Whilst the data available in M$M advertising is discursively constructive (and constructed) and is part of a performative ‘truth’, there are limits to how it can be read realistically and limits to how it should be used as factually representational. For example, policies and reports against human trafficking using methodology that relies on reading the nationalities and ethnicities of women selling sex in advertisements (Ditmore, 2011; Hyland, 2012) or
editorials that imply advertised nationalities may denote ‘trafficking hotspots’ (Bindel 2010) should be read with caution, accounting for the ways that people creating advertisements to sell sex using a range of signs, from the iconic, the indexical and the symbolic, which I define below. In other words, advertisements that sell sex may be less reliable as demographic data when constructed in part to attract the fantasies of potential customers.
For example, more than three-quarters of the M$M I interviewed admitted to being older than their advertised age by at least one year (and as much as five years). In the same way, men report exaggerating body measurements by adding to their chest, bicep, height and penis size (and removing from their waist and age) to create a more fantastic figure. They construct their own bodies in ways that queer distinctions between categories of embodiment and
performativity, and between accurate representations and fantasies. That queerness
intersperses strategies for attracting paid contacts and communicating sexual performativity (or the availability of particular sexual performances)
Signs in texts, whether visual or verbal, can be divided into three categories: iconic, indexical, and symbolic (Rose, 2007). Iconic signs maintain the most likeness to their referent. Indexical signs are those signs which have an inherent but socially created and culturally specific significance, such as terms like ‘student’ to imply youth and connotations of needing money and self-improvement. Symbols have a ‘conventionalized but clearly
arbitrary relationship between signifier and signified’ (Rose, 2007, p.83). For examples, see Figures 5.10-12, below.
Photographs are sometimes, but not always, a good example of iconic images in advertisements. The photos I analysed vary from the iconic (recent likenesses) to the indexical (older photos or retouched images) to the symbolic (a photo of another person altogether). This can be seen in the photos of ‘Rich’, ‘Galaxy’, ‘Raj’, and ‘Matt’.
In the first set of photos (Figure 5.10), Rich’s photo appeared as part of his ad which was in my sample from Boyz magazine 2011, after the staff at Boyz resumed printing ads for escort and masseur services (see Chapter 5 for more discussion). The photo appears to be taken professionally against a studio backdrop. Even with a professional composition and finish, I have interpreted this photo as an iconic signifier of how Rich looked in 2011, as opposed to only an indexical or symbolic representation40. In other words, I read this photo as an
‘accurate’, ‘realistic’, or ‘true’ likeness of the man who is advertising. Within the larger structure and read alongside the other signs within the ad and the section, I have also read this this ad with several other assumptions: that this man is self-employed and even that the person in the photo is a cisgender man. The ad also includes a link to his commercial profile on Gaydar. The benefit of analysing multimodal data is that it challenges constructs about how I have coded images. In this case, the same photo is still being used by an advertiser using the same name and contact details in 2015. As an image that is now (at least) four years old, it may be moving away from the iconic and towards the indexical. This syntagmatic reading – organising and interpreting the ads over time – exposes that the categories, again, are ‘fuzzy sets’. It is possible that Rich has maintained his appearance identically, but my data is limited in this sense.
40 To preserve anonymity, I have pixelated and redacted parts of the details I have recorded.
(Figure 5.10, Iconic Rich and Indexical Rich, Boyz 07 July 2011, p.84 and Gaydar.net 05 August 2015. The same photo may be an iconic sign if it is viewed recently after was taken and an indexical sign after a number of years)
In my second example, I have selected a detail from a single issue of Boyz magazine, when the design of the magazine included all of the escort advertising in an attached insert called Tug (as discussed in Chapter 5.) As this detail from page 6 illustrates, an ad is not read in
isolation or only syntagmatically (in position with its surrounding signs), but also read
paradigmatically – compared and contrasted against surrounding signs and even absent signs.
In this detail, two ads which appeared beside each other convey two men’s bodies, both framed similarly and cropped to display more or less the same parts of the two men’s bodies but omit showing their faces. Both ads use verbal and visual texts to convey and anchor their messages. Both provide a name or pseudonym, an age (or pseudo age, see Chapter 6), a
‘cock’ length (in inches), ethnic/race identities, their general location, location of meeting (‘in/out/hotels’) and mobile telephone numbers.
(Figure 5.11, Studio lighting Galaxy, Garden Raj, Boyz Tug insert, 01 January 2007, p.6. Photos interpreted as indexical and iconic signs)
Being so similar, the content displayed in one ad anchors the other and (re-)creates the expectation that this is the type of information provided. The two bodies displayed have similarities: both appear to be undressed, able-bodied, adult, cisgender men. Yet, they have different features when read against each other. The body in Galaxy’s photo has been produced and built up through exercise and other ‘body work’ (Pilcher, 2012). The dark colour of his skin anchors and is anchored by the verbal description of ‘Black African Caribbean’. Other work has been done to construct this image of his body. His physique has been oiled to reflect the light, his hand is positioned on his thigh to recreate a professional pose, and I have interpreted the photograph to be taken using a professional backdrop and lighting. Although his face is cropped from the image, he is facing square towards the camera, creating a more direct sense of appellation to his audience.
In contrast, Raj’s photo appears to be taken outdoors, in natural daylight. His head and his penis both cast shadows across his body and leg. He hangs his arms at his sides and is turned at a quarter angle towards the camera which may be to accentuate a casual but planted stance.
The contours of his arms and legs indicate that he does some form of exercise but the extra fat on his stomach and chest, the uneven tanlines on his thighs and the (possibly trimmed)
hair on his body constructs a different, less studied presentation of hegemonic masculinity than is typically, or stereotypically, considered ordinary for men who charge other men for sex. What might be interpreted as lack of attention to achieving one culturally ideal
presentation of an ‘ideal’ male body image, can also be read as a rejection of attention to norms and behaviours which are attributed to ‘the feminine’ (Wright, 1997).
Without oil, lighting, waxing/ shaving, or obvious body-shaping exercises, different audiences will interpret Raj’s body and his photo differently, whether as more, equally, or less desirable to them than Galaxy. Adding to the levels of signification, read
paradigmatically, Raj’s photograph can appear more iconic to audiences, who might in turn interpret professional posed, shot, and finished photographs as less realistic and only indexical of the man who is advertising. The paragdigmatic placement and reading co-constructs queer interpretations of how men who sell sex to other men should look and promote themselves.
My third example is the picture which appears in Matt’s41 ad in Figure 5.12. 1n 1997, ‘Matt 22’ advertised using a photo which appears to be a stock photo. He may indeed have been the model in that photo, but again a paradigmatic reading of the ad next to his in this detail indicated that a sourced image was also used in the ad for ‘Scott 35’. (Scott and Matt’s ads both use the same telephone number.) Like Rich in Figure 5.10, ‘Matt 26’ used the same photo five years later. Despite changing his pseudo age (by four years), Matt had maintained the same photograph (now in colour) and the same contact telephone number (now using the updated 0207 area code for central London in place of the older 0171 area code).
The photograph had been a familiar image when it first appeared. I am not able to recall where else I had seen both it and the detail from Scott’s ad. From memory they appeared on
41 Matt is not to be confused with ‘Matthew’ who participated in my collection of interviews.
greeting cards or other ads for tourism to Bondi Beach in Australia. Whilst I have not been able to trace the original photographer and the model remains unidentifiable to me, an ordinary search using Google images revealed that the image has continued to be used in other media and appeared on five blogs and websites, including a Pinterest board for ‘Misc [miscellaneous] Ass’.
A triangulated, semiotic reading of M$M ads highlights the hermeneutic and queer potentials within the texts. More specifically, using semiotics gives readers and researchers a structure for recognising how misinformation can be contrived or inferred if sex advertisements are mined for accurate demographic details of people selling sex, without a method of
triangulation with participants who are sometimes difficult to access or mistrusting of
researchers’ intentions. Examples of where triangulation and semiotics should have been used include policy informing reports which have used descriptive statistics on advertising data in lieu of surveys or interviews (c.f. Hyland, 2012; Smith and Kingston, 2015).
My findings are triangulated from data collected from magazine archives and recent editions, as well as semi-structured interviews with men who sell sex or sexual massage, key
informants who provide services to men who sell sex and my own ethnographic field notes as a migrant to/through some of London’s LGBT ‘scenes’, communities and spaces. The signs I examine here specifically are age, race, ethnicity and nationality, and I discuss ways M$M utilise these signs to (re-)create their identities in order to contact an audience of potential clients.
(Figure 5.12, Symbolic Matt. Clockwise from top left: detail from Boyz 10 January 1997, p.81; detail from 15 January, 2002, p. 60; screenshot of Google images search 20 May 2014. Even a photograph may sometimes be interpreted as only providing a symbolic signifier of its referent advertiser)
Particularly when modes of embodiment are taken into consideration, the findings of a verbal-text analysis are limited by the fact that they only examine the verbal-text and ignore the photo-texts as both independent and interdependent data sources (Jones 2005).
Photographs make up a significant portion of the content of contemporary advertisements.
They must be considered, not just as another rich source of data about how M$M represent themselves, but as primary signs that operate independently and alongside the written text, often operationally more instrumental in the construction and function of the advertisement to attract customers, and so fundamentally intrinsic to understanding M$M advertising (see Mowlabocus, 2010 for a discussion of the importance of ‘face-pics’ in personal advertising on Gaydar). In the following chapter, I illustrate some of the possibilities of utilising the polytextual features of the advertisements and the opportunities of triangulation when combining more detailed analysis on a smaller sample within a larger corpus.
5.4. Summary
M$M advertising provides texts that illustrate a rich social history of the place of sex work in (Western) ‘gay culture’. In the previous sections, I have discussed the advertising of men who sell sex to men by looking at how the (literal) media constructs a part of the gay scene and becomes the context for men who come into London’s gay scene. I have discussed the
different forms that the text and content have taken over 20 years, why some of those changes have happened, and looked at some of the limitations that this understanding places on what we can hope to be able to know or to see from the advertisements. Focusing on queer scene magazines (Boyz) and queer social network spaces (Gaydar.net), I have discussed the overlap and the slippage between the personal ads/ profiles and the Trade ads and Commercial profiles, and how co-existing in those spaces on one hand creates access between men who
have sex with men and men who sell sex to men, but on the other hand, also reflects that they are not two distinct groups, and that there is overlap and slippage between the two groups.
In the next chapter, I bring together some of the queer theory and advertising theory (including semiotics) to look more closely at how pictures are used in these forms of sex work advertising to make contact(s) with other men and to represent and recreate the body. I explore the levels of signification that are constructed and to represent and define material and textual bodies. I discuss the increasingly interactive nature of the media, and how boundaries between advertising, porn, and performance are already blurred and are likely to become more so, even while content of what is explicitly depicted changes in sometimes unexpected directions.