Assuming the Position: A Memoir of Hustling [Hardcover]

Rick Whitaker (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: August 24, 1999

Rick Whitaker divulges the complex reasons that drove him to prostitution and reflects on the cost of a life of half-truths and emotional lies. With an unsentimental eye, Whitaker chronicles his descent and eventual resolution.

Editorial Reviews

Amazon.com Review

Although Assuming the Position is, as Rick Whitaker describes it, "a memoir of hustling," don't expect it to be particularly erotic. Whitaker thoroughly deglamorizes male prostitution, depicting it as banal and emotionally numbing rather than sexy or transgressive. Any potential arousal to be gleaned from his exploits is further dampened by the book's highly mannered tone and the rather ordinary quality of Whitaker's psychological discoveries: "I was always pretending to be somebody's friend when I really only wanted his money," runs one such moment of self-reflection. "Of course this is just an extreme form of something we all do in order to get ahead, but such seeming friendliness is never good or heartfelt and it is always a cause, at least for me, of mental and emotional fatigue." Readers may also find themselves frustrated by the memoir's lack of narrative tension: Whitaker did drugs and had sex with men for money for a while, then he stopped, then he wrote a book about how it made him feel. Unfortunately, being able to write grammatically correct sentences about his unusual experiences isn't enough to make Assuming the Position an interesting book. --Ron Hogan

From Publishers Weekly

Now the assistant to the general director of the New York City Opera, Whitaker writes honestly about his experiences as a hustler and drug addict. After moving to New York in the late 1980s with a boyfriend, little cash and no contacts, Whitaker earned a degree in philosophy, wrote a novel and went to work in publishing as an editorial assistant to Gordon Lish. By 1997, he had acquired a serious dependency on cocaine and was having "a great deal of sex with strangers, some of it unsafe." In order to support his drug habit, he began working for two escort agencies and, in the next 20 months, conducted business with more than 100 men before giving up his sex work and going into recovery. Relying on a mix of erudition and titillation, Whitaker quotes Leonard Woolf, Wittgenstein, Thoreau, Andrew Marvell and Pascal as he relates the explicit sexual details of his work life. He's at his most astute when analyzing how his parents' highly unstable, overtly sexual relationship and his own complicated love/hate bond with his father set the stage for his hustling. Overall, despite the literary references, Whitaker's relatively modest psychological insights are overwhelmed by the far more compelling pulp narrative of a young man finding salvation on the brink of ruin in the big city. Agent, Malaga Baldi. (Oct.)
Copyright 1999 Reed Business Information, Inc.

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Product Details

• Hardcover: 160 pages
• Publisher: Four Walls Eight Windows; 1St Edition edition (August 24, 1999)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 1568581238
• ISBN-13: 978-1568581231
• Product Dimensions: 7.8 x 5.4 x 0.9 inches
• Shipping Weight: 9.8 ounces
• Average Customer Review: 3.6 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (34 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #691,976 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

10 of 11 people found the following review helpful:

2.0 out of 5 stars A bit insincere, June 20, 2004

By A Customer

This review is from: Assuming the Position: A Memoir of Hustling (Hardcover)

This book is not what I would call "quality prose". At times, it reads like a pompous college paper. I found particularly annoying Whitaker's propensity for throwing in quotes from famous figures and for using fancy words (e.g. mendacity, censorious, ennui, modus operandi, etc.) It seemed to me that he was trying to sort of compensate for his "dirty" past by showing off his intellectual side, which he indomitably possesses. What I also found annoying was the fact that the book lacked a clear well-crafted structure. Basically, we have an alternation of quasi-erotic stories with ramblings, masquerading as honest self-revelations, on the author's struggle with his own feelings. To that, you can also add a bunch of diary entries that serve as mere "filler". Frankly, this book is just another cheap commercial trick. On one hand, it aims at pandering to people's desire for quick trills. On the other hand, it aims at achieving the required, in the publishing world, dose of sentimentality taken for honesty. I think that the book would have had a different effect had the author revealed the true extent of his hustling. He doesn't really do so. Either the publisher did not want too much inappropriate information to come out or the author himself saved it so that it wouldn't completely (it already does to some degree) jar with his cultivated interests (classical music, philosophy, and literature).

Though some people find the book "disarmingly frank", I find it a bit insincere at certain points. Towards the end of it, the author says that he has become "less promiscuous" than he was before. That, I guess, implies that there was still some promiscuity going on around the time the book was released. So did Rick Whitaker completely change? The author wants us to think he did. Do I think he did? I don't know. I also still don't know why he really went into hustling. To make money or to spite his former boyfriend, Tom (we never found out why Tom left him)? Or perhaps Rick Whitaker was just a narcissistic self-indulgent gay man who craved attention. If that is so, then the whole book would have a different spin. Sex would be no longer a way for the author to satisfy his "needs" but rather a way for him to feed his ego. This is my take on the book. (...)

7 of 7 people found the following review helpful:

3.0 out of 5 stars Surprisingly bland, December 24, 2000

By 

M. J. Walters "dargelos" (Chicago, IL USA) - See all my reviews
(VINE VOICE)    (TOP 500 REVIEWER)   

Amazon Verified Purchase

This review is from: Assuming the Position: A Memoir of Hustling (Hardcover)

I don't really know what I expected. Prostitution is, after all, an act so loaded with emotional baggage that it's hard to imagine anyone ringing any new changes on the subject. Unfortunately Whitaker seems about as involved in his narrative as he was in his tricks, and that makes for unfortunate reading. The book alternates between a kind of laundry list of sex and drugs, and some fairly unsurprising rambles on why he does what he does. It's not badly written, but it's just not awfully engaging or particularly enlightening for anyone who really wants to get down to the whys and wherefores of prostitution. Oh...and it's not particularly sexy either....

20 of 25 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Judge for yourself, November 19, 1999

By A Customer

This review is from: Assuming the Position: A Memoir of Hustling (Hardcover)

After reading this book, and then some of the reviews, it's clear to me that the reviewers are far more jaded and cynical than the author. An addictive "type," if there is such a thing, Whitaker fell into prostitution. He tells about it. Now, if readers are disappointed the author doesn't come up with some tremendous mea culpa, expressing overwhelming regret for what happened, that's their hang-up. If you want to know what the life of a hustler must really be like -- told by someone as merciless in his assessment of others as he is of himself -- then this is your book. It strips away the fantasy, so don't go looking for an idealized portrait of a messy business.