Popular Culture
The male prostitute or hustler is a frequent literary and cinematic stereotype in the West from the 1960s onwards, especially in movies and books with a gay perspective, in which he may be a stock character. The male sex worker is often portrayed either as a tragic figure, as in the film Mysterious Skin in which a male prostitute has a history of molestation, or as an impossible object of love or an idealized rebel. Though less frequent in cinema and in novels, the male prostitute with an exclusively female clientele (the "gigolo" or male for female "escort") is generally depicted as less tragic than the gay hustler. The film My Own Private Idaho, starring Keanu Reeves and River Phoenix, focuses upon the friendship between two male prostitutes. Rob Schneider stars as a gigolo in his slapstick farce Deuce Bigalow: Male Gigolo and its sequel. Wiktor Grodecki's controversial film Mandragora tells the story of young runaways who are manipulated into the dark underground world of prostitution, drug addiction and AIDS. Another well known movie featuring male prostitutes is Midnight Cowboy. The Roman Spring of Mrs. Stone offers an older woman and a young gigolo in a tragic tryst. The TV series Hung is about a Detroit high school baseball coach who, due to financial pressures, turns to prostitution.
Read more about this topic: Male Prostitution
Famous quotes containing the words popular culture, popular and/or culture:
“Popular culture entered my life as Shirley Temple, who was exactly my age and wrote a letter in the newspapers telling how her mother fixed spinach for her, with lots of butter.... I was impressed by Shirley Temple as a little girl my age who had power: she could write a piece for the newspapers and have it printed in her own handwriting.”
—Adrienne Rich (b. 1929)
“There is a continual exchange of ideas between all minds of a generation. Journalists, popular novelists, illustrators, and cartoonists adapt the truths discovered by the powerful intellects for the multitude. It is like a spiritual flood, like a gush that pours into multiple cascades until it forms the great moving sheet of water that stands for the mentality of a period.”
—Auguste Rodin (1849–1917)
“If mass communications blend together harmoniously, and often unnoticeably, art, politics, religion, and philosophy with commercials, they bring these realms of culture to their common denominator—the commodity form. The music of the soul is also the music of salesmanship. Exchange value, not truth value, counts.”
—Herbert Marcuse (1898–1979)