names and other identifying details have been changed. 

This post was originally written in 2018 and republished in 2021

Of everything I’ve considered saying about my former on-and-off employment as a sex worker in New York City for around five years in my twenties, the fact I find most difficult to articulate and remain conflicted to admit is that it did, inexorably, change how I felt about men.

It’s the politically incorrect gulf in my coming out story I inelegantly sidestep: I identified as a heterosexually-inclined bisexual when I started giving hand jobs for money, and I left more or less a lesbian. It wasn’t the only factor in that transformation, but it was a major one.

Things I feel better about saying: I often hated it, sometimes loved it, and always liked it better than working at The Olive Garden. I’ll tell you that I loved the money-to-hours ratio and the hustle and how I’d never endured a sexual-harassment-free workplace in my life and at least in this job, I was getting paid to entertain exactly that. I loved the girls I met and the girls I kissed because of it, even the one I lived with until we’d ruined each other’s lives. (That’s another story.) I’ll tell you that sex work gave me incredible confidence and made me a better, more perceptive and skilled lover, and also better at boundaries and walking in heels.

But it’s harder to say, for example, that I identify with the deliberately defamatory 1954 pop-psychology hate-read “Female Homosexuality: A Psychodynamic Study of Lesbianism,” which noted, in the chapter on “Lesbian Practices Among Prostitutes”:

“…prostitution as a behavior deviation… attracts to a large extent women who have a very strong latent homosexual component. Through prostitution, these women eventually overcome their homosexual repressions.”

I usually avoid writing about my own experiences with sex work. At the time and for nearly a decade afterwards, I kept it a secret, like we all do. But it’s more than that. Sex work itself is a complicated conversation. It’s mostly illegal, but shouldn’t be. Many people in the sex industry are trafficked, many others do it under desperate or otherwise unideal circumstances. Feminists are divided over it, conservatives united against it.

So there’s a pressure on class-privileged voluntary sex worker narratives like mine to be, you know, “empowering.” We should be sex-positive happy hookers, adept at compartmentalizing, tucking sexual trauma and potentially misandry-inducing baggage away in a packing cube of the soul. We probably shouldn’t relate to Valerie Solanas. Sex work shouldn’t ever dry out our desire for recreational sex, even if just for a little while, and it definitely shouldn’t, above all, impact how we feel about men.

I know this work is fucking with me, I’d scrawled in the journal balanced on my thigh on the train from my part-time publishing day job to my secret sexy night job, gulping the canned champagne I’d deemed inconspicuous enough for public transportation.

I couldn’t do it last night, I wrote about the ex-boyfriend who’d come over, expecting the usual hook-up and, well, not getting it. That night would end up being my last attempt at unpaid sexual activity with a cis man. I think it’s ’cause I’ve allowed myself to be violated at work so much. Waves came over me — I wanted to cry, I wanted it to be over, I wanted it to be a woman. I don’t know if that’s because I’m gay — I still have so much desire for women, constantly — or because I’ve been fucked up by work. Have I displaced myself from my own body so badly this past week that there is no turning back?

I didn’t turn back. I plowed gamely forward, consenting to occasional low-grade trauma to pay off debt, have time to write, work low-paying media/publishing jobs and, eventually, start my own business. The trade-off was worth it. I wrote a lot.

That aforementioned ex-boyfriend was my actual boyfriend when I started out, in the winter of 2004. I kept it a secret until I couldn’t anymore, and then he shoved me and told me to get my dirty hands off of him.

Is this what I’m worth now? I wondered to myself, and then decided I didn’t care either way. As you can see, eventually, he didn’t either.

I’d blown through four waitressing jobs, assorted underpaid promotional modeling gigs, a dozen unsuccessful office job interviews and was a month into a blundering tenure at Banana Republic when I sent my photos and a cute email to a craigslist ad offering “artistic, college-educated women” “full-time money for part-time work, no sex.” I’d been in New York for six months and had accumulated nearly $20k in credit card debt. I felt swallowed by shopping-and-unemployment-related shame. I picked up erotic gigs off craigslist, like foot fetish modeling and filing topless for a very sad man, before landing at Serenity Spa.

I tell you this to bring you to the job interview at an East Harlem diner with Emily, a blonde filmmaker from Idaho who’d worked in Serenity during undergrad before buying out the old owner in hopes of financing her first documentary. The gist of the place was the girls were English-speaking and had gone to good schools, like what you’d find at a high-class escort agency, but provided a service more common to cheaper massage parlors — “bodywork” and “hand release.” So we could charge $220/hour + tips (which were significant), split between House and Girl. Blow jobs and sex (“full service”) were off the menu, but other acts were on it, each with an accordant monetary value.

Let me get one thing clear off the top: this industry is wildly racist and classist. The type of work I did is, for illegal sex work at that price point, probably the safest and cushiest type available, and my privileges, like being white and college educated, made that cushy work readily available to me. I cannot ever speak for any sex workers besides me.

“This sounds great,” I said when our plates had been cleared, and it was time to define the transaction. “I’m in.”

She smiled. “Good! Do you have any other questions?”

I had so many, but chose this one: “Does it — has it — like, make you hate men?”

“Actually,” she said, pursing her lips like it was a reassurance she’d given many times, “Actually it’s the opposite. You see an emotional side they don’t show everybody else. You know after 9/11, there were so many men on my table, just crying.”

I nodded, solemnly, trying to think about 9/11.

I’d just begun tentatively identifying as bisexual when I started at Emily’s, but carried internalized misogyny and homophobia inside me like kidneys. Ever since emerging semi-hot from an awkward depressive adolescence, I’d relished male sexual attention. I had sex with stupid gorgeous men and basic bankers who shaved all their body hair. I loved the vapid escape and thrill of seduction. As a lifelong too-smart very-weird girl attempting to pass herself off as a Cool Girl, I gathered “normal behavior” cues like lint. I ended up coated in “a woman’s worth is her boyfriend.” I watched Sex and the City like going to synagogue. So of course I thought I liked men enough to like men for a living.

I’d also just begun considering feminism, the concept, and its related literature. I’d avoided feminism’s stamp of radical un-sexiness for most of my life, preferring instead to sit on sagging couches with funny, unambitious frat boys — one of who’d, unbeknownst to me, photographed me during sex and, eventually knownst to me, shared the photos with his brothers — watching them play video games while they rhapsodized about who, of all the girls they had collectively fucked, had the worst boobs. When I’d get up to use their bathroom, its filthy floor always littered with Maxims and Playboys, which felt very on-the-nose, they’d each slap me on the ass as I passed, and I thought, “I’m doing a good job being normal.”

For almost an entire year, I loved sex work. I loved the fermented, stifled air of a two-bedroom apartment with sheets nailed three layers thick against the windows, spelunking through this underground economy, verbally sparring with potential clients on the phone. I loved Emily and the other girls in our perverted sorority, who were all a bit psychologically messy and sexually fluid; the newer girls had big dreams and the older ones, who Emily was slowly pushing out, had thwarted ones.

I felt empowered by the wad of cash snug under the arch of my foot. I loved watching myself in the mirror; my calves flexing in the heels I’d never wear in real life, the crest of my ass in the cheap, hyper-feminine thongs we picked up in handfuls from the Strawberry clearance bins.

I felt powerful, unstoppable, Robin Hood in a cocktail dress, like all these men had used me — not just me, but like every girl I knew — and now we’d hacked the system and we were using them. Sometimes, men paid me to make out with girls in front of them. What a gambit!

We got fake names — I picked Stephanie, the name of the first girl I’d had sex with (I know) — and became types easy to describe on the phone. Little loglines, really, that we’d sing to each other. It was polite to describe the other girl first, and then yourself, always in third person. “Tall, blonde, model-type figure,” Sienna would wink. “Beautiful long legs,” she’d smile.

I felt addicted to it sometimes. I think sex work is like, my calling, I wrote in my journal a few weeks in. Which is fucked up, I know, but it’s there, nonetheless. I felt hypersexual inside and outside of work. Spending so much time around unbridled lust kicked my responsive desire into overdrive. I’d regularly go directly from work to a girl’s house, eager to get underneath or on top of her, damp and starving.

You were supposed to create a fake self. At first, I didn’t. I barely kept my real name a secret. I was game. I talked about my boyfriend, liking girls, watching porn, publishing erotica. If the client was attractive or charming I’d skirt boundaries like a needle.

They wanted to get off but mostly they wanted to feel bohemian, young, alive, special, interesting.

Whatever they wanted, I gave it to them. I was a woman in this world. I didn’t know any other way to behave.

My goddess, if you will, was Natalie Portman’s Alice Ayers in Closer. I’d seen the play in college, and I saw the movie the same week I started at Emily’s, and then another three times. The topic of the movie is “love is a lie.”

Alice, a desirous and yearning girlfriend, is a bewitchingly withholding stripper. In the VIP room, she calls the shots, has the last laugh, is the one who leaves. Whatever happened at home, at work she controlled and extracted money from men, you do not need to desire me in order for me to know I am desired.

It gave her financial power that relied on male fallibility, rather than male sovereignty.

It gave her a secret, something to place on the table between her and the men she might love, who might try to take her powers away from her.

I never stopped thinking about Alice. Her pink wig, dead eyes, Dan licking his lips and telling her what to do, knowing that she makes the rules and he can’t touch. Defiantly spreading her legs as he angles for a closer look, repeatedly denying him full indulgence of his animal lust. I wanted to be Alice. I wanted power. I didn’t want to be what I’d been in my last year of college at Michigan, stuck in a fucked up relationship with a guy who made me feel weak.

Men rejecting women always felt fundamentally unjust to me, which was a clue I left in storage.

I’m suspicious of the version of me who asked Emily what I asked her, about hating men. I’d never ask that now, as lesbian. You know why.

I also started watching The L Word, via Netflix DVDs, that month. I thought about Shane constantly. She was so cool. Her confident pursuit of fleeting pleasure, desire that made her strong and had nothing to do with men. Bette, too, with her unapologetic rejection of male professional superiority and canonical inclusion.

I bought Whores and Other Feminists. Empowered by my new footing in capitalism, I stopped taking my anti-depressants and began making new queer friends on craigslist.

My boyfriend, a tender Republican who thought girl-on-girl affection was gross, decided to enroll in the Police Academy. We’d met at a restaurant where, upon learning of our relationship, the owner retaliated by giving us opposite schedules — lucrative dinners for him, sad breakfasts for me. So I yelled a lot and then quit. My boyfriend stayed. They never hired girls there anyways, I’d only gotten hired ’cause I showed up to apply when the owner was gone. So my days had been numbered.

At Serenity the day after we broke up, I felt like he’d followed me there, dangling my soul over my body like a goldfish over a toilet bowl. I didn’t want his judgement on me. We made plans to talk and I scribbled a feminist manifesto: my first. He accepted my letter gingerly, like the goldfish after it died but before getting flushed down the toilet. A few days later, he called, having confused my essay with a request for reunification. I just wanted him to agree with my thesis. He wanted to get back together.

“I don’t want a relationship right now,” I told him.

“Is that why you told me about your job?” he asked.

Yes. “No,” I replied. I was Alice, placing something on the table between us. Something I owned.

I had to go. I was doing a double with Alicia. She had an MFA from Yale and a girlfriend and blunt bangs and a face like a muffin and I was gonna have fake sex with her in front of a rich man for money.

I’d expected clients to demand sex or blow jobs. We were advised to “be playful but firm, like you were with your high school boyfriend.” And sure, they did that. I did not expect but did not mind the group of regulars I eventually acquired — kinky guys who wanted to be beat up or tied to stuff, men with waif fetishes, the academics, the orthodox Jews, the guy who wanted to wrestle.

What most of them wanted — and what I didn’t expect or want to give — was to “give us pleasure.” In sex worker language, “putting your hands wherever” is called “roaming.” You’ll see it on review boards, where “hobbyists” post evaluations of massage girls, ranking their appearance, performance and “sensuality.”¹

Every client believed himself unique in his desire to fondle our genitals in latex gloves until we “had an orgasm,” and that this desire was a specific reflection of their personal affection for women and attention to her pleasure. I. fucking. hated. it.

It was initially fine and eventually maddening. Worst was my own stubborn inability to entertain it, like the other girls could, seemingly without deep internal conflict. I understood the instinct — getting girls off turns me on, too! — but couldn’t abide the practice in this context.  Emily didn’t expect us to allow roaming unless we were comfortable with it, but also, I wanted to make money. How dare he presume that I’m an orgasm machine, damply awaiting his coin in my slot. How dare he assume I take his currency. I set up an L Word exclusive screensaver on my laptop, played Ani DiFranco during sessions, and told clients I was a lesbian, which was just a way of implying that I could be an orgasm machine if I wanted to, just… not for them and not like this. Sometimes, I didn’t even want to do the things I’d explicitly signed up for. I withheld, and was therefore often bad at a job that had once come so easily.

A lawyer regular had been tricked, bless this sacred whore, into believing girls could come from an aggressive two-finger rub on the small of her back. That was funny. Every time I see him on CNN, I chuckle like a man.

My other complaint, for which I blame Pretty Woman, was men refusing to abide the contract of it being a job — like a diner who imagines, after a few successful lunches with the same waitress, that she will agree to go home with him and cook and serve him dinner there, for free.

Listen: he wanted a blow job, I said no. His flimsy, oil-smeared card in our Rolodex was like this: DO NOT BOOK WITH VALERIE. DO NOT BOOK WITH GINGER. Blacklisting was a risk, he could get angry and call the cops.

He croaks at you to blow on his balls, you say no, but listen, the man wants what he wants, so he holds your head there until you make peace with dying that way, suffocated between the thighs of a terrible man. RIP your dignity. The smell settles into your hippocampus like a sofa.

Remember the one you told, back when you were new and easy, that your father, like him, had taught at Harvard Business School? Why you did so, I can’t tell you! That was really dumb! This man liked to grease you up like a pig and hump your back, a boomerang loop of a slip-n-slide, and normally your main concern is squeezing your buttocks together too tightly for him to slip in, but today he is yelling, “Daddy’s little girl likes to get fucked, you little professor’s daughter!” and you see your slimy face in the mirror and you think to yourself, “my Dad is dead” and then you wonder “am I dead too?”

Then it’s over, and you get your money and move on.

I started drinking at work with Camille, a raunchy brunette from New Jersey who wanted to be a screenwriter but got “caught up in the nightlife.” I was cleaning up after a client in the front room when her fake orgasm from the back got so loud I could hear it, and I edged towards the door, feeling wet and impressed. “So when I was done,” Camille told me as she microwaved a wet washcloth, “I bent over, like, panting, and said thank you so much for sharing that with me.” 

When it got late and the phones stopped ringing, she sent me out for a bottle of white and we drank it on the carpet, eating cheese cubes. It became a habit — the drinking — and then I started drinking with Bianca, and found out Paige had been drunk all along, and then, at the Midtown studio where you worked alone, I’d drink alone, which made it easier to act as fun as I’d formerly acted sober. Or I did coke alone — I had a brief requisite coke phase with my new lesbian party friends — or smoked weed on the fire escape. This all became routine.

I was not, eventually, a sex-positive whore.

It seemed to me at the time that the “feminist” aspect of sex work was necessarily limited to surrounding issues: labor rights, health care, bodily autonomy, police conduct/violence, the criminalization of financial need, cultural stigma. Sure, our work was feminist insofar as we redistributed wealth by flipping the model of economic exploitation to favor women instead of men, but the actual work, the meat and bones of the work, was stubbornly itself. “Nothing good comes of forcing desire to conform to political principle,” writes Andrea Long Chu. “You could sooner give a cat a bath.” We didn’t bathe cats, we fed them. We fed them food you’re not supposed to feed cats.

At first, I needed feminism to find the work “empowering and liberating.” Once that piece of self-actualization had been accomplished, what I wanted, but couldn’t find, was feminist permission to sometimes hate it. The right to consent to occasional disempowerment.

I couldn’t find that, so I kept it mostly to myself. I believed, and still believe, in the cause. I didn’t want to hurt it.

I stopped dating men in 2006, which I told myself was temporary. Besides, boys were never okay with their girlfriends being whores. In this way, sex work enabled me to do a thing I’d been afraid to do for a long time: be a lesbian.

Our clients were almost exclusively rich and white, sometimes racist, often misogynists. Many were genuinely hot. About half were kind, sweet and interesting, like the drug dealer who liked to masturbate together and tipped in incredible weed or the CEO of a major restaurant chain who read Gawker as religiously as I did.

I’d once admired men for being unemotional and controlled where I, and women, felt sloppy, irrational and “too much.” But I started seeing white cis straight men differently. I had, I felt, discovered the underlying mechanism of nothing less than the entirety of modern civilization: powerful men being fucked up about sex. Animals, the lot of ’em! Entitled, clueless. Compulsively sexual, resentful of the women they required to satisfy their compulsions. I felt that what separated good men from bad — and plenty of good men exist! — was not that they lacked those compulsions or desires, but that they’d adequately reconciled, controlled, or been socialized out of them.

Above all men were easy, and once men no longer felt like a challenge, the power dynamic dissolved, and with it, my interest.

You are weak because you can’t say no to your desire, says an anonymous sex worker to all men in a batshit interview loaded with incoherent generalizations and also that one perfect line.

Men would think I was looking at their face but I wasn’t, I was looking for what was simmering underneath. I was lighting a match.“I just think about how hot I am,” Celia advised me on my second week, in regards to dealing with insufferable clients. “Seriously, I just look in the mirror and get turned on by how good I look.”

“I just think about cabinets,” Jordan advised me in my third year. “Like I think about my house, and I focus on what I’m gonna buy with the money he’s giving me, and then I channel all the feelings about my new cabinets into him, as a person.”

Sometimes I felt like Alice Ayers.

Sometimes, I felt like Lili Taylor as Valerie Solanas in I Shot Andy Warhol.

After two years at Emily’s, the L Word character I felt more like was Jenny. Self-indulgent depressive self-mutilating Jenny, who wasn’t suicidal, she’d just fucked up her life a little bit. Writing was all that made sense to her, even though she was very bad at it. Jenny began like I’d begun — swallowing her artsy wild crazy bits to appeal to a nice-enough man who eventually revealed his previously-subsumed brutality. Jenny evolved like I evolved — upon discovering the option of a life without men, she quickly saw her compromises, and fled.

Also, I started a blog.

“Can we stop talking about this?” Kat would beg of me, lying on the bed where we sometimes fucked even though she was straight and we fought constantly. I’d been complaining about clients, again, which I guess I did a lot. We’d met at Emily’s, her two youngest girls, went to a $pread Release Party together one night, fucked, became fast friends, started doing a lot of doubles together, and now here we were, roommates in Brooklyn.

I didn’t respond — I’d already gotten into the habit of withholding from her, at this point — just pursed my lips, nodded, and got off her bed.

“It’s just —” she said as I was already out the door, making the journey to my own room, “You don’t have to like men. I still want to.”

She was vulnerable, in that moment, authentic in a way we rarely were with each other anymore. I stopped. I considered, perhaps for the first time, that my apathy towards giving men the benefit of the doubt revealed more about me than general misanthropy or chronic poor performance in service industries.

I tried to imagine female clients. (I only ever saw one.) I tried to imagine a really gross female client — I couldn’t even say ugly because I couldn’t imagine a woman really being ugly. There was some base level approval of women, as a species, that I didn’t feel towards men and perhaps never had.

I’d loved men, sure, but conditionally. I loved beautiful men who kept me puppy-level attentive with idiotic mind games designed to preserve their pride and independence at the expense of my sanity. I loved men in cologne and crisp polo shirts, gay hair, like the teen idols winking at me from magazines I read in the ’90s. Not since high school had I dated a man who could match me intellectually. Just finding one I was genuinely attracted to was hard enough, so that had always been enough.

I imagined a woman paying me to let her “give me pleasure” and that was fine, too. I wanted women to feel good about themselves. Men, though? Didn’t they have enough confidence already? Isn’t that why they had their hands all over me in the first place?

It’s not like dating women is a fucking picnic. We have an emotional abuse epidemic, for one thing. But dating women does feel less like screaming across a vast canyon, even when we’re just endlessly hurling fists of sand at each other’s eyes.

Speaking of: Kat. She couldn’t afford misandry. But I could. So I stocked up.

Emily wasn’t wrong about seeing “another side” of men. I felt good about sessions where I counseled a man through shame, grief or insecurity, subtly steering him towards vulnerability, maybe some diet feminism or casual social justice, hoping my work would positively impact the women in his everyday life. I did the world a profound favor by explaining, to a client who’d eventually write me a ten-page love letter, what tampons were and how long periods lasted. (His guess was “two days.”) I enjoy, in general, giving advice, hearing others’ problems, helping people connect the dots.

Even when it was bad, it was fascinating. I regret nothing.Ostensibly, I left Emily’s for Eunice’s to get distance from Kat, and ’cause I’d been skittish since singlehandedly fending off a police bust. But I stayed with Eunice ’cause Luna Salon prohibited “roaming,” and had a generous blacklist.

Eunice was small, but made herself big when she trekked outside to re-con new clients: loosely-tied black combat boots, trenchcoat down to her shins, long black ponytail tucked into a Chairman Mao hat.

Inside, she had another personality. She was showing me. While wringing out a pair of exfoliation gloves that had soaked, briefly, in a silver bowl of Dr. Bronners-peppermint-scented water, she told me, My mother was probably a prostitute. It’s just likely. Sometimes when I do this I feel connected to her, is that weird?

She’d been adopted from South Korea as a baby. I play up the Geisha thing, she explained, shrugging. Guys are into that.

Eunice was training me. I’d been working for her for about a month when she pulled me aside after a team meeting and said, We need to figure out who Stephanie is. Eunice had Secretly Shopped me, sending in client-friends who’d reported back that I seemed bored and hostile, that I’d switch from massage to hand job thirty minutes in, then sent them merrily on their way. I’d told myself it wasn’t my fault they came so fast.

Never send a man home early, she told me. He wants to get his money’s worth.

She crawled on top of me, straddling my ass with her bare thighs while working my lower back with her elbows. You have to get on the table, she told me.

Won’t they try for more if I do that? I asked. I’d grown exhausted by all the groping at Emily’s and had begun administering massages from great distances, like a pre-teen babysitter changing a diaper.

Nope, Eunice chipped. Because you’re in control. You take control, you keep control.

She massaged me with her entire body with delightful, easy energy, showed me how to draw out the post-release body-scrub if they came unreasonably fast.

Now you do me, she said, hopping off, and I hopped on.

Fuck you! She said barely into it, slapping my thigh.You DO know what to do!

Eunice told me about some ancient civilization — details escape me — where certain groups of men were bred, en masse, to just build stuff. They were simple-minded, she said. Basic. After a long day of building shit and moving/carrying things, these men required sexual release, and thus sex workers existed to please them. I think a lot of these Wall Street Guys are like, the modern version of those guys. Not complicated, just laying bricks, being bodies. That framing made sense to me. The only problem, more generally speaking, was that capitalism made those bricklayers think they were gods.

I’d initially relied on instinct to guide me through flirting with strange men, a behavior I’d always enjoyed specifically for its effortlessness. But now that my interests had changed, I needed skills and guidelines, like a real job. I needed to grow the fuck up and try.

Eunice, who was the only close friend I made at Luna, was bisexual, but most of her girls were straight. They were more clean-cut, had their shit together, kept their work and outside identities strictly separated. Serenity had crept from the margins of my life into all its body paragraphs like a strong thesis, but I was always a step outside of Luna.

Emily was often traveling, and never physically present, but Eunice was right there, hands-on, aggressively booking back-to-back clients and screening new guys. We entered detailed session notes into an extensive Outlook database, and having all that information about a client changed everything. She ran a “tight ship.” There was no more smoking pot in the bathroom, doing lines of coke off a bench, showering with Kat, getting riotously wine-drunk with Remi before fucking on the massage table. Eunice was strict about cleaning, meetings, timeliness. She had a part-time “slave” who called me “Miss Stephanie.” Eunice told him what to eat for lunch.

I came to love the abstract athleticism of intense full-body massage, attempting when possible to think of clients as fleshy rowing machines. I learned to take control, and most of the time, that was okay. I liked it again.

I could’ve fought back in the spring of 2007 when my first serious girlfriend told me she was “disturbed” I’d chosen to be a sex worker, a vocation she deemed valid for her heroin-addict ex, but for me — “i just can’t imagine why you would do that work, if there’s no extreme reason.” But I didn’t fight back. She was incorrect, and I still believe that for some people, sex work and monogamous romantic relationships can coexist. I wasn’t torn politically, but I’d become emotionally torn, and couldn’t summon the energy to explain myself. I was sick of lying, of playing mind games with myself to endure even the occasional grabby client. I wanted to walk into the light. I wanted to hoard my body. I wanted her to be the only one granted access to it.

“You’re letting her judge you ’cause you’ve started judging yourself,” my best friend Haviland told me.

Sex work was not my calling, at least not anymore. I was burned out.

At this point, Eunice was making her own plans to get out of the business, gradually transitioning management to a new owner. My writing career had been gaining velocity, I was hopeful.

According to e-mails I sent to friends around that time, I’d been “physically assaulted” by a client the week before. I recall, vaguely, feeling shaken afterwards and recommending we blacklist him. I recall, vaguely, feeling that I did not feel quite shaken enough. Whatever actually happened in that room, I never wrote it down anywhere besides, I assume, the Outlook database. I have no memory of it. Regardless, my soapbox was a far-off mountain. My legs were sore.

I hadn’t saved a dime.

I quit.

Mid-summer 2008, after some unexpected financial catastrophes, I asked my then-girlfriend how she’d feel about me going back. “I feel good about you making money,” she said.

Eunice had sold Luna to an employee. My first night back I worked with a hot, chatty bisexual hipster who’d slept with a mutual friend. I made $750 that night, which was $500 more than I expected. My body felt electric, like cash itself. This time, I saved.

Eventually the recession would land, and I would start Autostraddle, and I’d start wanting to stab all my clients with a knife again, and then I’d get back into day-drinking through my shifts, and then I’d quit for good.

But that first week back? Those first months? I felt high as a kite. I missed it. I missed having a man under my control, I wrote in my diary while my girlfriend napped. I missed the cash, the thrill, and the comfort of a reliable income.

And then, finally: I could never love a man again. But I could jerk him off, take his money, and spend it on my girlfriend.  

¹ SESTA/FOSTA has shut down myriad locations for sex workers to advertise their services, yet many of these review boards remain active. This law not only takes power away from sex workers, it gives a lot more power to anonymous men who often lie about their experiences and judge sex workers on their willingness to accommodate risk and break rules!

see the entire issue

Before you go! Autostraddle runs on the reader support of our AF+ Members. If this article meant something to you today — if it informed you or made you smile or feel seen, will you consider joining AF and supporting the people who make this queer media site possible?

Join AF+!