It’s not that men never noticed Ellie*. “I was just not one bit interested,” she says. While her friends were out collecting “horror stories” and boyfriends, then later, husbands and children, her focus was “finish school, go to uni, get a job, do all that stuff”. That focus paid off with a career in science, but by the time she turned 37 she was still a virgin, “and I felt like a part of me was missing”.
Sally* was never interested in marriage or children, but she has had “some lovely relationships along the way”. Her struggle has always been with monogamy. “Because for me, that was never important.” For the past decade, the 54-year-old marketing executive has been happily partnered to “a really open-minded person”, which meant she “didn’t need anything more than that newness of sexual adventure”.
Though Sally and Ellie’s sexual conundrums were very different, they came to the same conclusion: it was time to hire a male escort. Specifically, it was time to hire Mitch Larsson, the alias used by sex worker turned memoirist Dan Moon.
In his new book, Time For Her, Moon explores his relationships – short and long-term – with pseudonymous clients, and the toll his four years as a sex worker took on him. Affable in a bloke-next-door kind of way, Moon is not what you might expect a male sex worker to be, if you have any expectations at all. He never quite fitted in, he says: “I was a white middle-aged man and we’re traditionally the enemy to liberated sex workers.”
Ellie came across Moon on Instagram. She followed him out of curiosity, then he followed her back. They slid into each other’s DMs and as they talked, it dawned on her: her first time didn’t have to “be horrible or with someone that was just a one-night stand”. It could be with him. “I thought, I can control it and I can take it into my own hands.”
With Moon, Ellie already felt a connection. “It was a really weird thing, not something I come across a lot, especially with guys.” She made a booking at the beginning of 2023. She describes her experience with him as “the greatest thing anyone could ever give me”.
“I felt safe,” she says. “Dan was fantastic. He made me feel fantastic, and he actually unleashed something in me that I think had been dormant or hiding probably my whole life.”
When Ellie made her booking, Sally had been seeing Moon for more than three years. “I was only really seeking physical intimacy. But of course over time you do get connected,” she says. What started as thrill-seeking became far more intense – for both of them.
In his memoir, Moon writes about Sally – using the same pseudonym – as one of his life’s great romances. Sally read one of the first drafts.
“I felt it was beautiful,” she says. “It was sad, it was happy. It was strange seeing myself in there … but [the book is] a way to help people understand the real benefits of seeing a male escort.”
Sally was not surprised by the melancholy aspects of Time For Her, having already discussed them extensively with its author, but readers might be. While the book’s cover resembles a romance novel, and the content is often explicit, the needs that brought women to Mitch Larsson’s door (or his DMs) were rarely just sexual. Moon says the thing most of his clients wanted was “just kindness”.
“It’s simple as that. Just courtesy and kindness and honesty,” he says.
It turns out the Lothario-lessons that equipped him to satisfy the needs of a sexual adventurer like Sally, and quell the jitters of an anxious first-timer like Ellie (“I was just so damn nervous,” she says), were not in lovemaking, but listening. “Just checking in the whole time and just saying, ‘Is this good?’”
While he adopted the Larsson persona for both his bookings and his book, it was always Moon who showed up, ears and heart open. “The sex was just such a small part of it,” he says. “Probably 20% of it is the sex, and the rest of it is just listening.
“It was falling in love, falling in care,” he says.
Frequently, Moon was put in situations where there were “really big moments” in his clients’ lives – from job interviews to health scares, to sexual breakthroughs – “that only I knew about”.
“I would think … ‘How did so-and-so go on that mammogram she had?’”
Although there were some instances when a client would “just want a quick bit of relief”, for the most part Moon was seeing women with complicated histories. One long-term client had early onset Alzheimer’s; many had husbands who ignored them, cheated on them, or worse.
Some, like Ellie, had simply never had anyone take the time “to understand me or connect with me or vibe with me properly” before.
Moon feels he was hired to help heal these hurts, and saw it as his job to “give it your all”, he says. “You give your body, your mind, your heart, absolutely everything.”
Sally’s relationship with Moon taught her: “There’s so much more to the role in ways that are both deeply hard for the sex worker, but also quite fantastic.” Not only does it give women a sense of safety and control they could not get from dating, she says, it’s “an environment where you can actually say: ‘this is just for me’”.
“I found that a really liberating experience.”
Moon began escorting aged 41, in 2019. After start-stop careers in sales, law and photography, followed by a stint as a stay-at-home father, he dived into sex work without a lot of forethought. “We thought it’d just be a little bit of a side gig for a few extra bucks,” he says.
Soon after listing himself on a directory website, the messages started flowing. “I’ve always been interested in people, and I prefer to listen than to talk and I like to make a difference,” he says. “Escorting just seemed to tick all the right boxes, because it included that, the money was good, and I enjoyed sex.”
Moon’s wife tentatively encouraged this midlife career pivot, but as his sex work took off, his marriage hit the rocks. Within six months, he was no longer living in the family home. “In the end it was three or four days a week and I was out late at night and it just wasn’t fair on either of us,” he says.
He spent the next four years on an emotional and financial rollercoaster. Moon earned $1,000 for two-hour bookings – his minimum – $5,500 for overnight stays and $15,000 a week to accompany clients on luxurious holidays. During the pandemic lockdowns in Melbourne, he earned nothing.
Emotionally, his sessions would result in a “huge high … you’re in absolute ecstasy together as the escort and the client”. This would be followed by “the inevitable come down”, which he likens to post-holiday blues.
Moon’s phone was always on for clients. He did not take leave, or even days off. “Burnout was definitely a factor,” he says of his eventual decision to quit. “It’s very common in the industry. We all talk about it. And a lot of the guys that have been doing it for much longer than I have – some going on over 10 years – they have taken extended periods off … looked after themselves. And I definitely salute them for that. I really, probably, should have a few times as well.”
Moon’s transition out of sex work has been gradual. He stopped taking new bookings, then slowly stopped seeing his regular clients too. “It’s breaking up with 10 people at once,” he says. “With a lot of the clients that I’ve seen, you just have to just be content with having them as a beautiful memory and that’s it.”
Writing his memoir “was kind of the exit plan the whole time”, a project he hopes will destigmatise the work he was so invested in. “It gives [women] something that you just can’t get, and that should be celebrated,” he says. “It should be almost the norm.”
It is sad that many of his clients couldn’t get the care, attention and compassion they needed from a traditional lover, he concedes, but “it’s nice there’s a service that can provide that”.
Ellie says now there “probably is a bit of sadness” in her experience, but: “You’re thinking, ‘God, why hasn’t this happened before?’”
“It’s like a good sadness. Sad that what you’ve done for me is absolutely 10 times more fantastic than anybody else has ever done for me.”
*Names have been changed
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Time For Her: A Memoir of True Romance by Mitch Larsson is out now through Shawline Publishing.
