Despite the prevailing image of the prostitute as a drug addicted, impoverished street walker, recent studies approximate that 80-85% of all prostitutes would be better classified as middle or "high" class. Working for massage parlors, escort services, or privately out of their apartments, these men and women earn high hourly rates ($50-250) in a context of relative safety and autonomy. Not surprisingly, the sacred whore movement has sprung almost exclusively from within this upscale, inconspicuous portion of the prostitute population.

In the 1970's, some middle-class sex workers formed lobbying groups like C.O.Y.O.T.E. (Call Off Your Old Tired Ethics) to fight for prostitutes' rights. At the margins of this political movement, a spiritual arm evolved in which the stigma of prostitution was transformed into a kind of stigmata. Where the purely political prostitutes were fighting to be accepted as ordinary professionals seeking the same rights as other working people, the "spiritual prostitutes" went one step further. They consider themselves not only legitimate "workers," but the unheralded social workers, gurus, and saints of our time.

I also discovered that the movement is not confined to wacky San Francisco. There are prostitution "temples" and "private erotic practices" in California, Hawaii, Washington, the Southwest and New England. "Erotic healers" lead workshops and seminars, teaching ordinary folk how to have orgasms, dress up and talk dirty, and "heal their sexual wounds." There are books like "Women of the Light: The New Sacred Prostitute" and how-to videos like "Ancient Secrets of Sexual Ecstasy for Modern Lovers." The movement even has its own national spokesperson, Annie Sprinkle, a beatific ex-porn queen. Whether the "sacred whores" are invoking the scriptures of Tantrism, the relics of paganism, or the psycho-sexual theories of Freud's contemporary Wilhelm Reich, they all rely on that decidedly New Age blend of piety and unorthodoxy, intuition and ancient authority. After asking around in the bohemian underground, I soon had my first appointment with a real sacred sex worker.

***

I meet Regan in the brightly-painted flat she shares with two other women. With her pink cheeks, flowing Indian prints and anarchist hairdo, Regan is the very picture of an inner-city cherub.

As with most sacred sex workers I would speak to, a desire for quick cash rather than enlightenment brought about Regan's entry into sex work. When she lost her job as a cashier at a strip joint the same week her college tuition was due, she decided to join the dancers on stage. From there she got a job working for an erotic massage out-call service. But Regan soon realized her own feminist ideas didn't necessarily jibe with her clients' expectations.

"These men would call me up and ask me all these questions about what I looked like and I would say, I'm not a model and I'm not here to do modeling, what I do is touch."

She soon quit, and while working as a teacher for disturbed children, she studied a host of "bodywork techniques and therapeutic modalities". Finally, she began her own "private practice" and began working for Body Electric, a school dedicated to teaching "the art of sacred sexuality." Founded by gay men , Body Electric only recently began offering classes for women.

"My class involves a lot of self-awareness exercises, breath work, intimacy exercises. Then the students practice erotic massage on each other to the point where it's this room of women ecstatically screaming, praying, vibrating, catharting."

At first the misty New Age lingo confuses me. Then the words "group hand job" flash across my mind, and suddenly the workshop seems terrifying. Who would take such a class? As if she can read my mind, Regan tells me that the class attracts a wide variety of women: "Married, lesbian, straight. We even once had five Mormon women fly in from Utah."

The notion that I could be more uptight than a bunch of Mormon housewives is difficult to swallow. I move on to the issue of her private practice, which I assume caters primarily to men. When asked if the power dynamic in filling men's sexual desires isn't inherently degrading, she tells me that her private practice is now limited to a few women -- "all of whom I love so much."

As I leave Regan's apartment, I wonder if she's an "average" sacred whore. After all, she doesn't do "full-service sex," she has years of training, and she services only women -- which, even in the exalted circles of sacred sexuality, is highly unusual. Like a white bigot who befriends a black person only to decide the new friend's not really black, I venture to my next appointment certain that Regan will prove the exception to the rule.

Wearing a muscle t-shirt and tiny shorts, Gregory O'Neill welcomes me into his meticulous neo-modern apartment and offers me some ginseng tea, informing me that it's a trade secret among male prostitutes for its help with potency. The lanky redhead tells me how sex work provided him with an escape from his job as a paralegal at a corporate law firm. After getting a certificate in massage, he placed an ad in the local newspaper and launched his private practice which offers everything from traditional massage to "full-service" sex.

"When I was working at the law firm, I hated my self, hated my life. I fit the cliche description when you watch Donahue or Oprah of how prostitutes feel: demoralized, depressed. Then when I started doing sex work, I felt great about myself. I had my life in control."

This copy-ready explanation raises my skepticism, but he resists any suggestion that the work has a dark side, citing improved hours, better pay and more time for his acting career.

"It's a healing art just like medicine. The long and the short of it is that everyone in this society is really repressed."

Okay, I agree, maybe all sex work has some curative dimension because of the need for safe, sexual expression. But what makes the work sacred? When I press him to tell me how he distinguishes his work from that of a street walker, he launches into a tirade worthy of stage or screen.

"Frankly, I'm getting a little sick of the 'McSacred' whores. All prostitution is sacred, so can we get over this, and get on with the craft, please? They get a little too much mileage out of that concept. It's a gimmick. The hustlers on the street are as sacred as I am. They may not be in touch with it. They may be living on this seedy, desperate level but we're talking about a universal force that has been in play as long as the species has existed."

When I ask Gregory what he thinks about the high frequency of sex workers who were sexually abused, he scolds me for my backwardness. "That's just the kind of question they'd ask on Oprah. You gotta look out for the faux logic that is sex negativity: 'Were you abused? Sex is bad so something must be wrong with you.' I wasn't abused and I don't know a single sex worker who was."

I admit I'm not as free and easy as certain Mormon housewives, but the Oprah comparison strikes me as a little harsh. I sense that simmering just below Gregory's boosterism, is a looming directive. Don't you dare -- he seems to be telling me with each of his answers -- portray me as a victim.

No one could ever call Cosi Fabian a victim. At 49, Cosi enjoys the cachet of an elder intellectual in a profession known more for flesh than scholarship. Despite her writing, speaking engagements, seminars and appearances at conferences, Cosi has not retired from sex work as many others have. Sitting in the incensed air of her velvet-draped apartment surrounded by papers, books and ancient talismans, the dry-witted Brit with auburn curls and Tina Turner legs gives the impression of an anthropology professor who has divided her life between a primitive island culture and the academy.

When her AA group told Cosi that she needed to find "a higher power," the professed agnostic realized she was too much of a feminist to embrace a traditional religion with a male God.

"I went to the library. And I discovered the stories of the pre-patriarchal goddesses. For the first time, I found versions of the divine that not only reflected my true nature but precisely the things that had gotten me into trouble -- i.e. a very active sexuality, rebellious qualities and autonomous thinking."

For the next seven years while she worked as an executive secretary at an advertising firm, she developed her own religion based on the temple prostitute/priestesses of the ancient Near East. Deciding she needed a change, Cosi called all of her friends and asked them if they knew any working prostitutes. Eventually, she located a friend of a friend who briefed her on the logistics of becoming a self-employed call girl.

Impatient with my rote questions, Cosi launches into a discussion of the various intellectual positions within the sacred sex scene. "Tantrikas," drawing on the rites of the ancient Hindu sect Tantra, teach the individual to experience an "enormous spiritual orgasm." Her own philosophy, by contrast, is premised on "the spontaneity of the Goddess Aphrodite" and "holds that pussy is the original icon."

"I believe sacred sexuality can also be a good old fashioned debauch. Pleasure is its own best teacher."

In the middle of our talk the phone rings and she speaks to a client, her voice moving between maternal and openly sardonic. "Hello Mr. David. Are you ready to be done?"

When she hangs up, she announces matter-of-factly. "Dave the Slave. I'm doing a double with him and a friend of mine."

From her tone with "Dave," I do not doubt her ability to negotiate the fine line between humor, sexuality and tenderness. After meeting Cosi, my misgivings about women dedicating themselves to pleasuring men have all but vanished. Claims to "stand in for the Goddess" so that men can worship the "wondrous vulva" certainly sound like an elaborate defense, but coming from a woman of such easy self-possession, I buy it hook, line and sinker.

"The public seems to think that women who do this work surrender their selves and become chameleons for their clients. It's the antithesis. I am never more myself than when I'm doing this work."

This strikes me as good a definition of true vocation as any. And one that is difficult to live up to no matter what your work. I think about this as I step into Matthew Simmons' teal and lavender apartment, decorated with a flying Balinese phallus and stars on the ceiling. It is difficult to interview a saint -- even one belonging to a religion you cannot quite fathom -- and yet that is how I have come to think of this sweet-faced 36-year-old with the unfurrowed brow and liquid voice.

Like Regan, Matthew spends part of his time flying around the country teaching workshops for the Body Electric School. Like Gregory, he services a mostly gay male clientele and creates performance art about his sex work. Like Cosi, he has spent years developing spiritual beliefs that support his labor. But Matthew has ventured beyond the world of the average sex worker. Working as a "midwife for the dying," Matthew applies the erotic and emotional skills he learned as a call boy in Minneapolis (where his clients were mostly closeted married men) to help men dying of AIDS.

"It naturally evolved out of my sex work. The first person came to me after his lover had died and he had realized that he had totally shut down the sexual side of himself. He too had AIDS and wanted to feel alive in his body."

When asked about the dangers of AIDS transmission, he shrugs and says that he just takes the necessary precautions and does only what he's comfortable with. Often he encourages men to "speak their desire" in the most outrageous way so that even if they can't act it out it, they can still express it. While some of his clients have had the resources to pay him, he has also volunteered his services. For Matthew, the connection between giving pleasure and easing death is obvious.

"Two of the most energetic experiences that you will ever have in your own life are orgasm and death. In the moment when you're orgasming you are your truest self and in death there's the same kind of clarity. Conscious sex, conscious death -- and in that gaining consciousness about your life."

He leans forward and stares at me intently.

"Part of transformation is going to a place of the unknown and stepping into the fire, so to speak, and going to a place of danger. If you know where you're going, there's no magic in it."

By the time I leave Matthew Simmons's apartment, its flying phalli and starry teal-blue sky, I feel I have glimpsed into the sublime ether of the sacred sex worker. With each interview I have grown less and less comfortable asking my skeptical questions and more inclined to just listen slack-jawed to their bizarre yet endearing lives. I have, in short, become something of a convert.

Then I meet Trixy O'Toole, a retired sacred sex worker.

The strawberry blond with a Carolinian drawl and a sinewy cat-like presence is already waiting for me on a couch at the back of a dark cafe. The first thing she tells me is that her sex work grew out of her desire to "heal" her father who had molested her as a child.

"I'm not saying every sex worker has been molested but for me every time I went in that room I was dealing with my father. I saw 204 men before I could walk away. It was a matter of learning to say no."

I am in different territory now. Trixy is the first sacred sex worker to reveal the uglier side of the industry.

She tells me how for the past four years she beat, licked and groaned her way through a number of sex-related industries: phone sex, stripping, S/M dominatrix parlor and "sacred hand jobs." She candidly sums up her opinion of each one. In phone sex, men act especially revolting because they can't be seen. Working at a peep show was great for female bonding and watching men act out entertainingly bizarre fantasies but the pay is low. In the S/M parlor, she found the work alternately tedious and intense.

While working at Sanctum, a parlor run by a New Age madam, she observed both the sacred and seedy sides of the sex industry. Although the goddess-worshipping owner tried to maintain a reverent environment, most of the women regarded their clients with mercenary contempt. Trixy's own experience vacillated between both extremes.

"Sometimes I left the massage parlor and I felt like a nun, I felt so holy. I knew I had really helped someone and myself and raised the consciousness of the universe. Other times I would lose my healing intention and I would feel something had been taken from me."

Although Trixy aspired to be a spiritual healer via her sex work, just as often, she ended up feeling like "another hand job girl." She believes that although prostitution has the potential to be sacred, it usually falls short -- largely due to the behavior of the clients.

"I was trying to understand men better and heal male wounds and what I found was that a lot of men are in a lot of pain too and I don't necessarily like them."

I ask Trixy how she sees herself in comparison to the "lifers" I have interviewed. She says she saw her foray into sex work as a "journey of self-healing" rather than a true vocation. And while she's glad to escape it, she maintains the highest respect for those committed to doing the work of the sacred whore.

Suddenly I realize that for every negative statement Trixy makes, she feels she must also make a positive one. Trying to shore up the contradictions, she is caught riding the old pendulum between piety and disgust.

I walk home along a street where skimpily clad, hollow-eyed women stand, winking at cars in the icy evening wind. I try to hold two images in my mind at the same time: these down-and-out street walkers and the proud, rosy-cheeked sexual healers. From an intellectual perspective, I applaud and admire the sacred whores and their trailblazing work. At the same time, I know I would have to be as desperate as these women before I joined their profession.

A man calls to me from a car. Suddenly, I cannot look at the women because I myself am being looked at. The two pictures I was juggling shatter and my mind turns inward. As I hurry on, my face burns and my eyes fix on the pavement.