Hallie Lieberman
Author of
Buzz: A Stimulating History of the Sex Toy (Pegasus, 2017)
Gigolos: An Exploration of the Men Who Sell Sex and the Women Who Buy It (Beacon, 2026)
Hallie Lieberman is a sex historian and journalist. She has written articles about sex and sexuality for the New York Times, The Washington Post, The Wall Street Journal, BuzzFeed News, The Nation, Wired, Slate, Vice, and many other outlets. When she’s not writing about sex, she’s writing about breakfast cereal and comedy.
Twitter / Facebook / Instagram / TikTok / HallieLieberman.com / Represented by Kayla Lightner
BookS BY Hallie
Gigolos: An Exploration of the Men Who Sell Sex and the Women Who Buy It (Beacon Press, 2026)
A wildly entertaining and thought-provoking exploration that challenges our rigid assumptions around the dynamics of sex work—from a sex historian and client.
What kind of woman would hire a gigolo? It’s a question that gripped Hallie Lieberman since living in Berlin, where she first paid for sex, prompting her to go on a Gigolo Quest. What she finds is that the world of gigolos and their clients is more complex than you might expect.
Both sexy and cerebral, Gigolos is an absorbing tapestry of history, reportage, and pop culture critique that tells the story of male sex workers and their female clients. Lieberman takes readers across time and space––from clandestine tea rooms in 1920s New York to contemporary male strip shows in Las Vegas. She encounters escorts–turned–reality TV stars, comedians moonlighting as OnlyFans models, male strippers (past and present), and male escort agencies for women. She also spoke to countless women who pay for sex, legally and illegally, for a wide variety of reasons: to guarantee an orgasm, to ensure a sexual partner who respected consent, to save a sexless marriage, or to access sexual touch previously barred by disability.
Ranging from heartwarming to hot to hum-drum, these experiences show that sex work is not just about male clients and female sex workers. They also provide a pathway to discuss gender norms, power, and sexuality.
BUZZ: A Stimulating History of the Sex Toy (Pegasus, 2017)
In the vein of Mary Roach’s Bonk, a brilliant microhistory of the sex toy that ultimately tells the story of our changing sexual mores and evolving cultural values. Once only whispered about in clandestine corners, vibrators have become just another accessory for the suburban soccer mom. But how did these once-taboo toys become so socially acceptable? The journey of the devices to the cultural mainstream is a surprisingly stimulating one.
In Buzz, Hallie Lieberman traces the tale from lubricant in Ancient Greece to the very first condom in 1560 to advertisements touting devices as medical equipment in 19th-century magazines. She looks in particular from the period of major change from the 1950s through the present, when sex toys evolved from symbols of female emancipation to tools in the fight against HIV/AIDS to consumerist marital aids to today’s mainstays of pop culture. The story is populated with a cast of vivid and fascinating characters including Dell Williams, founder of the first feminist sex toy store; Betty Dodson, whose workshops helped 1960s women discover vibrators; and Gosnell Duncan, a paraplegic engineer who invented the silicone dildo. And these personal dramas are all set against a backdrop of changing American attitudes toward sexuality, feminism, LGBTQ issues, and more.
Both educational and titillating, Buzz will make readers think quite differently about those secret items hiding in bedside drawers across the nation.