20 GAY PEOPLE'S CHRONICLE MAY 20, 1994

PROGRESSIVE

URBAN REAL ESTATE

PHONE: 589-9696

1017 Fairfield Ave. Cleveland, OH 44113

Franklin Blvd.: $139,900

Large rehabbed Victorian in excellent Ohio City location. Five bedrooms, three full baths. Crown moldings, pocket doors, fireplaces.

Ohio City: $79,900

Pride of ownership abounds in this sharp, clean double. Newer, fully applianced kitchen down. 2.5 car garage with secure space for 2 more. Double lot.

Ohio City: $42,500

Well maintained double, deceptively spacious interior. Roof and furnace five years old. Newer bath up. Off-street parking for two.

Western Ohio City: $47,500 Beefy two family with three bedrooms in each unit. Large eat-in kitchen, big dining room, some natural woodwork. Front porch, both upper and lower, has been entirely reconstructed.

Flats/Market: $67,000

Swinging pad for the Cleveland cosmopolite. Open plan, loft-style condo. Versatile space with two-story sitting area. Lots of storage.

Ohio City: $29,900

Nice two family with fenced yard and outdoor deck. Garage for one. Needs a little elbow grease, but what a doll. Good income.

Your community real estate company. Ask us about our other listings.

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BOOKS

Helpful hustling and leather tips

Hustling: A Gentleman's Guide to the Fine Art of Homosexual Prostitution by John Preston

Masquerade, 175 p., $12.95, paper

The Leather Contest Guide: A Handbook for Promoters, Contestants, Judges and Titleholders

by Guy Baldwin Daedalus, 139 p., $12.95, paper.

Reviewed by Timothy Robson

The American appetite for self-help guides and "how to" books appears to be insatiable, and as evidence that there is a "how to" book for everything, I offer these two timely selections.

The late John Preston, prolific writer, editor, anthologist, pornographer, and former hustler, added a new dimension to his oeuvre with this guide to hustling, the business of male sex for money. In fifteen brief chapters, Preston gives practical information on the varieties of hustling, who buys sex, how to advertise and set prices, and how to handle tricks. Prostitution is illegal, and Preston also discusses issues of the law, taxes, and reasons why one should not hustle. Preston interweaves the factual data with anecdotes of his own experiences hustling from the time he was a fourteenyear-old in Boston's Park Square through his twenties and thirties as a well-paid leather top in San Francisco.

There are also numerous tales from interviews Preston conducted with other hustlers. My favorite involves a man with a fetish for Bass Weejuns, who hired hustlers

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to wear perfectly fitted, brand new loafers. At the end of every session, the man would not only pay the hustler's cash price, but also give the hustler the loafers. The man received his greatest pleasure in shopping for a replacement pair. In an author's note preceding the book, Preston invites former hustlers to send true stories, which will be collected for possible future books and will reside with the John Preston papers in the library of Brown University.

While few of us will ever actually engage in prostitution (as the seller, at least), most of us are at least curious: what's it like to hire a hustler? what do those ads in the Advocate Classifieds really mean? How does a hustler get into business? It is no surprise than many customers are closeted, often married, gay or bisexual men who want gay companionship or a friendly ear-even if just for an hour or so as much as they want sex. In other cases, the customer may be an openly gay man who simply doesn't want to put up with the hassle of picking someone up in a bar. Preston emphasizes that the relationship between hustler and trick is

that of a business transaction; the hustler is hired to please the customer, no more, no less. Both hustler and customer do well not to forget that relationship.

As usual, John Preston's prose is lucid and entertaining. Even if one never plans either to hire or be hired, this book contains a wealth of information about the male version of the world's oldest profession.

Guy Baldwin is a former Mr. International Leather, and The Leather Contest Guide is the first book of its type. The two granddaddy leather contests, Mr. Drummer and Mr. International Leather, have spawned a host of local and regional contests, both gay and straight, and Baldwin presents a concise guide to these erotic-fantasy-cumbeauty-pageants. The book may not have widespread appeal, but for promoters and potential contestants of leather events, it is highly recommended. The publisher, Daedalus Publishing Company, has produced a series of books on S/M resources, including Learning the Ropes: A Basic Guide to Safe and Fun S/M Lovemaking and How to Make Rope Restraints.

A talk with the Story

Continued from Page 17

really gracious about it. You can navigate your way through. Often you're up against men, or mostly men, running equipment, running lights, running sound.

Brooke: There are advantages to being a woman, because you can use your sexuality to get what you need, but I hate that. I hate it that in order to get what I want from a dicky sound guy, I have to be cute, I have to flirt.

What's the best part of what you're doing?

Brooke: The money is just pouring in. (Laughs.) We're fucking loaded, can't you tell?

Kimball: (Laughs.) Print that with a note of sarcasm.

Brooke: The best part is moving people, having them in tears or just giggling hysterically, and coming up to me and saying that it's moved them or made a difference in some way. That's just such an intense pleasure, because it moves us, and that's why we do it. We invest ourselves every night in these songs and in the performing of these songs, and it's incredibly rewarding and taxing and emotional and draining all at the same time. So the best part is having people get it and respond so incredibly, and in places that we never knew existed. You know, people coming out of the woodwork in these towns that we never have been to before, and all of a sudden we'll be there and 450 people will show up. It's just an incredible thing.

What's the worst part?

Brooke: Sound men! (Laughs.) There've been a few really bad days but for the most part we can at least manipulate them easily. (Laughs.)

Kimball: The worst part for me is repeating the same thing tomorrow night. I mean, this was a wonderful show and great crowd, but tomorrow we could go somewhere nowhere near as much fun and still have to put out a hundred million percent and be nice to people and professional, and I've found that's really hard. I need a lot of time alone. I need to be able to be in a bad mood if that's the way I feel and I need to learn how to control that around other people. It's definitely challenging, being stuck together in a small space working every night, traveling with a group of people. I've gotten along really well with everyone on this tour. It's a great band.

Are you always traveling with the band these days?

Kimball: We all live in Boston, so when

there are gigs not far from home we can bring them all. And if there's enough money, we can pay them all. But ordinarily that means we don't bring them. So we've traveled for years as a duo, and this is technically our second full-fledged tour with them.

Brooke: If it's near Boston at all we're going to take the band, if the club is large enough that we can pay them. They're all incredibly versatile, in-demand musicians. They're all Boston stars, so we're really careful not to take it for granted that they'll be with us.

For us, another hard thing is, we're really different people, and I'm the kind of person who will just drive myself into the ground. I'll get three hours of sleep and do everything anyone asks of me, and I have to always think about Jennifer, because she's not the same way.

Kimball: Ten hours!

Brooke: She needs ten hours of sleep a night and our stamina levels are just totally different. And so that's a hard thing, figuring out how hard to push Jennifer, how much she can take before she'll justKimball: Core meltdown. completely crash.

Brooke:

Kimball:

I hope I'm getting better at saying, "No, I can't do that." And that's really hard. We've been trained as women not to say that, and also as new artists on Elektra Records-I mean, it's true we've been doing this for years together, but in terms of Elektra and this kind of touring, it's all new. We just signed a couple of years ago, and so we did everything they've said. Absolutely every tour, all the promotion, all the radio, all the interviews.

Brooke: It's a business now, we're a commodity and we're trying to sell a product and that's really a hard thing, to know too much now, to have lost some of the innocence of, Wow, this is really cool, we can sing these cool things, people like it!

Lost innocence is one of Joni Mitchell's favorite themes. Do I hear her influence in your work?

Brooke: I realized recently there's this stigma with female songwriters that they don't want to be compared to Joni, because Joni's a god. I realized that's really dumb, because Joni was a huge influence on me.

The line in "Mermaid" about the ocean-"You want the ocean and not what he's giving you”—is significant for me since the ocean is associated with lesbian sexuality.

Brooke: It is? Great! I'll never sing it the same way again.