Times Square Hustler

The author became interested in male prostitution while researching populations susceptible to AIDS. He found such a population in male prostitutes in Times Square which had developed a community to deal with common problems. Among these changing the community were AIDS, crack cocaine, and urban redevelopment. This work is directed to sociologists, social workers, and those interested in popular culture.

"Bob McNamara has done a remarkable job of capturing the character and complexity of the street life of Times Square hustlers--a difficult and hard to reach deviant environment to be sure. Throughout, he not only tells their fascinating story, but goes further to examine the relations between hustlers, the hustled, and those who facilitate the entire process. A well-written account, his result should be read by all who are interested in the subject, the difficulties of ethnographic research, or the interactions between deviance (crime) and the environment in which it occurs."-Dennis Jay Kenney, Ph.D. Associate Professor, University of Nebraska at Omaha Director of Research, Police Executive Research Forum, "McNamara enhances our understanding of community by showing us how male prostitution shapes and is shaped by community structure, organization, and patterns of interaction."-Albert J. Reiss, Jr. William Graham Sumner Professor of Sociology Emeritus Yale University, "McNamara has ventured out into parts of the social world rarely visited by social scientists, and he has returned with a remarkably interesting and perceptive account of a way of life we know almost nothing about. A real achievement."-Kai Erikson Professor of Sociology Yale University, ?Drawing on months of field observation and 35 unstructured interviews, McNamara makes an important contribution to our knowledge about sex workers, subcultural life, and social deviance in general. The existing literature on male hustlers largely predates the AIDS pandemic and the arrival of crack cocaine, which together have altered the professional landscape for sex workers....McNamara documents these changes with clarity, updating the existing literature, but goes further to achieve the mark of truly fine ethnography: He weaves an engrossing tale from the life histories he analyzes.?-Contemporary Sociology, "Drawing on months of field observation and 35 unstructured interviews, McNamara makes an important contribution to our knowledge about sex workers, subcultural life, and social deviance in general. The existing literature on male hustlers largely predates the AIDS pandemic and the arrival of crack cocaine, which together have altered the professional landscape for sex workers....McNamara documents these changes with clarity, updating the existing literature, but goes further to achieve the mark of truly fine ethnography: He weaves an engrossing tale from the life histories he analyzes."-Contemporary Sociology

ROBERT P. McNAMARA is Assistant Professor of Sociology at Furman University. He is the author of Crime Displacement: The Other Side of Prevention (1994), Sex, Scams and Street Life: The Sociology of New York City's Times Square (forthcoming) and Sex, Drugs and HIV (forthcoming) with Cindy Patton. He has been a consultant for state, federal, and private agencies on topics such as AIDS, drug abuse, and policing.