Michael Hone

Hustlers Michael Hone

I'm the right person to recount this history, having written books that cover Greek, Roman, Renaissance, Middle Ages and Prussian homosexuality. The first half, Book One, is the highly serious, heavily documented story of hustlers during antiquity, including Alcibiades, Marc Antony and Constantinople emperor Basil I, while Book Two deals with present-day hustlers, men who crave sex, cruising nearly 24/7, for whom orgies and pool parties became so common that they sought new experiences through alcohol and drugs, and most died from what I call the gay plague, that or suicide. In depicting this I am also well placed, being a boy of my times, my thirst for knowledge and natural lust pushing me to travel widely, San Francisco at age 16, Paris at age 18, and following university and a stint in the Peace Corps I returned to Paris, my home base for long excursions to Amsterdam, Rome, Venice, a sabbatical year in Berlin and fourteen months in Greece, centered around Myconos. The reader is warned that this second section has pictures of frontal male nudes and language that clearly belongs in the locker room, both unavoidable--caveat emptor!