And The Escort of The Year Is… Backstage at The Sex Oscars
The finalists were hot, their fans were shy—welcome to an uncomfortable evening celebrating the sex economy at the International Escort Awards.
Melissa Bunni Elian
Three blocks from Aladdin on Broadway, two blocks from the Port Authority Bus Terminal, and one block from Papaya Dog, home of Midtown West’s best 99-cent hot dog, stands the Out NYC Urban Resort. It styles itself as New York’s first gay hotel, “the Big Apple’s local sanctuary” for a clientele of jet-setting homosexual tourists from Pittsburgh and Fresno. Opened in the summer of 2012, the hotel’s steel-and-glass-and-marble-and-more-glass aesthetic aims for posh futurism and manages neither.
The Out NYC boasts a middling faux-Mediterranean restaurant, a vast and chilly discotheque, chairs that look like human faces, and this year, the 8th Annual International Escort Awards. The Hookies, for short.
Hosted by Rentboy.com, the world’s largest listing service for male escorts, the awards purport to honor the work of Rentboy’s more than 170,000 listed escorts in sixteen categories, ranging from Best Daddy and Best Massage to the night’s titular honor: Mr. International Escort. The votes are tallied online—there’s no form to fill out after you’ve had a satisfactory appointment. One needn’t even be a registered client on Rentboy.com to vote. So how does one judge an escort’s prowess if one has not engaged the escort in sexual congress? One porn star who insists that he remain nameless ventures a guess. “A lot of this is just a front for the porn industry. Ever check out the banner ads on Rentboy.com? All porn studios.” He nods knowingly.
