Male Hustlers Find Help on the Road to Chicago's Emmaus

Former hustler Gerald admits, "Guys were willing to give money for services. I thought if no one knew about it, only me, then why not?"

And in this business, money can be quite lucrative.

As Larry Hope, a staffer at Emmaus Ministries, a Chicago-based organization that helps male prostitutes, explains, "On a good night, a guy can walk away with, like, $400 or $500, then come out and do it again the next night."

Despite the easy cash, in the end, the lifestyle of a male hustler can be a vicious cycle.

As Gerald recounts, "Off the high, I’d hustle; off the hustle, I’d get high."

Choices for many male prostitutes growing up were much more limited than for the average man, notes Emmaus Ministries' founder John Green.

"[People say], 'These guys made choices. They are on the streets because of poor choices. They have HIV because of poor choices. They are drug addicts.' I think that’s true, but I think their set of choices was a very different set of choices than I had growing up," he says. "I got to choose what private college to go to. I got to choose the people in my life. I got to choose whether to eat beef, chicken, or fish for dinner. Our guys got to choose whether they got beat up by their brother or uncle."

'Our guys' mentioned above are the men who show up at Emmaus Ministries in downtown Chicago. Green is a Wheaton grad, a Catholic, and “addicted,” you might say, to urban ministry. Barely out of college in 1990, John and his wife, Carolyn, took a hard look at their finances and goals.

"We invested it. Then we realized that 'where your treasure is, there is your heart also,' so we took it out of our Smith-Barney account in Boston and bought a crack house with it," says Green. "To us that was living justly. I questioned, 'God, who do You want me to love tenderly?' I found that God wanted me to love these guys very tenderly."

Homelessness is not a choice, explains Hope.

"People don’t wake up and say, “Hey, I want to be an alcoholic today, or guess what? I think I’ll smoke some crack and become a crack addict. Hey, I’d like to be a prostitute," he says.

Larry Hope knows what he’s talking about. He was an alcoholic and cocaine addict for 10 years and homeless for three. A street ministry helped him back on his feet – and now he reaches out to other men. He’s been the on staff with Green since 1998.

"People get overwhelmed, devastated by events and problems in their lives. They feel like they don’t have anybody to talk to, so they run to alcohol or drugs," says Hope.

Says Green, "If I were to ask you, 'Would you be a prostitute?' you’d probably answer, 'No!' Then I’d ask you, 'What would stop you?' You’d say, 'I have an education. I have resources. I have a faith, a self-esteem, a self-worth. I have parents, friends.' All these things are a safety net. What if you didn’t know who your father was when you were growing up? What if you don’t have an education? What if you don’t have a faith? What if you never had those examples of hard work and self-esteem? There’s not a lot that’s going to catch you. What does catch you is the streets. And the streets are very vicious parents."

So what exactly does Emmaus do? First of all, they evangelize. Teams go two-by-two into the streets and bars where hustlers ply their trade. They offer kind words, prayer, invitations to the house, and the gospel of Christ. Second, they transform. At the house, a man receives spiritual, relational, and practical help, like a meal, a shower, and clean clothes. He can also do laundry and use a computer or phone.

On the streets of Chicago, Emmaus staff volunteer Molly asks Tim, a male prostitute, "Tell me again why you do it?"

"I’m on drugs and it’s easy," says Tim. "It’s a lot better than going around snatching a purse and a lot easier to protect myself."

"Why not just get a job?" Larry Hope asks Tim.

Tim responds, "Then you got to take drug tests and stop using drugs and all that. I’m just at that point where I’m not quite done completely with using, which I should be, no doubt."

"I get the question a lot, what is success at Emmaus?" John Green reveals. "I’d like success to be where a guy gets off the streets and he goes to college and gets married and has 2.4 kids and a two-car garage, and that hasn’t happened. Success to me is where you help the prodigal son come to his senses, when you bring a type of hope into a person’s life."

So what keeps Green and the staff going when the outcome isn’t so rosy?

"When I work with the marginalized, when I work with these guys," says Green, "my life springs forth, my healing. I’m the one that is transformed the most by working with these guys, so in some ways it’s a very selfish proposition because working with these guys is just a joy."

About 175 men showed up at Emmaus Ministries in the past year. Of those, about 30 made a clean break from the streets. Gerald is one of their success stories.

"I was brought up in an alcoholic home, my mother and two uncles," says Gerald. "I lived a life of gangs and selling drugs and that lifestyle."

Street life had an odd sort of comfort about it.

"I got into hustling because people wised up to panhandling," Gerald says. "I didn’t think about the possibility of catching a disease. None of that was in my mind. It was just a way of getting alcohol and drugs at the time. They [male prostitutes] feel small and set apart from the world. They feel the people up high don’t even look at or take notice to them. They do have feelings. They do have hearts."

Larry Hope invited Gerald to the house, and after several visits, Gerald decided the streets were not a friend after all.

"Some of the things that possibly could have happened to me out there, no human being could have protected me, whether police or anybody," Gerald says. "It must have been some power other than any human one on this planet that could have pulled me from that insanity, and I know it was God."

Gerald got lots of help from the staff to start a new life. He’s been clean for four years now. He is now married, a father, and a shift supervisor at Starbucks.

"It is only His power within me that keeps me strong, keeps me doing the things I need on a daily basis. He is my life," says Gerald.