Towards the end of his first month frying poultry on Hollywood Boulevard, David Henry Sterry's boss asked if he wanted to make some real money. It was 1974, and having moved to Los Angeles to study philosophy, the 17-year-old was broke. His English immigrant parents had become embroiled in a messy separation, and had left their teenage son to fend for himself. The cultural inheritor of a stiff upper lip, Sterry refused to complain, and found himself work in the kitchen of a cheap chicken takeaway/diner, earning 78 dollars a week. However, his youth, pretty-boy looks and childlike naivety had already got him into trouble on Hollywood's less salubrious Hollywood streets, when he innocently took up the offer of free steak from a stranger who approached him on the forecourt of Grauman's Chinese Theatre. The steak was spiked, and after crashing at the guy's flat, Sterry woke to find himself being anally violated by his benefactor, involuntarily paying in kind for the piece of meat he had hungrily accepted.

But the proposal received from the proprietor of Hollywood Fried Chicken sounded more attractive. "He tells me he's got lots of rich, horny friends," remembers Sterry, who has since made a successful and varied living as an actor, marriage counsellor and novelist, "and that these friends will pay to party with a boy like me. He says I can make real money and have all the pussy I can shake a stick at. He makes it sound like fun, and I'm thinking: 'Wow, they're going to pay me to party? What the hell!"

And so, for the following school year, David Henry Sterry worked as a 'chicken', a teenage prostitute who was hired out to rich Los Angeles women for $100 plus an hour. His experience at the hands of the steak guy compelled him to insist he have sex only with women, and unlike most gigolos, he was young and good-looking enough to satisfy his pimps on this basis (although towards the end of his career; he did take the occasional 'non-sex' job with men, usually freaky types who wanted him to beat them up). Armed with a pager supplied by his 'employment counsellor', he punctuated lectures, sports and college dating with agency 'tricks', servicing some of the wealthiest women in California. Ironically, almost thirty years later, Los Angeles seems set to make Sterry rich again, with solicitations this time coming from Hollywood's other big money trade. Now in his early forties, Sterry has written a memoir of his year in the sex business - Chicken: Love For Sale On The Streets Of Hollywood - and film studios are battling for the rights to his story. Published this month by Canongate in the UK, Chicken is a funny, illuminating and disturbing record of the high-rent lifestyle, a tale which belies society's often one-dimensional attitude towards male prostitution. Its greatest strength is in showing how Sterry's attitude to his career was (and is) painfully ambiguous - sometimes he thought he was the luckiest 17-year-old in the world, getting paid to have sex with older women, while at others he sensed he was nothing more than a shamefully exploited teenager. More often than not, he was both at the same time…

What kind of things did your clients require from you?

About half the women wanted very specific, fetishistic things. One wanted me to crawl under the covers and service her orally while she never made a sound or moved a muscle - it was like she wanted to reproduce something that had happened in her early life. And then the other half didn't even seem to want sex - they wanted to talk about their miserable husbands and terrible kids. Most times they wanted me naked, and I think that says a lot about the power dynamic between the sexes in our culture - they wanted to pay a boy to take his clothes off while they remained fully dressed. These were all rich, powerful women who lived in mansions and drove huge automobiles, but they still felt powerless in life and sexually dominated by men. So they wanted to order someone around.

Were they mostly 'frustrated middle-aged' types?

I'd guess the youngest was about 30, and then I did have a grandma who'd never had anyone go down on her in eighty years! Someone gave me to her as a present. Everyone always says that must have been gross, but actually I felt honoured, and she was such a sweet, lovely person.

Were you ever unable to get it up for a client?

I always managed to perform, though I can't say my heart was always in it. But then you're not paid for your heart, you're paid for your body. There were many times when I faltered and drooped, but I had this mechanism where I would activate this voice in my head that I called the 'loverstudguy'. It was like one of those cheesy, corny soundtracks to bad porno with this voice going: (adopts Barry White style growl) 'Ooh, yeah, baby, you love it, don't you baby'. That'd make me feel like this sexy guy who could perform.

What did the job teach you about female sexuality?

I was once hired by a hippy chick who taught me how to do tantric sex (one of the greatest jobs I ever had in my life!), and she gave me such a valuable lesson. She said, 'If you can make a woman's pleasure your top priority and figure out what makes the woman in front of you happy sexually, then that woman will do anything for you'. They're just so fucking grateful, because they get so little of it in life. After that, they're like: 'You want me to put on the Scuba outfit? Well, OK, honey.'

What was the most bizarre trick you turned?

I think the weirdest was when I was hired by a grieving mother whose young son had been killed in a car accident. She told me to go into her dead son's room and put his clothes on. Every fibre of my being is saying 'No! Don't do this!', but I'm a professional so I put on the clothes and she comes back into the room in this little negligée and manipulates me so that I'm lying on top of her. Even then I manage to get that porno voice working in my head and get everything going, and I'm actually having sex with this woman who's calling me by her dead son's name. And then she says: 'Do you love Mommy, Braddy?' - Braddy was the kid's name - and I'm like: 'Oh, my God!' but finally I tell her that I love her and she's making these little noises, so I think at least I'm earning my money. And then her body lurches and I open my eyes just in time to see her vomit. That was probably the most bizarre, alienating, horrific thing I've ever lived through.

Did you ever do work for any celebrities?

The closest I came was a judge. I'd get 500 dollars to verbally and physically abuse him. The first time I ripped off his judge's robe, it really made me question the American judicial system - there he was, this flabby, white, hairy guy, and he had a pair of diapers on! But I actually found that work very easy - it was like getting paid to insult and smack around a boss that you hate. But it also activated emotions in me that it became impossible for me to control. That's how I got out of the business - one time I did one of those jobs and lost control. I broke every rule there was to break and smashed a guy up beyond all recognition. I thought I'd killed him. After that I couldn't go back to the agency. I was terrified - I thought they'd come after me and kill me.

Did you become convinced that everyone is sexually depraved?

I think that if you dig deep enough you'll find depravity in everyone's closet - it's just that we repress it. And the proof of this is in the fact that our email in-boxes are bombarded with stuff like lolita.com or priests-having-sex-with-horses. You find the weirdest, most disgusting sick shit just waiting for you - it's not even like you invited it in, it's coming to find you. I think we're in tremendous sexual pain as a culture.

And you saw plenty of that sexual pain?

Sure, I was right in the centre of it. When someone hires you for sex, the normal restraints that people put on themselves fall away, and they get to live out their darkest fantasies. There's a lot of role-playing in sex work. And to me it's much better to hire a woman of 30 to pretend she's a little kid than to hire a kid. Or take the judge - I'd rather have somebody like him in diapers than abusing somebody in diapers.

So, is chickening a job you'd recommend to your friends?

No, certainly not. I get emails all the time from guys who say: 'I like money, I like sex, how do I get started in prostitution?' But first of all, nobody underage should be doing sex work - you're just not ready for it. Also I think it'd be really difficult for a guy to make money having sex with women. I was in the right place at the right time or the wrong place at the wrong time depending on how you view it. I had the look, I was an athlete, I had a seventeen-year-old body and I worked for a really high-end agency. But there's a thousand women for every man making a living as a heterosexual in that industry.

Your prostitution career ended at 18.

What happened next? I moved out of state and lived in abject poverty for five years. I was broke, but I'd rather have been broke than go back to that business. When I graduated from college I moved to England and played soccer in the Northern Premier League for Gosforth Town. I actually trained with the Newcastle United Under-21 team, although I never signed for them. Then I ruined my knee, came back to the States, and worked as a marriage counsellor and a buildings inspector before deciding to go into showbusiness. I did stand-up, performed off-Broadway and did TV commercials and radio voiceovers. And then I was the master of ceremonies at Chippendales male strip club when it was the hottest ticket in New York. Finally, I moved back out to California to be in a movie, Memoirs Of An Invisible man with Chevy Chase.

And now you're doing a one-man show based on Chicken?

Yeah, I just started previews here in San Francisco last week. I'm going to bring it to the Edinburgh Fringe in August.

Unlike most sex workers you seem to have got out alive and unscathed. What has been the biggest consequence of teenage prostitution on your adult life?

I became a sex addict! After I left the business, I found myself craving sex all the time. Even when I was making a great living, I always had this secret life, finding myself going down to the bad parts of town where all the drug addicts, pimps and hookers hang out. I was married to a beautiful woman and we had this big house in Hollywood, but I'd still go down to skanky hoesville and pay for sex. I became a customer - the whole next ten years of my life were dominated by this overpowering compulsion for sex. It was like being hypnotised. And having these two compartmentalised lives would just kill me. I got myself into some of the worst situations and places on earth.

Such as?

One time I picked up these two women in Hollywood and took them to this really skanky motel, and in the parking lot some guy takes a gun out and points it two feet from my head, demanding money I'm supposed to owe him. I was terrified - it was four o'clock in the morning and I thought I was going to die. Finally I convince him I'm not the right guy, but even after looking down the barrel of a gun I'm still going to have sex with these women! It was like, 'Well, OK, I'm through that. Now let's go and have sex!' So we go into the motel room, one of them shoots up, the other's smoking crack and they've got scabs and weeping sores - and I don't even care! So I have sex with one of them and I hear this whimpering and I think: 'Oh yeah, she's really into it' Then I look up and this woman is crying her eyes out. And that is just one incident out of a thousand where I felt this overwhelming sense of self-loathing.

At what point were you able to have something like a normal sex life?

Well, eventually I lost everything - the house, the money, the wife and girlfriends - and I decided I couldn't keep up the pretence any more. I went through about 20 therapists, and finally found a Jungian hypnotherapist who helped me isolate the parts of my personality that were self-destructive. I started doing the work when I was 32 and it took me three years to really come to grips with it. Then I found an agent and wrote a novel which was a thinly-veiled account of my experiences. I also got the agent to agree to go out on a date with me. The date went well, we were sitting on her bed at 4 am and being a nice Jewish girl, she says to me: 'Have you had a lot of partners?" And I said: 'Well, it depends on your definition of a lot." Then she says: 'Have you ever been with a prostitute?' And for the first time in my life I was able to say, 'Well, actually I was a prostitute'. And instead of her running screaming into the night, I ended up marrying this nice Jewish girl. And now l live one of those little houses with a picket fence that I used to fantasise about when I was a seventeen-year-old chicken.