Working Sex

by Annie Oakley

  This brainstorm hit me at the same time I was dating a male stripper and a female prostitute. I doubt I would have ever made that leap in judgment had it not been for the fact that I knew real people in the sex industry, and they were people that I liked. I asked my girlfriend to teach me her profession. There was a lot to learn despite popular jokes to the contrary, and I employed almost everything I learned in college to become a successful prostitute. My mentor taught me to do things the way she had. I got a business license and began paying quarterly taxes right from the start. I learned to screen calls so I only did business with suitable clients and I learned to use latex barriers properly to protect my health.

  My new career was so much more honest than the corporate world I left behind. At first I thought I was trading in sexual harassment and gender discrimination for sexual objectification that paid extremely well. The men I saw as a prostitute were no better and no worse than the men I worked for and with as a senior customer service coordinator or marketing representative. Now instead of enduring on-the-job sexual innuendo for a meager paycheck, I was paid more in one day than I used to make in a week. The sex was honest and straightforward. The money was cash up front. My pragmatism made prostitution an attractive choice.

  What I did not know in 1989 when I began my career in prostitution is that it would blossom in a way that would eclipse my expectations for any career, let alone one in the sex industry. Eventually, I worked my way up from prostitution by the hour to high-end escorting and finally to being a courtesan. My clients would be some of the world’s most gifted, accomplished, intelligent, and wealthy men in the world. Their generosity of spirit would touch my life in ways far more meaningful than their money. And my initial animosity toward men would be transformed to a healthy capacity for empathy and understanding that all genders are struggling against a system that demands conformity to proscribed gender roles.

  I also discovered that my clients, for whatever reason, were more prone to worship women than objectify them. In the beginning, I attracted plenty of men who objectified me but as my career progressed, those superficial souls disappeared and I only shared time with substantial individuals who longed to service the goddess incarnate. They probably would not choose those words, but nevertheless their actions expressed this sentiment. I have been showered with love and gifts and money. But what has touched me the most has been the degree of vulnerability my clients have shown me. Whether grieving the death of a family member, dealing with a physical disablement or disfigurement, struggling with major life decisions or facing their own mortality, I have been honored to share the most private of thoughts and emotions. And that has lent a depth of fulfillment to my career in the sex industry that I never ever hoped for as I charted my corporate career.

  I am often asked if there was ever a negative side to my life as a sex worker. Of course there was. The most difficult part of being a sex worker is dealing with society’s stigma and legal sanctions. I was arrested once. That was a degrading experience, which is ironic since law enforcement claims to be attempting to “save” women like me from degradation. My arrest led to my eviction from my apartment because the laws are written so that landlords are implicated as felons unless they evict a woman accused (not convicted) of prostitution. Some so-called friends dropped me from their list of people to invite to their dinner parties. I have been accused of being the daughter of Satan by religious fanatics. Et cetera. In other words, the work is better than other work I have been paid for. But the hatred of society is hard to deal with and so most people don’t.

  Early in 2004, I announced my retirement from prostitution. I have a benefactor or two who will no doubt remain my friends forever. But my career aspirations are now turning to that of being an author. I can only hope that writing will be as fulfilling and fun as my fourteen years in the sex industry.

  campus sluts forever!

  Jessica Melusine

  I. BRIGHT COLLEGE DAYS

  It was a regular office in an early-20th-century house in a Midwest college town, with block glass on the windows so neighbors couldn’t see in, where the copier creaked out slow copies and ran low on toner and where we had smoke breaks out in the back and listened to the traffic on the main road.

  “He had me going for an hour,” Lola would say, and drag on her menthol cigarette while inside Tyler was explaining a particular foot fetish to the New Girl while keeping the customer on hold.

  “Only tennis socks, only tennis socks or he’ll get upset!” she said and pressed the button. Lola and I walked back in through the corridors and back to our respective cubes.

  It was 3 AM, I pressed the button on my phone and Alexis roared back to life from inside me as my phone rang and I answered with a high-pitched, “Hello, honey, thanks for calling the Campus Sluts!” trying to mask Melanie shouting, “Take it, bitch!” to her client from the next cube. I had a credit card to run and a cheerleader call to do. It was another night at the office, another night at the Campus Sluts. We had our traditions and like sorority songs or pep rallies, they stay and stay.

  II. PHYSICAL FITNESS, MENTAL FITNESS

  “So, we all have a gym.”

  “What?” I said.

  This was the story that we were supposed to feed prospective clients at the phone sex office, the ones who asked us how a bunch of horny college girls at the Large Midwestern University (all 18-23 with measurements that would make Playboy swoon and we all said the girl in the college issue worked with us anyway) got into the phone-sex business, if they even bothered to ask at all. Management never remembered to tell all of the girls so we’d adapt when we heard it. Apparently, in a story of secret, sexy origins, it started with a health club that some seniors at Large Midwestern started (we never said the name of the school, but let them wonder and draw conclusions even though most of our relations to the school were just hearing the roars from the stadium on game day). According to the story, the rent couldn’t be paid on the gym so the phone-sex business started in the back. This meant that in between laps on the StairMaster and trips to the shower, we could take calls and in a hybrid of wanking and philanthropy, the client would save our gym, relieve our sexual tension, and in doing so contribute to our education at Large Midwestern. It also explained our predilection for hanging out together, presumably when we weren’t all attending the same orgies.

  So, we worked out together and if they “guessed” the name of Large Midwestern, we’d just giggle. It made them feel smart. Some used the gym story in addition to the college, some didn’t; Lexus always liked to say she’d just gotten out of the shower, the water dripping down her long, lithe body, off her 5′9″ frame and B-cup tits. She’d smile at us over the phone mouthpiece, her grey hair glinting yellowy in the overhead fluorescent lighting. It came in handy if I had been running for the phone from getting my bag meal at the fridge, breath heaving and heavy.

  “Ooooh, it’s the StairMaster!” I’d say, settling into the office chair with the broken wheel. “I was just getting warmed up, baby. . . . I hooked up with the cutest girl here one day . . . did I mention she was one of those wild art major girls?”

  No one questioned why we were there late at night. It was finals or Greek Week or something and anyway, in my case, all my sorority sisters went there too. But they didn’t know my naughty phone-sex secret since they were too busy violating pledges with Push-Up ice cream pops or, in a story that led me down a road that never ended for one client, taking them to the Large Midwestern University Medical School so they could volunteer to be examined by the young gynecology interns. It was all sorority speculums after that and he never wanted to hear about my arm curls. Others just wanted to hear about school.

  “I’m worried,” a client once said.

  “About what?” I asked.

  “That your submission to me may affect your grades.”

  I asked him about applying to grad school and the next time he called with advice for forty-five minutes and I was able to tell him all about my
4.0 and my goals. After that, it was time to play slave girl and blow job, and he assured me I’d be fine, just fine in grad school.

  III. THE IMPORTANCE OF TRADITION

  We had traditions and we had game days. We were in a college town, after all. Late nights when we spun on our creaky chairs, made slurping noises on the phone, and read and reread the same tattered issue of Foxy Boxing, we had a game.

  There was an envelope full of words written on slips of paper. We crammed them into the envelope until it was full to bursting—and we played it like this, fast and furious. The minute one of the girls got on a call, she’d open the envelope and draw out words that had to be used in the call. We were very creative, since we had time on our hands. The player wrestled with words like gravy boat, Mrs. Beasley doll, corncob, and a variety of Ozzy Osbourne lyrics we threw in for good measure.

  “Oooh baby,” I’d say when it was my turn, “you’re gonna make me bark at the moon.” We’d all huddle around the speaker in the manager’s office and howl with laughter as the player would purr, “Oh honey, I’m gonna swallow up that corncob!” followed with “I bet you wanna touch my squirrel, don’t you?” and “That’s right, play with Mrs. Beasley!”

  Laughter would vibrate through the thin walls. Sometimes the player would have to press the mute button on our big, heavy office phones so she wouldn’t laugh, wouldn’t break her throaty whisper or high-pitched-giggle girl voice. The men, if they were confused, didn’t show it; they just kept stroking their corncobs (or sporks, or pencils) until the end result. We wondered often if they were so drunk they didn’t care or if we’d somehow reprogrammed their erotic responses.

  She pulls a slip of paper and covers her mouth with her hand and in the office we take a deep breath. “You know what I hear in my head when I’m fucking?” she says to the two men on the line, each of them sharing an extension, jerking off to her voice, as close as they have ever come to touching. “War Pigs,” she says, and hums it in a porno moan as we in the office giggle and applaud.

  “Oh baby,” one of the guys says, “that’s so fuckin’ hot!” and it’s all over for him, it’s all heavy breathing and exhaustion and we’re all collapsed on the floor, trying to breathe from laughing so hard. She was the queen from then on.

  It got us through the long nights, through the cavalcade of drunk calls when the bars closed on the West Coast, through the callers who just wanted to hear how much you were a no-good dirty whore, through the ones who just wanted to hear you come. Until the morning, when the sun rose and the day shift and more managers came on.

  IV. SO WE COMMENCE

  We had a high turnover at Campus Sluts. People graduated from the actual Large Midwestern, moved, got tired of the coprophiliac calls or had a fight with the manager, anything, and I was one of them after a year and a half. My last shift I came out as the sun came up. I’d be moving to Boston that morning and as I walked to the car, I wish I had a tassel to turn or a hat to throw. I’ve since worked as a model and I still work as a home-based phone-sex operator now and then and when I do, I think of the Campus Sluts and look back on those false years at Large Midwestern with a sort of pride. I did a lot: I won the English department essay contest, gangbanged the whole Sigma Chi house, applied to grad school, did my first bukkake film, ravaged innumerable pledges with vegetables, fingers, and frozen desserts, was intimate with balloons—all while working out every night and getting a well-deserved 4.0. If that isn’t dedication, I don’t know what is.

  an interwiew with gloria lockett

  Siobhan Brooks

  Gloria Lockett is the former codirector of the prostitutes rights organization COYOTE (Call Off Your Old Tired Ethics) and Executive Director of the California Prostitute Education Project (CAL-PEP), an Oakland-based, nonprofit AIDS and HIV prevention organization that works with street prostitutes. Lockett served on San Francisco District Attorney Terence Hallinan’s Task Force on Prostitution and as a member of former Governor George Deukmejian’s California AIDS Leadership Task Force. She has been published in several anthologies, including The Black Women’s Health Book: Speaking for Ourselves, edited by Evelyn C. White (Seattle, WA: Seal Press, 1990), Sex Work: Writings by Women in the Sex Industry, edited by Frederique Delacoste and Priscilla Alexander (San Francisco, CA: Cleis Press, 1984), and Lessons from the Damned: Queers, Whores and Junkies Respond to AIDS, by Nancy Stoller (New York: Routledge, 1998). She was also, for eighteen years, a prostitute.

  SIOBHAN: What led you into the sex industry?

  GLORIA: Money. I was young, twenty-one when I first got into the sex industry. I had two jobs, one as a clerk at a Lucky’s store and the other as a clerk at City Hall. I was also waitressing at the Hyatt House Restaurant and various hotels in Oakland, trying to support myself and my two kids, and it was very, very hard.

  SIOBHAN: How did you begin working in the sex industry? Did you have any connections with people who were already working in it?

  GLORIA: During that time women in San Francisco worked in their fur coats. They were nicely dressed, and their hair would look good. One day, I said to this guy I was seeing, jokingly, “I could do that.” Next thing I know he was bringing me a black dress and telling me to put it on. Basically, he and I were going out to work. That was in 1967, and it just went on from there.

  SIOBAHN: How long were you in the sex industry?

  GLORIA: I still consider myself to be in the sex industry, but as far as dating and working for myself, I was in it for eighteen years. I worked on the streets for about ten years, and then I worked in clubs in Burlingame and different hotels. In the latter years I went to working ads in newspapers.

  SIOBAHN: How were issues around safety and clients dealt with?

  GLORIA: I was working in a stable with lots of other women for about eighteen years straight. For ten of the eighteen years, there was an average of ten of us, me being the eldest. We were always around each other and worked in pairs on the streets and in hotels. We had procedures where if you got out of a car and no one was around, you took down the guy’s license plate number, or someone driving behind you took down his license number. As soon as you got into a hotel room you would pick up the phone and tell someone where you were and what time you were expected back. For the most part, I felt pretty safe; the streets are a little more dangerous than being inside, but a lot funnier. When you worked inside you had to play girlfriend and boyfriend, but on the streets the guys knew what you were down there for. They knew why they were picking you up—there were very few games that were played.

  SIOBAHN: How was race an issue in terms of how much money you made?

  GLORIA: The money varied. It went up and down depending upon what city and what town. Over the eighteen years I worked in a lot of different states. In order to be black and work the sex industry you had to move around a lot. In each state the money was different, anywhere from $10 to $600. I’ve worked Vegas, Hawaii, Alaska, Oakland, San Jose, San Francisco, and other small cities, so money depended on where you worked and what kind of date you were going to turn. If you were in Vegas in those days, the average date was $100. Most of the time the guys would offer you as little as possible. If you were on the streets they would offer you $10 or $20, but the art is to talk the men out of however much you could get instead of taking what they offered you.

  There was a time when I was on the streets that I could turn as many as ten or eleven tricks a night. But if you were in a hotel it was more like three or four, and if you worked out of ads in papers then it was five or six. If you worked in Alaska prices were up in those days because of the pipeline, so men had lots of money, plus it was very cold. Guys would work three months at a time before they would be ready to spend their money.

  Race played a very big part in how much money you made. Fortunately or unfortunately, I hung around a bunch of sisters who were white. We all helped each other out. If one of the girls would catch a date, we had an apartment or checked out the pad that we were working out of. The two or three b
lack women would wait until they got to the apartment and we would double-date. So, if you were standing out on the corner, they would definitely pick up the white girl first. No matter how big, ugly, or old she looked—it didn’t matter: The white girl went first, then the black girls.

  When I worked the hotel scene there were very few blacks, so you had to be very careful. You had the chance to rip guys off, not that I did, though it was tempting at times. But you couldn’t rip guys off because there were only two of you, and people in the hotel would know who you were, even if the guy didn’t.

  You couldn’t hang around with other black girls. You had to hang by yourself or with other white girls, because if you were hanging in the Fairmont or the Hyatt, the people working there were more apt to bother you if you were with another black girl. I might have hung with one black girl from time to time, but for the most part I hung with white girls or by myself. It’s a very racist thing, for different reasons. Some people have never seen a black woman; they’re raised in areas where they don’t see black women until they’re grown. Actually, I remember one time I was standing on the corner of MacArthur in San Pablo and this guy kept passing by looking at me. Finally, a stable sister of mine came out—a big white girl—and he picked her up. I waited until he got to the house; waited until she got her money. Then I went in and said to the guy, “You’ve got to tell me why you picked her up because I know that you were more interested in me than her. What is it?” He was shaking and he said, “Well, I didn’t see a black person until I was twenty. I was too scared.” [laughs] Racism plays a part in anything that you do.