Max Cameron, Porn Star and Escort, Responds to Incendiary Essay About ‘Whores’ By Left Magazine Publisher

First and foremost I must first express my acute bewilderment and embarrassment of the content and intent of San Francisco-based Left Magazine publisher David Helton’s attempt at an opinion piece titled “So You Wanna Be a Hooker?” One would hope that a publication such as Left Magazine would be held to a standard high enough to respect all LGBT issues, and not condemn, criticize, and vilify sex workers, an already marginalized group. With that being said, here are my opinions on the vitriolic filth spewed onto the pages of Left with regard to the Rentboy raid.

Dear Mr. Helton,

I cannot begin to convey how flabbergasted, offended, and confused I am after having read your attempt at journalism. I use that term extremely loosely, since it is devoid of actual facts and is more like a Facebook discussion amongst friends. Had you attempted even a modicum of research into the topic, rather than spouting very superficial facts that can be extracted by simply reading media headlines over the past few weeks, your piece, “So You Wanna Be a Hooker?” might not have been so derogatory, spiteful, acrimonious, and defamatory. And I was surprised to read this in a gay publication like Left, instead of Fox News or the Orange County Register.

While you claim that you “have no moral objection to prostitution,” after reading this article, I would have to adamantly disagree. Your tone and demeanor project the contrary. Mr. Helton, we are referred to as “escorts.” We don’t refer to ourselves as “whores” or “hookers” (unless of course, in jest). We are not, as you depict, ugly, crack-smoking, dumb, slutty, desperate shells of human beings. For a publication that supports broader LGBT rights, I find the way you generalize, compartmentalize, and dehumanize us in your writing appalling. Was it your intention to demean and insult sex-workers? If so, certainly have achieved your goal.

Had you reached out to any local escort, I’m sure they would have gladly given their opinion or statement on the matter, but you lackadaisically neglected to perform due diligence as a reporter.

Escorts are “uneducated, people with no skill or an ability to get a ‘real’ job.” You’ll have to excuse me in advance for this, but SIT DOWN AND TAKE SEVERAL SEATS. I personally graduated high school with honors and went to a distinguished California University. Many people use escorting a a means to supplement high costs of tertiary education and student loans, to, in fact, get that “real job” you refer to. Furthermore, I have a “real job,” as do many escorts. True, many primarily work in the adult entertainment industry, but we are composed of a very dynamic group consisting of professionals in a variety of sectors: law, medical, tech, education…need I go on? Which leads to:

“Sorry, whore, but you need to pay taxes on the money you earn.” The push to decriminalize consensual sex-work, instead of vilifying a victimless crime, will allow for a system of taxes to exist that you wish to see. While I cannot speak for everyone, I can assure you that a significant number of escorts already pay taxes. “How,” you say? Very simple: you file that allotted income as “All Other Personal Services.” You know what I’d like? For the whores on Wall Street, in DC, and other one-percenters to pay their fair share of taxes. Let’s look at the big picture, please; this is a drop in the bucket.

“No offense, but 90% of the guys who have listings on Rentboy are not guys I would fuck for free.” Well, 90% of the guys in streets and bars wouldn’t fuck YOU for free. Just because every escort on the site doesn’t conform to your asian, twink, power bottom qualifications (love you, Eli!), doesn’t mean the BDSM muscle bear might not be someone else’s cup of tea. “Different strokes for different folks.” And again, you neglect to address the fact that most people use the site for companionship. There is no statistic to support your assertion that rentboy.com is used for anything more than companionship, where an escort sells his time. I cannot even count how many times I’ve simply gone to dinner, a baseball game or on a short trip with someone that didn’t involve sex. Just remember your hypocritical comments when you are an old, decrepit, fetid, husk of a man, to whom no one will give the time of day. All you long for is companionship or even the embrace of another human soul. You think you might reach out to a nonjudgmental escort then?

“My recommendation is that you date someone who is also in that industry and understands it. However, often those relationships don’t seem very healthy. Instead, they become competitive and toxic.” Mr. Helton. I should hope you are aware with the proverb “people in glass houses should not throw stones.” And with respect to you and your reputation, I will leave that there for interpretation. Now, on a personal level, my boyfriend and I have an extremely healthy relationship, contrary to your perception as being “competitive and toxic.” We support each other in our endeavors. We communicate with one another. We support and praise one another. We love one another. You know what they say about assumptions…

I’m going to close using your quotation: “This is San Francisco. Everybody is a hooker.” And yet, escorts are the scapegoats and patsies? This logic simply does not make sense to me. The fact that we offer companionship in exchange for money rather than being “free” hookers is all but irrelevant, but for some reason, you decided to write an op-ed piece that is vapid, inflammatory, accusatory, and rife with inaccuracies. Why can’t we support all people in our LGBT community, regardless of your level of understanding? We must continue to fight for and strengthen a community that is already under the microscope, under constant attack, and marginalized. In the words of my friend Boomer Banks, “love and light.”

Sincerely,
Max Cameron
Adult Entertainer

Related: ADAM RAMZI ON THE RIDICULOUS RENTBOY RAID AND THE FUTURE OF SEX WORK

16 thoughts on “Max Cameron, Porn Star and Escort, Responds to Incendiary Essay About ‘Whores’ By Left Magazine Publisher”

  1. I was a full time sex worker / escprt for 20 years and paid tax. I am a psychologist and counsellor. No dummy. I ran verious escort agencies and was very busy. I now own and run a spiritual hotel for gay men in ythe UK, the only one in the world, as a NOT FOR PROFIT VENUE and put some soul back into a community in dire need of some healing. Articles that damn and destroy any section of the gay community – does not help. It destroys and belittles and this says a great deal more about the author.
    Shameful article. Shameful attitude. Shameful the magazine allowed it.
    Shameful behaviour.

    John bellamy

  2. Max (et al),

    As I wrote on your fellow escort, and personal friend Dylan Knight’s Facebook wall (where he helpfully posted your response to Mr. Helton), “Left” Magazine’s cynical diatribe is in need of a swift and assertive rebuttal. It sadly appears from Mr. Helton’s experience that he has never met the kind of professionals that walk among us as dignified human beings, are our friends, and certainly seek the same goals of economic security, a bright future, and the pursuit of happiness, whatever that may be. I noted that ironically, those in other forms of capitalist-based industry – which Mr. Helton seems obsequiously to prefer – are often the ones whose actions are cutthroat and competitive. However, I noted that I couldn’t see what could be more virtuous about a profession in the corporate world whose perennial focus is the bottom-line, if disregard for the financial welfare of others is merely a tertiary affair.

    If, as the mean-spirited “Hooker” article indicates, Mr. Helton elevates those who can be avaricious and self-serving simply because they work in a high-rise office and don a white-collared shirt every day, his (IMHO) wrong-headed “think-piece” should be seen as the contemptuous and shallow view that it is. In my estimation, anyone who places a stigma on his or her fellow human beings for the kind of work s/he chooses to do is the one who should be ashamed.

    However, to conclude my thoughts on an edifying note, here’s looking forward – hopefully along with Mr. Helton, although I have serious reservations as to his change-of-heart – to a time when, as has occurred in the past, darkness and ignorance begin to lift, and the general populace gains a much-needed education. I’m referring here to the way in which people began to view their fellow men and women as partners in life throughout history, instead of “the other”. Through much struggle, and subsequent victories (still being played out, mind you) African-Americans have accomplished these aims, women gained the right to vote, interracial marriages are now accepted in a way that would have been unthinkable 70 years ago, and most recently, same-sex couples are being granted a more equal role in society than ever before. These are all positive developments, but because articles like the one that “Left” Magazine has chosen to spew unfortunately sway opinions, other voices such as yours – rational, upbeat, persuasive clarion-calls – need to be heard loudly, clearly and continuously. Only then, I imagine, will our culture begin to understand that EVERYONE is our neighbor, and love, respect and the granting of honor to those around us is the only way to live.

    P.S.: Three days after leaving language very similar to the above pensées in the “comments” section under D. Helton’s write-up, it has yet to be published. Nor do I see that any comments whatsoever have appeared, leading me to believe that this fourth-string, online rag has no intention of publishing a counterpoint to Master David’s unfortunate op-ed. How very convenient, no? :)

  3. gee, good to live in europe, you americans still have a lot of issue with sex and especially escorting…..the negativity and even hatred i read towards the odlest profession in the world is saddening. Why don’t the rentoby.commers just move their business to more liberal and tolerant countries?

  4. I got notice of this from Chris Tennant’s FB page. It was a few days before I found time to read Helton’s essay. I’m kind of assuming that “Left” is some kind of vanity publication that no one actually pays any serious attention to. It looks like it has no reporting; just opinion pieces. I feel like I can say, after teaching writing for f o r t y years–yep, forty years, and amazingly, I’m still totally fuckable–but where was I? — I think I can say this Mr. Helton isn’t a writer, he’s just a guy who knows how to throw up a website. Max Cameron goes to the trouble of providing evidence and counter-arguments, but what’s the point when you’re talking to someone so uninterested in reality that they just make shit up or cite stereotypes as if they were facts, and so disinclined to develop any insight that, as Cameron says, they make the claim that they wouldn’t moralize, that they’re fine with everyone following their own bliss, while they’re in the midst of such a nasty, knee-jerk, unreflective, vicious attack upon a class of persons whose real crime, as Mr. Helton clearly puts it, is not that they get paid, but that they have a whole, whole lot of sex–like they were something unspeakably repellent, like, I dunno, GAY MEN or something? (Mr. Helton is a lot like that guy that screams at you, his face turning beet red, “I am NOT getting UPSET!”) For lines that give away Mr. Helton’s actual, Huckabee-ick-factor-ish repugnance at the very idea of sex, I especially enjoy his assertion that escorts earn their living “fingering the dirty asshole of some random guy whose boyfriend is out of town.” I don’t know about you, but the first thing I do when my boyfriend leaves town is clean my asshole real good in case I manage to talk an escort into fingering it. It seems obvious that this completely overcomes Mr. Helton’s objection to the fingering. Really, yes, I know there can’t possibly be anybody that reads “Left” and takes it seriously, but still, what really galls me about Mr. Helton’s screed is, really, it just seems spectacularly inappropriate for a magazine or blog or whatever to call itself “Left” and completely ignore the little matter of economic forces, labor for hire, and labor relations–which is in part to say that Mr. Helton just has no idea what people mean by “sex worker.” As against the many straw men he invokes–those people who believe that sex work is “easy”–Have you EVER met ANYONE who thought it was easy?–that it never takes a toll, and–this is rich–that what sex workers really want is to be respectable–apparently, they *scream* this–he actually agrees that “sex work should be legitimized and legalized”–does he maybe not know that “legitimized” means treated as a valid form of exchange of labor for payment? Wouldn’t you think that something called “Left”–he’s the publisher, you know–would allow that the political point to be argued in a sex-work “scandal” is not how individuals rationalize their choices, whether to engage in sex work or refuse to date sex workers–because, seriously, what this article really says is, if you’re a sex worker, sorry, dude, I can’t see dating you–but that all forms of labor for hire under capitalism inevitably involve exploitation of workers and — as a good leftist should say — that the alienation of labor has inevitable ethical and cultural implications and consequences. It makes no sense to speak of the escort who fingers a dirty asshole as a kind of depraved creature who has to be saved from himself, and not invoke the hotel cleaning crew who are “reduced” to swabbing out toilets, or the football players who batter themselves into concussion, or the college professors (like me) who cannot pursue the real aims of education under a corporate university model, or middle-management bureaucrats who abase themselves almost every time they write an email or answer the phone. Yeah, because sucking dick is sooooo much grosser than randomly beating prisoners or frying turdburgers in turd grease or stealing money from retirees via cold-call marketing. If you want to move up from sex work into one of these growth fields, Mr. Helton volunteers to help you with your resume. In the end, the silliest of these straw men is Mr. Helton’s claim that by saying that the Rentboy arrests might be suspect, we are saying that people shouldn’t be arrested when they break the law. We’re not Kim Davis here; we’re not suggesting anybody gets to choose which laws to obey, and ought to violate them with “impunity,” as Mr. Helton weirdly suggests. We’re saying it’s time to look at these laws–including, as a lot of folks in the FBI and local police forces are actually saying–how they’re selectively enforced. It could still turn out that Rentboy’s done something awful beyond merely providing a platform for escort ads. The one area where Mr. Helton is absolutely right is that Rentboy’s “scholarship” contest involved an insulting sum, completely unrelated to the real needs of patrons of the site.

  5. Good job on using as many SAT words as possible in your college essay; the effort is hard to miss. Being a part of the LGBT community doesn’t make one untouchable, prostitution is prostitution. I have more sympathy for those who do it due to lack of other alternatives (i.e. some members of the trans community). Otherwise it’s just another easy way to make money.

  6. A lot of men like David Helton hate themself for being old, beary, hairy and many other things. To make themselves feel better and relevant in a world that they feel excluded from, they try to devalue everyone around them. It’s hard for them to accept that as life goes on fewer and fewer people want to have sex with you. In that obsession they lose sight of the fact that that number is rarely zero. Someone you’re attracted to wants to fuck you. If you’re to lazy to go out and find that person, you can always hire an escort.

  7. Well said Max! Sounds like this guy did a tired old story on escorting and used the same old stereotypes and and lies. Pathetic that he tries to pawn it off as journalism. Somehow I doubt he is up for an journalism awards when he writes crap like that.

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