Rick Whitaker
Assuming the Position
A Memoir of Hustling

"How did I come to prostitution? The answer is a complicated one.… The first time I hustled, I went to a bar on the East Side well known for its clientele of hustlers and johns. I had, at the time, a rather dubious motive aside from a real but customary need for money.… I wanted to experience something intense.…"

Only one year after his last trick, Rick Whitaker divulges the very personal and complex reasons that drove him to prostitute himself and reflects on what it cost him to live a life of half-truths and emotional lies, a life of sex and drug dependence, depression and near life threatening despair.

Not unlike many young New York-bound writers, Rick Whitaker arrived at the Port Authority by bus from the Midwest with a few dollars and a pocketful of dreams. He hadn't anticipated the turns his life would take, but he ventured forth willingly, entering into prostitution — first on his own, then through escort agencies — for the money, or so he told himself, and to spite a lover who had hurt him.

Whitaker takes prostitution out of the realm of cop shows and tabloid style tell-alls. In a prose style that is both refined and graceful he looks at his life straight on, with an unsentimental and unsparing eye for detail, from his unconventional upbringing to specifics about encounters he has had with men who have hired him for sex. Whitaker brings prostitution into everyday settings: at the doctor's office, in a wealthy Park Avenue gentleman's penthouse, at a lonely lawyer's apartment in Brooklyn.

Whitaker doesn't fit our comfortable stereotype of a prostitute. He is a college-educated, one-time book publishing and now opera insider who found himself at a point in his life when prostitution actually made sense. Now, with the distance of time, he delivers a story both compelling and repelling, a chronicle of his slow decent into prostitution and drug addiction and his real-life redemption and resolution.

Rick Whitaker was born in Ohio in 1968 and moved to New York City in 1988. He writes book reviews for the New York Times Book Review, the New York Observer, and Ballet Review, and his stories have been published in The Quarterly and StoryQuarterly. He lives in New York City.

"… A sober … look into the often juicy (though more often icy) life and times of a gay prostitute in New York City.… What sets Assuming the Position apart from confessional… memoirs is Whitaker's willingness to unabashedly and publicly explore his addictions." — Paper magazine

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