This is their way of coping with same-sex desires that they are unable to accept. They tell themselves they are doing it for the money. There is, however, plentiful research suggesting that many guys who have sex with men for payment are in denial about their homosexuality. This part-time whoring may have been pecuniary. Later, while working as a male prostitute, he took a more hands-on role in sex, especially with Lennon. Was Malcolm X gay? Bisexual? In his schooldays, he was apparently a passive participant. According to Perry: "His male-to-male encounters, which rendered it unnecessary for him to compete for women, afforded him an opportunity for sexual release without the attendant risk of dependence on women." Why, then, did he prostitute himself? Misogyny and repressed homosexuality might be the answer. There was no imperative to sell his body. Dope-dealing, thieving and pimping were sources of income he had pursued with success. His passionate assertion that the need to feel masculine is a man's "greatest urge" indicates someone doubtful of his own manliness.Īs for his sporadic gay hustling, as Perry notes, "there were other ways he could have earned money". Far from macho, Malcolm hated fighting and got beaten by other men. He feared women and his early sexual experiences with girls were mostly unsatisfactory. His masculine insecurities and ambivalence towards women fit the archetype of a repressed gay man and point to latent homosexuality.Īfter the death of his father, when Malcolm was six, he lacked male role models and was dominated by strong women - in particular, his tyrannical mother. Perry suggests that Malcolm's gay encounters may not have been entirely financially motivated.
According to Malcolm's sidekick Malcolm Jarvis, he was paid to sprinkle Lennon with talcum powder and bring him to orgasm. Later, Malcolm worked as a butler to a wealthy Boston bachelor, William Paul Lennon.
In New York, two of Malcolm's friends from Michigan remember bumping into him at the YMCA, where Malcolm bragged he earned money servicing "queers". While living in Flint, Michigan, his roommate noticed that instead of sleeping in the room they were sharing, Malcolm sneaked down the hall to spend the night with a gay transvestite named Willie Mae. Later, from the age of 20, Malcolm had sex with men for money - as hinted at in Spike Lee's 1992 biopic - and he had at least one sustained sexual liaison with a man. Malcolm, Bebee recalled, ordered the youth to masturbate him, and subsequently boasted he had given him oral sex. A schoolmate, Bob Bebee, recalls the day they stumbled on a local boy jerking off. Yet Perry's book documents Malcolm X's many gay experiences.