A dead-end job was all Josh could find in the former coal-mining town in Wales where he grew up. So he left behind his friends to become a highly paid male escort in London. Will Storr hears his story

Let’s start with two lies: Josh Brandon is 21. I don’t know what Josh’s real name is, and when his age came up he said, “Let’s say 21.” He has blond choirboy hair, his body is pale and vulnerable and, on his beautiful face, innocence dances with filth across wide eyes and stung, parted lips. With his young appearance, Josh is what’s known as a “twink”. He’s also the most expensive hire on the UK’s most popular escort marketplace, sleepyboy.com and is, according to its founder, the most successful in Britain. Sometimes he sees four or five clients a day, and they’re mostly married men but there are also wealthy Arabs, an arms trader and the occasional celebrity. His website notes his waist measurement, cock size and gayness to a precision of one decimal point (“97.5%”). He has a loyalty card scheme. Nine smiley faces earn you an hour.

Here’s a funny story he told me. A few weeks ago a man arrived at Josh’s flat with a dog costume in a little bag. He asked Josh to dress in a schoolboy outfit while he attached his elasticated schnozzle and plugged his tail into place. Josh had to watch a porn film, then say “Come here, boy!” and tickle his stomach. The client rolled over and they had sex. “His snout was looking at me the whole time,” says Josh. “He looked exactly like a dog.” It was a two-hour job: £300.

Josh sees what he does as a legitimate business and compares himself variously to a doctor, a masseur and an athlete. He has monthly health checks, insists on condoms – even for oral sex – and forbids people from tying him up. He parries any attempt to paint his life as dark or dangerous, insisting his moneyed life in London is preferable to life in the town in which he grew up, where the only thing to do is work in Tesco. I asked if we could go there. And so, on a weekend of sagging cloud and sopping air, we met in Ammanford, 45 minutes north of Swansea.

You already know what Ammanford’s like. There’s the Argos; the Superdrug; the Iceland; the Shoe Express; the Subway; the abandoned cafés; the independently owned shop (Sugar ’n’ Spice) with the Closing Down Sale posters and the To Let board fastened to its signage. Josh sliced through the grey pedestrian precinct in his box-fresh trainers and shiny puffer jacket like a returning pop star. When I photographed him in the park in which he used to take drugs, a group of youngsters jeered at us. At the end of a windy car park, the triumphal Tesco sign loomed. We passed a weed-choked demolition site surrounded by steel fencing. “They said the actor from Men Behaving Badly was going to build a restaurant there,” said Josh. “There’s always rumours like that going about.”

Josh’s step-brother Kristian lives in a small terrace a few minutes walk from the shops. He leaned uncomfortably in the corner of the kitchen while Josh’s good friend, Elena, sat beside me. I asked what Josh was like as a kid. “He was a funny boy, really,” said Elena. “Likable.”

“He was dead popular in school,” said Kristian.

“For the wrong reasons,” said Josh.

“For the wrong reasons, yeah,” nodded Kristian.

Josh used to walk out of school, just getting up in class, saying, “I’m going for a tea.” At 15, he was expelled. By that time, he’d been on speed for two years. By 11 he was already hanging out with the older kids in the park, smoking weed and drinking. They’d give him all the drugs to stash because, even then, he looked younger than his years and the police never searched him. By 13 he was snorting up to seven grammes of amphetamine a day. “I got paranoid, always thinking someone was going to come at me with a knife,” he says. He’d hear chattering almost-voices, see flitting shadows. “It was paranoid delusions, basically,” he said.

“I remember when you saw that hand,” said Elena.

“I was at my gran’s house,” said Josh. “The hand was coming out of the wall, trying to pull me in. I was physically fighting it. Gran was like, ‘What’s going on?’ and I was like, ‘This fucking thing!’”

“Sounds cool, actually,” smiled Kristian.

Josh was sectioned in a Cardiff hospital. “I broke out loads of times,” he says. “I used to take the anorexic girls with me. I was like, ‘Come on, fuck this thing!’” Every time he escaped, a helicopter would be scrambled. “They told me it cost £7,000 for it just to take off.”

“Where would you and the anorexic girls go?” I asked.

“Just mostly stood under a tree thinking the helicopter couldn’t see us.”

Josh had proto-sexual experiences with male friends when he was eight or nine. As the second-best-looking boy in school he got the pick of the girls. “I fingered a few,” he said. “I did it to save face.” He was coerced into outing himself by a friend of his father’s who’d guessed about his orientation. “Her daughter fancied me. She was eight and was sending herself teddies and flowers and saying I sent them. Her mum said, ‘You need to tell her you’re gay.’”

“You had to tell an eight-year-old you were gay?” I said. “That’s ridiculous.”

“It is a bit ridiculous,” said Josh. “And then she said, ‘You’ve got something to tell your father as well.’ So I told him.”

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Prodigal son: Josh in the former mining town of Ammanford. Photograph: Will Storr

We talked about what it’s like to be young, in a town like Ammanford, and expectant of some kind of life. “The Tesco’s killed off our local trade: the butchers, the greengrocers,” said Kristian. After this, more high street brands moved in. Ammanford used to bustle with independent businesses. People don’t work for themselves any more. That has a hollowing effect on their spirits. Kristian describes kids “going back and forth down between the shelves with no real end. You’re not going to work for Tesco’s for years and come out going, ‘I’ve really achieved something with my life!’” If Josh had stayed, he’d have calcified. “He loves the city and the city loves him,” said Kristian.

Josh’s father lives in a nearby town called Garnant. Dressed in Saturday morning lounge-wear, he greeted me cautiously and prepared me a tea in a Cadbury’s Caramel Easter egg mug. The kitchen surfaces were clean of clutter except for a two-litre bottle of Coca Cola, a minibar vodka and a packet of Tesco apples. His family, he said, has been in the valley for generations. “There were three coal mines within five miles of here. It was a Thatcher thing. She shut them all down.”

He’s long separated from Josh’s mum. “We were married for about two years,” he said. “He lived with her until he was about 14 then came to me.”

“Was he the only gay in the village?” I asked.

“Around here, yeah.”

He wondered if Josh’s sexuality was a factor in his breakdown.

“Living in a community like this and being like that, which a lot of people don’t accept – I’d imagine that would play on your mind.”

“How did you react when he told you that he was gay?”

“There was nothing I could say, apart from ‘I really wish you weren’t.’ You don’t want anybody being like that because you’re not like that yourself. You don’t understand it properly. But he’s my son and that’s it, isn’t it? Whatever it is, it is.”

It was Josh’s father who enabled his move to London at 16. “He said he couldn’t handle it around here, that there was nothing for him. I put up the bond and a couple of months’ rent, took him up in the car to find somewhere.” They found a bedsit in Walthamstow. “They’re not pretty, those places. They can have six bedrooms, six different people in them, everybody from different nationalities so you don’t know who you’re going to be sharing a bathroom with. Even most of the white people are Russian or Bosnian or something.”

At first, Josh tried modelling. When this failed, he told his dad he’d started escorting.

“I felt sad,” he said. “It’s not something you want your son to do. I don’t talk about it in the house, I don’t talk about it to my girlfriend.”

She doesn’t know?”

There was a silence.

“Maybe she does know. Maybe she doesn’t want to tell me, thinking I don’t know.”

It seemed amazing that he didn’t talk to his partner about his only child’s life. Perhaps it was a very new relationship.

“How long have you been with her?”

“Ten years.”

I asked what he thought when Josh won his award for “Male Escort of the Year”.

“I didn’t think much of it.”

Unexpectedly, he melted into an affectionate smile. “He’s off his head. He don’t care.”

I felt Josh’s dad was trying hard to say the right thing but had been heartbroken by the revelation of his son’s sexuality and career. But he loved Josh, that was obvious. Nevertheless, I could see why Josh wanted to leave Ammanford and its people. I could see why, for someone like him, this Tesco town was a nothing town. Empty.

Back in London, Josh posed for photographs in his Stratford flat. He smoked cigarettes in a choirboy costume and pouted in his school blazer. He told me he’d decided to become an escort after meeting a lover on Gaydar who happened to be one. “His flat was beautiful. He had the king-sized bed, the big TV, the marble bathroom. He said he sometimes made £1,000 a week.”

Facebook Twitter Pinterest ‘If there’s an attraction I have to cut it off. I have a future to build’: Josh talks business. Photograph: Will Storr

Josh says he earns anything from a few hundred pounds a week to many thousands. He goes on working trips abroad on which he claims to earn up to £30,000 a month. He differentiates escorts from rent boys, who he says are hustlers. “They milk every penny from their clients.” He knows people who’ve been assaulted but says he never has himself. “I’ve had threats. Like, one guy threatened to slit my throat or whatever. It was over the phone, because I wouldn’t book him. I didn’t trust him when he spoke. The tone of his voice. And there’s the occasional text from some religious nut who’s like, ‘You’re going to burn for all eternity. Cleanse your soul.’ You know they’re fantasising about it. I mean, why are they Googling gay escorts?”

There are odd requests, too. One man pays £750 to clean Josh’s bathroom and iron his clothes while Josh watches TV. There’s a £5 fine if he leaves any creases. “I felt bad at first,” he said, “especially about the fine.” There’s a Swedish philatelist who makes him tear up books of expensive stamps. “He’s hurt at the sight of his stamps on the floor all ripped up, but obviously turned on at the same time.” Once, a client asked Josh to bathe his two-year-old. “I didn’t do it. Fuck that.”

Lots of men fall in love with Josh. “It happens monthly. It’s really annoying. I lose a lot of money because I have to say goodbye to them. It’s no good for them, it’s no good for me.” Occasionally, he feels genuinely sexually drawn towards his clients. “If there’s an attraction, I have to cut it off. I don’t want anything to grow from that.” It’s difficult when an escort discovers he’s using his heart. Even with the non-clients. “Throughout my career, there have been two guys I’ve been in love with. I guess there’s some kind of guilt. You think, ‘I love this person, I really don’t want to…’” Josh thought for a moment, and I saw the businessman in him. “You have to think, ‘They might be gone tomorrow, and I have a future to build.’”

After we said goodbye, I wondered if the desire to find some grim punchline to Josh’s story speaks of the magical thinking we sometimes indulge in when it comes to sex. Surely it must be dangerous to trade it, as if it were no different to putting up a shelf? But Josh is convinced that the bargain he’s made is more than equal to the cost of escape. And, after visiting Ammanford, I too found it hard to believe that he’d have been better off staying, with his father and the amphetamines and the Tesco. There are risks in what Josh does, of course: a chance he’ll end up beaten and bitter. But I say his father should be proud of the son who refused to accept the oblivion of his hometown and is working so hard to write his own happy ending.