as being very similar to how he might conduct any personal exchange: initial contact and social exchange (online chat), evaluation of level of attraction, contract, travel to a location, sexual contact, and conclusion (for more on how men use Gaydar, see Mowlabocus, 2007a, 2007b, 2010a, 2010b).
Others revealed that their personal Gaydar profiles were the conduit for their first paid exchanges, when other members offered them money after an initial rejection. George is one example:
My friends went out at the weekend, went to saunas, met people, did it for nothing. I thought, “Fuck it, I’ll get paid for it.” [Smiles.] It was that simple … Uh. How did I start? Somebody messaged me on Gaydar, and, I wasn’t really that interested. And then they turned around and said, “I’ll pay you for it.” And that’s what started it. And they did. And I enjoyed it. I get a buzz out of getting paid for it because I would normally do it anyway. So fuck it. (George, 42)
Personal profiles and Internet chat rooms can be used to experiment with selling sex with little or no investment, financial or social, on the part of the advertiser. A commercial transaction may be initiated by the advertiser or passively received, unsolicited. M$M use interfaces, like the Gaydar website, in ways that can be described as both passive and active. The profile, while actively created by the M$M, becomes a site potential clients can use to make contact. Advertisers also use their profile to contact other members with a message or a “wink” or by leaving a “track,” like a “poke” in Facebook, effectively “spamming” members as a form of solicitation. M$M may also take advantage of other features, such as chat rooms, where they may repeatedly post messages or adopt a practice of exiting and reentering the chat room to draw the attention of other members, which is known as “frogging.”
Promotion Strategies
The men I spoke to had various advertising strategies. Some used a scattergun approach, placing advertisements with several publications and sites simultaneously and having no solid measure of how much business they were attracting through particular media. Others advertised only in publications where they realized a high return on their investment. Patterns of advertising varied as well. Some respondents focused on repeat business and only advertised when they wanted to attract new clients, whereas others used an intermittent but considered pattern of advertising, placing ads in different publications at different times, allowing for time off, and placing ads in publications in other cities if they planned to work while traveling abroad. Some of the men also were aware that ads in different publications attracted different types of clients.
Finally, the types of advertising (for sex work, body work) and the ad content (level of sexual explicitness) have an impact on the perceived effectiveness of the ads in terms of attracting clients, which affects workers’ decisions about where and how to advertise and how to represent themselves in the media in order to increase their income, maximize efficiency (i.e., earn more per client), and increase job satisfaction.
A Picture Is Worth a Thousand Words
Photographs make up a significant portion of contemporary ad content (see figures 4.3 and 4.4 ). They should be considered a rich source of data fundamental to understanding M$M advertising (see Mowlabocus, 2010b), as they often reinforce identities that are based on physical or personal characteristics, or on particular services. Early photo ads featured relatively tame images. For example, the first photo ads that appeared in Boyz in 1993 featured a studio portrait of an attractive, well-groomed young man in a white sleeveless T-shirt, which was very different from the sexually explicit photos that were to follow. Photos were not widely used until 1996, when headless photos of men’s bare muscular chests appeared regularly.
Others revealed that their personal Gaydar profiles were the conduit for their first paid exchanges, when other members offered them money after an initial rejection. George is one example:
My friends went out at the weekend, went to saunas, met people, did it for nothing. I thought, “Fuck it, I’ll get paid for it.” [Smiles.] It was that simple … Uh. How did I start? Somebody messaged me on Gaydar, and, I wasn’t really that interested. And then they turned around and said, “I’ll pay you for it.” And that’s what started it. And they did. And I enjoyed it. I get a buzz out of getting paid for it because I would normally do it anyway. So fuck it. (George, 42)
Personal profiles and Internet chat rooms can be used to experiment with selling sex with little or no investment, financial or social, on the part of the advertiser. A commercial transaction may be initiated by the advertiser or passively received, unsolicited. M$M use interfaces, like the Gaydar website, in ways that can be described as both passive and active. The profile, while actively created by the M$M, becomes a site potential clients can use to make contact. Advertisers also use their profile to contact other members with a message or a “wink” or by leaving a “track,” like a “poke” in Facebook, effectively “spamming” members as a form of solicitation. M$M may also take advantage of other features, such as chat rooms, where they may repeatedly post messages or adopt a practice of exiting and reentering the chat room to draw the attention of other members, which is known as “frogging.”
Promotion Strategies
The men I spoke to had various advertising strategies. Some used a scattergun approach, placing advertisements with several publications and sites simultaneously and having no solid measure of how much business they were attracting through particular media. Others advertised only in publications where they realized a high return on their investment. Patterns of advertising varied as well. Some respondents focused on repeat business and only advertised when they wanted to attract new clients, whereas others used an intermittent but considered pattern of advertising, placing ads in different publications at different times, allowing for time off, and placing ads in publications in other cities if they planned to work while traveling abroad. Some of the men also were aware that ads in different publications attracted different types of clients.
Finally, the types of advertising (for sex work, body work) and the ad content (level of sexual explicitness) have an impact on the perceived effectiveness of the ads in terms of attracting clients, which affects workers’ decisions about where and how to advertise and how to represent themselves in the media in order to increase their income, maximize efficiency (i.e., earn more per client), and increase job satisfaction.
A Picture Is Worth a Thousand Words
Photographs make up a significant portion of contemporary ad content (see figures 4.3 and 4.4 ). They should be considered a rich source of data fundamental to understanding M$M advertising (see Mowlabocus, 2010b), as they often reinforce identities that are based on physical or personal characteristics, or on particular services. Early photo ads featured relatively tame images. For example, the first photo ads that appeared in Boyz in 1993 featured a studio portrait of an attractive, well-groomed young man in a white sleeveless T-shirt, which was very different from the sexually explicit photos that were to follow. Photos were not widely used until 1996, when headless photos of men’s bare muscular chests appeared regularly.
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