Yet Perry's book documents Malcolm X's many gay experiences. A schoolmate, Bob Bebee, recalls the day they stumbled on a local boy jerking off. Malcolm, Bebee recalled, ordered the youth to masturbate him, and subsequently boasted he had given him oral sex. Later, from the age of 20, Malcolm had sex with men for money - as hinted at in Spike Lee's 1992 biopic - and he had at least one sustained sexual liaison with a man. While living in Flint, Michigan, his roommate noticed that instead of sleeping in the room they were sharing, Malcolm sneaked down the hall to spend the night with a gay transvestite named Willie Mae.
In New York, two of Malcolm's friends from Michigan remember bumping into him at the YMCA, where Malcolm bragged he earned money servicing "queers". Later, Malcolm worked as a butler to a wealthy Boston bachelor, William Paul Lennon. According to Malcolm's sidekick Malcolm Jarvis, he was paid to sprinkle Lennon with talcum powder and bring him to orgasm. Perry suggests that Malcolm's gay encounters may not have been entirely financially motivated. His masculine insecurities and ambivalence towards women fit the archetype of a repressed gay man and point to latent homosexuality.
After the death of his father, when Malcolm was six, he lacked male role models and was dominated by strong women - in particular, his tyrannical mother. He feared women and his early sexual experiences with girls were mostly unsatisfactory. Far from macho, Malcolm hated fighting and got beaten by other men. His passionate assertion that the need to feel masculine is a man's "greatest urge" indicates someone doubtful of his own manliness.
As for his sporadic gay hustling, as Perry notes, "there were other ways he could have earned money". Dope-dealing, thieving and pimping were sources of income he had pursued with success. There was no imperative to sell his body. Why, then, did he prostitute himself? Misogyny and repressed homosexuality might be the answer. According to Perry: "His male-to-male encounters, which rendered it unnecessary for him to compete for women, afforded him an opportunity for sexual release without the attendant risk of dependence on women."