I have two master’s degrees, five years’ experience in the nonprofit sector and three years’ experience teaching — and I cannot get a job. Why? Just google me. I’m the “Hooker Teacher” — at least that’s what I’ve come to be called ever since Sept. 27, 2010, when I found myself on the cover of the New York Post.
“Meet Melissa Petro,” the story began,” the teacher who gives a new twist to sex ed.” The piece describes me as a “tattooed former hooker and stripper” who was “shockingly upfront about her past.” Indeed, earlier that month, I’d written an Op-Ed on the Huffington Post that criticized the recent censoring of the adult services section of Craigslist and came clean about my own sex-worker past. Because I was arguing that sex workers shouldn’t be ashamed to speak for themselves, I signed my name to it. The New York Post wasn’t interested in my politics, however; its interest seemed only in cooking up shock that an elementary school teacher would dare admit such a shady history.
The Internet shaming was fast, intense and seemingly unending, summed up in February by columnist Andrea Peyser, who wrote: “Hooker turned teacher Melissa Petro is a disgrace.”
Eight months after the story broke, I am jobless. I cannot get hired. And even my biggest supporters ask me privately: “But seriously, what were you thinking?” The answer is complicated. I was being idealistic. I was being provocative. I was naive. I picked a fight that I thought I could win — and I was wrong.
One reason I was so casual about the disclosure was that I had been writing about my past long before becoming a teacher. As a student at the New School, where I earned a degree in creative nonfiction, I began work on a memoir that details, in part, how I began stripping while living in Mexico as a student abroad. As an undergraduate at Antioch, I conducted ethnographic research across Europe and in the U.S., interviewing women from all aspects of the industry about their lives and their professions (published in the collection “Sex Work Matters: Power and Intimacy in the Sex Industry”). The subject of sex work and workers’ rights became a passion about which I’ve written in print and online, everywhere from academic and literary journals to political blogs.
Another reason I didn’t think my story would be shocking is because, well, my story isn’t shocking. Whereas some women’s road to sex work entails coercion and last-ditch survival, for me, this wasn’t the case. The product of a working-class home — the first in her family to go to college, let alone study abroad — my working as a stripper began as a means to an end. Prior to stripping, I’d worked in fast food. I’d worked in retail. I even spent one summer delivering singing telegrams. I was used to long hours, unreasonable bosses and very little pay; stripping — at least at first — was the ideal job.
But sex work, I would learn, was a far from perfect occupation. Prostitution, in particular, was not the job for me. I was simply not suited for a profession that relied on dishonesty. I got caught up in the industry’s pull toward materialism and greed. The industry’s criminalized and stigmatized nature only exacerbated the rigors of the work. I kept my job a secret, even from my family and friends. Living a lie, I lied to myself. My own denial and self-justification made it near impossible to extricate myself from the business. It was only by writing about my experiences that I was able to see my truth.
Around my 27th birthday, I gave up sex work for good. It was some months later when — unemployed and working on a book — teaching presented itself as an option. I was attracted to the flexibility and creativity of the profession. I liked the idea of working with children and of making a difference in my community, not to mention the summer vacation. After graduating from the New School, I landed a spot as a New York City Teaching Fellow, which bills itself as a highly competitive program that recruits “high quality, dedicated individuals from different backgrounds” to become teachers in New York City’s struggling public schools. My first year as a teacher, I earned my master’s in childhood education in the evenings while working full-time at an elementary school in the South Bronx. I taught art and creative writing to students in grades K-5, nearly 700 students each week. In the three years I spent there, I grew to love my job.
My past had no bearing on my competence as a teacher, and so I refused to operate as if it did. The idea that an elementary school teacher wasn’t entitled to a life in her off-hours I found equally absurd. Sure, I’d seen other teachers get in trouble for stupid things like pictures or comments posted on Facebook. Even so, I did not think it would happen to me. I was well appreciated at my school. When it came to my administration and my colleagues, my personal life was just that: personal. Many of them knew I was a writer, and those who had bothered to google me knew I wrote about my past. It had never been an issue — until the day it became front-page news.
There it was, my name and likeness — a most unflattering shot, by the way — under varying versions of the “hooker teacher” headline (which always made it sound like I was still involved in sex work, as though I were heading from the reading circle straight to working the streets): “Bronx art teacher blabs about exploits as stripper and hooker,” “Prostitute teacher a reason to end tenure.” I was called an “idiot prosti-teacher” in one N.Y. Post headline. One photo caption by the same publication read, “Attention whore.” More offensive than my past, it seemed, was the fact I’d had the gall to talk about it. The women’s blog, the Frisky, supposed it was “all part of Petro’s media-savvy plan to get publicity for her upcoming memoir,” which the writer called “disgusting.” The Daily News, Inside Edition and Us Weekly all sent their female reporters, women ironically similar to me — young professionals, well-dressed, writers themselves — to get in my face, demanding to know how I could refer to myself as a feminist.
As an advocate, I had long ago realized the media generally treats current and former sex workers in one of two ways: We are portrayed as victims, looked down upon and felt sorry for, too stupid to realize our own victimization; or else we are made out to be villains — dirty, cheap and willing to do anything to satisfy our greed. For years, I’d fought these gross stereotypes. Now I found myself on the receiving end of it.
To some, it was unfathomable to think that a woman could have once been a prostitute and, at another time, served her community competently as a teacher. Even New York’s Mayor Bloomberg made a statement personally requesting my permanent removal from the classroom. It was as though I were a monster needing to be stopped.
I’m not a monster, or a moron. I’m a human being, and — like everyone else — I’ve made mistakes. In the community where I grew up, girls didn’t become writers and teachers; they became strippers. I worked hard to earn my degrees. Of my sex work past, I have no regrets. Why, hadn’t I done exactly what critics of prostitution would have wanted? I had exited the sex industry to become a “productive” member of society. And yet no one seemed to accept that I might not be ashamed of my past. That I might, on the contrary, be proud of it.
I thought my perspective deserved to be heard. I thought that my speech was protected. I did not believe a government employee could lose her job for publishing an Op-Ed. Like I said, I was naive.
The night before the Post article came out I received a phone call from the superintendent of schools in my district informing me that I’d been put in reassignment. Instead of teaching I would report to the Department of Education administrative offices and sit awaiting instruction, where I sat for months until this past Friday, my last day. After months of investigation, I was formally charged. The charges — conduct unbecoming a professional –were a direct result of my published writing, the evidence cited against me consisting entirely of my quoted work. The fact that I was competent in my role as a teacher was never called into question. Even the Post could find no way of describing me other than “well liked.” But my job performance was never a consideration. The only fact that seemed to matter, apparently, was that I’d been a whore.
In the days and weeks following my reassignment, I learned a number of hard lessons about constitutional law. The constitutionality of a government employee’s speech is contingent on whether or not that speech creates a distraction in the workplace and, if it does, it is not protected so long as the distraction outweighs its political worth. This is the same reason that a soldier, according to people like John McCain, shouldn’t announce that he or she is gay. Doing so, the argument goes, would create a “mortal distraction.” In the case of the Hooker Teacher, in order to fire me the DOE needed only to prove that my writing created a disruption in my school community and that such a disruption had little societal value. Whether it was my speech or the speech of the New York Post that created the disruption was, of course, an argument to be made.
Meanwhile, the actual political import of my work was impossible to gauge, my own words buried in google searches underneath inflammatory news pieces, sensational headlines and cherry-picked excerpts from my creative work that, printed out of context, suggested I wrote at length about marijuana-fueled shenanigans and lesbian love affairs. Contrary to how I was being painted in the headlines, I was not a teacher blogging recklessly in her off-hours on WordPress about her sexual escapades. I was a writer and, as a writer, I was establishing a platform as a social commentator on an issue of cultural importance.
In the wake of Hooker Teacher headlines no one was debating the censoring of Craigslist, the legality of prostitution or even the constitutionality of my reassignment. The heated debate in the commentary section of the Daily News, for example, was whether I was hot enough to be paid for sex. The papers printed my personal Facebook statuses as if they were news. CBS published a slide show of my personal pictures, implicating my family and friends. The home where I lived was revealed on the nightly news so that anyone who wanted to could easily come find me. I was personally insulted and put at risk, then made to feel that by publishing a work of serious nonfiction, I had been “asking for it.”
Sure, I knew I was taking a risk. I stated that in the original HuffPo piece. But knowing there is a risk doesn’t mean you realize how great a risk it is, or what the consequences will be. And the consequences, in a word, have been devastating.
While I was paid by my employer through April, I had been relying on two after-school jobs to make ends meet. The day the Post story hit I was unceremoniously fired from both, including a position working in the childcare section of my gym. Other than an offer to be in a porn mag and another paid opportunity to be interviewed on “Inside Edition” — an agreement that felt a little like Red Riding Hood signing off to have dinner with the wolves — there were no silver linings in my dark cloud of publicity. Like the teenager I had once been, this past winter I would’ve done almost anything for cash. No one willing to hire the hooker teacher meant that I skipped meals. I walked instead of taking the train and didn’t launder my clothes as often as necessary. This, I understand, is the predicament of the unemployed and working poor and it reminded me a lot of how I grew up. I worked hard to escape those circumstances, and the fact that I was back there — with student loans to boot — felt unfair.
I suppose I could’ve just gone back to hooking. Instead, I made the arguably anti-feminist decision to give up my apartment and move in with my boyfriend. If this situation has taught me anything, it is that sometimes we must put ideals aside and think practically — much like I did at 19 years old, when I became a stripper. So, in the end, I resigned from my job, rather than pursuing a trial. I quit rather than be fired because, had I not signed their agreement, the DOE threatened to contest my unemployment. As much as I believed in the merits of my case, it was a risk I couldn’t take.
Now, I send out rafts of résumés, and I can’t find work. Whether that’s partly the economy, I can’t say, but these days it seems my most important former occupation is the one not on my résumé. Despite all I’ve lost, though, I refuse to let this defeat me. I know there would be something worse than living with the consequences of speaking my truth: living in silence. Let’s hope potential employers take note: I didn’t lose my job for being a hooker. I lost my job for being a writer.
It used to be that strip clubs were merely blamed for society’s ills. Now they’re actually being charged for it.
In recent years, measures have been introduced in Georgia, Pennsylvania, Texas, Illinois and, most recently, California to apply special taxes to strip clubs — specifically to fund sexual assault services. Now, even if you aren’t inclined to view erotic entertainment as the source of all evil, this might seem an appropriate aim — who wants to argue against additional support for rape survivors? It would seem even more so when you consider politicians’ and activists’ repeated claims of solid scientific evidence showing a link between strip clubs — specifically those that sell alcohol — and sexual violence.
That is, until you look at the alleged proof.
The key study advocates point to is one commissioned by the Texas Legislature in 2009. But that very report states, “no study has authoritatively linked alcohol, sexually oriented business, and the perpetration of sexual violence.” What’s more, when I talked to Bruce Kellison, director of the Bureau of Business Research at the University of Texas at Austin, and one of the authors of the report, about the alleged link between strip clubs and sexual assault, he said, “That’s not really what our study was trying to do.”
What it was trying to do was review the research on whether clubs have a “negative secondary effect” (in other words, harmful side effects). “Most of the [research] has found that there is a moderate amount of increased criminal activity outside of clubs,” he said. That’s a point contested by some: Daniel Linz, a communications and law professor at the University of California, Santa Barbara, says studies used to support restrictive zoning or special taxes on strip clubs are methodologically flawed — they fail to use appropriate controls and rely on inconsistent and unreliable data sources. Take, for example, that zoning laws often relegate strip clubs to shadier parts of town, where, of course, there is greater crime. Without an appropriate control, that crime can’t be attributed to the club itself.
According to a study Linz conducted, “Those studies that are scientifically credible demonstrate either no negative secondary effects associated with adult businesses or a reversal of the presumed negative effect.” He tells me, “We’ve done crime map after crime map after crime map of many cities and there just aren’t clusters of crime around [strip clubs]. Most crime in most cities tends to occur around high schools.” Tax the teens!
That’s just to speak of crime in general. The important thing here, given the aim of these tax initiatives, is sex crime. The Texas report looked at the incidence of sexual violence in particular inside the clubs and found that there wasn’t “additional sexual assault violence going on in the clubs,” says Kellison, or even around the clubs.
Again, as with many things in this arena, that’s contested by some. Richard McCleary, a criminology professor at the University of California, Irvine, whom Linz says he’s had a “10-year scientific battle with,” argues that there is a sexual violence impact, but not the kind that these initiatives imply. He cites a 1998 survey of “a small sample” of adult entertainers that found a high rate of reported sexual victimization inside or nearby the club. This contradicts the findings of the Texas report, however. It’s also important to note that the proposed special taxes don’t go directly toward victimized dancers; the intended target is much broader than that.
McCleary also backs up his assertion saying that street prostitutes “are attracted to the neighborhood because of the clientele and that tends to be an extremely violent trade.” Even if we’re to presume that street prostitutes are driven to strip club neighborhoods in droves, and that they in general experience a high level of violence in their work, it isn’t a direct consequence of the venue itself. As Judith Hanna, an anthropologist and author of “Naked Truth: Strip Clubs, Democracy and a Christian Right,” told me, decriminalizing prostitution would be a much more effective way to address the violence that street prostitutes face.
Hanna is particularly sympathetic to the cause. She’s worked as a volunteer for over a decade with a program for victims of sexual assault, and yet she says, “I never, nor have others in the program, known of a sexual crime victim related to a strip club.” She’s quick to point out that “there is a plethora of evidence that clergy have committed sexual crimes against women, boys and girls.” Where’s their sexual violence tax?
Kellison cuts to the chase: “The reason that many advocates say the strip club industry is being tied directly to the effort to raise funds for rape crisis centers is not because there is increased sexual assault behavior going on inside the clubs or outside the clubs or as a result of a guy going to a strip club,” he says. “That is a very difficult argument to make. What the advocates will say is that it’s an industry that is primarily run with the use of women for, generally speaking, male purposes, male benefit. And that’s why advocates have seen it reasonable to ask the industry to support a tax that would fund services that are primarily geared toward women.”
Well, they rarely actually come out and say it so plainly without the cover of alleged evidence, but that is the fundamental moral judgment behind these initiatives.
Now, there is a strong link between alcohol consumption and sexual violence, but, as Linz says, “any location that is serving drinks, whether it’s a strip club or a regular bar is going to have this societal effect.” He adds, “Compared to other businesses that serve alcohol in the community, these places are no better and no worse.” In other words, it’s the booze, not the boobs.
McCleary, on the other hand, argues that there’s evidence that those who have consumed both alcohol and adult entertainment are more violent than those who have consumed only one or the other. But this is based on laboratory research, which McCleary admits is a far cry from the real world. He also says “it’s very difficult to establish a causal link.”
Critics say these measures have advanced because of courts holding them to a low standard of proof. While some circuits require “reliable social science evidence” to establish negative secondary effects, says Linz, others essentially say, “The city can pick and choose among findings and come to whatever conclusion they want.” Some argue that secondary effects — which were originally used to justify zoning restrictions but have since been applied to even regulations on the content of dances and the degree of nudity — have trumped First Amendments rights. David L. Hudson Jr., a research attorney at the First Amendment Center, calls exotic dancing “a First Amendment stepchild” and writes in a report on the topic, “Many free-speech advocates claim that the secondary-effects doctrine has allowed municipal officials an easy path to censorship.”
Speaking of censorship, Hanna sees crusading religious moralism at work. “A segment of the politically active Christian right are not only opposed to these clubs but they are working like the Tea Party works,” she says. “They have alliances, they have big money and they’re fighting it. Sometimes it’s indirect, they’re electing their people to legislative bodies — you only need one person to start making big noise.”
These measures are a crystal clear reflection of extreme conservative views of sexuality and gender. As Hanna tells me, “The Christian right believes that if you see a nude woman you’re gonna go out and rape the first woman you see.” She also points to the stereotype of “men as a volcano of testosterone ready to be ignited.” From that vantage point, the leap from strip clubs to rape makes intuitive sense — but it doesn’t make it fact.
There’s also just plain financial desperation behind these initiatives. Several sponsors have admitted that the tax is a response to devastating budget cuts to sexual assault resources. Sin taxes — those applied to alcohol, cigarettes and gambling — are not new and have only increased as cities face severe budget cuts. What’s unique about the strip club taxes is not only that boozy adult entertainment venues are being singled out — as opposed to the broader category of liquor — but also that the taxes are being directed toward a cause that is empirically unrelated.
When it comes to adult entertainment, though, critical thinking often falls by the wayside. Strip clubs are an easy target for religious moralizing and political pandering — and one few are willing to defend.
It’s hard to work up much outrage about the Secret Service prostitution scandal, in which 11 members of the president’s elite protective service and various military personnel were found to have picked up escorts in Colombia, where they were doing advance work for the president’s visit. I guess it is probably not a good idea for the people in charge of protecting the president to leave themselves vulnerable to sexual blackmail, but on the other hand we do not live in a John Le Carré novel or “24″ episode, and I don’t think the threat of a honey-trap assassination conspiracy plot is very credible. If members of the Secret Service want to get drunk and hire escorts after work, that is their business. (As Melissa Gira Grant says, the only actual scandal here — and the reason this became an international incident — is that all these guys tried to bilk one of the women out of the money she was owed.)
But the predictable Washington mixture of prurient interest and moral posturing has turned this incident into grist for the scandals-and-investigations mill. And now we have the attempts at somehow making this a winning partisan issue for Republicans. Chuck Grassley, the senator from Iowa who triumphed over adversity and became the ranking Republican on the Senate Judiciary Committee despite being functionally illiterate, would like to know whether any White House staff also slept with escorts that evening. No one has made the claim, but Grassley’s asking just in case. (For a live peek at a future paranoid right-wing myth in its embryonic stage, read the comments on that Washington Times story: “I can just hear those paper shredders going a mile a minute in the white house, and the document forgers are being called in, you know the same ones that did the birth certificate.”) Grassley was on Fox last night to make sure viewers repeatedly heard baseless speculation as to the involvement of White House staff.
Rep. Pete King, Long Island Republican and stalwart publicity monger, has sent Secret Service Director Mark Sullivan a list of 50 questions about the scandal in order to make it appear that he is very seriously investigating this very serious incident.
For those outside Congress, for whom insinuating escort patronage by unnamed White House staff seems a bit of a reach, the game is to attempt to use the scandal to prove some point the fecklessness of Obama as a leader and his shameful failure to make everyone in Washington stop being so awful and wasteful all the time.
NRO’s Mark Steyn, after praising the fiscal discipline of the agent who attempted to bilk his escort (ugh), suggests that the moral of the story is that we pay too much for presidential security, and that all those agents and fancy bullet-proof Suburbans are wastes of taxpayer funds and evidence of broke post-Imperial America’s profligacy. Sarah Palin, who had every right to be personally aggrieved for once, after it was reported that the agent at the center of the scandal wrote gross sexist things about her on Facebook, was among the first to declare that the problem was with the “culture” Obama has created at the White House. (Karl Rove, smarter than most of these people, suggested that politicizing a Secret Service scandal was dumb and counterproductive. Secret Service Director Mark Sullivan, coincidentally, was elevated to his position under George W. Bush.)
The makeup of the Secret Service, obviously, has very little connection to the political party of the person occupying the White House. Like most American law enforcement agencies, it’s primarily white and overwhelmingly male, and, historically, the culture of the agency has had more than a whiff of machismo. These are not exactly the sort of public sector employees right-wingers get off on demonizing.
In fact, the right has had for years a sort of Clint Eastwood-inspired fantasy of the Secret Service agent as folk hero. Decent, hard-working men putting their lives on the line to protect a bunch of elitist ingrates. That ingratiating phony Bill Clinton and his frigid, hectoring monster of a wife weren’t deserving of such stolid, unflinching loyalty and service.
The fullest expression of this fantasy is in this classic chain email that made its way to every inbox in the nation during the second president Bush’s first term. According to this email, attributed to the unnamed author’s former neighbor, the president’s security detail was constantly disrespected by those awful Clintons and their terrible staff. Hillary Clinton was “arrogant and orally abusive.” “She forbade her daughter, Chelsea, from exchanging pleasantries with” agents. “Al Gore resented Bill Clinton and thought he was to centrist. He despised all republicans.” Agents prayed for Bush to win the election, and their reward was the joy they all felt in the presence of President Bush and his amazing, wonderful wife.
This nonsense has its roots in fake anti-Hillary attacks, attributed to imaginary Secret Service members, that Republican operatives spread to sympathetic media voices starting more or less the day Bill took office. Former Secret Service agents do plenty of gossiping and bitching, most frequently to Ronald Kessler, but their complaints don’t tend to track quite so directly to right-wing fantasy narratives.
But a popular trope is of the upstanding agents blanching at being asked to look the other way as libidinous Democratic presidents — Kennedy, Johnson, and Clinton — womanized. (Clinton was said to have threatened to fire agents who stymied his attempts to have trysts with Monica Lewinsky, though the agent who made the claim admitted to having invented it.) The pat moralism of the conservative Secret Service fantasy makes the agency’s lurid misadventure a bit funnier. It also explains why various people have to somehow convince themselves that the Obama administration somehow degraded the agency, through a lack of “management skills” or the widespread embrace of sexual deviance that is the logical end result of repealing the military’s ban on out gays and lesbians.
When people learn that I’m a gay male escort, they invariably ask me how much my life is like the movie “Pretty Woman.”
“It’s more like ‘Daddy Day Care,’” I usually quip. And while that’s meant to be a joke, there’s also some truth to it. I spend a good amount of my work time offering support and advice to men in their 30s and 40s who are just coming out of the closet. Surprised? I was too, at first. But then I thought, where else are these guys going to catch up on two decades of sexual and social experience? Until someone comes out with “Gay for Dummies,” the next best thing is a trained professional.
A few years ago, for example, a charming man from Vancouver hired me every night for a week while he was in Las Vegas for a conference. By the time he went home we’d checked off every item on his wish list, and he was finally comfortable lying naked with another man. It was strangely gratifying to help a guy learn the ropes.
But nothing prepared me for Hector: Thirty-nine years old, handsome, stocky, with a full black beard. Born and raised in Argentina, he lived in Chicago and owned a seat on the stock exchange. He was successful but lonely, and so intensely left-brained that he had carefully engineered a self-improvement plan: He took a sabbatical from work to get himself together. Among other things, he needed to admit he was gay and better understand how that fit into his life. That’s where I came in.
When I first spotted him I thought, “Damn, this guy needs new pictures.” He was much better looking than he’d led me to believe, and more socially adept as well. We clicked instantly. And I don’t know where he learned how, but he kissed like the devil himself.
We had a suite at the Bellagio and spent the weekend like a couple of princes. We went to the spa on Sunday, and then stayed in our bathrobes and ordered appetizers from room service while we watched the Oscars, like two teenagers pretending to be Hollywood royalty.
We also made practical plans, mapping out the next few months on a calendar, scheduling what we’d do and where we’d go. He came back to Las Vegas twice, and we traveled together to Washington (for the cherry blossoms), Provincetown, Montreal, Miami, Hawaii and – wait for it – Paris for the French Open. This was the best gig ever.
Now, I can be what my friends kindly refer to as “an acquired taste.” I have a classic Irish temper, I talk too much, and I tend to be too clever by half. I can also be moody, needing to go off by myself for no discernible reason. So while I wasn’t concerned I’d get bored with Hector, I was a little worried he might get tired of me. But we only had one serious confrontation.
I tried a little too hard to share my love of nude beaches, for which Hawaii is especially famous. He tolerated the one we found on Maui; it was beautiful, and it wasn’t crowded. But the one on the Big Island was another story. It required a treacherous climb to get to, and was filled with too much tie-dye and the kind of bodies no one wants to see naked. Long story short: We didn’t stay very long.
We were spending a few days in Hilo, which is not a town most people recommend. The best hotels haven’t been renovated since the ’70s and there are very few sandy beaches within city limits. As we were driving back, Hector grew quiet, and I tried to fill the air with idle chatter.
“Can we not talk until we get back to the hotel, please?” he asked.
Eventually we stopped for coffee.
“I’m really angry right now,” he started, “so I have to ask you this and hope I get an honest answer.” A beat. “Was that beach the whole reason we came to Hilo?”
I’m not usually very good with confrontation, and my knee-jerk response is to raise my voice. But Hector was calm and his tone was more inquisitive than accusatory, so I tried to follow his lead. “If you knew me any better,” I answered, “I’d be really pissed off that you asked me that question. I don’t manipulate people, and I really don’t like being accused of it.”
“And if I knew you better,” he said, “I probably wouldn’t have to ask. But I do.”
I understood where Hector was coming from, especially given the number of disappointments we’d already met with in Hilo. I explained to him that I didn’t even know about the nude beach until we’d planned to come here. I wanted to come to Hilo for the botanical gardens and the waterfalls we’d seen that morning.
“OK,” he said. “Makes sense. But we’re done with nude beaches.”
It was the only time he ever pulled rank, and within a day the story was a joke between us, the mere mention of Hippie Hollow eliciting mutual groans.
The “Hippie Hollow Incident” was the most mature disagreement I have ever had – including fights with my parents, everyone I’ve ever worked for, and all of my boyfriends. The guy I lived with for four years? We’d have had two weeks of drama and a ruined vacation at the very least. Instead, Hector and I grew closer because of it. Was this because this was ultimately a business deal and we weren’t arguing as much as negotiating? Or was it because we were especially adept at communicating with each other? Who can say?
Whatever the reasons, the rest of our time together only became more enchanted: sunset dinners on the beach in Kona, orchestra seats for “Follies” at the Kennedy Center, watching Federer’s narrow victory over Monfils from a box at the French Open. It was the kind of magic that would make even a chick-flick aficionado roll her eyes and say, “Yeah, right.” And yet there we were.
Until we weren’t.
The last time I saw Hector was in the Newark airport after we came back from Paris. We’d planned to meet up again in San Francisco for one last week before he returned to work. Instead, he canceled a few days before our meeting. His leave had gone terribly over budget, he said, and he wanted to spend time alone before heading back to work. We’d do a long weekend in the fall, after he’d readjusted to work. Sounded good to me.
I tried to arrange a rendezvous over Thanksgiving and then again over Christmas, but both times he demurred. I was on the East Coast for New Year’s and I asked him if I should stop in Chicago on my way home. He never gave me a straight answer until I pushed the issue. He said it wasn’t a good time.
So our story is unfinished. We send each other text messages several times a week, and I consider him one of my best friends. And yet, I still can’t help wondering what things would be like if we’d met under different circumstances.
Once, while walking along the Seine (you can’t make this stuff up), he told me how sad he was that our time together was drawing to a close. Half-joking, I suggested he take me away from my life of crime and make an honest man of me. He said he wished he could, and I believed him. I still believe him. But I also know that we live in a real world where people click and then discover all kinds of complications. We just happened to know the complications in advance, and then went on the honeymoon, only then to discover how much we liked each other. For now, I continue to mentor guys in the ways of love with other men. Hector has returned to work with confidence, and he has no trouble meeting guys. I encourage him to date. If I know the way Hector’s mind works he won’t even think about embarking on any kind of serious relationship – with me or anyone – until he’s had more practice. In the process he might meet the one guy who’s perfect for him, and good for him if he does.
I know nothing serious could grow between us until I retire from the skin trade. I certainly couldn’t date a hooker – I’m way too insecure for that – and I wouldn’t expect anybody else to. But I’m not planning to escort for the rest of my life. I expect I’ll leave Vegas eventually too; there’s way too much world out there for me to stay in the desert. I don’t expect anything as widescreen as a limo or flowers or being “saved” by anyone (with or without a lot of money); I gave up on that fantasy a long time ago. What’s different for me now is that I’m able to imagine somebody else – maybe Hector, maybe not – in the picture with me on whatever comes next. And that means seeing things through a whole new lens.
Ontario’s top court has legalized brothels in the Canadian province, a ruling that is meant to protect the safety of sex workers.
The landmark decision taken Monday, decided that the dangerous work of prostitution could be made more safe if it occurred under one roof with security staff, reported the Globe and Mail.
The Appeals Court of Ontario said that some of the country’s anti-prostitution laws were unconstitutional as they restricted the prostitute’s ability to protect themselves — a ruling already made by a lower court in 2010 but appealed by the provincial and federal governments.
The court also said that it would re-model the law against pimps, which prohibits living off the work of others by adding “in circumstances of exploitation,” reported PostMedia News.
This is thought to allow violent or manipulative pimps to be arrested, while permitting prostitutes to be able to hire drivers and security staff for their safety.
Prostitution is legal in Canada with many caveats.
According to the Associated Press, while sex work might be legal, soliciting sex and operating a brothel are both criminal acts.
While the latter provision was struck down, the court upheld the ban on soliciting sex in public.
According to the National Post, the new laws will likely prompt similar challenges in other provinces around the country.
The case was brought forward by an appeal by the provincial and federal governments, which opposed the earlier lower court ruling.
The case took nine months of deliberation and a week of oral arguments with more than 25,000 pages of evidence, according to the National Post.
Witnesses at the hearings included current and former prostitutes, police, activists, politicians and journalists.
Both sides said they will take their case to the Supreme Court of Canada if they lost.
The new laws, which will be binding in Ontario, will come into effect next year.
This article is the second in a
new series of oral histories by former and current sex workers, in which they describe the moment they told their family what they do.
I’ve lived in San Francisco for 18 years, and I’ve always been around porn. For a long time, I worked behind the scenes, at a couple of companies’ websites and stuff like that, but I had never wanted to do porn because I wasn’t secure with the way I looked or I had a boyfriend who was against it. Around 2009, those weren’t problems anymore. I got approached to do some nude photo shoots, and one of them ended up being picked up by Men Magazine, which at that time was kind of a big thing. At the same time, a friend of mine was directing a video that he wanted me to be in. At first I just wanted to be an extra, and then he was like, “Why not just have sex in it?” And so I did. Then another director found out about me, and then another, and then I was scheduled in four videos in pretty much the same time.
I liked doing porn. Though I never wanted to be in a situation where I was doing it to pay my rent, I wanted to do it to enrich my life, so I could do things I wanted to do or so I could go on a vacation I wanted to go on. I was making good money, and all that kind of stuff. I filmed my first films in the beginning of 2009, and things started to come out in August 2009. I got tons of press and everything, but I didn’t tell my mom — not because I was skittish about it. My mother was a free love hippie-type person, and she’s always been very sex positive. But it was not something I needed to tell her. My parents divorced when I was really young, but I don’t talk to my dad. I came out to him when I was 17 or 18, but he is very anti-gay, so I haven’t spoken with him in 17 years.
Then in February of 2010 I got a phone call from my mom. My mom never calls me. Never. It’s like pulling teeth to get her to talk on the phone, but she called me and she was like, “Are you on the cover of a magazine?” I had been voted Man of the Year in Unzipped Magazine that month, so I said, “Yeah … how do you know that?” And so she told me this story: It was a Saturday night, and she had had a date with a guy and he had stood her up. She wanted to entertain herself so she went to the adult bookstore to buy a dildo, and she decided to browse the gay magazines because she said that’s where the hottest guys always were. And there I was on the cover of the magazine.
Later on she called me again. She had read the article that went with my photos in the magazine, and she said it was really beautiful. She cried a little bit and I was like, “Oh, that’s really nice.” I think at one point she wishes she could have done porn, which is a strange thing to hear from your mom. Now we talk a lot more and there’s always the feeling that I don’t need to be hiding anything from her. If you’re open to your mom with the fact that you do porn there’s not really any other secret you can have.
Porn is much more out there these days. So many celebrities have sex videos, and everybody has naked pictures on their phones, and there are so many amateur porn tube sites. But I know a lot of people who come from conservative religious backgrounds whose parents have completely disowned them or distanced themselves from them, and it’s unfortunate. It’s hard to come out as a gay person, but it’s even more difficult to also come out as a person who has sex for a living. It can be hard for some family members to take. But that’s their loss, unfortunately.
My partner also does porn and his porn coming-out started when his aunt, who had a lot of gay friends, found his blog online. Then she told his mother. And she was shocked at first. But now she’s completely accepted it and makes jokes about it, like, “If I do porn, my porn name is going to be Luscious Lynn.” My mother is actually coming to visit in a week for a few days, and she’ll be meeting my partner for the first time, which is great.
I’ve never seen doing porn as a negative thing — ever. Just because it’s sex doesn’t mean it’s not moral. I’m not swindling people. There are plenty of white-collar jobs with bigger ethics and morality issues. I know the rest of society doesn’t see it that way, and it’s always a little frustrating to be an intelligent, educated, articulate person doing porn and have people thinking that you’re a high school dropout.
My mom’s just happy that I’m successful and not on drugs and happy. Anything else is a bonus.
As told to Thomas Rogers.
Samuel Colt is a gay porn performer living in San Francisco.
A photo of the author 
(Credit: iStockphoto/wragg) 
President Obama, surrounded by members of the Secret Service, upon his arrival in San Diego, Sept. 26, 2011. (Credit: AP/Pablo Martinez Monsivais) 
(Credit: ArrowStudio, LLC via Shutterstock) 
Sex workers listen to a presentation at the 16th International AIDS conference in Toronto (Credit: Reuters/JP Moczulski) 
(Credit: Unzipped.net) 
