Str8 No Chaser uncovers societal narratives around masculinity, erotic labor, and the often contradictory ways we construct identity, sexuality, and gender.
Looking for Mr. Good Enough
In a 2004 episode of Will & Grace, openly gay attorney Will Truman (Eric McCormack) arrives solo to a couples-only cooking class and is paired with Adam, a handsome stranger who seems genuinely smitten with him. As Adam (Christopher Backus) begins flirting and offering compliments, Stuart—Jack’s partner—teases that Jack (Sean Hayes) had been on the verge of buying Will “a hooker” to cure his romantic dry spell. Will laughs it off…until he spots Jack in the corner discreetly handing Adam cash.
When Adam later invites Will back to his place, Will confronts Jack and unleashes one of the show’s sharpest barbs:
“Couldn’t you have at least gotten somebody halfway respectable instead of this piece of rough trade from Skanksville?”
The line lands because it’s absurd—Will’s panic spiraling into self-sabotage—but also because it touches a deeper cultural nerve. Even viewers who didn’t know the term felt the charge in “rough trade,” a phrase thick with connotations of danger, desire, class anxiety, erotic projection, and a faint, unmistakable condescension—as Adam’s sunken face clearly shows. Will’s “rough trade” burn works because the term’s history is older, stranger, and more complex than a punchline could ever carry.
Fair Trade
To understand rough trade, we have to return to trade itself—a term that emerged in Polari, the multilingual cant spoken among British gay men, sailors, sex workers, theater folk, and criminals from the eighteenth through the mid-twentieth centuries. Trade originally referred simply to sexual partners, usually men who did not openly identify as gay, especially given homosexuality was illegal in Britain until 1967. Trade was eventually used to describe a guy who slept with men but maintained a masculine persona or self-identified as straight even as he accepted a drink, a blowie, a gift, or cash.
Trade frequently referred to men from working-class backgrounds whose masculinity seemed unvarnished by middle-class expectations. It was less an identity than a role, posture, or position within a hierarchy of gender, culture, and class. In Black queer communities, trade still holds cultural power as a descriptor for straight-identified men who engage in queer sex while maintaining rigid masculine codes, a dynamic shaped by homophobia, effeminophobia, economic precarity, and the fierce social policing of Black masculinity.
In ballroom and drag culture—popularized globally by RuPaul’s Drag Race—the term “trade” typically refers to a masculine-presenting man, not necessarily straight, whose swagger or sexual availability echoes earlier cross-class usage.
So What Is Rough Trade?
If trade is the spark, rough trade is the voltage. Polari distinguished “rough trade” not by sexuality but by demeanor and class: men who appeared tough, hardened, sometimes malevolent, and whose masculinity carried the suggestion of unpredictability. Rough trade did not inherently mean violent, though pop culture often reduces the term to that cliché. And, admittedly, trade and rough trade are often used interchangeably.
Early sources like the Gay Girl’s Guide (1949) were clear: the term described working-class or tough partners but explicitly warned that violence was not its defining feature. The danger was primarily imagined—a projection layered onto men whose lives bore the marks of labor, precarity, or rugged masculinity. Even contemporary definitions, such as those in the Cambridge Dictionary or Green’s Dictionary of Slang, echo the same themes: lower-class masculinity, sex work, toughness, and erotic tension. The term is an axis of class, longing, and projection—not a promise of harm.
The term’s complexity becomes clearer when we look at how it traveled through queer languages and literature across the twentieth century. In Polari: The Lost Language of Gay Men, linguist Paul Baker notes that “trade” has been used since at least the eighteenth century to describe casual sexual partners, male prostitutes, or masculine “pickups,” with roots in Molly House slang.
By the mid–twentieth century, Polari offered two definitions of “rough trade”:
a working-class or blue-collar sex partner, and
a tough, unpredictable, or potentially violent one.
These meanings later collapsed into each other through stereotype, as if class itself implied danger—a deeply harmful conflation that allowed queer culture, and society at large, to project menace onto men from marginalized economic, racial, or cultural backgrounds.
Rough Edges
The evolving definitions of “rough trade” reveal how long queer culture has linked masculinity, class, and risk. Queer literature captured this dynamic long before porn ever did. Oscar Wilde’s well-documented desire for working-class men—boxers, carriage boys, soldiers—became both his pleasure and his undoing, and early references echo that tension. In a 1900 letter, Wilde described a lover as “half rough, all Hylas,” collapsing beauty and roughness into a single erotic ideal.
Green’s Dictionary of Slang appears to confirm this lineage with examples that trace rough-trade’s shifting meanings: Robert McAlmon’s novel Miss Knight (1925) portrays “a beautiful blond policeman who was real rough trade,” while Robert Scully’s camp classic Scarlet Pansy (1932) laments that “rough trade after you’re through with it, is such a bore.”
Midcentury pulp and underground fiction—cheap, sensational paperbacks sold in drugstores, bus stations, and adult bookshops during and after World War II—returned to the term repeatedly. Chandler Brossard’s The Bold Saboteurs (1953), Antony James’s America’s Homosexual Underground (1965), Steven Berkoff’s Decadence (1977), and Christopher Cook’s Robbers (2000) each deploy “rough trade” to evoke some mix of class tension, threat, sexual volatility, and taboo masculinity.
Beyond the Anglophone world, queer South Africans adapted Polari into Gayle, a secret language blending English, Afrikaans, and Yiddish. In Ken Cage’s Gayle: The Language of Kinks and Queens, “rough trade” refers to heterosexual, often Afrikaans-speaking rent boys who are not gay-identified but rely on male prostitution—illustrating how class and sexuality refract differently across cultural contexts.
Some dictionaries, like Guild Press’s Guild Dictionary of Homosexual Terms (1965), offered an even starker definition: “a heterosexual who has sex with a homosexual.” Others, including non-sexual entries in Green’s Dictionary, used “rough trade” simply to denote a tough crowd or environment, appearing in Emmett Grogan’s Ringolevio (1972), William McCarthy’s Vice Cop (1991), and Frank Bill’s Back to the Dirt (2023).
Taken together, these examples reveal a term formed not by a single meaning, but by shifting anxieties around class, masculinity, sex, race, and power—and underscore why rough trade must not be conflated with BDSM or consensual “rough” play. The phrase has always been a cultural inkblot, absorbing whatever fears, fantasies, and hierarchies were already in the air.
A Class Apart
Long before Polari coined “rough trade,” photographer Montague Glover built a visual language of cross-class desire, depicting working-class men not as threatening or crude but as tender, sensuous, proud, and achingly young. Serving in the British Army during World War I (1916–1918), Glover kept a diary in which he openly recorded same-sex encounters—remarkably bold in an era when homosexuality was criminalized.
While in uniform, Glover began photographing fellow soldiers in trenches and billets, framing their uniforms, lanky bodies, and whispered beauty. Throughout the 1920s and 1930s, Glover invited soldiers and lovers to his London flat, dressing them in uniforms, breeches, and working-class clothing from a trunk of props—a practice that echoes modern roleplay and uniform fetishism.
Glover’s photographs, later collected in A Class Apart by James Gardiner, reveal a world that was already there—soldiers, sailors, laborers, delivery boys, and Guardsmen—predating by decades the postwar boom of military-themed erotica captured on film by Bobby Garcia, Dirk Yates, Dink Flamingo, and Rob Navarro—and later examined by writers Steve Zeeland and Mark Simpson.
Glover’s personal life further illuminates the cross-class dynamics embedded in the rough-trade trope. In 1930, Glover met Ralph Edward Hall, a handsome working-class teenager fifteen years his junior, who became his lover and lifelong partner—though publicly described as his “servant” to navigate rigid British class boundaries. Their fifty-year relationship, portions of which appear in My Dear Boy: Gay Love Letters Through the Centuries.
Tom of Finland (Touko Laaksonen) grew up admiring the laborers and uniformed men around him, later exaggerating their masculinity into hyper-erotic fantasy. Drawing on his military service and lifelong fascination with uniforms, he transformed working-class archetypes—bikers, policemen, lumberjacks, leathermen—into near-mythic embodiments of rough-trade longing.
Laaksonen said that Marlon Brando’s portrayal of Johnny in The Wild One (1953) shaped his vision of a hypermasculine, hypersexual biker—inspiring the creation of Laaksonen’s own iconic character, Kake. Brando’s Stanley Kowalski—sweaty, volatile, sexy, and working-class—became one of Hollywood’s earliest embodiments of rough trade on-screen. Joe Dallesandro’s turns in Andy Warhol films made Dallesandro the patron saint of antisocial allure.
Cultural visibility also shaped the rough trade’s evolution. Quentin Crisp helped popularize “rough trade” in The Naked Civil Servant (1968), referring to “roughs” as aggressively masculine working-class men who masked their attraction to men through taunting or harassment. Crisp captured the duality with characteristic wit: “Some roughs are really queer and some queers are really rough.” And late-1960s–early-1970s drag performer Lee Sutton (Leonard Sutch) echoed that camp sensibility with the quip, “I’ve been feeling a little rough all day.”
John Schlesinger’s Midnight Cowboy (1969) exposed the fragility behind Joe Buck’s rough-trade persona as it unraveled under economic pressure. William Friedkin’s Cruising (1980) and Rainer Werner Fassbinder’s Querelle (1982) leaned further into volatility, creating noir atmospheres where sex and sociopathy were inseparable. Even the 2014 film Foxcatcher, based on a true story, used wrestling and class obsession to echo the long-standing pattern of elite fixation on working-class male bodies.
Bodies Across Boundaries
Throughout global queer history, middle- and upper-class men have sought partners from working-class backgrounds. The appeal has always been shaped by asymmetry: the gritty allure of a man whose masculinity seems unselfconscious; the thrill of an encounter that crossed class boundaries; the erotic pull of someone whose life appeared harder, riskier, or freer from social etiquette.
Scholars like Kerwin Kaye and Seth E. Davis relayed that rough-trade figures emerged from structural conditions—poverty, labor inequality, policing, survival economies—rather than pure erotic fantasy. Working-class men became desirable not only for their perceived toughness, but because their class position invited such projections: authenticity, emotional indifference, dominance, or volatility. Rough trade, in other words, is an eroticization of the working class largely crafted by men who were not working-class themselves.
In port cities from Rio de Janeiro to Bangkok to Marseille, sailors, soldiers, dockworkers, and day laborers regularly took male lovers or clients without troubling their sense of masculinity; their encounters were shaped less by identity than by economics, opportunity, and proximity. Similar patterns emerged in Havana and Manila, and in London’s East End, where Cockney bricklayers, costermongers, and dockworkers often took queer sex partners.
These cross-class, cross-status dynamics show that rough trade precedes its coinage: the phenomenon arises wherever masculinity, labor, and economic disparity interconnect.
Queer Rebels of the Harlem Renaissance
Queer literature captured the dynamic long before pornography gave it a visual vocabulary. Writers such as Walt Whitman, Edward Carpenter, and John Addington Symonds used coded language to celebrate “real men,” often implying that manliness was rooted in labor and class. Claude McKay’s Banjo (1929) offers one of the earliest printed uses of “rough trade,” attaching erotic energy to the swagger of sailors and drifters.
One of the first explicit articulations arrives in Harlem Renaissance writer and artist Richard Bruce Nugent’s semiautobiographical novel Gentleman Jigger—written in the 1920s and ’30s but published in 2008. Nugent writes unabashedly about his attraction to “hoodlums and rough trade”: sailors, gangsters, street toughs, and the magnetic danger they embodied. His protagonist, Stuartt, falls in love and has an affair with a mobster reportedly based on Lucky Luciano, making Nugent perhaps the first American writer to use rough trade plainly and without euphemisms.
By midcentury, underground and pulp fiction expanded the motif with a rawness mainstream publishing refused to touch. Lou Rand’s Gay Detective (1961)—retitled Rough Trade in 1964—was one of the earliest gay pulps of the decade, pairing noir sensibility with queer longing. Hubert Selby Jr.’s Last Exit to Brooklyn (1964) traced the brutal grit of working-class neighborhoods where rough male intimacy, violence, and erotic ache lived side by side.
At the same time, the literary persona Phil Andros—the erotically fearless pseudonym of Samuel Steward—brought the hustler voice into sharp, unapologetic focus. His 1966 novel $tud is often cited as the first American “rough trade” gay porn novel: a swaggering, unashamed portrait of a male prostitute narrating his exploits with wit, grit, and sexual realism.
The gay pornographic pulp series Rough Trade (1972–87) combined noir, machismo, and carnal cravings—often accentuated with illustrations by queer visual artist Rex. Critically acclaimed novel Saul’s Book (1983) by Paul T. Rogers deepened the lineage with its wrenching vision of Sinbad, a Puerto Rican hustler bound to an older criminal lover.
The literary lineage continued into the twenty-first century as Todd Gregory’s Rough Trade (2009) revived risk and transgression in short-fiction form, while Katrina Carrasco’s Rough Trade (2024) —set in 1888 Washington Territory—explores queer nightlife, smuggling, surveillance, and the precarity of masculinity in frontier America.
Across a century of queer writing, rough trade has revealed our deepest tensions between attraction, status, fantasy, and fear.
Bad Boys and Tough Tattoos
Samuel Steward may be the most important figure linking early queer erotic representation to later documentary truth. A professor-turned–tattoo artist-turned novelist, Steward kept meticulous sexual diaries—recording encounters that spanned from sailors and hustlers to Hollywood royalty such as Rudolph Valentino, Thornton Wilder, and Rock Hudson (in a freight elevator, no less).
Steward’s journals later became invaluable to Alfred Kinsey’s landmark research on male sexuality. Steward’s filmed encounter with artist Mike Miksche—shot under Kinsey’s supervision in 1950—is one of the first documented BDSM scenes in American sex research.
Writing as Phil Andros, Steward chronicled sailors, hustlers, convicts, and streetwise lovers. His stories captured their bravado, humor, restlessness, and emotional complexity, refusing the moralism that surrounded male sex work. Steward’s work offered an erotic realism that neither pathologized nor romanticized rough trade.
Blue-Collar, Blue Fantasy
“David likes psychos. Nude ones. Money-hungry drug addicts with big dicks. Rage-filled robbers without rubbers. And of course, convicts—his ultimate Prince Charmings.”
John Waters once said this of David Hurles—aka Old Reliable—one of queer history’s most singular archivists of outlaw desire. Beginning in the late 1960s and working well into the mid-2000s, Hurles photographed, audio-recorded, and videotaped hundreds of hustlers, drifters, bikers, ex-cons, and parolees—and on rare occasions, stepped into the frame himself.
Unlike the polished fantasies of Tom of Finland, Hurles’s models bore the marks of real life: broken noses, prison tattoos, scars, hard stares, and bodies shaped by labor or addiction. His studio was as much a refuge as a workplace, though he was often robbed or physically harmed by the very men he photographed.
But what Hurles understood—perhaps better than any artist before or since—is that men want to be wanted. His models were never props; they were lived textures of working-class masculinity in an America that fetishized, feared, and forgot them. Hurles did not invent rough trade, but he gave it its clearest, rawest, most unflinching face.
Jack Deveau’s Rough Trades (1977), produced by Hand in Hand Films, is widely considered the first gay porn feature to fully center working-class virility. Billed as “the blue-collar blue fantasy,” the film follows a wealthy penthouse host who becomes consumed by a rotating cast of working men—a taxi driver, telephone installer, handyman, elevator repairman, and delivery worker—drawing directly on the long tradition of class-crossing desire.
Around the same time, Joe Gage released the first installment of his own blue-collar trilogy, beginning with Kansas City Trucking Company (1976), followed by El Paso Wrecking Corp. (1978) and L.A. Tool & Die (1979).
Gage would later recall seeing Hurles’s work while making Kansas City Trucking Company, saying, “I was instantly in love with the all-American dirty mind of the great David Hurles.” In a 2011 interview, Gage noted that Hurles “didn’t influence my aesthetic as much as allow me to realize that there were others out there who had a similar vision—who appreciated a very specific kind of reality as much as I did.”
Hurles, Deveau, and Gage extended a lineage stretching back to Nugent, Glover, and Steward, turning rough trade into a fully realized visual and erotic mythology.
Rough Trade 2.0
The term “rough trade” continues to surface in contemporary queer storytelling. In the television series Fellow Travelers (2023), Hawk (Matt Bomer) explains to his partner Tim (Jonathan Bailey) that rough trade “will offer to blow you for five bucks, but fifty-fifty they’ll just beat you up and take your wallet.”
The term’s cultural longevity also extends into literary circles. In Passionate Outlier: Gay Writers and Allies on Their Work, Frank Pizzoli recalls Gore Vidal’s long-standing fondness for “rough trade,” a detail reflecting how deeply the phrase circulated among queer writers in the mid-twentieth century. And in early 2025, Hollywood Reporter film critic David Rooney described a moment in Peter Hujar’s Day when the photographer raises an eyebrow at an “occasional hook-up” who insists on “playing rough trade.”
Today, the figure survives in new guises: in amateur porn, fan sites personas, studio-engineered masculinity, fetish roleplay, and the aesthetics of delinquency and grit. The threat has become more performative than perilous, the class dynamics more obscured, and masculinity itself sometimes more acquired than innate.
In my next essay, I’ll look at how digital culture, gentrification, and economic shifts have restyled rough-trade erotica, and how that evolution has influenced cross-class fantasies today.
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SEE ALSO:
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REFERENCES
Baker, P. Fantabulosa: A Dictionary of Polari and Gay Slang. Bloomsbury Academic, May 25, 2004.
Baker, P. The Feints and Jabs of Polari, Britain’s Gay Slang. Literary Hub, August 22, 2019.
Baker, P. Polari: The Lost Language of Gay Men. Routledge, 2002.
Cage, K. Gayle: the Language of Kinks and Queens. Jacana Media, 2003.
Chauncey, G. Gay New York: Gender, Urban Culture, and the Making of the Gay World, 1890-1940. Basic Books, 1994.
Crisp, Q. The Naked Civil Servant. Jonathan Cape, Ltd., 1968.
Davis, S. E. “Trade: Sexual Identity, Ambiguity, and Literacy Normativity.” Literacy in Composition Studies, vol. 9, no. 2, 2022, pp. 48-66.
Foucault, M. The History of Sexuality, vol. 1: An Introduction. Translated by Robert Hurley. Vintage Books/Random House, 1978.
Gardner, J. A Class Apart: The Private Pictures of Montague Glover. GMP/Gay Men’s Press, 1992.
Gay Porn Blog. “Gay Porn Interview: Joe Gage On David Hurles and Old Reliable.” Gay Porn Blog, February 28, 2011.
Goodman, E. Soldier, Sailor, Stable Boy, Spy: 100 Years of Tom of Finland’s Legacy. Inside Hook, July 27, 2020.
Green’s Dictionary of Slang. Digital Edition. Jonathon Green, 2025.
Gregory, T., editor. Rough Trade. Bold Strokes Books, 2009.
Guild Press Ltd. The Guild Dictionary of Homosexual Terms. Guild Press Ltd., 1965.
Holland, M. & Hart-Davis, R., editors. The Complete Letters of Oscar Wilde. Henry Holt, 2000
Janetti, G. & Bradford, S., writers. “Looking for Mr. Good Enough.” Will & Grace, season 6, episode 14, Scene 7, NBC, February 19, 2004.
Kaye, K. “Male Prostitution in the Twentieth Century: Pseudohomosexuals, Hoodlum Homosexuals, and Exploited Teens.” Journal of Homosexuality, 2004, 46(1–2), 1–77.
McAlmon, R. Miss Knight and Others. University of New Mexico Press, 1992.
McKay, C. Banjo: A Story without a Plot. Harper & Brothers, 1929.
Nugent, R. Gentleman Jigger: A Novel of the Harlem Renaissance. Edited by Thomas H. Wirth. Da Capo Press, 2008. Fordham University Press, 2024.
Nyswaner, N., (creator). “Hit Me.” Fellow Travelers, season 1, episode 3, Showtime Networks, November 12, 2023.
Pizzoli, F. Passionate Outlier: Gay Writers and Allies on Their Work. Rebel Satori Press, 2025.
Rosenkrantz, L. Peter Hujar’s Day. Magic Hour Press, 2021.
Spilde, C. ‘Fellow Travelers’ Jumps in Bed With Rough Sex and Dirty Politics. The Daily Beast, November 10, 2023.
Spring, J. Secret Historian: The Life and Times of Samuel Steward, Professor, Tattoo Artist, and Sexual Renegade. Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2010.
Scully, R. Scarlet Pansy. Fordham University Press, 1932.
Waters, J. Role Models. Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2010.
FURTHER READING & VIEWING
Fantastic post. Thank you. ( where’s Genet?)