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Subject: THE GUIDE: Houses with Boys
Date: 2 Nov 1995 02:55:46 GMT
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For the best in gay travel, politics, steamy sex histories, hot 
video reviews, and hard-hitting features, visit The Guide 
Online, the web site of The Guide magazine: 
http://www.guidemag.com

---------------------------

HOUSES WITH BOYS

You don't have to know the rules or speak the language 
to enjoy a Dutch gay brothel. A nervous American finds 
out 

by Larry James 

Nothing I expected to see in Europe intrigued me more 
than Amsterdam's gay brothels (or as the travel guides 
call them, "houses with boys"). Indeed, to see the 
brothels was the reason I had taken the early bullet train 
from Paris, leaving much of the Louvre unseen, and 
headed into the low countries. 

What would a male bordello be like? I had envisioned 
dirty little rooms and hard-looking straight boys trying 
to seem like James Dean while straddle-legging bare 
metal folding chairs. Now I found myself on a 
downtown Amsterdam sidewalk facing a simple street 
door, about to find out. Gathering up my courage, I went 
in. 

As my eyes adjusted to the dim light, I found myself in a 
small, simple bar, the sort of place you might find off the 
dining room of a country hotel. There were a dozen 
stools at the bar, a sofa, and some large stuffed chairs. I 
headed for the safety of the bar, joining a middle-aged 
man and a bartender in his late 20s before I risked a 
glance back toward the boys themselves. 

Sorting themselves out on the sofas and chairs was an 
assemblage of some half dozen young men. They had 
the slow, slightly self-conscious movements of those 
with great energy and no par ticular place to go. I smiled 
amiably and looked them over. 

Each young man met my eyes, acknowledging my glance 
with a friendly grin. One stood out. He was extremely 
handsome and probably the youngest of the group. He 
was short and dark with glossy black hair. Even across 
the room I could see that he had extraordinary eyes, 
filled with mis chief and boyish humor. 

I turned back to the bar and tried to settle down with a 
beer. 

Slowly, the short, dark boy drifted over and stood next to 
me. I turned and smiled. He smiled only a little, as one 
who encounters a stranger with whom he has not yet 
decided he wants to talk. 

Uncertain, I turned away. As I did, the young man 
abandoned what had apparently been an effort to entice 
me by seeming disinterested. Leaning on his forearm, he 
slid up the bar toward me. His smile, devoid of coquetry, 
was now a full, youthful grin. It seemed to say, "Well 
now, we've played hard-to-get, so let's talk." 

"Hallo," he said in a thick accent. I turned shyly toward 
him and caught the lush foliage of his long lashes. I 
nodded and smiled slightly. He seemed not to know 
what to say next, so he just grinned. He took my hand 
from the bar and held it between his. 

"I am Carlo," he said, leaning closer to me. 

"Hello, Carlo," I answered. "What brings you here?" 

My question was foolish, and it threw Carlo for a loop. 
He looked at me, too stumped even to grin. He opened 
his mouth as if to say something, closed it again, and 
just smiled. 

"He works here," said another, taller young man with 
bleached white hair who had been lingering just near 
enough to hear our conversation. "So do I," he added in 
perfect American Mid western. "Carlo doesn't speak 
much English." 

"He doesn't have to," I tried to quip. The blond boy 
withdrew. 

"What do you do here?" I asked Carlo, feeling somehow 
bolder. 

"I fuck!" Carlo replied. "I fuck you," he added, "right 
now!" 

"But Carlo, I just got here," I protested. 

Now Carlo leaned toward me and laughed softy in my 
ear. "I fuck you in the ass till you can stand up!" This 
had the sound of a phonetically learned phrase, and he 
had missed the contraction for "can't." 

"No," I said, "I need to have a drink and relax. Maybe 
later." Carlo put his hand on my thigh and let it slide 
down to my knee, squeezing before he reluctantly pulled 
it away. 

When Carlo had gone, the blond boy sat down on the 
bar stool beside me. His white hair was cut short. He was 
nice-looking and straightforward. "Carlo is Italian," he 
said. "He hasn't been here very long." 

"He's in the right business," I said. "He's absolutely 
beautiful." 

The blond boy smiled and nodded. He put his hand out 
to me: "My name is Terry." 

"Where you from, Terry?" 

"You can't guess?" 

I grinned. "Where in America?" 

"Cleveland," he replied, "though I went to school in 
Chicago." He turned and studied his glass for a moment. 
"You like Carlo?" I figured Terry was offering to make 
the needed arrangements. 

"Do you speak Italian?" I asked. 

"No, but I can tell Carlo anything you want me to." 

I demurred, not wanting to rush into anything. "No, 
that's all right. I'm going to have a drink and relax. I've 
been sight-seeing all day." 

We discussed what there was to see and do in 
Amsterdam, and then Terry said, "You don't have to 
rush. In fact, you can just have a drink and talk to the 
boys if you want to; you don't have to go with anyone." 

Terry told me he had a degree in philosophy from 
Northwestern. He had held various jobs, but had always 
been sexually compulsive. He loved what he was doing 
now, and made quite a bit of money doing it. But most 
of all, he loved the sexuality of his work. Terry was a 
serious young man, and I think that he really does have 
a Northwestern philosophy degree. 

I asked him if he didn't get tired sitting around all 
afternoon like he seemed to be doing on this day. Sure, 
he said, but some days he was very busy. But how could 
he keep it up on busy days? Not all his clients insisted 
that he cum, he said- indeed many did not care or didn't 
want him to. 

"But if they want you to you will?" 

"What ever the client wants, he gets." 

"Anything?" 

"Sure," Terry said. "It isn't cheap." The going rate is 200 
guilder, about $100 US. "It's got to be safe," Terry said, 
"otherwise anything." 

"So Carlo meant it when he offered to fuck?" 

"Sure," Terry grinned warmly. "I would, too." 

"And you get fucked too?" I asked. 

"With a condom, certainly," he said. "Almost all of us 
do." 

"But not all?" 

"No," he said firmly, "Carlo doesn't." Terry leaned 
forward confidentially. "Carlo is dead straight. He's got 
girlfriends all over Amsterdam." Terry and I chuckled, 
and I bought him a beer. 

"Carlo probably will later, but he doesn't now. Someone 
will offer him a big tip or one of the boys will get him 
past the first time." 

I was envisioning this exotic scene. "You would do this 
for Carlo?" I asked. 

Terry gave me his first really enthusiastic grin. This was 
not the first time he had thought of Carlo's cherry ass. 

International cast 

Terry swung around on the bar stool. "See anyone you 
like?" 

"Sure, I like them all," I said. "I like you." 

"No, you don't like me, not that way." 

He was right. His acknowledgment let us drop our roles 
of hustler and prospective client. 

"What's that big blond like?" I asked, looking at a large-
bodied kid with a knee over the arm of the sofa. 

"He's good," Terry said, "got a big cock. He dances in the 
theater." 

"You have a theater?" 

"Yeah, we have live shows on Friday and Saturday night 
and on special occasions." I noted that this was Thursday 
afternoon. 

"His name is Frederick, and he likes the SM room." 
Terry's gaze drifted back from Frederick to me. "You like 
SM?" 

"Never tried it," I said truthfully. 

"You should. We have a good setup here." I looked at 
Frederick's large, hard body. I won dered what it would 
be like being disciplined by Frederick- or more 
interesting, disciplining Frederick. 

Terry and I talked about some of the other boys. One was 
Canadian, two were German. There were no Asians or 
Africans. I asked Terry about it. "We have a couple of 
black boys," he said, "but I don't think any Asians." My 
question about Asians seemed to interest Terry, and he 
turned to the barman and asked if they had any Asian 
boys. "Not right now," he answered, "We could probably 
get one." He glanced at me. "No," Terry said, "we were 
just talking." 

"I'd like to talk to the manager," I mentioned. 

Terry looked at me, focusing. "Why?" he asked. 

"I'd like to do an article on the place," I said. 

"You're a writer?" This seemed to cast me in a different 
light in Terry's eyes and he looked at me for a moment, 
perhaps adjusting his notion of why I was here. 

"I don't think Tommy does interviews anymore," the 
barman said directly. 

"Why not?" 

"It seems like every time he does, he gets fucked over. 
You know, they come in here and everything is great, 
then you get the article and it's all this trash and 
sensationalism. Exposé stuff. He just decided not to give 
anymore interviews." 

"You're talking about the straight press," I said. "I write 
for a gay American magazine." The barman nodded 
noncommittally. "What do you want to know?" 

The big tour 

Soon I was introduced to Tommy, and he was escorting 
me through the various rooms of the brothel. I had a 
chance to pose the questions burning on my mind. 

"How do you select the young men?" I queried. 

"We look for good, clean-cut boys," Tommy answered, 
holding open the door to a large room for me. "They 
don't have to be super good-looking, but they have to be 
nice, and good to talk to. They need to have an average-
to-good body. We talk to boys between 18 and up to 
about 30 or so." 

We were standing in a large windowless room with a 
queen size bed against one wall, a large 

television against the wall facing, and a nicely tiled open 
shower in the corner. "This is an average room," 
Tommy said, flipping a switch on a small panel above 
the bed, flooding the space with romantic mood music. 
A flick of the dial switched the tunes to rock, then 
Western. With the excep tion of the missing window, 
the room could be at an upper-end hotel, though the big 
bed had no top sheet or blankets. 

"How do you know if a boy will work out? Does 
someone try him out?" 

"No," Tommy replied. "The boys come here and ask for 
a job. We never advertise or solicit. If I like them, I have 
them fill out an information form and I take them to a 
room for an interview. If I'm not sure about his body, I 
may ask him to take off his clothes, but not usually. If 
everything is all right, then we give them a few days 
trial, usually three days." 

So much for my fantasy job- hiring boys for a bordello. 

But surely I could find useful work as a trainer, right? 
No, Tommy said, dashing another dream occupation. 
"The young men know what they are doing. And if by 
chance they don't, their customers will tell him. We 
have a video they can look at before they go into the 
Thai room- where the boys give full body massages. 
With SM, either they do it or they don't. It's up to the 
boy." 

"How long do the boys usually stay?" I wondered. 

"Usually about six months," Tommy said, opening a 
drawer in the bedside table that revealed all the simple 
tools of the trade- condoms, lubricants, massage oil. 
"Some boys stay a year or two." 

Health problems were something else I was wondering 
about. "A government health worker comes here to test 
the boys for STDs every three weeks," Tommy told me. 
"The boys are very clean and healthy. If we didn't keep 
them healthy, we'd be shut down." Under Dutch law, 
Tommy ex plained, workers of any kind can't be 
required to be tested for HIV. But if a sex worker wants a 
test, it's free. "They have to practice safe sex anyway so it 
doesn't matter." 

What counts as safe? Sucking without coming in the 
mouth, and anal sex with a condom. Come in the 
mouth is discouraged, and unprotected anal sex is 
absolutely forbidden. 

"The boys do anal sex then?" I asked, my mind 
wandering back to the allegedly virgin-butted Carlo. 

"They don't have to," Tommy told me. "It's up to them 
and what they and the client agree to. The rule is that 
the boy has to find out what the client wants while they 
are still at the bar. If the boy doesn't want to do 
something, then the client is free to find a different boy. 
But the boy has to say what he will do or won't do in 
advance so there is no disagreement in the room." If 
only lovers had such high standards of honesty and 
communication! 

"Can the boy charge more for different things?" I asked. 
Tommy was emphatic: "This is strictly forbidden." All 
the negotiation had to be done in the bar before the boy 
takes the man into the room. Once there, he cannot ask 
for more money. The man can tip if he likes, but the 
hustler cannot pressure the customer for tips or sell 
extra service. 

"Do your customers fall in love with the boys?" I asked. 
Maybe the question didn't quite translate to someone so 
steeped in the brothel industry, but Tommy answered 
that any outside rela tionship between a boy and a client 
he meets in the business is also forbidden. A boy who 
dates a customer on the side, Tommy said, would be 
fired. 

Rooms of love 

Now Tommy and I went into the SM room. This was a 
new experience for me. Some of the devices were 
obvious enough: there was a rack for neck and wrists, 
leaving the body bent double at the hips and the ass 
exposed. I could also figure out the rack with black 
leather straps for wrists and ankles, perfect for spread-
eagling a boy or client. On one wall hung a collection of 
whips, restraining equipment, and plastic phalluses. 
There was what looked like a gymnast's side horse, but 
fitted out with manacles and straps. It was not 
impossible to visualize my friend Carlo strapped across 
it. 

"What is that?" I asked, pointing to a cage, about the size 
of a traveling crate for a German shepherd, but made of 
heavy iron bars. The cage dangled from the ceiling on a 
rope that allowed it to swing a few inches off the floor. 
Tommy detached the rope from a hook on the wall and 
raised it up so that the cage floor was knee-height. This 
he seemed to offer as an explanation. I looked at it, still 
unable to apprehend what was apparently so obvious to 
Tommy. 

"But what does it do?" I asked. 

"You get inside it," Tommy said, suddenly realizing the 
extent of my ignorance. How could a man fit inside so 
small a cage? But if he were inside, I realized, his head 
would be crowded against the bars at one end and his ass 
helpless against the other. Again I thought of Carlo 
learning one of the tricks of his trade, the one he has so 
far not mastered, through the bars of this ingenious 
device. 

The Thai Room was much like the other rooms, only 
next to the shower was a water bed. It was here that a 
customer could enjoy the Thai massage which, Tommy 
told me, involved the full length rubbing together of oil-
slathered naked bodies. 

Tommy told me he'd been running his brothel for ten 
years. I didn't have the courage to ask if he had once 
been a "boy"- he certainly was a good-looking man, 
though now over 30. 

Tommy began to talk about Dutch politics. He claimed 
that his would become the first fully -licensed male 
brothel in the world. Contrary to what many Americans 
believe, Tommy told me, the brothels of Amsterdam are 
still technically illegal. He was not sure when 
legalization was to happen but seemed to think it would 
be soon. He told me proudly that the federal minister of 
health had come here to see how a brothel should be 
run. Several other houses with boys had been closed, 
Tommy said, because they employed boys under 18 
years, or permitted drugs. Some even were accused of 
importing youths from the Balkans and holding them as 
sex slaves. 

I asked Tommy about his relations with the cops. He 
explained that there was a special police unit for the red-
light establishments. He had called the police only twice 
in ten years. "I once had one guy who would not pay," 
he related, "and another who was drunk and 
disorderly." 

The tour was over, and Tommy led me back to the bar. 
Like a good ethnographer, I wanted to watch closely the 
pairing off process between boys and patrons. Now 
several men sat drinking at the bar. The boys lounged on 
the sofas waiting, bored, and talking to each other. 

Carlo was there, his devastating grin and his beautiful 
dark eyes drawing me in as ever. But we had already 
talked- he would not approach me again unless I invited 
him. I studied the young hustlers. Each smiled as I 
looked at him, but I invited none to approach. Except 
Carlo, none of the boys available now had been here 
earlier in the afternoon. Terry told me that there was the 
afternoon shift (noon to seven), and the night shift, 
which was on now and would work till all clients had 
gone, sometime after 2 am. 

At the far end of the room a door opened and blond 
Frederick came into the bar. He was followed a moment 
later by Terry, who was dressed as if for the street. 
Frederick settled comfortably on a sofa with the other 
boys. Terry stopped just inside the door and looked 
down the bar at the seated men. When his eyes came to 
me, I held his look and so he came round the bar and 
down to me. 

"You like the tour?" he said in his Midwestern twang. 
"Very much," I said. 

Terry grinned at me and then nodded his head in the 
direction of the end of the bar and the hall to the rooms. 
He let the set of his eyebrows and his slightly opened lips 
ask the silent question: did I want to go to a room with 
him?

--------------------

--article from The Guide magazine, October, 1995
visit The Guide Online-- http://www.guidemag.com