Throughout the movie Mike did not really have an identity. He was searching for it all along and never found it. Mike searched for his mother in every place he could think; he even went to Italy in hopes to find her and had no such luck. He never really knew who his father was because of mixed stories; was it the man his mother shot at the movies or his own brother? This question was never answered. The whole movie Mike never really had a place to call home which is why he and all of the other hustlers traveled around and considered Bob as their father figure. Scott knew who his mother and father was and could choose his way of life. Scott did not have to travel around from place-to-place, he just chose to do so. On the other hand, Mike could not choose which road to take and which is why,
“only in the fantasies made possible by hustling-as one of the gaps, or contradictions, in society’s sexual system-can Mike have an identity at all. The only hope, perhaps, is that a good fairy will pick him up one day. This is the underlying fantasy of most road movies that are on some level about cruising, hustling, or hitch-hiking: that the next encounter will be the one that will take the protagonist ”home.””
This goes to show that hustling in Mike’s case his “home” or at least a way of trying to find it. He keeps hustling and bouncing around from city-to-city and place-to-place on the “queer road” because it’s the closest thing to home he has got.
