New information technologies not only have increased the availability of male sex work and made it more visible, they also have opened up clear distinctions between male sex workers, some of whom have been advantaged within the global economy while others struggle. Premium escorts make a choice to deliver services in select cities around the globe, and make informed choices about where they will travel. Contrast this to the workers described by Heide Castañeda, who travel from impoverished places because of their families’ desperate financial situations. They do not offer a premium product and often are seen as undercutting local sex markets. As migrants, they do not have access to health insurance and they struggle to get services because of their low income and noncitizen status. The impression is that they approach this sort of work as transient and opportunistic, and they have little control over their working life and environment. However, they are not powerless and they have made a decision to engage in sex work because they see it as providing opportunities not otherwise available to them.

There has been an inclination in previous literature on male sex work to present disadvantage as a product of the individual’s pathology or of homosexual subcultures. The problems of male sex workers, therefore, were not attributed to social, political, and economic conditions in the wider society. While feminists drew attention to how wider structural conditions, especially patriarchy, influenced the conditions of female sex work, few organizations were willing to champion male sex workers. One issue was that many male sex workers were considered to sit outside both the gay and mainstream communities, and constructions of hypermasculinity, which many male sex workers present in their self-marketing, emphasize qualities such as power, strength, and rationality. Society’s failure to respond to the needs of immigrant workers is clearly articulated in this chapter through the notion of structural violence. We take this a step further to make the following observation: male sex work can be a product of sociostructural disadvantage and at-risk behavior a result of alienating migrant sex workers from access to the public health and welfare services.