Rough Trade Cowboy

These photos were shot less than ten years ago, but they're more in the style of 1950s/1960s porn when "rough trade" lads picked up a few bucks baring all. I have the sense many of the "rough trade" blokes of yesteryear were hustlers of some sort, but I never saw a definitive source on that.

I always thought a non-porn drama about a rough trade male hustler set in early 1960s Los Angeles could make an intriguing film. To give it a narrative spine, perhaps he'd be tangentially involved in some murder or perhaps set up as a perpetrator. He comes to LA to make it big in the legit movie business, but ends up hustling his body for cold hard cash.

The milieu would be something like Midnight Cowboy but less bleak and more candid in light of our more accepting times. I think it would also be interesting to explore the idea of a man who thinks he's straight and merely hustling gay men for sex in return for money, but then he falls in love with a man on a deeper level than the Joe Buck/Ratso Rizzo friendship.

Setting up a film like this in Hollywood would be close to impossible. I can see my agent now rolling his eyes at me over lunch when I pitch him the story.