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1999, Van Sant executive producer) follows the story of a young man named Johnny (Jesse Bradford) who wants to become a race car driver as he falls in with a group of hustlers in Las Vegas. Gregg Araki’s Mysterious Skin (2004) poses a striking contrast to Speedway Junky . The film, which works through a narrative that could have been lifted straight out of an NQC film while appropriating a mainstream aesthetic, is about two teen boys, one of whom is a gay hustler, who are struggling to piece together their lives after their baseball coach had sex with them.
    Post-NQC, the use of the character type of the male sex worker has flourished and become dramatically fractured. While major studio productions Deuce Bigalow: Male Gigolo (Mitchell, 1999) and The Wedding Date (Kilner, 2005) work to sanitize the gigolo, maintaining strict hetero-sexuality and presenting homosexual sex work as abject, Mandragora (Grodecki, 1997), Speedway Junky, Lola und Bilidikid (Ataman, 1999), L.I.E . (Michael Cuesta, 2001), Sonny (Cage, 2002), Mysterious Skin , Breakfast on Pluto (Jordan, 2005), and Boy Culture (Brocka, 2006) all have worked to push the male sex worker in a variety of other directions.
    Mandragora and Lola und Bilidikid both grapple with male sex work in a way that echoes the work of the NQC. Robin Griffiths (2008) sees a strong parallel between the aims of Mandragora , which follows the rise and fall of a teenage hustler in Czechoslovakia, and the aims of the NQC. “Grodecki,” writes Griffiths, “was just as ground breaking in his unwavering yet ambivalent commitment to destabilize and subvert the heteronormatively inclined moral narratives, imagery and subjectivities that governed the more established tropes of Czech cinema and cultural production: confronting its entrenched stereotypes, assumptions and taboos even as he problematically re-inscribed them” (p. 139). While Mandragora ends tragically and ultimately works to reinforce notions of sex work as perverse, it deals with the AIDS crisis in a very visceral way.
    In a scene of Mandragora in which Malek (Miroslav Caslavka), the film’s protagonist, and his friend David (David Svec) hire two female prostitutes to have sex, Malek is asked if he would like to have sex with or without a condom (there is a price difference). “You’re not afraid of AIDS?” Malek asks. “We’ve all got it anyway,” replies his companion. Where AIDS (and disease more generally) is never a concern for Deuce Bigalow or The Wedding Date ’s Nick (Dermont Mulroney) and where The Living End ’s Luke and Joe, in the height of the AIDS crisis, have been diagnosed with a death sentence, Mandragora ’s sex workers are always already implicated in the AIDS crisis as a simple fact of their profession. While issues of abject morality foreground many of the films that, either explicitly or implicitly, deal with male sex work pre-AIDS, films since the AIDS outbreak have fractured, dealing both with the moral implications of sex work and, frequently, concerns about health and disease. Where the dirty, run-down spaces of Midnight Cowboy historically symbolized abjection in regards to cinematic representations of male sex work, the bodies of the hustlers in Mandragora and The Living End have become a new site of concern.

     
    FIGURE 3.4
    Mandragora ’s sex workers are always implicated in the AIDS crisis as a simple fact of their profession during the period of time in which the film takes place.
    References
     
    Aaron, M. (2004). New queer cinema: An introduction. In M. Aaron (Ed.), New queer cinema: A critical reader . Edinburgh, Scotland: Edinburgh University Press.
    Aggleton, P. (Ed). (1999). Men who sell sex: International perspectives on male prostitution and HIV/AIDS . Philadelphia: Temple University Press.
    Benshoff, H. M., & Griffin, S. (2006). Queer images: A history of gay and lesbian film in America . Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield.
    Breight, C. (1997). Elizabethan World Pictures. In J. J.