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This chapter highlights some of the progress that has been made in research on male sex work, and explores the diversity of the male scene. It considers the current policy context in England and Wales in relation to what is known about patterns, places, and forms of male sex work. The chapter provides supporting evidence by research and data emanating from the UK, but also draws on international work. It outlines the current policy context, paying particular attention to A Coordinated Prostitution Strategy (Home Office, 2006). The chapter then contextualizes the male sex industry in terms of its broad demographics and details a new model for thinking about research on male sex work. It also explores different forms and practices of male sex work in public and indoor locations. The chapter draws conclusions regarding the current regulation of the male sex industry, and makes recommendations as to where legislative attention should be focused.

For nearly two decades, the AIDS epidemic in the Caribbean—now showing HIV prevalence rates that are second only to Sub-Saharan Africa—has been officially described in public health and epidemiological reports as “heterosexual.” At the same time, men with a history of same-sex exchanges or who are involved in sexual commerce have been largely neglected or under-prioritized in HIV/AIDS policies and programs, despite persistently high HIV infection rates in this population. This chapter draws on three years of ethnographic research in two cities in the Dominican Republic among men involved in informal sexual exchanges in tourism areas, and considers how men's experiences with tourists problematizes static public health labels such as “the heterosexual epidemic.” It is argued that traditional public health approaches are largely incapable of capturing the nuances of men's experiences or the ways their behavior is shaped by the large-scale transformations in gender, sexuality, and work.

Chapter 2 presents the results of intersubjective and autoethnographic research with Albanian (and Romanian) male sex workers in Italy and Greece in the late 1990s and early 2000s. It analyzes the discourses and practices through which young migrant men both reproduced and challenged the heteronormative and homophobic way in which the relation between masculinities and sexual conduct was negotiated at home. By selfrepresenting as straight and ‘only active’ young men who are ‘fucking queers’ in order to respond to ‘economic necessity’ young Albanian and Romanian migrants abide, publicly, by heteronormative canons of masculinity while engaging in sex work with other men and affording more affluent and individualized lifestyles. The chapter shows how the author used irony and flirting as strategic intersubjective, relational, and affective strategies to challenge normative selfrepresentations. It also shows that young people’s engagement in migration and sex work resulted from the agencing decisions they made in relation to moral orientations – socio-cultural alignments of models of personhood, mobilities and objects – that emerged in relation to a macro-historical event: the further commodification and individualization in late-modern, neoliberal and postindustrial times of the traditions, institutions, livelihoods, and authorities that had already been fluidified by modernisation.

Chapters 3 and 4 explore the engagement of young male migrants, including minors, in multiple and itinerant forms of mobility. Their priorities and needs, as well as their understandings of their own agency, are compared with those informing sexual-humanitarian interventions. Not all decisions to migrate and to work in the sex industry are equally agencing: migratory projects and experiences are often characterized by loss, marginalization, and exploitation. Chapter 3 focuses on “errant” mobilities that are characterized by migrants’ experiences of loss in relation to their mobile orientations, which is grounded in the investment of their migration projects with the existential salience of a ritual of passage. Drawing on the experiences of young migrants selling sex in Seville, the author argues that the ability to master the late modern fluidification of sex-gendered selfrepresentations distinguishes mobile orientations characterized by agency from those marked by the loss of a sense of direction. The author discusses the invisibilization of migrant minors and young people selling sex in Seville by referring to the stylistic choices he adopted throughout the making of Comidas Rapidas, a short documentary about the tearoom trade at Seville’s main bus station.

Chapters 3 and 4 explore the engagement of young male migrants, including minors, in multiple and itinerant forms of mobility. Their priorities and needs, as well as their understandings of their own agency, are compared with those informing sexual-humanitarian interventions. Chapter 4 presents more agentic forms of “minor” mobility, characterized by the “boditarian”—that is, embodied, tacit, and underprivileged—experiences of ownership of the commodified and fluidified terms of late-modern subjectivity among young Romanian men selling sex in Amsterdam. By distinguishing the more emancipatory minor mobility from errance, the author attempts to avoid the pathologization and victimization that characterize hegemonic analyses of child and youth migration while acknowledging the potential and specific elements of vulnerability that can emerge. The chapter shows that for many young men, engaging in sex work means getting involved in different kinds of relationships that offer different degrees of support, dependence, and autonomy, in both psychological and economic terms. The degree of agency characterizing their mobile orientations depends on whether they are able to make sense of their emotional lives and migration trajectories with the material, discursive, and psychological resources available to them.