In fall of1991 SF Bay Area adult weekly Spectator published my essay “No Wrong Way to be You.” Soon after I proposed a feature story on street prostitution, concentrating on San Francisco’s seedy Tenderloin district (“the TL”). As a former TS (transsexual) prostitute, I knew the business, the area, and some of the sexworkers. I hit the “stroll” with a tape recorder to interview my sisters still out there. Most wanted to be heard—especially with HIV/AIDS still making headlines.
The result ended as a cover story that spanned two issues of Spectator. It brings back an era when an unsafe sexual encounters flirted with death, when the stroll was full of streetwalkers playing cat & mouse with the police while we tried to avoid violent johns (customers).
The below image shows most of the Tenderloin (the blocks not fuzzed out). The area tinted in red was historically worked by genetic women, trans and male prostitutes (each in their own areas). The black & white photo is one I took in 1991 for the article and was used on the cover.
[Please note I have not changed the language that was in common use at the time, especially not direct quotes from my interviewees, some of whom have since passed on from AIDS, drugs and violence.]
Working
©1991, 2003 by Christine D. Beatty
You can’t make up your mind whether you love us or despise us. We’re definitely the kind of girl you’d like to fuck, but not the one you’d take home to meet Dear ‘Ol Mom. In polite company, you use loathsome words to describe us, yet you practically jizz all over yourself when you’re with one of us. As long as you got the money, Honey, as long as you don’t fuck us over, we don’t really care what you think. We are prostitutes, and it’s your fifty, so let’s do it.
As a former prostitute, I have no illusions about what most straight people think of working girls. Furthermore, I knew just what my attitudes were toward “normal” people, and what I would have told them if I had gotten the chance. I’d want them to know what the working girl’s world is like. I knew what I’d say. Then I got to wondering what my sisters might say. I also wondered how things had changed, since it has been five years since I fucked and sucked for bucks. I decided to ask around.
Aside from the frequent contact I have had with my former co-workers, I conducted 12 formal interviews to put together this story. I spoke with streetwalkers, bar whores and call girls. I spoke with genetic and transsexual women prostitutes. Most of these interviews took place on the street or just off the street. I want to make it clear that this isn’t a scientific study. I kept my questions to a minimum and let them speak their minds. What follows is the substance of those interviews and my own experience.
When I played back the tapes of interviews I conducted on the street, it took me back to those Tenderloin sidewalks. Most of the area is poorly-lit and dangerous at night. It is not the kind of area a rational person would hang out without a reason. You’d either need to be a streetwalker or a writer for the Spectator to send much time on these sidewalks.
Most of the streetwalking happens between midnight and three AM, although I’ve seen girls on the stroll around the clock. When money gets tight, when there’s not a lot of dating going on, the girls hit the pavement early. Usually a street hooker works when it is dark. There is an endless procession of cars around the block, their stereos blasting, frequent cat-calls coming from them. Occasionally, a car slows down to look you over. You try to make eye contact, you smile hopefully, and if his window is down you say whatever you think might entice him to stop. Maybe you even flash some titty at him.
If he does stop, you approach his window. You hope there is no cop within view, because it could mean anything from a ticket to a trip to jail. Now you got to deal with a guy who is probably going to beat around the bush and who is going to try to spend as little as possible. Through all of this, your mind is mostly focused on one thing: getting the next one once the date is done. So, Mister, hurry up and come.
I found that most of the girls, even the ones that didn’t know me, were glad to talk once they saw I wasn’t going to interfere with their work. Many of them seemed glad that someone saw them as being more than a piece of meat in a miniskirt. In the interviews that follow, I have changed most of the names since I didn’t always get permission to use their real names. I developed a number of impressions from these women that meshed with my own experience of the job. From them, I can draw a composite of a hooker I will call “Suzy,” who sums up these impressions.
Suzy is a woman in her mid-twenties and has been hooking for 8 years. She was a runaway as a teenager because of problems at home. She is on drugs, which is one of the reasons she is selling herself. She has been arrested and convicted of prostitution once for every two or three years she has been hooking. She is aware of California’s mandatory HIV-testing law for convicted prostitutes, and practices safe sex as a rule. She has aspirations of doing more with her life, especially given the dangers of the job. She has been beaten or robbed by a trick at least once in her career. Most of all, she doesn’t think she is hurting anyone and wants to be left alone.
Gloria Lockett, Cal-PEP
One of the people I interviewed for this article was Gloria Lockett, the founder and director of Cal-PEP, the California Prostitute Education Project. Ms. Lockett was herself a career prostitute of eighteen years. While I waited to speak to her, I thumbed through a copy of a progress report that her agency had forwarded to the state. The numbers were dismal. It showed that of the prostitutes that Cal-PEP had reached, 30% were IV drug users, just 65% demonstrated some knowledge about HIV and only three-quarters were committed to always using condoms with their clients. I asked her about these numbers.
“Actually, most of the professional prostitutes do practice safer sex,” she told me in her downtown Oakland office, “I’d say at least 90% of them always use a condom.”
She explained to me that the lower numbers were due to crack addicts who traded sex for drugs—“toss-ups”—and who had to be counted as prostitutes by her guidelines. “There’s a lot of heavy denial from those women.”
When I asked her for an estimate of the numbers of working girls using drugs, she guessed it at “sixty percent or better.”
I mentioned something I’d read in a local newspaper story about how you could tell what drug a hooker was on by what street in the Tenderloin she worked. Ms. Lockett seemed unimpressed with that claim, and told me that it was more of an area-by-area thing.
“In the Mission [district of San Francisco], it’s heroin. In the Western Addition, it’s crack. In the Tenderloin, it’s more of a mix.”
This made sense to me, because nobody ever told me what street to work when I made my occasional appearance on the streetcorner.
Cal-PEP is still doing outreach in Oakland and San Francisco. On a regular basis, its workers hit the streets and hand out condoms and disseminate safe sex info. It is a worthy organization that can use all of the support this area and state can provide.
Lisa & Candy
“Lisa” was the first woman I interviewed. I caught up with her on the corner of Ellis and Hyde about midnight in early September. Lisa is a flawlessly beautiful transsexual who could easily be taken for a genetic female. She has been whoring for about 18 years, starting at the age of 13 when she ran away because her parents couldn’t accept a son who wanted to become a woman. With no skills and little education, she turned to the streets as a means of survival.
“Okay, prostitution: I’ve worked in massage parlors, I’ve run ads in the sex newspapers, and I don’t think we’re doing anything wrong. Guys come to us because they want to get relief or they want to live out their fantasies with us, and that’s better than them going out and raping somebody or taking advantage of someone.”
Our talk turned to issue of safety on the job.
“I hope that all of the girls use condoms and get check-ups,” Lisa told me.
“You do though, right?”
“Definitely.”
She knew about the mandatory HIV testing law because she had been tested after a recent prostitution conviction. She tested negative.
“I’ve been arrested fourteen times. I’ve plead guilty twice and I was guilty once, and so I’ve done time only three times out of almost fifteen-twenty years of prostituting. That’s not too bad of a track record… I don’t clip my dates. I’m pretty straight up; I lay my cards on the table.”
She smiled as she told me that not all of her dates know she is a transsexual, “Otherwise I’m straight up with them.”
Lisa has been thrown out of a car, had a knife held up to her neck and had a gun stuck in her face.
“Luckily I’m still alive and here. I’ve got a scar from my navel almost to my breast.”
When I asked her if she ever thought of getting out of prostitution she told me it was an on and off thing for her.
“I’ve worked part time as a practical nurse. I take care of elderly people.”
When we talked about drugs, Lisa told me there’s no way she could work the street sober, and she has tried. She managed to stay off drugs working at a massage parlor, but let a relationship with a guy get her back into the habit. This profession is difficult on domestic life. She attributes the breakup of two relationships directly to the job. Most men hate the idea of their girlfriend fucking for money. It emasculates them. It is interesting to note, however, the few of them have gone to get jobs so their lover didn’t have to be a prostitute.
I ran into “Candy” just seconds later. Like Lisa, I have seen Candy around the neighborhood off and on over the years.
“I just started coming back out here full time again. I was on, like, a five year sabbatical. I did phone sex and turned my occasional regular trick, and you know, that.”
She started hooking at 16 as a teenage runaway. The money was good, and she got spoiled at an age when most teenagers were learning to save their allowance, because she sometimes made hundreds of dollars a day.
“That’s why I’m still out here, ‘cause I like the money. I can’t see myself working at a five or ten dollar an hour job,” she laughed.
When I asked her what she’d like to tell the world about working girls, she told me “We’re not all junkies and we don’t all have AIDS. And some hookers are really nice people.”
Candy has had a minimal number of scrapes with the law. She has only been hauled in on a “B charge” (Penal Code 647-B, soliciting prostitution) twice in ten years, and mostly gets a “ten dollar ticket now and then.”
She thinks the police should concentrate drugs and real crime. “Most of us out here aren’t doing anything but making our money and doing our drugs or whatever we’re doing. We’re not harming anybody but ourselves. I think they should take that into consideration when they’re hassling us when there’s all kinds of muggings and murders going on.”
When I suggested that some prostitutes are committing real crimes by stealing from their clients, she told me that in ten years she only stole from two tricks.
“One time the guy was a big asshole to me, and he fell asleep. The other was a drunk who was really, really cheap and was really trying to work me, so I just did it.”
At this point, a car pulled over to the curb. The man inside was obviously looking for love, so I thanked Candy as she scooted over to get in his car and make her sales pitch.
Patti, Starr & Tina
A few nights later I ran into my old acquaintance “Patti” whom I’d known for five years. She and I weren’t formally introduced: we met briefly in the hallway of my apartment while she was turning a trick in my roommate’s room. Well, turning a trick wasn’t really it. She was running off with his money after he’d undressed. Patti was working the corner with a friend named “Starr.” I invited them into a nearby bar so we could get off the street.
Patti has been whoring for 15 years off and on, and Starr for 5 years. Patti is a transsexual who couldn’t find a job working as woman; rather than work as a man she opted for prostitution, and later developed a habit. Starr also works the street to support her drug habit. She has a straight job, but needs the extra income for drugs.
Patti wants people “to not judge us all. We’re not all bad people.”
Starr said “Don’t stereotype us. You don’t have to be from a poor family or the projects or even to be without money to be out on the streetcorner.” Starr wishes the cops would quit harassing the working girls, “especially when, when they’re not on the nine-to-five, a lot of them are very good customers.”
Typical police harassment is a ticket for “Obstructing the Sidewalk” which, if you are a well-known hooker like Patti, can get even when you’re walking down a sidewalk.
Both girls knew about the mandatory testing law, which Starr believes is a good idea.
“A person carrying HIV really shouldn’t be working the streets. Any person that has any morals wouldn’t. But if they have a habit, and they’re HIV positive, then they might anyway.”
I asked her if she insisted on safer sex with her customers.
“Oh, YES. I enjoy life.”
Customers occasionally ask for the girl to forego the condom, and many of them are willing to pay extra, especially when it comes to getting a blowjob. A savvy girl will take the extra money and sneak a rubber over the guy’s cock anyway. When I asked them if they had any last words, the both said, almost in unison, “please play it safe.”
One thing I was struck by was the number of transsexuals who are working the streets. At least a third of the girls on the street are former males, though many of them still haven’t had their final surgery. Some of them are so feminine and flawlessly beautiful that I sometimes forget how difficult it can be for a TS to find a straight job. I had to make many compromises to get back in my career, even though I already had an education and job skills. The sight of these women reminded me that the street is the place that society has for many transgender people. The next girl I met was an excellent case in point.
“Tina” is a pretty, young Asian TS in her early twenties. She has been hooking four years, and was introduced to the job by a friend who was already turning tricks. Her parents know what she is doing, but they understand that she has difficulty finding a straight job as a transsexual. As understanding as they are, however, she pointed out that she no longer lives with them. She defends her work.
“I’m just working like this for my life. What else can I do? I’m not hurting anybody.”
She has also had relationships broken up because of her working. Prostitution often compounds the problems that transsexuals have in trying to find a stable relationship.
“Always broken-hearted,” she told me with a wistful smile.
Sheila, Marilyn, Karen & Sharon
Most of the girls I met had been in town for a while, but “Sheila” who is a 22 year old Latina from Texas has been working in the City for only two months. She starting hooking two years ago because of “money, excitement and adventure… meeting gorgeous men… and it’s tax free.”
She did experience some hassles in Texas, seven arrests for prostitution, and twice here so far. Because she is a new girl in town, they brought her downtown on her first arrest so they could have her photo and fingerprints.
She has had one gun pulled on her, but she told him “If you’re going to shoot, go ahead and shoot. You’re still not getting your money back.”
Sheila is out on the street to support her crack habit. She is not happy with being on drugs, but she still makes no apologies.
“Look, I’m human. I don’t give a damn what you say about me, because I’m going to do what I want to do. If you can’t accept that then fuck off. Life’s a bitch, alright? We are human beings and we have feelings too, so please respect us for that.”
I ran into “Marilyn” on O’Farrell Street. Marilyn has got some kind of media karma. She was interviewed by 48 Hours on a recently-aired show, a Chronicle writer interviewed her this summer in a feature that they ran on hustling, and now she’s talking to me. She has been working the street off and on for about five years. She works to support a crack habit.
“Hey, am I going to get paid for this?” she asked all of a sudden.
Apparently, the good folks of the television and the major newspapers didn’t pay her for her time, which is what a prostitute is really selling. When I told her I didn’t have a budget, she seemed anxious about getting back to work and went on her way.
I wasn’t having too much luck that night. There were lots of potential buyers on the street, so not many girls seemed interested in talking with me until I ran into “Karen.”
Karen was working with another girl who was pregnant, obviously loaded, and who didn’t want to talk. Karen had been working about eight years, and got into it for the quick money.
“At least it used to be quick. Now it’s just convenient money, at times.”
“What about the downfalls?” I asked.
“Going to jail. Crazy people.”
“How many ‘B’ charges have you had?”
“Too many… I’d say eight, ten.”
“How about harassment tickets?”
“Only one of those.”
“Only one?”
“I usually don’t stand in one spot.”
When I asked her what she’d tell the world about prostitution, she told me “they should make this legal, because it’s something that obviously a lot of people need. If it was legal, it would be a lot safer, a lot cleaner, and nobody would be getting sick behind it.”
One girl I ran into was actually eager to talk to me. She believed that she had a story worth telling, but I found it tragically similar to some of the other girls I met. Her name is “Sharon.”
Sharon has been hooking off and on for ten years. She was a runaway in her early teens, coming from a history of foster homes, abuse and rape. Her drug habit, mostly heroin, is what keeps her out on the street. She is HIV-positive, but practices safe sex to prevent reinfection with the virus as well as to protect her clients.
She wishes she could tell young people who have family problems, “If you can get counselling, if you can get some understanding from your parents, go for it. Make somebody understand, because this sucks.”
Danielle
“Danielle” whored for 11 years, most of them in Boston. She is now 25. She began “dating” for the excitement after she learned that men were willing to pay her for sex. She started turning tricks even before she left home.
When I asked her of her impression of whoring she told me “It’s not all it’s cracked up to be. It’s a rough, difficult job that isn’t all glamour.”
Drugs and recognition by the police made it difficult for her over the years.
“How many times have you been arrested?” I asked.
“Fifteen times over ten years… for prostitution.”
“Convictions?”
“Five times.”
I asked her if she had any other job-related arrests.
“Common Night Walking, lots of them, umpteen-dozen times,” she told me.
Those arrests are a tactic used by Boston police to harass prostitutes.
“When they can’t get you for prostitution—when you don’t quote a price—they’ll haul you in for Common Night Walking just to get you off the street, or for Disorderly Person, and I have umpteen-dozen of those too.”
Her only serious arrest was for larceny when she allegedly clipped a date. She told me that another girl did it, but she got the bust. I asked her if she clipped many dates.
“No, I was an honest, straightforward whore.”
She estimates that perhaps half of the hookers she has known clip dates on a regular basis. “I liked to be around those ones, they always had money [laughs].”
She was raped and strangled and robbed by a trick when she was younger, but she just chalked it up to experience, “It woke me up.”
She has been confronted with knives and guns from tricks “many times” but managed to avoid serious consequences.
She mostly considers herself retired, “but I wouldn’t turn down some money flashed in my face.”
Angel
Angel is one of the hardest cases I have ever known. She has been an acquaintance of mine for almost three years, and a real friend for half that long. Angel was a prostitute for 23 years, but she has retired from the job. She has seen it all.
“I’ve worked everything. I’ve worked call girl services in New York. In New Orleans I worked mostly bars.”
When I met her in early 1989, she was working the streets of the Tenderloin. She started at 13 years old, because it was her only option at the time. When she got older it was the only thing she knew. She hasn’t turned a trick since she got clean and sober a year and a half ago. Her whoring was completely linked to her drug use. First to remove her inhibitions so she could work, and later to get her out of bed so she could work.
“Did you clip your tricks?”
“Every one I possibly could. It was my duty.”
“Was violence from tricks a common thing?”
“No, but every now and then something happened, usually when I let my guard down.”
She has had knives and guns pulled on her, and she has been shot and stabbed several times in the course of her career.
Angel has only been arrested for prostitution six times, convicted just three times, and has gotten only forty harassing charges in more than twenty years.
“You have to stand still for those. I was too high.”
She is grateful to still be negative for HIV after all of the craziness she lived through.
“I was so high on drugs that I wasn’t even thinking about safe sex. First off, I didn’t practice sex very much. I was just there to get the money and take off and go get more drugs.”
When I asked her about relationships, she said “Prostitutes usually attract a whole different set of guys, usually men that don’t work, who are dysfunctional, who need someone they can take advantage of. That’s why I stayed out of relationships.”
We compared the relative merits of the different kinds of hooking.
“The street is faster money,” she began, “Less talk. Especially if you got a habit and you’re fucked up out of your mind, the street is the place to be. The guys are right there, they’re nervous of the police so they’re gonna grab a girl and try to go quickly.”
The downsides of streetcorner hustling are “you’re more susceptible to arrest, cheaper tricks, more things that tear your self-esteem down. You put up with people’s bullshit, people looking at you… the streets are a hard life.”
“In the bars you can relax and get to know the person better. You don’t have to go with just anybody. And the money is usually better.”
The bar is not quite as fast as the street, and sometimes there is game-playing on the part of the tricks. Angel found that she couldn’t work the bars when she got too loaded.
“If you’re too fucked up, everybody’s going to notice it. If you got a bad drug habit, you don’t look as good. They have more light to see you in, they have time check you out.”
It turns out it is even easier to clip a date in a bar than it is in their car. “Get some other girl over there and make it look like someone else did it,” she said. “That was never any trouble.”
She found working the phone to be a mixed blessing for her. Generally, the clientele was better and she made a lot of money, but she ended up spending it on drugs.
“For a while, you really think you are doing something, but it’s all taken away from you in the end. Very few girls I know have ever managed to walk away with it. It’s a wise girl that quits just in time to get out with her money.”
When I asked her about violence from tricks, she related a story to me that made me glad I had gotten out of the business years ago.
“I was here in San Francisco, and I met this guy out in front of the bar. Anyway, he was cute so I said what-the-fuck. He took me and he bought me a hit of speed, and I did my shot… We went to his hotel, and we went up to his room. I go into the bathroom and the phone rings. In some hotels they’ll make you leave if they you’re a hooker, and I thought it was the desk clerk saying we’re not gonna have this, for [me] to get out. So I answer the phone, and there’s a deep voice saying ‘is she undressed yet?’ I was scared. I knew something was up. I knew the man wasn’t a cop, and I knew it wasn’t the guy at the front desk… So I was trying to get my clothes on, and he’s rattling the door. In a very calm voice he said, ‘you’d just as well come out, because I’ve given you [LSD] and in a few minutes you’ll be helpless.’ That’s when I realized I was tripping out of my mind. I couldn’t even get my clothes back on, I was so fucked up. And he’s rattling door, and I’m trying to hold the door closed and put my clothes on at the same time, and I was succeeding in doing nothing because I was getting more and more freaked.”
“How did you get out of there?” [I asked.]
“The police came. I had been throwing glasses and ashtrays out the window and screaming for help… I began to hear drilling at the door, and it was getting ready to come off its hinges. From where this room was, there was a little ledge about ten feet away, and I tried to jump out of the window, but I missed it and fell three floors, bare-assed naked.”
She managed to catch a window ledge, and the police pulled her in and escorted her through the hotel like that, without a stitch of clothing on.
When I asked her if she had any last words about prostitution, she told me, “They’ll never get rich. Most people have a fantasy of getting ahead, getting rich from prostitution, making something out of their life that way. Very few hookers ever get ahead that way. There’s always one or two, but for the amount of girls who get into it—you’re much better off just getting a job.”
“Is it a common fantasy among hookers?”
“All of them: finding a trick who’s rich man, and him falling in love with them and supporting them all their life.”
She wants to warn potential hookers that “it’s not worth it. There’s good money, but it costs you too much of your identity. You have to shut so much off, you lose yourself.”
[Angel died of respiratory failure in 2014—twenty-three years after this story was published—still clean and sober. She’d earned her GED in 1992 and went on to counsel addicts, HIV patients and other at-risk people. She and I remained dear friends up to her death.]
Tanya
The last girl I interviewed was “Tanya.” Tanya is gorgeous transsexual who has only been whoring for five months. She had a relationship break up, so she moved here to get a fresh start. Near penniless, she knew she could sell herself and quickly build up her bank account to the point where she could start a straight job again. So she took out an ad in the Spectator. (Don’t waste your time, I’ve changed her name, too.) She only wants to do this job the minimum amount of time and get out. She’d never consider working the streets which she considers too dangerous and too degrading. If she weren’t a transsexual who needed to save up $15,000 for her final surgery, she probably wouldn’t have to be doing this, but almost no health plans pay for a sex change, so here she is.
She views her job philosophically, “While I’m helping them fulfill their fantasy, they’re helping me finance my dreams.”
* * *
It is difficult to sum up a story like this. There are a lot of different types out there who sell themselves, and it is not an easy job at all. Once you get through the glamour phase, and the having lots of money phase, it can get very old, especially if you develop a habit the way I and many other girls did. It is not an easy life to get out of. Angel had to lose practically everything and start over in a homeless shelter, but she is now in vocational training and can see the light at the end of the tunnel. I hope that other girls who get sick of the job will get that opportunity as well.
I refuse to condemn the job or the people who are doing it. I was a [sexworker] for over a year in 1985-86, and at the time it was the only option I had. I am not ashamed of it in the least, or else I wouldn’t proudly admit to it in print. I’m just glad I was able to move on. For all of the girls still out there, I want to tell them “Play it safe, girl. And visit the self-help center if you want to find a way out.”
And to the tricks, to the guys who pay these girls, I say “Treat those girls right. It’s a bitch of a job, so be glad it’s not you.”
[I was awarded a spot on Spectator‘s masthead for this article and continued to be published there for the next twelve years. I am grateful to managing editor Layne Winklebleck and publisher Kat Sunlove for their faith in me and their encouragement and friendship. You’ll rarely meet better people.]
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