GLR May-June 2024

be turned away. The informal supporting network that made hobo life possible was simply not there for women or men of color, so only a brave few ventured out. The Great Depression radically changed The Road. A more diverse population—in ethnicity, age, and gender—hit the rails, while community soup kitchens and New Deal work programs replaced the private charity of the back door “poke-out,” aided by the efforts of “Sally Ann” (the Salvation Army) and “Willy” (Goodwill). But beginning in the 1870s and until the Wall Street Crash of 1929, the faces that grinned from “side-door Pullmans” as freight train boxcars rattled past were overwhelmingly young, white, and male. And horny.

are the victims of this passion.” Avoiding any discussion of sex between two consenting adults—the hobo’s “going 50-50”— Flynt instead wrote at length about men who had sex with boys. He was particularly dismayed by the number of young people who seemed to admire tramps, and to be willing participants in sexual pairings. “The general impression made on me by the sexually perverted men I have met in vagabondage is that they are abnormally masculine. In their intercourse with boys they al ways take the active part. The boys have in some cases seemed to me uncommonly feminine, but not as a rule. In the main they are very much like other lads, and I am unable to say whether

their liking for the inverted relationship is inborn or acquired. That it is, however, a genuine liking, in altogether too many in stances, I do not in the least doubt.” The older participant in these rela tionships was known as the “jocker” or “wolf,” and the younger was known as the “prushun” or “punk.” Flynt condemned

The promise—or threat—of sex hung over The Road like musk in rutting season. When 21-year-old Len De Caux climbed into a boxcar in 1921, he was greeted by a man who initiated the conversation by of fering to pimp for him: “You’ll look okay ... when you’re all dolled up. There’s rich guys

Hundreds of thousands of young men took to the roads and rails in the years from the Civil War to the Great Depression.

goes for a clean-appearin’ punk.” De Caux had no desire to be anyone’s punk, but he was frequently too exhausted to fend off exploring fingers. “Once I awoke, after a crawly nightmare, to find my fly-buttons undone and my private parts exposed to public view.” Homosexual activity was usually not so stealthy, though—nor so one-sided. “I took a crack at him, and he took a crack at me,” one hobo explained, stressing the mutuality of a sexual encounter. In hobo slang the practice was known as “going 50-50.” § T HE FIRST ETHNOGRAPHIC STUDIES of hobo life in America were published in 1893, first as individual journal articles and then collected as a book, by Josiah Flynt (penname of Josiah Flynt Willard). The book Tramping with Tramps was based on nearly a decade of association with these men, including an eight month stint of living on The Road himself, during which Flynt became one of the earliest “participant observers,” as sociolo gists would come to call them. Flynt’s reports overturned one of the most enduring myths of the hobo: that he was a solitary wan derer. Instead he found that men on The Road tended to gather into small supportive families. The hobo has “the desire to feel that although he is forbidden the privileges and rights of a po lite society, he can nevertheless identify himself with just as def inite and exclusive a community as the one he has been turned out of.” Tramps found companionship in what Flynt called “out cast’s clubs” of like-minded men, and although he supplied brief sketches of some of the shared interests that might draw men to gether, Flynt felt that one type of tramp association was simply “too vile for description.” Nevertheless, he later described in some detail (based, he informed the reader, on “what I have per sonally observed”) homosexual practices that were supposedly too vile for him to describe: “usually what they call ‘leg work’ (intercrural), but sometimes immissio penis in anum .” So groundbreaking was Flynt’s exploration of homosexual ity among tramps that he was invited to contribute an appendix to Havelock Ellis’ Sexual Inversion (1897). “Every hobo in the United States,” Flynt wrote, “knows what ‘unnatural inter course’ means, talking about it freely, and, according to my find ing, every tenth man practices it, and defends his conduct. Boys

these liaisons as sordid and exploitative, but also reluctantly agreed that in many cases the boys were eager partipants. “Some of them have told me that they get as much pleasure out of the affair as the jocker does. ... Those who have passed the age of puberty [about sixteen in the late 19th century] seem to be satisfied in pretty much the same way that the men are.” While our response to reports of sex between men and boys on The Road is necessarily complicated by current understandings of agency and consent, in this period a very different set of as

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