Rentboy’s clients were nearly all queer men, and the site was a profitable and politically active part of the gay community. Female sex workers and their allies have been making the argument that sex work is a form of labor that deserves dignity and respect for decades. Presenting male escorts not as victims or as debaucherous, but as people with dignity who were doing important work, was a radical notion. “I feel like we did everything we could to make sure that we taught survival skills and that people were thriving.” “We were always working to reduce the stigma and increase the pride that people had in the fact that they were doing a job that was noble and it helped people,” Hurant said. Rarely, if ever, is the profession shown in a positive light in popular media ( 2017’s Scotty and the Secret History of Hollywood is a notable exception). When Hurant founded Rentboy in 1997, male escorts, particularly gay male escorts, were generally a reviled group, portrayed on film as murderers ( The Living End), thieves ( Midnight Cowboy), or drug addicts ( Less Than Zero). There were also forums for escorts to communicate with each other and share knowledge about clients.
The courses were a part of their non-profit arm, HookOnline, which included a website that provided advice on how to safely interact with clients and deal with police, and a place for live chatting with experts about topics like the Affordable Care Act.
As an incentive, if escorts attended a class, they would receive two weeks of free advertising on Rentboy. Many also took part in the free workshops held around the country by Rentboy’s educational arm, Rentu, that taught escorts about everything from HIV prevention to how to correctly file taxes.
Agents seized 836 terabytes of data from Hurant’s home and Rentboy’s office that day, the equivalent of 1,600 laptops worth of data, Hurant said.Īt the time of its shuttering, about 3,000 men were placing ads on Rentboy, and they didn’t just use the site for advertising. Airing on Showtime, the male-escort Oscars featured awards for Best Porn Star Escort, Best Cock, and Best Bottom.īaum watched while every hard drive, computer, and phone was confiscated and six of his co-workers were shackled and whisked away.
If there was any question whether escorts were selling sex, Rentboy’s yearly Hookies awards laid them to rest. Everyone knew that Rentboy served to connect mostly cis male male escorts to their clients, even though no financial transactions were made on the site. Rentboy had existed for 18 years when DHS raided it, and there was nothing secretive about the site. Meanwhile, in another part of New York City, TT Baum, the brand manager of Rentboy’s massage site,, and about a dozen other Rentboy employees were working in the company's corporate office when DHS agents unlocked the front door and ransacked the place, Hurant and Baum said. After letting him get dressed, they cuffed him and placed him in a van. None of the agents would tell him why this was happening. Hurant-who was the CEO of Rentboy, a website for men seeking male escorts-watched as every electronic device he owned was hauled away. They stomped into Hurant’s house, moving from room to room seizing computers, flash drives, Kindles-anything they could find that could possibly contain the data they were looking for.