Gay San Francisco: 1903 NEW ORLEANS - I made the acquaintance of an elderly man who was witty, charming, and absolutely fascinatingly frank about his early sex life during the throes of Victorian America. I'm submitting here my remembrances of the things he told me: I was 12 when I came to San Francisco, having run away from my home in a small town in Oregon. It was about 1903. I did odd jobs but my primary means of making a living was under the guise of shining men's shoes. In actual fact I sucked their cocks for pay' which, I suppose, made me one of the turn-of-the-century boy prostitutes. There were even boy houses in those days, though their existence was a carefully-guarded secret, known only to men and boys and even so, only to those "in the know." I'm sure that upper-class men and boys assumed that much of what they beard was merely fanciful rumor. Many of the regular whorehouses had boys "on call." I first got into prostitution when I became acquainted with other runaways and boys of the streets. They were tough kids. They had to be or else they wouldn't have survived. In those days the streets were dimly lit by gaslight. The approach was almost always made by the customer. A guy would ask a passing boy for a shoeshine. 1f he wanted more than just a shine, we would go into an alley and he would take his cock out of his pants. Kneeling down, pretending to shine his shoes, we could suck quite easily and if anyone approached, we stopped sucking and started shining. It was easy to bear someone coming: most of the sidewalks were of wooden planking. At first I would spit nut the load but later I learned to like the taste and would swallow it. I only spit it out if the guy didn't appeal to me. Lots of seamen would pay 25