The Great Mirror of Same-Sex Love - Prose - 102. Unknown - "San Francisco Callboys"

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How to get 'a shine' in Old SF

“I was 12 when I came to San Francisco, having run away from my home in a small town in Oregon. It was about 1903.

I did odd jobs, but my primary means of making a living was under the guise of shining men's shoes. In actual fact, I sucked their cocks for pay, which, I suppose, made me one of the turn-of-the-century boy prostitutes.

There were even boy houses in those days, though their existence was a carefully guarded secret, known only to men and boys, and even so, only to those “in the know.” I'm sure that upper-class men and boys assumed that much of what they heard was merely fanciful rumor.

Many of the regular whorehouses had boys “on call.” I first got into prostitution when I became acquainted with other runaways and boys of the streets. They were tough kids. They had to be, or else they wouldn't have survived.

In those days, the streets were dimly lit by gaslight. The approach was almost always made by the customer. A guy would ask a passing boy for a shoeshine. If he wanted more than just a shine, we would go into an alley and he would take his cock out of his pants.

Kneeling down, pretending to shine his shoes, we could suck quite easily, and if anyone approached, we stopped sucking and started shining. It was easy to hear someone coming: most of the sidewalks were of wooden planking.

At first I would spit out the load, but later I learned to like the taste and would swallow. I only spit it out if the guy didn't appeal to me. Lots of seamen would pay 25¢ for a blow job. Some of the biggest loads I ever got were from those seamen. […]

A boy named Manny approached me one evening for a four-way. A rich saloon owner liked to have three boys at a time. I went with him and we all stripped. The guy was in his early 50s. He liked to have one boy suck him while the other two stood by and he could feel them up, running his hands all over their bodies, and playing with their cocks.

He would stop the boy sucking him and have one of the others take over. Eventually, all three boys would suck his cock. He would time us by counting, each boy making ten slides up and down his cock, then another boy. We went on like this, 10 strokes apiece at a time. Whichever boy was lucky enough to get his load got $20 in addition to the fee he paid each of us. He was married and had three daughters who considered themselves “up in the world.”

I knew some boys who signed on as cabin boys after the captain had become taken with them. The kid was, for all intents and purposes, just a piece of ass for the captain at sea. Most of the boys who signed on as cabin boys loved being fucked. Sometimes the first mate would get to fuck the boy too, but the crew usually let the boy alone, fearing the captain's anger.

I was a shoeshine boy until I was 16. You were considered a man at that age. Also, I was too old for the trade; the men really liked the younger boys better.

But I never gave up cocksucking and I got a lot of cock.

When I was in my 20s and 30s, I would have liked to visit a shoeshine boy myself, but times had changed and there just weren't any anymore.”

—Unknown,[i]

regarding events 1903-1907

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