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Nothing I expected to see in Europe intrigued me more than Amsterdam's gay brothels (or as the travel guides call them, "houses with boys"). Indeed, to see the brothels was the reason I had taken the early bullet train from Paris, leaving much of the Louvre unseen, and headed into the low countries.

What would a male bordello be like? I had envisioned dirty little rooms and hard-looking straight boys trying to seem like James Dean while straddle-legging bare metal folding chairs. Now I found myself on a downtown Amsterdam sidewalk facing a simple street door, about to find out. Gathering up my courage, I went in.

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As my eyes adjusted to the dim light, I found myself in a small, simple bar, the sort of place you might find off the dining room of a country hotel. There were a dozen stools at the bar, a sofa, and some large stuffed chairs. I headed for the safety of the bar, joining a middle-aged man and a bartender in his late 20s before I risked a glance back toward the boys themselves.

Sorting themselves out on the sofas and chairs was an assemblage of some half dozen young men. They had the slow, slightly self-conscious movements of those with great energy and no particular place to go. I smiled amiably and looked them over.

Each young man met my eyes, acknowledging my glance with a friendly grin. One stood out. He was extremely handsome and probably the youngest of the group. He was short and dark with glossy black hair. Even across the room I could see that he had extraordinary eyes, filled with mischief and boyish humor.

I turned back to the bar and tried to settle down with a beer.

Slowly, the short, dark boy drifted over and stood next to me. I turned and smiled. He smiled only a little, as one who encounters a stranger with whom he has not yet decided he wants to talk.

Uncertain, I turned away. As I did, the young man abandoned what had apparently been an effort to entice me by seeming disinterested. Leaning on his forearm, he slid up the bar toward me. His smile, devoid of coquetry, was now a full, youthful grin. It seemed to say, "Well now, we've played hard-to-get, so let's talk."

"Hallo," he said in a thick accent. I turned shyly toward him and caught the lush foliage of his long lashes. I nodded and smiled slightly. He seemed not to know what to say next, so he just grinned. He took my hand from the bar and held it between his.

"I am Carlo," he said, leaning closer to me.

"Hello, Carlo," I answered. "What brings you here?"

My question was foolish, and it threw Carlo for a loop. He looked at me, too stumped even to grin. He opened his mouth as if to say something, closed it again, and just smiled.

"He works here," said another, taller young man with bleached white hair who had been lingering just near enough to hear our conversation. "So do I," he added in perfect American Mid western. "Carlo doesn't speak much English."

"He doesn't have to," I tried to quip. The blond boy withdrew.

"What do you do here?" I asked Carlo, feeling somehow bolder.

"I fuck!" Carlo replied. "I fuck you," he added, "right now!"

"But Carlo, I just got here," I protested.

Now Carlo leaned toward me and laughed softy in my ear. "I fuck you in the ass till you can stand up!" This had the sound of a phonetically learned phrase, and he had missed the contraction for "can't."

"No," I said, "I need to have a drink and relax. Maybe later." Carlo put his hand on my thigh and let it slide down to my knee, squeezing before he reluctantly pulled it away.

When Carlo had gone, the blond boy sat down on the bar stool beside me. His white hair was cut short. He was nice-looking and straightforward. "Carlo is Italian," he said. "He hasn't been here very long."

"He's in the right business," I said. "He's absolutely beautiful."

The blond boy smiled and nodded. He put his hand out to me: "My name is Terry."

"Where you from, Terry?"

"You can't guess?"

I grinned. "Where in America?"

"Cleveland," he replied, "though I went to school in Chicago." He turned and studied his glass for a moment. "You like Carlo?" I figured Terry was offering to make the needed arrangements.

"Do you speak Italian?" I asked.

"No, but I can tell Carlo anything you want me to."

I demurred, not wanting to rush into anything. "No, that's all right. I'm going to have a drink and relax. I've been sight-seeing all day."

We discussed what there was to see and do in Amsterdam, and then Terry said, "You don't have to rush. In fact, you can just have a drink and talk to the boys if you want to; you don't have to go with anyone."

Terry told me he had a degree in philosophy from Northwestern. He had held various jobs, but had always been sexually compulsive. He loved what he was doing now, and made quite a bit of money doing it. But most of all, he loved the sexuality of his work. Terry was a serious young man, and I think that he really does have a Northwestern philosophy degree.

I asked him if he didn't get tired sitting around all afternoon like he seemed to be doing on this day. Sure, he said, but some days he was very busy. But how could he keep it up on busy days? Not all his clients insisted that he cum, he said- indeed many did not care or didn't want him to.

"But if they want you to you will?"

"What ever the client wants, he gets."

"Anything?"

"Sure," Terry said. "It isn't cheap." The going rate is 200 guilder, about $100 US. "It's got to be safe," Terry said, "otherwise anything."

"So Carlo meant it when he offered to fuck?"

"Sure," Terry grinned warmly. "I would, too."

"And you get fucked too?" I asked.

"With a condom, certainly," he said. "Almost all of us do."

"But not all?"

"No," he said firmly, "Carlo doesn't." Terry leaned forward confidentially. "Carlo is dead straight. He's got girlfriends all over Amsterdam." Terry and I chuckled, and I bought him a beer.

"Carlo probably will later, but he doesn't now. Someone will offer him a big tip or one of the boys will get him past the first time."

I was envisioning this exotic scene. "You would do this for Carlo?" I asked.

Terry gave me his first really enthusiastic grin. This was not the first time he had thought of Carlo's cherry ass.

International cast

Terry swung around on the bar stool. "See anyone you like?"

"Sure, I like them all," I said. "I like you."

"No, you don't like me, not that way."

He was right. His acknowledgment let us drop our roles of hustler and prospective client.

"What's that big blond like?" I asked, looking at a large-bodied kid with a knee over the arm of the sofa.

"He's good," Terry said, "got a big cock. He dances in the theater."

"You have a theater?"

"Yeah, we have live shows on Friday and Saturday night and on special occasions." I noted that this was Thursday afternoon.

"His name is Frederick, and he likes the SM room." Terry's gaze drifted back from Frederick to me. "You like SM?"

"Never tried it," I said truthfully.

"You should. We have a good setup here." I looked at Frederick's large, hard body. I wondered what it would be like being disciplined by Frederick- or more interesting, disciplining Frederick.

Terry and I talked about some of the other boys. One was Canadian, two were German. There were no Asians or Africans. I asked Terry about it. "We have a couple of black boys," he said, "but I don't think any Asians." My question about Asians seemed to interest Terry, and he turned to the barman and asked if they had any Asian boys. "Not right now," he answered, "We could probably get one." He glanced at me. "No," Terry said, "we were just talking."

"I'd like to talk to the manager," I mentioned.

Terry looked at me, focusing. "Why?" he asked.

"I'd like to do an article on the place," I said.

"You're a writer?" This seemed to cast me in a different light in Terry's eyes and he looked at me for a moment, perhaps adjusting his notion of why I was here.

"I don't think Tommy does interviews anymore," the barman said directly.

"Why not?"

"It seems like every time he does, he gets fucked over. You know, they come in here and everything is great, then you get the article and it's all this trash and sensationalism. Exposé stuff. He just decided not to give anymore interviews."

"You're talking about the straight press," I said. "I write for a gay American magazine." The barman nodded noncommittally. "What do you want to know?"

The big tour

Soon I was introduced to Tommy, and he was escorting me through the various rooms of the brothel. I had a chance to pose the questions burning on my mind.

"How do you select the young men?" I queried.

"We look for good, clean-cut boys," Tommy answered, holding open the door to a large room for me. "They don't have to be super good-looking, but they have to be nice, and good to talk to. They need to have an average-to-good body. We talk to boys between 18 and up to about 30 or so."

We were standing in a large windowless room with a queen size bed against one wall, a large television against the wall facing, and a nicely tiled open shower in the corner. "This is an average room," Tommy said, flipping a switch on a small panel above the bed, flooding the space with romantic mood music. A flick of the dial switched the tunes to rock, then Western. With the exception of the missing window, the room could be at an upper-end hotel, though the big bed had no top sheet or blankets.

"How do you know if a boy will work out? Does someone try him out?"

"No," Tommy replied. "The boys come here and ask for a job. We never advertise or solicit. If I like them, I have them fill out an information form and I take them to a room for an interview. If I'm not sure about his body, I may ask him to take off his clothes, but not usually. If everything is all right, then we give them a few days trial, usually three days."

So much for my fantasy job- hiring boys for a bordello.

But surely I could find useful work as a trainer, right? No, Tommy said, dashing another dream occupation. "The young men know what they are doing. And if by chance they don't, their customers will tell him. We have a video they can look at before they go into the Thai room- where the boys give full body massages. With SM, either they do it or they don't. It's up to the boy."

"How long do the boys usually stay?" I wondered.

"Usually about six months," Tommy said, opening a drawer in the bedside table that revealed all the simple tools of the trade- condoms, lubricants, massage oil. "Some boys stay a year or two."

Health problems were something else I was wondering about. "A government health worker comes here to test the boys for STDs every three weeks," Tommy told me. "The boys are very clean and healthy. If we didn't keep them healthy, we'd be shut down." Under Dutch law, Tommy explained, workers of any kind can't be required to be tested for HIV. But if a sex worker wants a test, it's free. "They have to practice safe sex anyway so it doesn't matter."

What counts as safe? Sucking without coming in the mouth, and anal sex with a condom. Come in the mouth is discouraged, and unprotected anal sex is absolutely forbidden.

"The boys do anal sex then?" I asked, my mind wandering back to the allegedly virgin-butted Carlo.

"They don't have to," Tommy told me. "It's up to them and what they and the client agree to. The rule is that the boy has to find out what the client wants while they are still at the bar. If the boy doesn't want to do something, then the client is free to find a different boy. But the boy has to say what he will do or won't do in advance so there is no disagreement in the room." If only lovers had such high standards of honesty and communication!

"Can the boy charge more for different things?" I asked. Tommy was emphatic: "This is strictly forbidden." All the negotiation had to be done in the bar before the boy takes the man into the room. Once there, he cannot ask for more money. The man can tip if he likes, but the hustler cannot pressure the customer for tips or sell extra service.

"Do your customers fall in love with the boys?" I asked. Maybe the question didn't quite translate to someone so steeped in the brothel industry, but Tommy answered that any outside relationship between a boy and a client he meets in the business is also forbidden. A boy who dates a customer on the side, Tommy said, would be fired.

Rooms of love

Now Tommy and I went into the SM room. This was a new experience for me. Some of the devices were obvious enough: there was a rack for neck and wrists, leaving the body bent double at the hips and the ass exposed. I could also figure out the rack with black leather straps for wrists and ankles, perfect for spread-eagling a boy or client. On one wall hung a collection of whips, restraining equipment, and plastic phalluses. There was what looked like a gymnast's side horse, but fitted out with manacles and straps. It was not impossible to visualize my friend Carlo strapped across it.

"What is that?" I asked, pointing to a cage, about the size of a traveling crate for a German shepherd, but made of heavy iron bars. The cage dangled from the ceiling on a rope that allowed it to swing a few inches off the floor. Tommy detached the rope from a hook on the wall and raised it up so that the cage floor was knee-height. This he seemed to offer as an explanation. I looked at it, still unable to apprehend what was apparently so obvious to Tommy.

"But what does it do?" I asked.

"You get inside it," Tommy said, suddenly realizing the extent of my ignorance. How could a man fit inside so small a cage? But if he were inside, I realized, his head would be crowded against the bars at one end and his ass helpless against the other. Again I thought of Carlo learning one of the tricks of his trade, the one he has so far not mastered, through the bars of this ingenious device.

The Thai Room was much like the other rooms, only next to the shower was a water bed. It was here that a customer could enjoy the Thai massage which, Tommy told me, involved the full length rubbing together of oil-slathered naked bodies.

Tommy told me he'd been running his brothel for ten years. I didn't have the courage to ask if he had once been a "boy"- he certainly was a good-looking man, though now over 30.

Tommy began to talk about Dutch politics. He claimed that his would become the first fully -licensed male brothel in the world. Contrary to what many Americans believe, Tommy told me, the brothels of Amsterdam are still technically illegal. He was not sure when legalization was to happen but seemed to think it would be soon. He told me proudly that the federal minister of health had come here to see how a brothel should be run. Several other houses with boys had been closed, Tommy said, because they employed boys under 18 years, or permitted drugs. Some even were accused of importing youths from the Balkans and holding them as sex slaves.

I asked Tommy about his relations with the cops. He explained that there was a special police unit for the red-light establishments. He had called the police only twice in ten years. "I once had one guy who would not pay," he related, "and another who was drunk and disorderly."

The tour was over, and Tommy led me back to the bar. Like a good ethnographer, I wanted to watch closely the pairing off process between boys and patrons. Now several men sat drinking at the bar. The boys lounged on the sofas waiting, bored, and talking to each other.

Carlo was there, his devastating grin and his beautiful dark eyes drawing me in as ever. But we had already talked- he would not approach me again unless I invited him. I studied the young hustlers. Each smiled as I looked at him, but I invited none to approach. Except Carlo, none of the boys available now had been here earlier in the afternoon. Terry told me that there was the afternoon shift (noon to seven), and the night shift, which was on now and would work till all clients had gone, sometime after 2 am.

At the far end of the room a door opened and blond Frederick came into the bar. He was followed a moment later by Terry, who was dressed as if for the street. Frederick settled comfortably on a sofa with the other boys. Terry stopped just inside the door and looked down the bar at the seated men. When his eyes came to me, I held his look and so he came round the bar and down to me.

"You like the tour?" he said in his Midwestern twang. "Very much," I said.

Terry grinned at me and then nodded his head in the direction of the end of the bar and the hall to the rooms. He let the set of his eyebrows and his slightly opened lips ask the silent question: did I want to go to a room with him? **

So you want to be a whore in Amsterdam?

If you seek employment at an Amsterdam "House of Boys" you'll have to give some information about yourself: age, height, weight, cock size when erect, circumcision status, and whether you are "active, passive, or both."

At the brothel I visited, new boys also get a form that tells them:

We will only employ boys willing to engage in full gay sex activities with the clients. Boys who simply wish to lay there and let the customer do the work can work elsewhere.

All our boys:

Must be prepared to kiss, cuddle, lick, and suck cock and balls. Must be able either to fuck, get fucked, or both. All boys must be prepared to suck cock, without condom is perfectly safe. Boys willing to get fucked will always earn more money. Only boys who are willing to get fucked will be sent on outside escorts. **

Editor's Note: from The Guide, October 1995