A society of teenage prostitutes? Interpreting male teens’ engagement in age-differentiated same-sex encounters in 1930s Paris

This article explores adolescent sexualities in early twentieth-century France through the daily lives of twelve young men who had sexual contacts with adult men in 1930s Paris. Drawing from a police file opened after the murder of one man they all shared a connection with, it explores the personal situations, itineraries, encounters, and identities of male teenagers who engaged in age-differentiated partnerships. While making the case for a collective approach of these teens, it argues that their experience cannot be contained within the conceptual realms of youth prostitution nor queer initiation. Rather, the intersection of age gap, youth, class, and transactional sex designed a specific space in which young men could explore, experience, or survive, without falling into adult categorizations of social and sexual marginality. This article was published open access under a CC BY-NC-ND licence: https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/ .