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Where the Boys Are

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"We'd sit down, eat and then get into the grind. He gave me $200 to get down and dirty -- not intercourse but oral sex. We'd stay until we finished, four hours or five hours.

"They're not getting the satisfaction from their womens," Gerald speculates about the men who visit the Stroll. "How they wanna, when they wanna.

"Or else they're not ready to admit they're gay."

To see him in a white T-shirt that contrasts with his bloodshot eyes, it's difficult to imagine Gerald in high heels and a dress, his fingernails and toenails painted red. But this is the way he'd dress for the Stroll. His crack addiction, he says, was a motivator to work, and the drug, in turn, helped him maintain the energy to stay out all night long. Now, between detox and job-hunting, he hasn't been walking the Stroll.

But he plans to go back.

"This is me, this is my life," he says. "I had some good experiences at it, dressing up as drag queens."

In 1980, plainclothes St. Louis police officer Gregory Erson was killed while working a prostitution detail. In those days the Stroll was located on Washington Avenue at the eastern edge of the Central West End, and it featured women. Erson's death prompted a major police crackdown. A decade later, in 1992, comedian and activist Dick Gregory led a march along the Stroll with the goal of reclaiming the neighborhood from its seedier elements. "The people must get the courage to know they can do something about the prostitutes and dope dealers," he told the Post-Dispatch. "With courage comes the power."

A year later 34 female prostitutes and 34 johns were arrested during a two-week crackdown on the "South-Side Stroll," located in the area framed by South Grand Boulevard, Jefferson Avenue, Meramec Street and Gravois Avenue.

St. Louis has had a Stroll for as long as anyone can remember, and female prostitutes continue to ply the above areas. But nowadays "the Stroll" refers to the region roughly bordered by Washington Boulevard and Locust Street on the north and south and Jefferson and Compton avenues on the east and west.

Carter Hendricks owns a business in the neighborhood, but he's concerned that there might be break-ins if his shop were to be identified in print. He's been here since the late 1980s, Hendricks says, and first noticed the male prostitution trade about ten years ago.

"The clientele has changed," he says. "The clientele in the mid- to late '90s was much more heavily married white businessmen from the county. You know, driving Oldsmobiles."

But now more of the men doing the trolling are black. Hendricks speculates that many are on the "down low" -- black men who consider themselves straight but have sex with other men on the sly. Whatever the case, Hendricks says the Stroll is busier than ever: "It's a marketplace, and sometimes the marketplace gets really organized. It's been more of a problem again in the last few months."

Because the neighborhood is dominated by light industry, for a long time the night moves didn't prompt much public outcry, according to Robert Berger, chairman of the Locust Business District. But loft renovations have begun to draw a residential contingent.

"About six years ago we had thirteen families within our district," Berger says. "Now I wouldn't be surprised if we had close to a hundred. Over the past year and a half, two years, you're seeing more and more individuals parking their cars and walking to their place of residency. At our meetings there'll be people coming up and complaining about auto break-ins, or break-ins in their place of business, or being accosted on the street, or a woman's purse being stolen within that area."

One disgruntled resident is 38-year-old advertising writer Wade Paschall, who moved into a restored loft near the Stroll three years ago. He's now trying to mobilize his neighbors to get the area cleaned up.

Paschall believes Harbor Light isn't pulling its weight.

"It's hard to go after an organization like the Salvation Army," he says. "It's like: 'Who can hate ice cream?' On their own, all their programs are great. But when you put them all together, it's just sort of this recipe for disaster. There is a lot of overcrowding in the facility. This is not a case of, 'Hey, I don't want this in my backyard.' It's that this isn't working for the guys inside any more than it's not working for me. I don't think it's that they have any bad intentions, it's just that it's gotten beyond their control."

Tim Best says that's a common misperception.

"I would absolutely dispute that it's not working for these guys," the Salvation Army captain counters. "Anybody who feels that way ought to come down and let me take them on a tour and show them that we're a series of connected small groups. While I understand the view from outside -- that we're a big facility where everything is all melded in together -- what we really are is a mini-continuum of care. Providing care for a guy who is just coming off the street, all the way to guys who are being restored in their work ethic, who are being restored to their family. Treatment begins when a guy comes off a mat and enters into the program."

"You drive by at night and see ten guys loitering in front of the building," Paschall complains. "If they're Harbor Light guys, then why aren't they inside? And if they're not Harbor Light guys, then why doesn't the Harbor Light call the police?"

Best says he does precisely that. "However, if they're across the street, we've been told in the past that we don't have the right to call the police for people that are not on our property. Well, we call anyway, and if they are our guys they are brought inside, and if they're not our guys they're asked to move along.

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