NPR: “Behind Closed Doors”

I was hosted recently by Michel Martin on “Tell Me More,” a program on National Public Radio. Juhu Thukral from the Sex Workers Project at the Urban Justice Center and Annie Lobert, the founder of Hookers for Jesus also participated. The segment is titled Behind Closed Doors: The Reality of Prostitution, a bit gimmicky, it’s true, but, hey, it’s not like they needed my opinion…

I had several problems with the interview. I had long, drawn-out series of conversations with the NPR folks about “legal” issues surrounding my use of a pseudonym, and, in the end, they decided to broadcast that I was going solely by William because I was “in fear of arrest.” The most disturbing point being that NPR failed to credit the organization I was representing, Sex Workers Action New York (SWANK). This went down as both the Sex Workers Project and Hookers for Jesus were represented in a strong way. I guess sex workers currently working in the business are too busy in the alleyways shooting up, so how could they be organized, right? I tried to make up for it by referencing SWANK quite a few times.

The next bits are mostly my fault: I compared the reproductive right of abortion in poor economic circumstances, which I called a “choice among limited choices,” to the “choice” of doing sex work. Not the happiest of comparisons.

I also wasn’t clear enough when I mentioned the move between the “getting by” model, which I said involved trading sex casually for food and shelter out of bars and clubs, to the “professional” model. Michel Martin took that to mean I was an always street working kid, which isn’t accurate, and I didn’t get edited in for correcting her as I would have liked to. I was in seriously strained economic circumstances after moving out at 15-ish, it’s true, but being a well-educated Irish kid, I didn’t have as much trouble as I could have, and the fact that it was sex work to sleep with someone for a bed, a dinner, a raise at work, or a ride to Paris didn’t enter my mind back then.

So, you win some you lose some. Overall, I don’t think it was too bad for a first-timer on radio, and I learned a lot from Annie L. and Juhu besides.

‘Pink Scare’ Press Release

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE

PRESS RELEASE
Workers Action New York (SWANK), swank@riseup.net
Sex Workers Outreach Project - New York City (SWOP-NYC), swop.nyc@gmail.com
Prostitutes of New York (PONY), pony@panix.com
Desiree Alliance, info@DesireeAlliance.org

The Pink Scare: Ms. Palfrey and Sex Panic

New York, NY - The activists at Sex Workers Action New York (SWANK), Sex Workers Outreach Project New York (SWOP-NYC), Prostitutes of New York (PONY) and the nationally-based Desiree Alliance are saddened that Deborah Jeane Palfrey, also known as the D.C. Madam, passed away on May 1st in an apparent suicide. We - prostitutes, strippers, pro-dommes, porn stars, sex experts, and allies - extend our sympathies to all of those hurt by this most recent chapter of the “Pink Scare,” in which oppressive legislation and social stigma partner to generate hysteria around what, for us, can prove to be simply a decent way to make a living.

On Getting Stiffed

In the support section of Sex Workers Action New York (SWANK) this week I brought up that awkward and embarassing fact: I’ve been stiffed by clients.

“But we had such a splendid time,” says the CEO, “how could you want to get paid for it?”

If I say x an hour, one john is bound to read it retail. And if I write it “by hour” or “per,” the client finds some excuse. Then I have the “choice” to either dispute it, collect some collateral and risk losing the paycheck, or take the payment and run. I know, I know. I’m supposed to collect upfront, but playing tax collector isn’t how all clients get hooked, folks. They are just “helping me out” (packing the cash in an envelope and stuffing their hands in their pockets like they just stole a f$#!ing cookie).

The suprising thing to hear from SWANK was that I’m not alone. It doesn’t matter how practiced you think you are, apparently, it happens. I don’t know what I’d do without other workers. Join Prostitutes Anonymous? I think not. I’m no addict. I just get paid, even if, every now and then, I’m the one who gets shorted.

“Experts” and Other Johns

It isn’t just second-rate poets. The publication of academic work on prostitution is an industry in itself, an obscenely wealthy competitor of the ”sex sector.” In the 1800s, people read about the “diseased body” of the prostitute in works by William Acton and Havelock Ellis. These days, the New York Times and other periodicals lap up the advice of “prostitution experts” such as Ronald Weitzer. 

The following is taken from an enlightening article ”Do ‘High-Class’ Prostitutes Escape the Law?” from Cleveland.com:

Prostitution expert Ronald Weitzer of George Washington University says the way existing laws [against street prostitution] are enforced works just fine.

He advocates a tough stance on the streets because “street prostitution victimizes host communities and leaves the prostitutes themselves open to victimization.”

So . . . the street worker is a parasite and should be treated as such. Is that right, Ronald? While, the expert continues, the ”de facto decriminalization” of indoor work would lessen the strain on law enforcement and allow boys, after all, to be boys. This, of course, is his solution.

Maybe I’m being too hard on Ronald, though. The focus on “de facto decriminalization” is central to sex worker rights-talk, too. The same articles showcasing “experts” pull quotes from managers, call-girls, and escorts who, at least as quoted, share the same racist and classist biases in favor of decriminalization, which would do little to decriminalize “loitering” and public nuisance laws specific to street work.

This kind of talk excludes low-wage workers and street workers, who are disproportionately, but not entirely, women of color, men who have sex with men, and transwomen. The fact that Ronald Weitzer and sex workers activists might agree on paper is a wake-up call to us involved in sex worker rights. The fight against police violence, the struggle for affordable housing, and the work toward economic justice should be at the top of our list of shared priorities, not separate and unequal concerns, and some of the first of our soundbytes. That and outing “experts” like Weitzer.

Big E-Brother, Part Two

There are around 100,000 arrests for prostitution in the U.S. each year. The numbers, however, are shifting as vice cops take to the Internet. The crackdown on Craigslist advertisement seems to correspond to a rise in police usage and rate of arrests, and the site itself collaborates using phone “authentication” and serious checks on the accounts of providers.

* The above image was taken from CBS.com

The spokesperson of Craigslist.com tells it like it is, “as is evident from news reports around the country, Craigslist actually makes it easier for police departments to conduct sting operations against prostitution rings. If you’re a prostitute or a potential john, you’re taking a big risk putting a listing on Craigslist, because we cooperate actively with police departments.’’

In a quick search of a news cache, I found randomized arrests in the past two months made through Craigslist in Philadelphia, Fayetteville, Jacksonville, Saint Paul, Jefferson City, Ogden, Concord, Poughkeepsie, Santa Cruz, Escondido, Mobile, Queens, Manhattan, Rockford, Knoxville, Nashville, Louisville, Laurel, Salem, Milwaukee, Omaha, and Des Moines.

Out of these cases I speed tallied 126 sex workers and 74 johns, which places sex workers at a 3:2 risk of arrest against their employers. The listed arrests largely posed “women” as sex workers and “men” as johns, although we can’t be sure how many working men and transwomen were lost in the government shuffle.

It does seem, however, that women-born women are the main targets of Craigslist e-stings. All in all, sex workers advertising on Craigslist, and their employers, would do well to watch out.

Smoky Mountains Porno or Bust

I dashed out of the Big Apple on some back pay this past week and headed to the Smoky Mountains (I’ve been looking to femme up a photo shoot in Appalachia, as I’m gearing up to release a porno experiment sometime in July).

So there I am, all snug in my pantyhose and ready for a quick, solo-porno shoot. Then this red-headed teenager pops around the nearest tree trunk and stops dead to stare wide-eyed at the silk bunching around my pantied crotch . . . yes, that’s a penis, dear, and it’s excited.

His parents follow on his heels, so I’m left exposed in the brush, and everyone pretends like it’s just another day in the park. So much for my dreams of becoming an Appalachian porno star. In any case, I waited till the kid and his parents ambled off down the rapids before I shot some half-photos of myself and busted a load on the nearest Oak trunk. I thought of the redhead, too, that little shit. I’m not sick, you know, just vindictive.

Sphitzing Spitzer

I’ll just cut to the chase. Of all the ties in his closet, why the stripes? I would’ve gotten on the Amtrak back to New York, 3.5 “diamonds” or no.

But for real, f#$k that guy for his busts and, more importantly, best of luck to the now-infamous Kristen, also known as Ashley Dupré.

Sex Work’s Big E-Brother

The Erotic Services category has long been policed on Craigslist.com, and not only as per the request of law enforcement. It used to be up to vigilantes to report “violations” of the Terms of Use such as e-prostitution. The newest regimen in place from Seattle to New York City, however, is being implemented by Craigslist itself.

The site now regulates postings in Erotic Services in two ways. First, Craigslist requires mandatory account creation before posting as a services provider. This would allow CL to log all your posts over a period of time under one e-mail account. The second track requires phone authentication from postees to Erotic Services. This one-two punch suggests the creation of an easy-access database for law enforcement, either to deter on-line prostitution or prepare for a major e-bust.

It wouldn’t be the first time. In the past three weeks alone, Craigslist.com stings have been carried out in nine states, in the municipalities of Knoxville, Nashville, Louisville, Laurel, Salem, Milwaukee, Jacksonville, Des Moines, Omaha, and Ogden, Utah.

How are workers responding to these restrictions? Judging from the increase in traffic on the Personals boards, most are stepping up their code in “diamonds,” posting in Personals, and moving beyond code-words as obvious as “generous.”

No matter how you look at it, the regulation of Internet hook-ups has that Bloombergian ring to it. It just means us sex workers and other philanthropists ought to give, and fuck, all the more.

Playing It “Straight”

I had never been in the workaday closet closet until I started going “gay-for-pay.” I mean, there was that time when I was 15, but I more or less “came out” the night my 28 year-old manager Esteban jacked me up against the restaurant dumpster.

Needless to say, I went from $6.15 to $7.50 an hour.

These days, though, when I tell Johns I’m “gay” they just look disappointed. Why are “straight” guys so desirable to clients, anyways?

In their own words: straight is “studly,” “hot,” “exotic,” “youthful,” and, my personal favorite, the “real deal.” So in-between the lines of the “gay-for-pay” psyche, it’s the workers who fuck pro bono who are the “fake” ones.

But the world of paid sex can’t help but complicate the “either/or.” Michael Dorais, a sociologist and social worker, writes in Rent Boys that out of 40 of the male sex workers he studied “Seventeen described themselves as homosexual, thirteen as heterosexual, and ten as more or less bisexual.” Also, the figures coming out of the male-to-male porn industry suggest a large percentage of stars are straight-identified.

So, many male sex workers seem to identify sexuality with an emotional connection rather than a physical one; that’s why labels like MSM - “men who have sex with men” - are more than a CDC statistic. Some people, clearly, are “gay-for-pay,” and a hustler can be all these things; a whore, a “man,” and more.

The facts hold up in histories of MSM, as well. George Chauncey’s Gay New York shows that before World War II (1890-1940), the New York City scene was split up between the working-class areas of Times Square, Harlem, and The Bowery. The MSM could be  one of the visible “fairies” (effeminate gays), an undercover “queer” (masculine gay), or open “trade” (heterosexuals). “Trade,” Cauncey writes, were often sailors, transient workers, and other men who would fuck or suck for money, cheap enough for us to wonder why they’d do it for as little as a penny or a dime . . . but in the 1900s no one asked “trade” why they did it. Instead, they were recognized as “men” so long as they were, well, on top of the matter.

It was only in the 30s, 40s, and 50s, as the legendary (oh, if only we had pictures of him in drag. . .) J. Edgar Hoover and the vice cops swooped down on the friends of Dorothy and other communists, that all “men who have sex with men” came to be recognized as “inverts” by the shocked and appalled middle-class (who, by the way, had been “slumming” it in drag bars for years). And the fact that MSM were, at the same time, publicized more and more as perverse didn’t help the matter. The raucous bathhouses and balls of the 1900s, 10s, and 20s began to give way to an underground scene.

Then came Stonewall, where fairies, queers, and trade begot the universal “gay,” and that was that for trade.

Since Stonewall, the scope of “manliness” has narrowed criminally, and male sex workers who sleep with men don’t fit into the frame. Even if they are “gay-for-pay,” they often aren’t recognized as such. So in the midst of all this gender trouble, what’re we to make of a hustler who plays it “straight”?

“Meet Me at the Hyphen”

Last night I pulled a trick at the Waldorf-Astoria. The “Hyphen” is a notorious hotel in Midtown, Manhattan, and the suites are supposed to go for six hundred sixty dollars and up a night, but I haven’t seen a flophouse that chintzy since Paris.

The Waldorf does, however, carry a spectacular array of delicacies: miniature condiments. And they’ll let you in without an I.D. before 11PM! So, if you’re quick about it, you can dumpster room service and pad your bag with scented toiletries and miniature bottles of Hellman’s. It’s true, I may never eat it, but isn’t it the cutest?