I’m so busy with preproduction of my first narrative feature film, I haven’t had time to write. I just read something that recalled my experience going on female hormones in summer of 1985. In this nostalgic moment, I offer you an excerpt of my memoir from that time of my life.
Feminization was my crusade, a tits-out assault on masculinity, waged in pain. I endured the electric hornet of the beard-removal needle, the jab of the estrogen hypodermic, the ripping of hot waxed hair from my legs, forearms and chest. Living the lie of manhood hurt infinitely worse. When I looked in a mirror and saw Him, my body seemed a prison interning the woman inside. Masculine features threatened my identity as Pamela. They had to be eliminated no matter what.
Concern for my womanly appearance wasn’t mere vanity. The consequences of being “clocked” or “read” as a TS woman ranged from degradation to violence. Failure to pass as a GG — a genetic girl — brought sneers, scowls, and shouts of “freak” and “faggot.” The sheer intensity of their hatred sometimes bordered on derangement; they wanted to obliterate me. So far I’d been lucky; nobody had tried to beat me up. I’d seen a few girls in the bar who’d not been so lucky.
Whatever epithets they yelled hurt less than knowing I’d failed at being a woman. When my spirits were low I feared they were right: I was a pathetic freak. I took little consolation that even flawless TS women attracted verbal abuse when someone clocked them.
Not even the most beautiful T-girl was safe from being read until she got her “down-there” surgery. Until then she had to guard against a “basket” — the telltale bulge of male genitals against her clothing — a faux pas avoided with an expert “tuck” to recess the genitals between the legs. With a proper tuck, a trick can grope down there forever and still not feel It. Tuck badly and your balls got crushed like Thanksgiving walnuts the first time you crossed your legs.
My queenly big sister Misty taught me tucking and other trade secrets, like I was her pet project. Together we went for hormone shots, on thriftstore shopping sprees and barhopping jaunts. She, TJ and Spirit Club owner Sheila filled in the family I’d left behind. Even raucous Dianne was a friend; beneath her jibes lay fondness. Their friendship made this hard path a little easier.
Trust was a far more practical aspect to true friendship in the Tenderloin. During a rare visit to the Black Rose bar, my prized faux fur coat disappeared from my seat. After I quit feeling sorry for myself, I counted myself lucky I’d brought my purse with me to the restroom. The TL drastically altered my concept of “lucky.” It also taught me a new meaning for the word. The phrase “breaking luck” is hooker parlance for turning the first trick of the day. Early luck is often a good omen
As autumn approached, our escort agency had less and less success with early luck. No longer able to afford the nightly rental of the realty office, Gilda and Rob moved the agency to a squalid, abandoned flat on Telegraph Hill. While I waited for outcalls [to go out on], I helped clean up the place, or I’d hang out with Rob as he worked the agency phone. A few times he let me handle the line, calling for credit card authorizations and managing the dates. At the end of the night, the escorts came by to exchange their charge slips for cash, minus fifty for every call.
Like any enterprise, escort agenting carried its own unique pitfalls, such as a potential felony arrest for pandering. A much more common hassle was when a girl stole a call. She’d claim the john changed his mind, then do the date for cash and keep the agency fee. The most devious thieves told the john to take his phone off the hook, so you couldn’t confirm he’d canceled.
The biggest pests were the phonefreaks, creeps who jerk off to a woman’s voice. They posed as genuine customers but never spent a dime, pissing off the escorts and wasting our time. Usually they ended up on the Ignore list, but on slow nights Rob also gave them a taste of “Ignacio,” a character from the standup comedy routine he was always working on.
Squeezing his voice into a perverted, reedy gargle that sounded like a demented Yoda on amyl nitrate poppers, Rob gave the offending phonefreak a ring. This was a phone call most effectively perpetrated at four in the morning. The first time he did it, I nearly gagged laughing.
“Hello?! Is this John?!” he screeched into the phone. “My name is Ignacio! Ignacio! I am a gay, Haitian intravenous drug user! Kiss me, darling!”
He paused to let the yawning victim contend he’s not John and ask who it is again.
“Ignacio!” he chortled, “and I’ve been looking in your bedroom window, John. You have such a nice, round bottom. I’d love to put on a long rubber glove and fistfuck you. I’ll grease up my arm with Crisco —”
Both my hands clamped raucous braying behind my lips, tears streaming from holding in my mirth as he went further over the top.
“Well, what do you know?” Rob remarked, cradling the phone, “he hung up.” He maintained a straight face only a few seconds before joining me, howling.
The most obnoxious phonefreaks were awarded rotating stints in Rob’s telephone autodialer, a button labeled “Fun.”
Gilda and Rob were like an older sister and brother in my family of outcasts — outsiders from the mainstream. All of us were refugees from the decaying wonderland of the American Dream, an illusion bought into by suckers who cast votes and bought possessions as if it changed anything. In the three months since I left my marriage I’d fully renounced my bourgeois upbringing as a lie I’d never felt a part of anyhow. Where I was now, this was where I belonged. I had no place else to go.
…
Shortly after Gilda and Rob began squatting in the flat, I wearied of my tiny Post Street flop and its mice infestation. I’d given up setting traps; it was easier to consider them pets I didn’t have to feed. It was little more than a place to sleep, eat and paint my face for the Spirit Club. I was ashamed to bring even tricks there, so it was time to move.
I leased a studio at Central Towers, a highrise only three blocks from the bar. My new place had wall-to-wall shag on floors with radiant heating, huge closets, guitar-friendly concrete walls, fulltime security in the lobby, and a balcony. Though the corrupt heart of the Tenderloin beat right outside the front door, the apartment itself looked shiny-new. When I closed the drapes I might as well have been in Pacific Heights, yet with Tenderloin rental rate. I felt like a high class bitch living there.
I’d barely settled in when Gilda and Rob decided to leave for Los Angeles. Before they headed south they offered me the opportunity to run the escort agency for a percentage. With five hundred a month from my grandparents and my VA tuition check barely covering rent and food, I jumped at the offer. With the Price Wars phone line forwarded to my new apartment, I’d soon be able to afford regular hormone shots, longer electrolysis sessions and new dresses instead of thriftstore castoffs.
I would practically be a Madam! Madam Pamela!
Fate had other plans. Two days into my new career as a whoremistress, Rock Hudson bought a ticket to the Great Hospice in the Sky. With AIDS consciousness brusquely shoved into the world’s face, the sex business was decimated overnight. The phones cooled faster than the summer fog that rolls into San Francisco, and Gilda’s flock to flew the coop to more established agencies.
Despite these two huge strikes against me — little demand by tricks and no hookers to supply them — I told myself I could still make it work. Only if Pollyanna had been a prostitute could anyone else have been more naively optimistic.
Epilogue: My career as an escort agent ended two weeks after Rock Hudson’s death. I told myself that it was for the best—running Gilda and Rob’s agency was a felony bust waiting to happen—but I was still crushed. I turned my attention to finishing my AA degree in Computer Science at a campus where blatant transphobia—that wasn’t even a word back then—made it tough to concentrate on my studies.
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