Jerry Portwood has been a friend of the Narratively family for a minute now, sharing his expertise on how to self-edit on our sister site, Narratively Academy, as well as his tips for how to handle the kind of rejection every writer deals with. We’re also a big fan of the site he founded and edits, the Queer Love Project.So, when he came to us with this essay, that paints a nuanced picture of a scenario many romanticize at some point, we were thrilled. Read on to enter a new world with Jerry and see how he fares.
The two young women, dressed in stylish black miniskirts, long dark hair cascading down their backs, stood in stilettos under the streetlights like they belonged there. They said, “Hola,” in demure voices when Patricio and I returned together around 2 a.m. after finishing drinks with friends. Their tasteful makeup accentuated their big brown eyes as they glanced my way and smiled, a beautiful smile that felt warm and pleasant and full of love.
“You know they’re putas,” my boyfriend of two years said after we opened the glass door of our swanky building and took the chrome elevator up to the third floor. “They must be fancy prostitutes for the rich guys in the neighborhood.”
In fact, I hadn’t realized. The city was full of sex workers, but most of them congregated in seedier parts of the city and wore tackier clothes. These women were a far cry from the ones that lined the grimy streets of the other neighborhoods near the port or the Raval, where they wore next to nothing and boldly offered themselves in husky voices from the shadows. And the word putas, meaning whores, stung.
Maybe a slur in another language never feels quite as serious. I was still acquiring language skills, but Spanish was my boyfriend’s native tongue — he was a child of Cuban refugees who was born and raised in Puerto Rico — and his use of it gave me a fragile sort of permission to incorporate it into our lexicon. So, I started calling these gorgeous street walkers “our putas” as I tracked their nocturnal movements from our Barcelona balcony. Like a bird-watcher keen to monitor a rare specimen, I watched as they leaned next to the tinted window of a black Mercedes or whispered to each other on the lonely boulevard during slow winter nights that rarely dropped below 60 degrees, so they still showed plenty of leg. I thought of them as our two elegant sentries.
They seemed less interested in us, and I figured they knew Patricio and I were a gay couple — since they’d seen us so many times returning late at night together — and, therefore, harmless. They also knew about all our conspiratorial trysts. The times we’d returned with a third. The time I’d snuck up with a young man from Ecuador. We protected each other’s secrets.
I longed to talk to them, to understand their stories, to learn their names, but I worried that it was patronizing — to approach my putas and ask them to reveal their personal tales to the gringo who lived upstairs in this chic apartment on the second fanciest street in Barcelona. I itched to confess to them that I’d fantasized about being a puta myself.
After moving to Spain the summer of 2003 — during one of the deadliest heat waves in Europe’s history — I noticed the advertisements in the magazines for “American Boys.”
“Maybe I should audition,” I said to Patricio one day, showing him the black-and-white advert in the gay rag. I’d failed at being an English tutor to the children of rich Catalans, and this could be a way to make some cash. “I mean, I’m American and I’m a boy,” I said, “so I seem to have the basic qualifications. Think I’d get the part?”
I was only partially joking. I’d studied acting in college and was quickly typecast as the prince in children’s theater productions, or considered for boy-next-door, nice-guy roles. As much as I chafed at that stereotype, if I was to be cast as the ingénue, then maybe it was a role I was meant to play. So far, I’d failed at being a twink back home since, along with being young, cute and hairless, it required a certain level of air-headed naiveté. As soon as I opened my mouth, a book fell out, which typically scared away men who were looking for a less complicated lay. I didn’t want to feign childish ignorance, and my college professor partner had no qualms with having Mr. Smarty Pants to cuddle up with.
Perhaps with my limited Spanish, however, I could pass myself off as a young horny colt with nary a thought to burden my boyish vigor. I imagined some sophisticated Spanish señor, maybe a closeted politician or a lonely filmmaker, looking through a catalog of young men and finding his ideal boy in me: “I want him,” he’d say. If he was willing to pay for that opportunity, I could fulfill his fantasy. The power that came with that level of desire thrilled me — theoretically.
“Sure, if you want to,” Patricio said. “Do you really want to?”
