but he never found that much of a problem. It was the ego massaging, “dumb toy boy acting” and emotional duplicity that took its toll.
It seems there are a lot of people out there looking for more than just sex, and Andrew found that out the hard way, having to ditch phones and evade stalkers.
“The sex side of it has always come relatively easy,” he explained. “We all have performance problems. My first job was an absolute disaster. I had to run away I was so scared. But what’s more difficult is when women start to have fantasies that you are their boyfriend. Some girls would stalk me so much I had to change phones.”
His “economic decision” to become an escort, made while working in a coffee shop and realising the parking meters made more in an hour than he did, turned out to be quite an earner.
Before long, Andrew was stuffing wads of £50 notes under his mattress, opening off-shore bank accounts, and buying up houses like an Arabian sheik. From provincial Cornwall to Cambridge and on to London, Andrew’s progression up the property ladder was spectacular.
Recalling that heady time, he said: “I felt like I was in the Godfather movie. At one time I had seven houses. The work was non-stop. I paid about £1,000 a month in advertising and that was it. People think escorts spend money on cocaine and booze but really my expenses were low. I was always quite sensible. I felt untouchable.”
That was five years ago. Two court cases and an Inland Revenue investigation later and Andrew is down to his last two properties, although he says he is still “comfortable”.
While he has few moral scruples about his vocation, he remains wistful about the way it affected his close relationships.
“Escorting does come at a price,” he says. “The lies, subterfuge and deceit have been very difficult to live with. I had girlfriends all the way through, but at first I opted not to tell them [about my work], which was hard. I’d always be ducking out to take a call, and telling them I was ‘in property’.
“When I did tell one girlfriend the relief at actually telling someone was unimaginable.”
One of the most daunting hurdles was the prospect of coming clean to his deeply religious parents.
“I told my mum after about five years,” he said. “My parents think being an escort is a sin and they don’t really talk about it but I think they accept it. The reason I don’t tell everyone is for the sake of them and my nieces and nephews. They still live in a small town in Cornwall and that kind of thing doesn’t go down well.”
Although he no longer works as an escort, Andrew is keen to see an open and frank discussion of the broader issues of life in the sex industry and the challenges facing those working within it.
“The nuances of the sex industry tend to be lost,” he said. “Prostitution is always talked about in black and white terms or just made invisible. In Garrick Street there are five working brothels but nobody talks about them.”
While he hasn’t exactly rediscovered his faith, Andrew says he has started to “get back into the church”, and is now a volunteer branch leader of the sex workers union – campaigning against a change in the law that he says would essentially criminalise the whole industry. It is for this reason he wrote the book.
“The Bill going through Parliament is an outrage,” he says. “Criminalising the people who buy sex will push everything underground. These women don’t have a voice but they are our mums, daughters and neighbours. There are all kinds of people in the sex industry. Of the 22 groups the government consulted in 2008, at least five were Christian projects. Only one consultation was held with sex workers.
“Most sex work is an economic choice, and its about time we stopped trying to ‘save’ everyone. It should be regulated and taxed like any other industry.
“It is some of these feminist assumptions that skew the debate. The ridiculous thing is it takes a capitalist man to write a book to get on the radio and speak up for these people.”
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