Who believes a disgruntled client(sss) ratted out rentboy?

[Mocha]

After discussing this with a girlfriend who is not affiliated with the business, it's got me wondering. Stories of things that happened on dating sites like POF, and even someone who confessed to her that he was only looking to come over to find things to steal.

 

I'm starting to think isn't so much a gay rights or prostitution issue. I think perhaps clients were getting tricked and ripped off, maybe even robbed....by these shady unreviewed advertisers that seemed to proliferate rentboy lately.

 

I meet clients who are lawyers/attorneys on occasion. I can't imagine how much deep shit I'd be in if I tried to pull a fast one. We don't Always know who the person hiring us does, and if it's connected to government and someone really screws them over...I can see someone doing something earth-shattering, catastophically apocalyptic. And watching a few episodes of Mob Wives New York...we all know what happens when someone rats someone out.

 

I also hear of clients telling me of guys who have taken the money, and did a runner.

 

However, I think this is more of a reason to get some form of legal verification to show. But, it's good sites like daddys is ahead on letting the good guys be known.

[Mocha]

Another thing is...I noticed about a year ago rentboy got really strict on what you could say or put in ads/pictures. I should have seen that as dubious. Maybe they were being threatened or something and had to tone it down. Rentboy used to be very freedom of speech.

 

However, men4rent did similar drastic measures...but they didn't go off air completely goddamn.

[+ stevenkesslar]

I'm starting to think isn't so much a gay rights or prostitution issue. I think perhaps clients were getting tricked and ripped off, maybe even robbed....by these shady unreviewed advertisers that seemed to proliferate rentboy lately.

 

And watching a few episodes of Mob Wives New York...we all know what happens when someone rats someone out.

 

I also hear of clients telling me of guys who have taken the money, and did a runner.

 

However, I think this is more of a reason to get some form of legal verification to show. But, it's good sites like daddys is ahead on letting the good guys be known.

 

Okay, can I vote twice? Mocha, you win the Bull In The China Shop Award, too.

 

At a time when some of our friends are under arrest and may be subject to jail, and God knows how many thousands of escorts and clients are potentially having their credit card information and other information pored through by the government, and potentially they are drawing up a list of the next targets for their witch hunt, you really ought to know better.

 

This IS an outrage, and it IS a gay rights issue. It is an issue for a lot of rights advocates, including women and children and health professionals. Go read Adam's post on the change.org petition and watch the video, and sign it, and get your clients to sign it. And after that, if you still think this is not about gay rights .... sorry, maybe you need to just stop thinking.

 

And now I am going to play the race card. The first person to engage in negative and speculative hearsay slamming Rentboy was Latino. Now somebody African American is engaging in hearsay about unnamed "clients" getting "robbed." What the fuck is going on with that? Go Google the word "hearsay." And try to focus on how we can unify and not blame the victim. You should know better than me what that means.

[+ sync]

I'm thinking this is much wider and deeper than is obvious right now. The involvement of DHS does not make sense to me, unless Rentboy.com's operations outside the US have raised some issues.

[bigvalboy]

Okay, can I vote twice? Mocha, you win the Bull In The China Shop Award, too.

 

At a time when some of our friends are under arrest and may be subject to jail, and God knows how many thousands of escorts and clients are potentially having their credit card information and other information pored through by the government, and potentially they are drawing up a list of the next targets for their witch hunt, you really ought to know better.

 

This IS an outrage, and it IS a gay rights issue. It is an issue for a lot of rights advocates, including women and children and health professionals. Go read Adam's post on the change.org petition and watch the video, and sign it, and get your clients to sign it. And after that, if you still think this is not about gay rights .... sorry, maybe you need to just stop thinking.

 

And now I am going to play the race card. The first person to engage in negative and speculative hearsay slamming Rentboy was Latino. Now somebody African American is engaging in hearsay about unnamed "clients" getting "robbed." What the fuck is going on with that? Go Google the word "hearsay." And try to focus on how we can unify and not blame the victim. You should know better than me what that means.

 

He's another Mr. Muckle...

 

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=E1p55RpVd1c

 

 

Thanks for articulating what I didn't have the energy to convey.

[+ FreshFluff]

No one had to "rat on" Ratboy. The evidence was all out there and has been for a long time.

 

But I think I get what Mocha is talking about. Someone here linked to a blog that claimed a Rentboy escort was a scammer and wanted to hold RB responsible. The last entry was, "We brought down Rentboy!"

 

I think that's unlikely. As we discussed before, I'm guessing that the H-1B visa application started the whole thing. Someone at ICE got the application, was galled at how brazen Rentboy was, and passed it on to DHS.

[gallahadesquire]

Elvis wants to make a comeback, and thought making a scene would help.

[YoungAD]

No one had to "rat on" Ratboy. The evidence was all out there and has been for a long time.

 

But I think I get what Mocha is talking about. Someone here linked to a blog that claimed a Rentboy escort was a scammer and wanted to hold RB responsible. The last entry was, "We brought down Rentboy!"

 

I think that's unlikely. As we discussed before, I'm guessing that the H-1B visa application started the whole thing. Someone at ICE got the application, was galled at how brazen Rentboy was, and passed it on to DHS.

 

This seems to be one of the more plausible scenarios of what sparked the raid.

 

I believe Hustlaball was last October, and the investigation was apparently already underway then. I wonder if someone associated with Rentboy was trying to get a visa for a significant other, before the marriage decision was handed down.

[Guy Fawkes]

We can speculate all we want ; but until the first day of trial, we simply don't know. I have a completely different theory.

[+ VeryHappyCustomer]

Come on, Daddy! Don't be coy.

[RyanDean]

I find I've developed my own theory, too.

 

Perhaps we could run a "you choose" contest and have forum folks vote on the theory they like best.

(With the pledge that, should your vote turn out to be correct/closest, you donate to the DaddyBandwidthFund and/or SWOP.)

[+ José Soplanucas]

Okay, can I vote twice? Mocha, you win the Bull In The China Shop Award, too.

 

And now I am going to play the race card. The first person to engage in negative and speculative hearsay slamming Rentboy was Latino. Now somebody African American is engaging in hearsay about unnamed "clients" getting "robbed." What the fuck is going on with that? Go Google the word "hearsay." And try to focus on how we can unify and not blame the victim. You should know better than me what that means.

 

I agree this is a civil rights issue and we should look for ways to unify and expand our alliances. Unfortunately, you are not helping when you play the race card. WTF.

[+ stevenkesslar]

I agree this is a civil rights issue and we should look for ways to unify and expand our alliances. Unfortunately, you are not helping when you play the race card. WTF.

 

Point taken, and I am sorry. Needless to say, I can't just leave it at that.

 

I intended to rub some nerves and get a reaction, for a specific reason.

 

The biggest victims of criminalized prostitution (according to Amnesty International and the growing coalition of LGBT, medical, and civil rights groups that support them) are women and children, a disproportionate segment of whom are not white. However much indignation white, middle-class escorts or clients may feel right now - and that is what most of us are - we are not the most tragic victims of anything.

 

If Ricardo is right, and the "word on the street" that Rentboy.com was "running some underage Latino boys" turns out to be correct, I am going to feel sorrier still, and eat much more crow than I just did. All I can tell you for sure right now is that Rentboy.com staff like Lady Coco, a Puerto Rican woman, were just arrested and face 5 years in jail, and as far as I can tell - based on the written complaint - she did absolutely nothing wrong, other than work with lots of adult rentboys to help them earn an income. Meanwhile, lots of male escorts are freaking out about whether the DHS, to quote one, "is going to come knocking down my door." So far, this is simply a war on a big chunk of the gay community. Period. Until we learn it really is something else, making baseless charges against Rentboy.com based on hearsay makes no sense. Let DHS proves its own case, which I don't think it can. Us doing it for them is blaming the victim, using hearsay. I intended to rub nerves to at least try to make that stop.

 

It also goes way beyond that, and now I am really going to go off the deep end.

 

My first boss, for 6 years, was a white ethnic woman and national leader that had an incredibly good relationship with Bill Proxmire, deceased, U.S. Senator from Wisconsin and former Chairman of the U.S. Senate Banking Committee. I worked for years with Proxmire and his staff to organize oversight hearings that helped us develop billions of dollars in programs for distressed inner-city neighborhoods that were redlined. Proxmire was also responsible for getting the key anti-redlining laws passed, and they still stand. The power of a Committee Chairman is amazing.

 

Here is a brief description taken out of a book of one meeting I organized with a federal agency in Washington D.C. in the 1980's that ultimately led to billions of dollars in sound mortgage lending programs for low income home buyers, after hundreds of mostly non-white activists stormed out of school buses and took over their D.C. headquarters in what we called "hits." I redacted out my real last name and put in my escort first name, Steven. Other than vanity, there is a specific reason I am painting this picture, which I will outline in the next paragraphs. "They had no idea who we were or where we came from," said [steven], who organized the effort. The roster of activists looked nothing like the credentialed technocrats sitting across the table from them. [steven] was a 26 year old self-taught data geek whose college mentor was Paul Wellstone. Across from him sat a nun from Cincinnati, a Cleveland mom who got involved because she was fed up with packs of stray dogs in her neighborhoods, and of course [steven's] big blond boss. They converged again and again in Washington over the months that followed, scraping together funds for plane tickets and armed with information that proved that making loans to low-income people in inner-cities ... would be a smart business proposition." It was smart business, by the way, until about 15 years after the meeting the book just described happened, when the banks who pushed predatory lending started to fuck it up - but that's a whole different story. My point was to say that in that description, I was the only white man, most of the people in the room were women, many of them were black or Hispanic, and that was typical of almost everything we did.

 

Why does any of this matter? Because right now the Chairman of the U.S. House Committee that oversees DHS is Rep. Michael McCaul, a white Republican from Texas. I was talking to a Republican client yesterday who suggested that McCaul probably has the power to personally call off the witch hunt at DHS, if he really wanted to. I have no idea whether that is true, but based on my experience, it would not surprise me. The bigger problem is that I don't know anyone who knows McCaul, and certainly no one who has a relationship with him like my boss and I did with Proxmire and his staff. Meanwhile, the ranking Democrat on the Committee is Rep. Bennie Thompson, who is black. He's from Mississippi. Unfortunately, I don't know anyone who knows him, and I don't know any escorts that live in or near his district.

 

There are some committee members from the LA area: Rep. Norma Torres and Rep. Loretta Sanchez. Both are Hispanic women, from predominantly Hispanic districts. They may or may not be allies, they may or may not care about this, and they may or may not have any ability to do anything about DHS, even though they sit on a US House Committee of a few dozen people that oversees DHS. They are not ranking Committee members, and they are in the minority. But given everything I know about politics, it would not hurt to try to find out if they are allies, and if they would help us in any way. If I imagine meeting with either of them or their staff, the worst possible scenario I could imagine is that I present myself as a white, middle class escort that basically feels I should be able to make money getting hired by white middle-class men for things that sound salacious. If I then mentioned that this all concerns a website that is frequented by "promiscuous" gay men and that "runs underage Latino boys," I would be laughed out of the room, if not arrested.

 

On the other hand, I could imagine a meeting that included me but also included one or two Hispanic escorts, ideally one being a woman, as well as Hispanic victims of the kind of trafficking Amnesty International is preparing to fight. It would be even better if somebody from Amnesty International or one of several local anti-trafficking groups in the LA area attended such a meeting with us. If the numbers being thrown around - 17,500 people trafficked into the US every year, 200,000 kids at risk of being trafficked into the sex industry - are at all accurate, it probably is happening in their districts, even though they are not central LA. I can't imagine there are many U.S. Representatives or Senators particularly sympathetic to white male escorts like me, but I can imagine them being open to the argument that - whatever they think about me - what DHS is doing does not help anyone, there are no victims, and it is going to make life even worse for their most vulnerable constituents.

 

As it happen, Paul's [Wellstone] wife Sheila adopted human trafficking as her issue as a Senator's wife. She organized the wives of other U.S. Senators, many Republican, and did a lot of good work on the issue, and there is now actually an award given in her and Paul's name every year for people who fight human trafficking and slavery in the United States:

 

http://freedomnetworkusa.org/wp-content/uploads/2015/01/Wellstone_Award_Nomination_packet_2015.pdf

 

One piece of very good news is that this is largely a bipartisan issue. Being moral advocates, and being suspicious of overreach by federal agencies, I think a lot of Republicans would be possible allies if they were persuaded that what DHS is doing now is overreach, and it is simply going to hurt vulnerable people being trafficked and abused more.

 

To go back to basics, we are under attack. This is like Stonewall or 9/11 to me. We have to think long and hard and clearly about what we do, why we do it, and who our allies are. Most of us are white men. The last thing I want to do is sound racist. In fact, I feel in every bone of my body that if we don't understand and embrace the ways in which criminalized prostitution particularly effects women and children and people of color, we are not going to get very far. And if we want to use our time and words here to engage in hearsay about how Rentboy.com ran underage Latino boys, we may as well turn off the lights, shut down the website, and go home.

 

Again, I am truly sorry. I hope that the Latino and Black and Asian escorts and clients on this site actually emerge as the best advocates in the effort to defend people like Lady Coco from wrongful arrest and harassment.

[Mocha]

Okay, can I vote twice? Mocha, you win the Bull In The China Shop Award, too. At a time when some of our friends are under arrest and may be subject to jail...This IS an outrage, and it IS a gay rights issue. It is an issue for a lot of rights advocates, including women and children and health professionals.

 

Steven, girl, stop getting so feisty. I know you're passionate about this issue....I'm not saying my suspicious are fact...I even asked, "who else thinks..."

 

Now, I may or may not be correct...but its not out of the question for that to happen. If someone gets gypped and calls the authorities, the first thing they are going to want to know is where they met the person from. Why do you think backpage got outted, and they started arresting clients at random in New England recently? It wasn't random, someone was killed, a backpage ad was mentioned...and being that backpage is based in the U.K., they went after the local johns.

 

Now, I'm not saying that we shouldn't stand up and make it a gay rights issue, or even a general freedom issue...yes, America is fucked up and sucks as a country for many Blacks and escorts. I've said that millions of times. BUT, i wouldn't doubt this may have had a tiny origination somewhere with some bad business, etc. if it's any consolation...that this happens to many organizations, think about the marijuana dispensary (it's legal in Colorado, yet they still get raided sometimes) and church raids, strip club raids, etc that happen. I personally know someone in my family who worked for an organization that was raided, and it started with a disagreement between people within the business, and out of nowhere, everyone who worked for the person were raptured up and arrested. In fact, my relative was no longer working for the business...and they came months later. But in the end, after 2 years of finding NOTHING of evidence, the case was dismissed against the employees, but a couple of people involved in the scheme did get some time and/or bargaining. So trust me...I know someone who's been thru this.

 

Rentboys advertising are not employees of rentboy. If a business gets raided, the authorities won't go after the customers too (unless they just so happen to be in the middle of a massage)

 

I'm not really concerned about them having access to thousands of rentboys and plotting their next move. That would be an enormous amount of resources, for something with very little proof. Half the people don't even use real pics and use google voice phone numbers which has no tracking. And the bank has no obligation to release information.

 

My whole reasoning for asking is because I thought it seemed weird that DHS would get involved. I don't know everything about every little government sector, but why would it get THAT deep? That's like the bomb squad and SWAT team coming to check on a neighborhood birthday party, rather than just the local police. I've also not said anything about underage Latino boys. So that, you have to take up between you, Ricardo, and rentboy.

[american executive]

This is purely speculative. I don't think the Feds are after Rentboy because some clients felt ripped off by an escort. Would that be likely calling the cops to complain that someone stole your illegal drugs? I am not sure.

 

My guess - it is either anti-gay or perhaps more so a "whipping boy", that is, an attack on escorting in general. A site like Rentboy appeals to bi and gay men. Most likely the socio-economic and demographics of Rentboy's escorts' clients are varied. But what about similar sites for heterosexual connections? Those for sure would encompass a much larger and diverse demographic. Would the Feds want to "fish in that sea"? Who or what might show up? A well-known entertainer, upstanding business person or even more shocking - a Fed as a client! So, perhaps go after an escort site with less of a broad focus such as Rentboy. Attack the services of that particular escort site and perhaps they've made a dent in the whole industry; possibly with less collateral damages.

[Lookin]

. . . I thought it seemed weird that DHS would get involved. I don't know everything about every little government sector, but why would it get THAT deep? That's like the bomb squad and SWAT team coming to check on a neighborhood birthday party, rather than just the local police.

 

That's a good point. I've been assuming DHS was the lead agency, but perhaps they were brought in by the NYC police.

[Mocha]

That's a good point. I've been assuming DHS was the lead agency, but perhaps they were brought in by the NYC police.

 

A Google and wiki pull shows this:

 

Homeland security - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Homeland_security

Homeland security is an American umbrella term for "the concerted national effort to ensure a homeland that is safe, secure, and resilient against terrorism and other hazards where American interests, aspirations, and ways of life can thrive to the national effort to prevent terrorist attacks within the United States, ...

 

Oh lookie here, does this not sound familiar...the subway guy recently got arrested for this, there might be a CONNECTION. DING!

 

• Investigation of people making and distributing child pornography;
  

...Now, I'm not making any speculations, but based on how it describes homeland securities job duties, that's the only thing I can see that's sexual related in this they cover. I'm not saying they were doing that...i don't know, we don't know. But looking at it...it just sounds too fucking crazy, too fucking soon to the time that the subway guy was goin to fly to New York to meet with an underage person and that shit hit the fan and was all over the news.

[Mocha]

This is purely speculative. I don't think the Feds are after Rentboy because some clients felt ripped off by an escort. Would that be likely calling the cops to complain that someone stole your illegal drugs? I am not sure.

 

Well, I wasn't talking about a simple ripping off. I'm referring to a situation where perhaps a client was in a dangerous situation. Yes, it'd be silly to call the cops if someone stole illegal drugs, but if a person ended up dead with a bullet in their head over some drugs...Even someone not in their right mind would be sure the cops are going to be all over it. I know 2 people who are serving life sentences for that.

 

And I don't do drugs.

[Kenny]

Steven, you really need to be more polite. We never would have had the American Revolution if Tom Paine hadn't been so sweet and well-mannered.

 

Oh, wait... Never mind.

 

Point taken, and I am sorry. Needless to say, I can't just leave it at that.

 

I intended to rub some nerves and get a reaction, for a specific reason.

 

The biggest victims of criminalized prostitution (according to Amnesty International and the growing coalition of LGBT, medical, and civil rights groups that support them) are women and children, a disproportionate segment of whom are not white. However much indignation white, middle-class escorts or clients may feel right now - and that is what most of us are - we are not the most tragic victims of anything.

 

If Ricardo is right, and the "word on the street" that Rentboy.com was "running some underage Latino boys" turns out to be correct, I am going to feel sorrier still, and eat much more crow than I just did. All I can tell you for sure right now is that Rentboy.com staff like Lady Coco, a Puerto Rican woman, were just arrested and face 5 years in jail, and as far as I can tell - based on the written complaint - she did absolutely nothing wrong, other than work with lots of adult rentboys to help them earn an income. Meanwhile, lots of male escorts are freaking out about whether the DHS, to quote one, "is going to come knocking down my door." So far, this is simply a war on a big chunk of the gay community. Period. Until we learn it really is something else, making baseless charges against Rentboy.com based on hearsay makes no sense. Let DHS proves its own case, which I don't think it can. Us doing it for them is blaming the victim, using hearsay. I intended to rub nerves to at least try to make that stop.

 

It also goes way beyond that, and now I am really going to go off the deep end.

 

My first boss, for 6 years, was a white ethnic woman and national leader that had an incredibly good relationship with Bill Proxmire, deceased, U.S. Senator from Wisconsin and former Chairman of the U.S. Senate Banking Committee. I worked for years with Proxmire and his staff to organize oversight hearings that helped us develop billions of dollars in programs for distressed inner-city neighborhoods that were redlined. Proxmire was also responsible for getting the key anti-redlining laws passed, and they still stand. The power of a Committee Chairman is amazing.

 

Here is a brief description taken out of a book of one meeting I organized with a federal agency in Washington D.C. in the 1980's that ultimately led to billions of dollars in sound mortgage lending programs for low income home buyers, after hundreds of mostly non-white activists stormed out of school buses and took over their D.C. headquarters in what we called "hits." I redacted out my real last name and put in my escort first name, Steven. Other than vanity, there is a specific reason I am painting this picture, which I will outline in the next paragraphs. "They had no idea who we were or where we came from," said [steven], who organized the effort. The roster of activists looked nothing like the credentialed technocrats sitting across the table from them. [steven] was a 26 year old self-taught data geek whose college mentor was Paul Wellstone. Across from him sat a nun from Cincinnati, a Cleveland mom who got involved because she was fed up with packs of stray dogs in her neighborhoods, and of course [steven's] big blond boss. They converged again and again in Washington over the months that followed, scraping together funds for plane tickets and armed with information that proved that making loans to low-income people in inner-cities ... would be a smart business proposition." It was smart business, by the way, until about 15 years after the meeting the book just described happened, when the banks who pushed predatory lending started to fuck it up - but that's a whole different story. My point was to say that in that description, I was the only white man, most of the people in the room were women, many of them were black or Hispanic, and that was typical of almost everything we did.

 

Why does any of this matter? Because right now the Chairman of the U.S. House Committee that oversees DHS is Rep. Michael McCaul, a white Republican from Texas. I was talking to a Republican client yesterday who suggested that McCaul probably has the power to personally call off the witch hunt at DHS, if he really wanted to. I have no idea whether that is true, but based on my experience, it would not surprise me. The bigger problem is that I don't know anyone who knows McCaul, and certainly no one who has a relationship with him like my boss and I did with Proxmire and his staff. Meanwhile, the ranking Democrat on the Committee is Rep. Bennie Thompson, who is black. He's from Mississippi. Unfortunately, I don't know anyone who knows him, and I don't know any escorts that live in or near his district.

 

There are some committee members from the LA area: Rep. Norma Torres and Rep. Loretta Sanchez. Both are Hispanic women, from predominantly Hispanic districts. They may or may not be allies, they may or may not care about this, and they may or may not have any ability to do anything about DHS, even though they sit on a US House Committee of a few dozen people that oversees DHS. They are not ranking Committee members, and they are in the minority. But given everything I know about politics, it would not hurt to try to find out if they are allies, and if they would help us in any way. If I imagine meeting with either of them or their staff, the worst possible scenario I could imagine is that I present myself as a white, middle class escort that basically feels I should be able to make money getting hired by white middle-class men for things that sound salacious. If I then mentioned that this all concerns a website that is frequented by "promiscuous" gay men and that "runs underage Latino boys," I would be laughed out of the room, if not arrested.

 

On the other hand, I could imagine a meeting that included me but also included one or two Hispanic escorts, ideally one being a woman, as well as Hispanic victims of the kind of trafficking Amnesty International is preparing to fight. It would be even better if somebody from Amnesty International or one of several local anti-trafficking groups in the LA area attended such a meeting with us. If the numbers being thrown around - 17,500 people trafficked into the US every year, 200,000 kids at risk of being trafficked into the sex industry - are at all accurate, it probably is happening in their districts, even though they are not central LA. I can't imagine there are many U.S. Representatives or Senators particularly sympathetic to white male escorts like me, but I can imagine them being open to the argument that - whatever they think about me - what DHS is doing does not help anyone, there are no victims, and it is going to make life even worse for their most vulnerable constituents.

 

As it happen, Paul's [Wellstone] wife Sheila adopted human trafficking as her issue as a Senator's wife. She organized the wives of other U.S. Senators, many Republican, and did a lot of good work on the issue, and there is now actually an award given in her and Paul's name every year for people who fight human trafficking and slavery in the United States:

 

http://freedomnetworkusa.org/wp-content/uploads/2015/01/Wellstone_Award_Nomination_packet_2015.pdf

 

One piece of very good news is that this is largely a bipartisan issue. Being moral advocates, and being suspicious of overreach by federal agencies, I think a lot of Republicans would be possible allies if they were persuaded that what DHS is doing now is overreach, and it is simply going to hurt vulnerable people being trafficked and abused more.

 

To go back to basics, we are under attack. This is like Stonewall or 9/11 to me. We have to think long and hard and clearly about what we do, why we do it, and who our allies are. Most of us are white men. The last thing I want to do is sound racist. In fact, I feel in every bone of my body that if we don't understand and embrace the ways in which criminalized prostitution particularly effects women and children and people of color, we are not going to get very far. And if we want to use our time and words here to engage in hearsay about how Rentboy.com ran underage Latino boys, we may as well turn off the lights, shut down the website, and go home.

 

Again, I am truly sorry. I hope that the Latino and Black and Asian escorts and clients on this site actually emerge as the best advocates in the effort to defend people like Lady Coco from wrongful arrest and harassment.

[Kenny]

Remember when, a decade ago, the Feds took down Emperors Club VIP? Yes, employees were fined and went to jail. But the real aim wasn't to snag them. It was to take down a single client -- Eliot Spitzer, Governor of New York -- through scandal. That's all I could think about watching the news on TV, as DHS agents carted boxes of data from the RB offices.

[+ stevenkesslar]

Why do you think backpage got outted, and they started arresting clients at random in New England recently? It wasn't random, someone was killed, a backpage ad was mentioned...and being that backpage is based in the U.K., they went after the local johns.

 

Now, I'm not saying that we shouldn't stand up and make it a gay rights issue, or even a general freedom issue...yes, America is fucked up and sucks as a country for many Blacks and escorts.

 

Let's kiss and make up, Mocha. (I don't think that's illegal, at least not yet).

 

You are right on both counts.

 

To me the whole point is the more you drive things into back pages or, worse, back alleys, the more vulnerable everybody is, and I'm pretty sure who loses the most in that scenario. That is exactly what the de-criminalization advocates are arguing. As you correctly point out, it makes a huge difference when somebody gets killed. In this case, there are no victims. At least not in a 22 page complaint that roles back the clock and instead focuses on making homosexuality sound like a crime. You'd think if they went to the bother of defining words like "twink" to fit their conception that it's part of a vast global sex crime, they might have mentioned there was evidence that "underage" children were being trafficked. They didn't. That's my point.

 

Steven, girl, stop getting so feisty. I know you're passionate about this issue

 

Sadly, Mocha, you are wrong on that count. I am going to keep being feisty. But don't go getting ideas. Not in bed. Everybody knows I'm not that kind of girl.

[+ stevenkesslar]

someone was killed, a backpage ad was mentioned...and being that backpage is based in the U.K., they went after the local johns.

 

By the way, it's worth underlining and thinking about this, since we are all about S & M & H right now. (Speculation, mentioning, and hearsay).

 

There is a theory that the obvious solution is to just take the servers out of the US. Maybe, maybe not. If anything, if it's a site based in .... um, The Netherlands .... seems like local law enforcement (or DHS) would just have a bigger incentive to target the local johns - if they want to continue this crusade.

 

You know what else is interesting about this? To me, it's proof that there's a very good reason to think that this case is built on a house of cards. We have a 22 page document that sounds like "an indictment of gay men", as the New York Times just editorialized, and yet in making our judgments, the jury (us) still has no clue what the words on the page actually mean, or what really happened. Which suggests that the only way to prove something is, oddly enough, to present actual proof.

[+ stevenkesslar]

Excellent article that I don't think has been posted yet .................

 

http://thinkprogress.org/lgbt/2015/08/30/3696447/rentboy-raid-and-sex-trafficking/

 

Seems like this is gradually filtering out to mainstream LGBT groups, who get that this is a broad attack on LGBT people and are starting to speak out. It reinforces that there are no victims, and it is a distraction from the real issue - human trafficking with real victims, who are mostly women and children.

 

Let me flag and reprint a few paragraphs from the article I find particularly chilling:

 

It seems as though the government is trying to take some sort of stand to say that these businesses can’t even have the veneer of legality,” [Jean] Tobin [of the National Center for Transgender Equality] said. “Not to speak to specific charges, [Rentboy] has operated in the open for a long time…they haven’t hidden themselves,” and have a track record of harm reduction advocacy and letting sex worker advocacy groups advertise their services on the site.

 

Moreover, the harm reduction organizations that Rentboy advertised could also take a hit if they’re seen by businesses as a red flag of criminal activity. “It’s giving a warning to all of these [online] services that if they post links to harm reduction services that their site is being used for illegal activity,” Koster said, SWOP’s spokeswoman.

If I had to make a decision based on facts, not hearsay, it sounds like Rentboy.com, was advocating harm reduction for victims of sex trafficking, not "running underage Latino boys." What is really scary is that this could not only have a huge detrimental effect on escorts, it could also have a detrimental effect on harm reduction organizations who Rentboy.com helped to actually reduce harm - especially if the government chooses to go after them, too, but even if they don't.

 

This takes it one step further than blaming the victim. It is the government directly or indirectly victimizing the organizations who are actually trying to help the victims. In the words of Ricardo.............what the fuck?

[+ stevenkesslar]

And so the flood begins ................

 

http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2015/sep/01/rentboy-online-brothel-tool-economy-sex-work

 

Rentboys, escorts, whatever you want to call yourselves - since we know a little about using the Internet, go to the computer and start to compose your stories.

Amazingly, in 22 pages of slurs against gay people, that noted we know how to shave and piss and shit, DHS failed to mention that we also know how to speak and think and type. Let's teach them that we do.

[+ José Soplanucas]

Point taken, and I am sorry. Needless to say, I can't just leave it at that.

 

I intended to rub some nerves and get a reaction, for a specific reason.

 

The biggest victims of criminalized prostitution (according to Amnesty International and the growing coalition of LGBT, medical, and civil rights groups that support them) are women and children, a disproportionate segment of whom are not white. However much indignation white, middle-class escorts or clients may feel right now - and that is what most of us are - we are not the most tragic victims of anything.

 

If Ricardo is right, and the "word on the street" that Rentboy.com was "running some underage Latino boys" turns out to be correct, I am going to feel sorrier still, and eat much more crow than I just did. All I can tell you for sure right now is that Rentboy.com staff like Lady Coco, a Puerto Rican woman, were just arrested and face 5 years in jail, and as far as I can tell - based on the written complaint - she did absolutely nothing wrong, other than work with lots of adult rentboys to help them earn an income. Meanwhile, lots of male escorts are freaking out about whether the DHS, to quote one, "is going to come knocking down my door." So far, this is simply a war on a big chunk of the gay community. Period. Until we learn it really is something else, making baseless charges against Rentboy.com based on hearsay makes no sense. Let DHS proves its own case, which I don't think it can. Us doing it for them is blaming the victim, using hearsay. I intended to rub nerves to at least try to make that stop.

 

It also goes way beyond that, and now I am really going to go off the deep end.

 

My first boss, for 6 years, was a white ethnic woman and national leader that had an incredibly good relationship with Bill Proxmire, deceased, U.S. Senator from Wisconsin and former Chairman of the U.S. Senate Banking Committee. I worked for years with Proxmire and his staff to organize oversight hearings that helped us develop billions of dollars in programs for distressed inner-city neighborhoods that were redlined. Proxmire was also responsible for getting the key anti-redlining laws passed, and they still stand. The power of a Committee Chairman is amazing.

 

Here is a brief description taken out of a book of one meeting I organized with a federal agency in Washington D.C. in the 1980's that ultimately led to billions of dollars in sound mortgage lending programs for low income home buyers, after hundreds of mostly non-white activists stormed out of school buses and took over their D.C. headquarters in what we called "hits." I redacted out my real last name and put in my escort first name, Steven. Other than vanity, there is a specific reason I am painting this picture, which I will outline in the next paragraphs. "They had no idea who we were or where we came from," said [steven], who organized the effort. The roster of activists looked nothing like the credentialed technocrats sitting across the table from them. [steven] was a 26 year old self-taught data geek whose college mentor was Paul Wellstone. Across from him sat a nun from Cincinnati, a Cleveland mom who got involved because she was fed up with packs of stray dogs in her neighborhoods, and of course [steven's] big blond boss. They converged again and again in Washington over the months that followed, scraping together funds for plane tickets and armed with information that proved that making loans to low-income people in inner-cities ... would be a smart business proposition." It was smart business, by the way, until about 15 years after the meeting the book just described happened, when the banks who pushed predatory lending started to fuck it up - but that's a whole different story. My point was to say that in that description, I was the only white man, most of the people in the room were women, many of them were black or Hispanic, and that was typical of almost everything we did.

 

Why does any of this matter? Because right now the Chairman of the U.S. House Committee that oversees DHS is Rep. Michael McCaul, a white Republican from Texas. I was talking to a Republican client yesterday who suggested that McCaul probably has the power to personally call off the witch hunt at DHS, if he really wanted to. I have no idea whether that is true, but based on my experience, it would not surprise me. The bigger problem is that I don't know anyone who knows McCaul, and certainly no one who has a relationship with him like my boss and I did with Proxmire and his staff. Meanwhile, the ranking Democrat on the Committee is Rep. Bennie Thompson, who is black. He's from Mississippi. Unfortunately, I don't know anyone who knows him, and I don't know any escorts that live in or near his district.

 

There are some committee members from the LA area: Rep. Norma Torres and Rep. Loretta Sanchez. Both are Hispanic women, from predominantly Hispanic districts. They may or may not be allies, they may or may not care about this, and they may or may not have any ability to do anything about DHS, even though they sit on a US House Committee of a few dozen people that oversees DHS. They are not ranking Committee members, and they are in the minority. But given everything I know about politics, it would not hurt to try to find out if they are allies, and if they would help us in any way. If I imagine meeting with either of them or their staff, the worst possible scenario I could imagine is that I present myself as a white, middle class escort that basically feels I should be able to make money getting hired by white middle-class men for things that sound salacious. If I then mentioned that this all concerns a website that is frequented by "promiscuous" gay men and that "runs underage Latino boys," I would be laughed out of the room, if not arrested.

 

On the other hand, I could imagine a meeting that included me but also included one or two Hispanic escorts, ideally one being a woman, as well as Hispanic victims of the kind of trafficking Amnesty International is preparing to fight. It would be even better if somebody from Amnesty International or one of several local anti-trafficking groups in the LA area attended such a meeting with us. If the numbers being thrown around - 17,500 people trafficked into the US every year, 200,000 kids at risk of being trafficked into the sex industry - are at all accurate, it probably is happening in their districts, even though they are not central LA. I can't imagine there are many U.S. Representatives or Senators particularly sympathetic to white male escorts like me, but I can imagine them being open to the argument that - whatever they think about me - what DHS is doing does not help anyone, there are no victims, and it is going to make life even worse for their most vulnerable constituents.

 

As it happen, Paul's [Wellstone] wife Sheila adopted human trafficking as her issue as a Senator's wife. She organized the wives of other U.S. Senators, many Republican, and did a lot of good work on the issue, and there is now actually an award given in her and Paul's name every year for people who fight human trafficking and slavery in the United States:

 

http://freedomnetworkusa.org/wp-content/uploads/2015/01/Wellstone_Award_Nomination_packet_2015.pdf

 

One piece of very good news is that this is largely a bipartisan issue. Being moral advocates, and being suspicious of overreach by federal agencies, I think a lot of Republicans would be possible allies if they were persuaded that what DHS is doing now is overreach, and it is simply going to hurt vulnerable people being trafficked and abused more.

 

To go back to basics, we are under attack. This is like Stonewall or 9/11 to me. We have to think long and hard and clearly about what we do, why we do it, and who our allies are. Most of us are white men. The last thing I want to do is sound racist. In fact, I feel in every bone of my body that if we don't understand and embrace the ways in which criminalized prostitution particularly effects women and children and people of color, we are not going to get very far. And if we want to use our time and words here to engage in hearsay about how Rentboy.com ran underage Latino boys, we may as well turn off the lights, shut down the website, and go home.

 

Again, I am truly sorry. I hope that the Latino and Black and Asian escorts and clients on this site actually emerge as the best advocates in the effort to defend people like Lady Coco from wrongful arrest and harassment.

 

I fundamentally agree with you. I just find quite annoying your patronizing tone of Big White Brother telling brownish people what to do and think. Your obsessive reporting of the ethnicity of every single person involved in your story is distracting of the main issue. But I agree with you and call for every single person committed to civil liberties to stand for rentboy, beyond race, ethnicity, gender, political affiliation, etc, etc., etc.