No human being can do to another (or to herself!) what a vibrator does — after getting accustomed to a vibrator’s high intensity, it’s easy for an orgasmic woman to grow attached to her vibrator. The risk here is that connecting physically with a lover is less emotionally urgent — if the vibrator takes over, the relationship can grow into an affectionate emotional bond devoid of sexual need. This is a recipe for dissatisfaction. Great sex with a steady partner produces the happy sense that all your emotional needs have been temporarily sated. By this wonderful person! If you are getting off with a vibrator and not with your partner, this healthy illusion is not available and distortions may occur.

A sure sign of vibrator-takeover syndrome is the woman with 10 functioning fingers who never brings herself to orgasm manually. If your fiancée is still capable of bringing herself to a climax without a vibrator, there is hope. And even if she thinks she can’t, it’s a question of whether she once did — or never learned to in the first place. Some women have successfully weaned themselves from a vibrator by going to a sex therapist who specializes in teaching people how to masturbate (again or for the first time.) Some women consciously decide to put their vibrators aside and find it easy to readjust on their own.

If she can still masturbate to the point of orgasm, she should make a point of doing so. She should focus on slow gentle treatment, instead of trying to replicate the vibrator. She might want to try this on her own before she spends time doing it with you at her side. The first step to connecting with your body is reconnecting with her own — with or without you present. If you can’t be at her side during this process, perhaps you should think about being there for her on the phone. If you ignore her sexually when you are physically apart you can’t really blame her for seeking the attention of a machine.

If you’re interested in what she does when you’re not around, she might be willing to follow your suggestions. See if she will renounce her vibrator for a few weeks or months. Perhaps she will agree to have no more than one orgasm a month with the vibrator. You might both enjoy making a little game out of the process. You don’t want to make her feel self-conscious or cranky. If she likes being bossed around, make the best of it and use that to initiate a playful change of policy. But, whether she likes to be guided by you or not, she has to want to change her ways. She won’t come around unless she has some basic curiosity about what the next orgasm with you will feel like.

Another experiment you might suggest is to deprive yourselves of orgasmic release for a week before your next tryst. No masturbation on your part or hers, with or without a vibrator. However, you may send her flirtatious e-mail and leave adoring messages on her voicemail. You don’t have to tell her that you’re concerned about her vibrator addiction, but do tell her to bury it for that week. Have some fun with this problem and it may resolve itself.

You are fortunate to have a partner who enjoys her orgasms, and she’s fortunate to have a partner who wants to bestow pleasure. It’s a shame to let a vibrator come between you! But you must be tactful and chivalrous in your campaign. Any hint of petulance or resentment on your part will make her cling to that vibrator. You must be heroic — tolerant, masterful, patient and generous. She will only separate from that vibrator if she admires you in some primal sense.

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Have a sex question? Send to: asktracy@salon.com

Want more advice from Tracy? Read the Ask Tracy Directory

I had no idea what to expect from my first customer but I was shocked when he proposed marriage: “Tracy” — or whatever I was calling myself that night — “will you marry me?” I abruptly told him: “No! I can’t marry you!” We were very much at cross-purposes. He wanted to know if that meant I was engaged. I simply didn’t believe in marriage and I was under the age of consent, something he didn’t know. For me, thoughts of marriage led to bureaucracy — How old must you be to sign the paperwork? — or ideology: Was marriage the foundation of capitalism? As bad for you as processed flour?

Or perhaps I was just not ready to have any respect for the custom because my parents’ marriage ended before I was 8. I wasn’t disillusioned so much as unimpressed with the institution of marriage.

For that customer, marriage was a romantic impulse, a solution for loneliness. But perhaps he was already married — a possibility that never occurred to me that night. I assumed he was proposing because he was emotionally unstable, but perhaps he was proposing because he was far more stable than he appeared to be — only pretending to be the lovestruck, lonesome bachelor. Though I was lying about a number of things, I took what he said at face value — the mark of a newbie in the game of sexual intrigue.

Later, as a pro, I discovered that marriage works in mysterious ways. People sometimes ask whether I’m more jaded now than when I entered the sex trade. Most of my customers were married, and how can you even trust the concept of marriage when you witness these cracks in the armor, the daily infidelities? After many years of being what madams call a “good listener” and a self-interested observer, I came to respect an institution I do not entirely trust. As a hooker, I learned to see men as commodities. A smart hooker also learns to respect another woman’s turf, and wives are seen by many as the ultimate owners of these men.

There is a basic respect for marriage that resonates in the world of prostitution. Marriage is not for amateurs, especially when divorce is so easy to obtain. Married people who cheat often find that their most unfaithful efforts render them “faithful” in eerie, unexpected ways — sexual cheating rarely sets you free; it can turn the cheater into a prisoner of the supposedly betrayed spouse.

Or a prisoner of one’s own fantasies. A number of married clients led fantasy lives, pretending to be free in some cases, or pretending to be married to younger women when in fact they were married to formidable mother figures.

One client, a tender sensualist of 60 living part time in the South of France, spun a convincing tale about his beautiful, childlike wife and her trysts with tennis instructors. So alluring were Claud’s bedtime stories that he had a number of call girls believing the hype! We — seasoned professionals — imagined that he did not really watch her getting it on with the tennis coach, but we believed she was a second wife in her 30s, with slim hips and soft skin. We liked to think we were complementing their sexy cosmopolitan marriage, and it was easy to get a little turned on by his banter.

Each one of us had some older American clients who embodied the stereotype: overweight, inattentive to their looks, content with a quick blow job, passive suburban American husbands. Their sexless marriages were based on the sharing of property, children in college, and other mundane facts. Claud, however, was well-groomed, vain, somewhat trim, a delightful conversationalist and not bad looking. He made you feel sexy because he was sexy. Other clients made you feel sexy like a porn star or a pin-up model in the presence of a naive fan. These lackluster husbands, though kindhearted and decent (they wouldn’t abandon their wives or cheat a prostitute) — had the sex lives and marriages they deserved. They used money to buy what other men might obtain with their looks, personality or conversation. They were complacent about their bodies. Claud was different. He deserved to live with a delicate, pretty girl and could afford to — or so I thought.

When another call girl ran into Claud at a Broadway musical, she was taken aback. “I saw Claud at the theater with his wife! She looks like his mother!” Laura told me. I was dubious: “Are you sure it’s not his mother? Maybe his wife was in France…”

Laura insisted: “He was acting totally like a husband. She’s his wife. And she was covered in Bulgari jewelry.”

For some reason, we were both a little disappointed. We had wanted to believe Claud’s fantasy of lighthearted matrimony. So did he, for a few hours in the afternoon, but he accepted the reality of a serious, conventional marriage. Every feature of his fantasy wife — litheness, girlish charm, a naughty niceness — was the opposite of his real wife, according to Laura (whose description was unflattering). How ironic that our storytelling customer might be a hard-eyed realist while we, the supposedly cynical operators, wanted to believe an American fantasy about European marriage. It was a Jamesian moment, to say the least.

At this point I began realizing that a number of my clients had married into money — if not into cash, then property or connections or other things that made life manageable. The midcentury archetype of a man ruling the roost with his superior earning power, having extra sex partners he can pay for, while his wife stays in the suburbs becoming more maternal and sexually virtuous by the hour, was looking more like a simple middle-class fantasy. Real marriage was more bizarre than that.

Not every client was like Claud. As a beginner in the sex trade, I saw married couples for an escort service. I felt very much like a peeping Tom when I got into bed with a couple. Husbands are more deferential, less presumptuous in these threesomes; when they are not, there’s probably trouble brewing. Most hookers would like to be on their way out the door before that kind of tension begins. A part of me admired these wives for doing something I would never have the courage to do: Three-way sex was normal in my job but never happened in my love life. Yet these couples were either so secure or so bored that they made a habit of inviting another woman into bed. One wife became positively petulant with her husband. “Oh, not now!” she sighed, as if they were on a long car trip, arguing about directions. But she was warm and friendly toward me, insisting that I tuck the money “someplace safe” as I was leaving. I was about half her age and still so new that I never felt confident about my ability to satisfy a woman’s body. These couples were a minority, a side trip for me, and never the main part of my business. But I felt that I saw quite a lot on those occasions.

Sometimes my customers showed me the family snapshots — attractive wives, Christmas card images of the kids — and reported a basic happiness that still didn’t prevent them from wanting variety. For one customer, the urge to watch a few minutes of porn at lunchtime — and not the kind of porn geared to couples — followed by a quick release, was not really consistent with married life. When he spoke about his wife, there was a carnal edge that was missing from some customers’ conversations. She was part of his fantasy life, but she lived in the suburbs and he spent his weeknights in a city apartment.

Many were married to attractive, stylish women who ignored them sexually. And sometimes, I am sorry to say, this was totally understandable. Once, when discussing a regular whose beautiful, well-dressed wife didn’t have sex with him more than twice a year, my friend Laura shrugged. “Can you blame her? I wouldn’t have sex with him either, if I didn’t have to.” He was not offensive as a john — being unattractive didn’t matter so much when he was paying. But he projected a neurotic dissatisfaction about life that would make any woman want to slap him if she had him in her life for more than a few hours. What kept them together were a grown child who had never grown up, a lifestyle, two houses, and a shared love of French vacations. Benny loved being seen with an elegant, pretty woman of any age as much as he loved complaining about his marriage. Sexually, he was a strange mixture: good at oral sex, hung up on dildos — the more absurd-looking the better — always trying to see what he could get away with. His favorite call girls were those who refused to kiss him.

The more you listened to Benny describing his wife — a woman who occasionally locked the master bedroom area and allowed him to use only the guest areas of the house — the more you realized what he needed. The key to his wallet and his heart was a hooker who did this sort of thing in bed. If you banished him from the private areas and made him use only the “common areas” of your body, he became a regular and sometimes fell in love, even to the point of offering fur coats, apartments and good watches. If you gave in to his many demands, like an amateur, he would show up again because men will do that. But contrary to what he thought, Benny was not seeking an alternative to his wife. He was seeking a variation on her theme of denial, which led me to think that perhaps Benny was madly in love with her, in his own masochistic way. Benny’s marriage would have been frightening to me had it not been so alien.

Some clients refused to discuss home life at all, making me wonder if they were unhappily married, or so happy there was nothing to discuss. The very happy can sometimes run out of gossip. Some felt guilty, but men who routinely pay for sex outside the home don’t usually feel guilty about the sex. Men are more sensible than women give them credit for. That doesn’t mean they are free of guilt, but they have more emotional intelligence than we like to admit, and they’re quite good at taking what they need from a situation without agonizing about sexual morality.

One client, married with children, told me: “I don’t feel guilty when things are going well. I feel guilty about doing this when business isn’t good.” A quick afternoon trick, David ran his own business in the diamond district. If he stayed away from the shop for too long, he was being disloyal to his business. If he spent money on sex when business was slow, he was disloyal to the mother of his kids. I sensed that David was happily married. The economic bond between David and his wife shaped his sessions: He was never the sort to have a prolonged visit. Sex with David was simple, hot, direct — not languorous and graceful, like my sessions with Claud. Anything that might inspire a higher price was not broached or tried. In this peculiar way he was faithful to his marriage. For married couples, money can be more emotionally charged than fidelity of the flesh. Married people sometimes hide money from each other, lying about what they spend and how they spend it.

When people say there are unseen partners in every bedroom transaction, I have to agree. David’s marriage was never absent from our encounters. Benny’s wife was a role model. And Claud’s fantasy wife — young, pretty, free — may have been a projection of himself. Just as a female novelist can re-create an aspect of herself through a male character, so can lots of men create sexual stories about themselves disguised as women.

How, some people ask, can a man who visits prostitutes be happily married? Is this a delusion of the prostitute who is never as objective or experienced as she would like to think? Perhaps, but we have to define what happily married means. Does it mean being in love, which often means that you’re sexually obsessed with a romantic partner? I think it means “happy to be returning home” to the marital domicile. The happily married customer does not dawdle at the end of his session. He is just looking for sexual variety, an erotic staple for quite a few men. Without variety, a lot of men would simply go nuts, no matter how deeply they love one woman. Their need might be satisfied by porn, flirtation, looking across the street, or a neatly contained encounter with a prostitute.

“Does it ever keep you awake at night?” That’s a question I was once asked about “having sex with other women’s husbands.” I have, indeed, been kept awake by this question, by the complications and sneaky realities of marriage. It would be too smug and pat to say that I always sleep soundly, oblivious to the feelings we have about sex, fidelity, trust, passionate love. I’m not a card-carrying polyamorist, and I believe in romantic love. Despite all the cheating that goes on, I believe that we might be lucky enough to find our ideal mate. The idea of a man who can monopolize my sexual attention, making my heart skip a beat at all the right moments, is compelling. But the high romantic energy that causes a man or a woman to swoon, to stay focused on one person, is not present in every marriage, even in happy marriages. And not every woman or man requires this sensation in order to be happy.

If the marriage is based on children, the desire to be a good parent can trump the desire for romance. There is a big difference between being in love with each other and being good together as parents. A friend once told me that, while her parents were rather damaging to her, they were very much in love. They had an affectionate, vital marriage that did not end until one partner’s death. Yet their children were deprived of affection.

In some cases, the buildup to a marriage proposal can be exquisite, erotically charged, because there is a hint of the unknown. And then the actual marriage, with its shared goals, known routines, can make two people feel more like siblings than lovers. (This is especially an issue when husband and wife look like they could be related.)

Indeed, some men marry women from their own ethnic or religious group while viewing exotic women purely as sex partners. As a New York prostitute with an Asian appearance, I sometimes attracted these men. Customers who go for exotic prostitutes are often stereotyped as racist exploiters or insensitive tourists, but sex cannot always be about partnership, familiarity, comfort and home. In fact, this kind of sex can provoke a need for “exotic” sex with a stranger. Marriage can start to look and feel like fraternal incest which, I believe, is the sexual opposite of courtship. Marriage, after all, is about family even when children aren’t part of the deal.

George, a regular customer for many years, had a WASPish manner but came from a mixture of European Catholic ancestors: his preference for brown, black, Latin American and Asian prostitutes was extreme, I thought. I was happy to have him as a customer, but I secretly wondered what caused this old-fashioned quirk. I found him not so much exploitive as evasive. He was avoiding sex with women who felt too familiar and he was the only boy in a family of older sisters. It’s not so much that the exotic woman is providing exotic sex as we are sometimes led to believe — it’s more likely that the client finds “normal” sex exotic with the foreign partner. “Foreign” women didn’t seem like siblings to George, and sex with an exotic prostitute meant he was out there in the world, independent.

But let’s not idealize a man like George. He thought interracial marriage “a bad idea” even though his favorite call girls were all descendants of interracial parents. He was, in many ways, an establishment stereotype, living in a fictional world while having sex in the real world.

In a very idealized, enlightened universe, conservative husbands wouldn’t believe that having commercial sex with a prostitute from a different ethnic group was a form of fidelity. But many people do live this way, and the lure of the exotic plays an important role in the sex trade. Marriage is often about creating a dynasty or a household with somebody who looks like you, talks like you, and believes what you believe. Or it’s about enlarging a community. Many of my clients were Hasidic and Orthodox Jews whose lifestyle was so rarefied that almost any number of women could seem exotic, alien, foreign. There are many stereotypes about Orthodox and Hasidic customers circulating in New York. For example, the notion that they have casual sex exclusively with black prostitutes. The infamous New Yorker cover by Art Spiegelman, depicting an Orthodox man and a black woman, touched a nerve by reminding us of this. The kissing did not quite ring true, but their proximity said a lot.

In the hidden moments of the day, on the way home from work, men of all races and religions are having sex with women they wouldn’t meet in their official lives. In the case of my Hasidic and Orthodox clients, I felt that almost any woman who was unsuitable for marriage was able to pass for exotic.

Some liberal visionaries would say that marrying the person who doesn’t look like you is the more progressive path. But people who marry outside the obvious “tribe” can be pulled together by class, profession, lifestyle, politics, education and by subtler forms of tribalism, causing more of that sibling intimacy between husband and wife that causes men to seek the outsider as a paid sex partner. Contrary to stereotype, traditional conservatives are not the only men who need alternatives to family life and married sex. If they were, the sex industry would have withered away by now.

And what about the married woman? Why are we talking about men’s predictable double standards and their peccadilloes, yet again? As it happens, there is an entire subculture of married women who secretly work in the sex trade, like undercover agents or sexual “moles” (as Cold War double agents were called). “Belle de Jour” is alive and well and living in every major city of the world. But that’s another story, to be explored at a future time.

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We want to make you a part of this series. What is the state of your union? Did you find the one and never look back, or has finding lasting love been a marathon of trial and error? Did you have a fairy-tale wedding only to watch things crumble once the reception was over, or have you glided along in marital bliss since Day One? We want to hear your stories of joy, romance, heartbreak and pain. After all, partnership, as we all know, is a complex concoction of all of those things. (Please remember: Any writing submitted becomes the property of Salon if we publish it. We reserve the right to edit submissions and cannot reply to every writer. Interested contributors should send their stories to marriage@salon.com.)

At a sex-worker conference in May, I couldn’t help noticing how unusual a “regular guy” can look in a room filled with male sex workers who are still acting boyish (even into their late 30s), and far more likely to be interested in gardening and decorating than baseball.

At first, it’s disorienting to hear Sterry talking so candidly about the lost inner prostitute — a youthful persona he left behind after a year of turning tricks while in college. He’s not a veteran of the sex trade like some of us and he’s new to the hookers movement. So Sterry probably has no idea what people are saying behind his back. Because most of his customers were women, he defies a few stereotypes, including those of the sex-workers’ movement.

One male sex worker (who never met Sterry) suspects that he’s “under-reporting the number of men he serviced.” Come on, another activist insinuates, did he really make a living just doing women? Activist sex workers love to debate the authenticity of their comrades — out of earshot, of course — and we often theorize about whether or why a particular prostitute is essentially putting on airs. So Sterry is not being singled out.

In p.c. lingo, it’s often stated that many males who have sex with men “do not identify as gay.” The homophobic young hustler who resentfully has sex with men, while pretending that “nothing really happens” with his customers, is a trope — of the sex trade, of the streets, of the movement. “But,” I ask one doubtful colleague, “shouldn’t you read ‘Chicken’ [Sterry's memoir] before you jump to all these conclusions?”

Sterry admits that male sex workers weren’t the first people to welcome him into the movement. He sounds wistful. “They haven’t been as warm toward me. But the women have been wonderful, very supportive.” When I float the phobic-hustler-in-denial theory, he protests, “I’m not homophobic! I worked in the theater for 10 years — and I was best man at my ex-wife’s gay wedding.” Despite his straight appearance, this guy is not exactly wearing the mantle of macho.

Hetero male prostitutes are sometimes treated like curiosities in our movement. At the PONY (Prostitutes of New York) meetings I attend, they are rare. When such a guy appears at a PONY meeting, the girls gather out of sheer nosiness. We ask questions that we wouldn’t ask another girl, out of respect for her privacy. We sometimes end up sounding like the voyeurs we’ve spent our lives dodging. With all this in mind, I asked David Sterry for an interview.

I feel like we have so much in common! I had a feminist mom, like you, and divorced parents. We both did a stint at one of those experimental free schools. Started sex at 13. And then we became … teen prostitutes. But here’s where I start having second thoughts: The title of your book is “Chicken.” You were turning tricks at 17. When I was a 17-year-old hooker, I thought of myself as a woman and if anyone had called me a chicken I would have slapped him! Isn’t 17 kind of old to be calling yourself a “chicken”?

You may not have been a chicken at 17, but I certainly was. I didn’t start working when I was 14, like you. At 17 I had had quite a bit of sexual experience, and yet in many ways I had led a life of sheltered affluence, wrapped in the suburban cocoon of my family. I saw myself as a man at 17, but unfortunately, I was not yet. I did not have the skills and tools to make my own way. I was taken advantage of because of my naiveté and ignorance.

So you didn’t lie about your age? I worked in a nightclub at 15 where I was surrounded by hookers in their 20s. Those girls would have kicked me right out of there had they known I was so young.

I was hired by older women who wanted a teenage man-child, and that is what I delivered. I had the body, face and mind of a teen, not yet a man. To me, the whole point of chickenness is that it’s that glorious in-between time when you’re not a child anymore, but not yet an adult — a teenager who engages in indiscriminate sexual activity for money. Tracy, I was so young and so tender. My pimp collected chickens, and I used to party with them, it was one of the great joys of my time in the Life. And believe me, I fit right in with all these beautiful young chickens.

I feel like I’m totally out of touch with teen prostitutes. I honestly don’t know what I would say to a 16-year-old hooker if I met one today.

I do outreach with Larkin Street Youth Services in San Francisco, giving away condoms, lube and bleaching kits for needles, telling homeless kids about the health clinic and living facilities. We give out toothpaste, sunscreen, Handi Wipes — the most popular item is Q-tips.

Q-tips! Really?

The kids can’t get enough Q-tips. Also, because I discuss being raped and being a skanky ho, I have become a lightning rod for people confessing the horrible shit that’s happened to them.

You dedicate “Chicken” to the “boys and girls who have been victims of abuse at the hands of adults.” Did you really feel that your clients were abusing you?

I generally was not abused as a sex worker. One couple I wrote about in the book paid to humiliate me. I hated that. I was a terrible submissive.

I like the way you capture the teen hustler attitude –floating, aimless, “get the money up-front.” But your female customers come across as individuals, which is very noticeable to me. I saw my customers as two-dimensional stereotypes back then. I didn’t try to see into them the way you did. I didn’t have to. I wonder if female customers work your emotions more. Was there any such thing as a stereotypical female client?

The only thing they had in common was that they had money and they were a lot older than me: traveling business ladies, rich lonely housewives, old hippies, kinky L.A. freaks, the newly liberated and the curious. I even had a grandma I worked with; she didn’t make the book.

When you wrote “Chicken” did you see yourself as part of the “sex worker literati”? Did you think you’d be riding a cultural wave? Making a political statement?

I was a sex worker for one school year when I was 17, so I felt in many ways removed from the life. However, I was always drawn to sex workers after that, and had many friends in the sex-worker world. I felt compelled to write “Chicken” for deeply personal reasons. I wasn’t even aware there was a “sex worker literati,” so I feel lucky to be riding that wave as it’s cresting.

The Sex Worker Art Show in Olympia, Washington, was the first event I performed in to promote my book — in January — and it was a life-changing event. The organizer, Annie Oakley, is one of the most amazing people I’ve ever met. I was overwhelmed by all the love and support people gave me. Being in that event allowed me to embrace my “Inner Ho” in a way I did not think was possible. And backstage: It’s the only time I’ve been in a room where someone asked, “Does anyone have a spare nipple clamp?” and three people raised their hands and said, “Sure!”

Well, you went on to organize a number of sex-worker literati shows this spring on the West Coast. There’s no convert like a recent convert.

And our next Sex Worker Literati event is in New York on Sept. 26. What I love about the shows is that they’re a public forum to talk about sex and sexuality without anyone grinding their ax. So many times when I have been to meetings of people who have something in common — like sex-worker conferences — the interaction devolves into factions and personalities clashing. At the sex-worker literati shows, people are more interested in exploring the issues with the audience. They’re sweet, touching, deep, troubling — and I want to emphasize that they’re always riotously funny.

Are there books or movies about male prostitution that strike a chord for you?

I did a TV show called “Mornings on 2,” and they juxtaposed my interview with clips from “Midnight Cowboy.” I love that movie, it’s one of my favorite films, and it really seems to capture the damage, frustration and seediness of that world. “My Private Idaho” was very good. J.T. Leroy’s “Sarah” is a beautiful book. “American Gigolo,” on the other hand, is a joke. Believe me, Blondie was never playing in the background when I was working.

You mean, “Call Me”? I liked that song! So if someone makes a movie about your year as a teen prostitute, do you have a dream soundtrack?

“Get a Haircut” (and get a real job) by George Thorogood and “Mercedes Benz” by Janis Joplin would be on the list. Along with “Just a Gigolo” by Louis Prima.

You talk about being raped at 17 — by a stranger and not by a customer — in your first chapter. This isn’t something I feel comfortable discussing or even reading about because I’m so squeamish — and I was surprised that I could handle those passages. Are we in denial about male-on-male sexual violence? Are there some assumptions or taboos that make it harder for a man to press charges? I think a lot of women will ask: Why didn’t you go to the police?

I think young men are not expecting to be raped — I know I wasn’t — so in some ways they make easy targets. I believe I was drugged before I was raped, although I cannot prove that, yet I was so ashamed and felt so guilty — like it was my fault — that I did not report what happened to me. That is one of the great regrets of my life because I’m sure he did it to other kids. But I never wanted to see that guy again.

I think a lot of guys believe if they come forward, they will be labeled gay or that people will think they must have been looking for it. Someone in my own family said that I was stupid for going into that apartment, and that basically it was my fault for being raped. I was young and scared with no resources. I did not deserve or ask to be raped. I think very few men are willing to go in front of the world or into a court of law and say “I got raped.” The first component of change is information. If people can look at me, a writer of books, married with a happy wife and life, maybe they can tell their own stories, and move through their trauma as I have.

Tell me about married life. Is it true that you recently married your agent?

Yes, I married the woman who was my book agent, Arielle Eckstut. I call her the Snow Leopard. She’s beautiful, sleek, fast, delicate — yet deadly when she has to be. She fired me as a client about a month ago and my new agent is the fabulous Mark Reiter of IMG. I love Arielle madly, and we have a blast working together. She’s the one that told me to write a memoir in the first place.

I don’t think I could handle having a guy in my life who is a symbolic sex worker, talking about all his former tricks. Do you think most women would agree with me? Or am I being a hypocrite?

I don’t know how she does it. My ex-wife said that Arielle is part-saint, and that is accurate. She is an amazingly secure, open-minded woman. I think of myself as the poster boy for heterosexual, underage, male sex workers. Arielle is curious, smart and brave about my past. Again, she’s the one who told me to write the book.

What are you working on, right now?

I am 50,000 words into a novel about a 25-year-old son who falls in love with his dad’s fianceé. I’m trying to write this book with no sex in it, and believe me, Tracy, it’s hard.

This Republican marketing strategy offers abstinence to crusading wing nuts, safe sex to public-health wonks and a combination of both to ambivalent parents. On this issue, at this moment, the administration is almost like a well-run American brothel offering a diversity of wholesome blondes, smoldering brunettes, ethnic beauties and spunky redheads. Something for everybody.

It’s easy to demonize, lampoon or categorize Powell’s Christian right detractors. But abstinence, less than a decade ago, was championed by Americans very far from the religious right. Hillary Clinton, in her moderate manifesto, “It Takes A Village,” wanted teenagers to abstain from sex until the age of 21 — despite the fact that the age of consent in many American states is 16. Remember Donna Shalala, former secretary of health and human services? Certainly not a woman you would describe as a right-wing demagogue. In 1997, Shalala launched a teen abstinence campaign that included — according to Katie Roiphe’s provocative account — support for the “secondary virginity movement,” which is a way for sexually experienced teens to redefine themselves as virgins. Without even having her hymen surgically restored, a young woman could proclaim herself a virgin by taking a chastity oath. Lunacy about teen sexuality is not the exclusive property of the lunatic fringe.

By endorsing condom use, Powell is aligning himself with realists who acknowledge that most human beings will eventually start having sex. There are those who insist that teenagers aren’t “ready” for sex, but sometimes I wonder how many adults are truly ready for sex. There’s a strange kind of hypocrisy surrounding teen sexuality that has nothing to do with religion or government spending - it’s based, rather, on the notion that adults are sexually mature by virtue of their chronological age.

Perhaps Bush and Powell should talk to some sexually active adolescents. For example, when I was a sexually active teenager, I carefully protected myself from pregnancy because I wanted to prove that I was grown-up enough to have a sex life. I thought an accidental pregnancy would somehow disqualify me from adulthood. Later, I discovered that real grown-ups do not have to set such high standards for themselves because nobody is telling them that they’re too young for sex. We talk about the “epidemic” of teen pregnancy but why do we never hear about an “epidemic” of unplanned pregnancies among adult women?

Every mistake a teenager makes in the realm of sex is pathologized by conservatives and liberals alike, despite the fact that most of these mistakes are also made by women well into their 30s. In fact, adults above the age of consent must account for the majority of unplanned pregnancies, abortions and STD cases. Why, then, do we project our anxieties about sexual risk onto this temporarily disenfranchised group of people — teenagers? Is it because we’re afraid they’ll outdo us in some way? Are adults embarrassed about the mistakes they’ve made even when they should have known better?

A few tips from a professional: Promiscuity, done right, is an inherently nerdlike pursuit that requires discipline, practice and forethought. You can’t just throw condoms at an STD epidemic if people don’t know how to use them properly. Anyone who has spent time convincing the public to use condoms, teaching people how to put them on (and get them to stay on) and distributing them on street corners, can tell you this. So, of course, can any competent sex worker. It’s easier to be methodical about sex when it’s your job. Romance is not an ideal setting in which to study safe sex because few people want to calculate their every move while having sex purely for pleasure. Safe sex might even be regarded as a strange form of erotic sublimation by those who require unplanned passion. This could explain the reluctance of some teenagers to use condoms, but what can explain the same reluctance in adults?

Actually, many adults haven’t got a clue about the basics of condom use. These are the adults who complain that condoms are not 100 percent effective because “they break.” Indeed, sex with a condom is never as safe as abstinence, but many sex workers have observed that condoms don’t break when you keep a tube of KY or a bottle of Astroglide next to your bed. (No, you should not rely on the fact that a condom is already lubricated by the manufacturer. That merely makes it easier to put the condom on.)

There was a time not long ago when the only lubricant at the local drugstore was KY jelly and you could only find Astroglide in sex boutiques. But KY now comes in two “flavors” — liquid or jelly — and good lubricants are not exactly hard to find. Still, a lot of people over 30 aren’t schooled in the fundamentals of lubricating latex. A person conscientious enough to use condoms might not realize that a synthetic lubricant is essential — to prevent breakage, discomfort and other erotic snafus. This is an aspect of contraception and STD prevention that the abstinence lobby would banish from any curriculum because it hints at teaching people how to be “good in bed.” But you can’t effectively teach teenagers about birth control without discussing the politically dicey subject of sexual skill.

And all those adults who have abortions because of broken condoms? They were once teenagers.

There are other aspects of condom etiquette that many adults aren’t clued into, which need to be part of any sex education program. For example, many people are disenchanted with condoms because of the aftertaste. Switching from intercourse to oral sex can be awkward if you haven’t learned to think of mid-sex grooming as a natural aspect of intimacy. Too many people assume that washing up is something you do after, not during, sex. A woman can gracefully get out of bed, head for the bathroom and privately rinse herself free of condom aftertaste without ruining the mood. Call girls do it all the time and it gets easier with practice.

While I applaud Powell’s comments, condoms alone are not the answer because good condom skills don’t come naturally — they must be learned. As for abstinence, it is not without allure. Stripped of government funding and other political baggage, the idea of waiting for sex can be quite erotic. But teenagers probably know that already.

Jeff was a mild-mannered middle manager at Citibank, wore bangs and a beige suit, always smoked a joint beforehand, and liked to go twice. He wasn’t a big spender, but he was reliable.

Marvin, in his 60s, lived alone in a high-rise on Whitestone Boulevard and paid extra for the cab. He also gave me a nominal “tip” for letting him take close-up Polaroids of my pussy. I wasn’t ashamed of my profession by any means, but when people say that “every woman has fantasized about being a hooker” — well, I knew this wasn’t what they meant. A middle manager who goes twice and a retired bachelor in Queens who collects homemade beaver shots.

Desperate to find a reliable escort service, I began combing the ads and discovered that the other agencies were even tackier than Jeannie’s.

At one agency, I went on a call with two escorts who invited me to live with them. They both shared a large apartment with someone whom they described as their “old man.” They had two Siamese kittens, a weekend place in the Hamptons, and dressed like fashion-conscious secretaries. Pretty but not hyperchic.

“Thanks,” I said, “but I don’t think I could live with cats.”

Back at the agency, the owner — marveling at my naiveté — spelled out the scenario when I told her about their generosity.

“He’s their pimp, Nancy! Get it?”

“Really? I thought … I thought that sort of thing only happened in the movies.”

The owner was a tired-looking, gray-haired woman in her 50s who did not suffer the naive gladly. “If that’s what you girls are looking for in life, be my guest, but don’t come crying to me when you want to get out! If you can’t stand on your own two feet, you have no business working. Where did you say you were from?”

And from that moment on, she seemed to dislike me. In fact, she stopped giving me calls. In her mind, a working girl either lived with a pimp or despised anyone connected to the pimp scene. My neutral puzzlement struck her as snooty, and she didn’t like snooty hookers.

I couldn’t understand why the two girls who had tried to recruit me seemed so content and normal. It was obvious that they were free to come and go — for good, if they wished. I was intrigued by their general aura of stability, though I couldn’t imagine living with them. The owner was one of those people who hates anyone she can’t understand. She understood pimps. She understood those two girls. But she didn’t understand my curiosity, and this made her hate me. My two-week stint with that agency had yielded very little, and the two girls who’d tried to recruit me — well, I wasn’t about to ask them for business now that I knew the score.

So I was feeling rather jaded when I entered Liane’s apartment for the first time. And I was worried about the rent. My jaw almost dropped when Liane said, “You mustn’t talk to my clients about money — I will pay you if there’s ever a problem.”

This was not an escort service: Liane was a proper madam with clients she could count on. I had read about such operations in books, a long time ago, as a child. But I had grown accustomed in my teen years to working escort and, for someone who starts out in a bar, working escort is a glamorous self-improvement. Meeting a reputable madam like Liane isn’t necessarily in the cards.

In that split second, as Liane prepped me for my first date in her apartment, everything changed. I had never before met a madam or working girl who took so much pride in her clients. None of the nightclub managers or escort-service owners could afford to; they didn’t even aspire to. Their prevailing attitude was that johns pay — “they” pay — and “we” collect or get paid. Winners receive, losers give. Liane’s ideas about “us” and “them” were different. Johns were not just transient wallets, they were permanent connections — to be treasured. Suddenly, I sensed that Jeannie had been quite barbaric. When I realized how primitive the escort agencies were, I knew how lucky I was to have stumbled into Liane’s apartment — and how important it was not to act as surprised as I felt.

I did everything in my power to stay on Liane’s good side. Her normal clients were as nice as the best clients I had ever encountered working escort. Her better clients — well, you don’t even meet guys like that through an ad. They’re much too careful. I didn’t kiss the bedsheets in gratitude, but I paid all my cuts on time. When Eddie, that first client of Liane’s, asked for my phone number, I pretended I didn’t have one — told him I was staying in the home of a prudish relative. This way he wouldn’t feel rejected; he could see me again, through Liane. And did.

Liane had one thing in common with Jeannie’s escort service: a possessive vigilance regarding girls who give their numbers out. Of course, I’d wanted to give Eddie my number. He was a quick $300, and I was tempted when he said, “I’ll be in town next month for two days — at the Waldorf this time. Liane’s an old pal, but she doesn’t have to know everything, does she? I’ll have a nice room.”

But if Liane found out, she might stop giving me business, and I could end up working hotel bars and escort services again. And if I did, I was bound to get busted — or something much worse. Seeing Eddie repeatedly, for $180 instead of $300, getting about half as much as some girls were making for the same work, I was deeply tempted. Of course, I wasn’t staying with a prudish relative — but I didn’t know if I could trust him to stay mum. I played it safe, very safe. I wasn’t going to let go of the opportunity Liane had given me: to work at the highest levels with the best clients.

Other girls, well established in their apartments, with private clients of their own, felt confident about taking Liane’s clients — especially her hotel dates. When it comes to “stealing” dates, hotel calls fall into the gray zone. You’re not in another woman’s apartment, where pushing your number on a man is an out-and-out no-no. What the madam doesn’t know won’t hurt you, and Liane understood that some of the older girls gave their numbers out. But she expected loyalty from new girls. And while other girls could afford to lose her business, I simply couldn’t. The reality was that the new girls, the loyal girls, were the ones who got the most business from Liane. She used the other girls only when she had to. (And that’s why, today, I hear from Liane only once in a while.)

After my initiation into the rough-and-tumble of clubs, bars, and $200-an-hour coke dates, I was willing to keep seeing Liane’s clients on Liane’s terms. I was meeting diplomats and famous publishers. Her clients were often mentioned in the Times, and their faces sometimes appeared in those engraved portraits on the front page of the Wall Street Journal. But most of all, I could relax with a new client; I didn’t have to think about whether he was a cop. Or whether he was going to pay. Though I still paid a cut to a madam, I had arrived. My technique was improving. My bedside manner was smoother, more confident. I began to see my previous adventures (and misadventures) through different eyes. I could concentrate on cultivating my clients, not just surviving, and was surprised to discover that I actually liked being good at oral sex. But I wondered if I would get stuck on this lesser track — the unambitious track occupied by girls who don’t give their numbers out.

Allison didn’t give out her number, either. Of course, she had her own reasons — insane reasons. She had this rather dotty idea that giving johns her phone number would make her more of a hooker. She did actually have a roommate, a girl from her hometown in Fairfield County who knew her family. So she had to be cautious about hiding her new job. But even after her roommate moved out, Allie continued to work for Liane and to see clients through other call girls, as if direct contact with these men would somehow contaminate her. As if she could hide her job from herself, now that she was her own roommate.

“Allison’s a natural!” Liane would sigh. “They all want to see her again. If only she had more common sense outside of bed!”

But Allie’s guilt was a source of revenue for Liane.

“Working for Liane is easier,” Allie once told me in a weak moment. “It’s harder to stop when you see guys on your own.”

I never could relate to Allie’s sex guilt. Hooking always felt like a logical next step for me. Ever since the age of 10, I’d wanted to be a hooker — and before that, a Playboy centerfold. Before that I wanted to be a librarian. Allison had never had any occupational fantasies as a child. Not a one. I didn’t understand those kids when I was a kid — how could they be so unexcited about the future? Allie and I would not have been friends if we had known each other as kids. When she started having sex, she was almost 17, and she didn’t use anything until she had a pregnancy scare. That’s so typically Allison.

Jasmine, who started hooking in her late 20s, always had her eye on the bottom line. She used her babysitting money to begin a career as a ticket scalper — at 14 — and squirreled away exactly 10 percent of her profit, religiously. Most of the balance was reinvested in tickets.

When she was arrested in front of Madison Square Garden for peddling Rangers tickets, she lied to the cops about her age. She wanted to be tried as an adult. That, in fact, is how she met the notorious Barry Horowitz (who last year became my attorney, too). Back then, Horowitz was an idealistic Legal Aid lawyer paying his social dues. She was incensed when he guessed her real age. He said she could use it to beat the charge. This “went against the grain,” she insisted. He told her she had no concept of the future, and he was, she once told me, “so obnoxious that I had to stop talking and listen to him.” Horowitz pointed out that many adults in her position would happily pretend to be 16 if they could: “So, if you wanna be an adult, you’d better start thinking like one. Beat the system.”

Horowitz got Jasmine out of jail, helped her finesse the incident with her dad, and made sure that her arrest record was expunged when she turned 18. With the money she had stashed under her bed, she started a small franchise as a marijuana dealer, then moved on to bigger and better drugs when she graduated from high school.

At 25, Jasmine was a very discreet Upper East Side drug dealer, living in a nondescript elevator building with no doorman and taking an awfully long time to get her business degree: “Perpetual student’s a great cover for a drug dealer. I kept switching my major.” But she was getting itchy.

“I wanted to keep expanding my business,” she once told me. “I didn’t do any of my product, but I was addicted. To growth. If you really want to deal, it’s still a man’s world. A chick can only go so far. There’s always gonna be some guy with a gun or worse who thinks that because you’re a chick, he can hold you up or move in on you. You can’t deal drugs as a single woman unless you’re content with moderate growth. It’s like being on the mommy track!”

So turning to a new criminal enterprise — using her body for the first time — was an admission, as she likes to say, that “anatomy is destiny.” And a chance to be good at something where “it’s all about being a chick.”

One of her pot customers, a good-looking pimp called Rico, started boasting to her about his business. A number of his girls worked for small private houses in Manhattan. The second-tier private madams weren’t as stylish as Liane, but they were equally security conscious. Jasmine wanted in, and she wanted to work safely. But Rico dismissed her offer when she suggested that he take her on for six months.

“I could learn that business in less than six months,” she assured him.

“Well, that’s the problem,” he said. “You’d make trouble with my other ladies. No, thanks. I don’t need it.”

Then she offered him $500 to introduce her to a madam, and he accepted.

Jasmine worked in a very private, high-turnover house for about three months — an apprenticeship she insists was worth every cut she paid. She learned how to get some guys in and out the door in less than 10 minutes. She managed to make some good connections and, at the first opportunity, bought a book from a girl who was moving to Florida. And that’s how we ended up meeting in a luxurious 35th-floor apartment overlooking the U.N.

We both knew Jean-Paul, a French bachelor who saw girls and entertained his colleagues on a regular basis. So there we were, at a small party with two good-looking Dutch guys (whom every girl avoided because they seemed so young and energetic) and three mysterious diplomats, somewhat more senior, from the Gulf States. The girls had all been hand-picked by the host because Jean-Paul didn’t like leaving his party arrangements to a madam. He was one of those self-sufficient bachelors who could decorate his own apartment and arrange a successful evening with a few call girls. Probably knew how to cook as well.

The girls kept pairing off in the powder room to compare notes — banknotes. We all wanted to make sure we were getting the same rate. Jasmine was relieved when I assured her that she wasn’t undercharging.

But there was instant tension between Jasmine and a pretty redheaded girl, an adventurous Mormon who had escaped from Utah to New York by way of Nevada. When a client asked Jasmine and the redhead to join him, Jasmine balked. I ended up doing the scene and listening to the redhead’s giggling assessment as we undressed together: “That girl, Jasmine? She’s sooo uptight! I worked with her before, and she thinks every girl she meets is a lesbian!” She was playing with my bra strap, stroking my hair. “It’s like, everybody’s supposed to be ‘after her’! Can you believe it?” I smiled politely. Our client was getting an eyeful and an earful. After we were done, the redhead whispered, “I don’t usually get into it with girls, but you turned me on. Here’s my number.” I called her the next day, and we exchanged a few dates. If she hadn’t been such a cocaine addict, we would have done more business together. She was pleasant to work with, had soft hands and an interested tongue. I’m happy to fake it with another working girl, but if she insists on the real thing, why not?

Jasmine, on the other hand, is highly paranoid around other working girls. She won’t cop to being lesbophobic, but she refuses to see married couples because she won’t “do a girl for real.” You don’t learn how to be smooth and “European” about these things by working in a high-turnover house. Even if it’s in a nice building with a doorman, as it had been in Jasmine’s case. You can make good money seeing the cheaper, faster dates, but it’s not the kind of work that broadens your mind.

Eventually, I introduced Jasmine to Liane, who decided to work with her occasionally but did not take a deep liking to my ambitious new friend. Jasmine was too well established by then to curry favor with Liane. And it was never in her nature, anyway, to look up to another woman, even if that woman was old enough to be her grandmother.

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From the forthcoming book “Diary of a Manhattan Call Girl” by Tracy Quan. Copyright (©) 2001 by Tracy Quan. To be published in August by Crown Publishers, a division of Random House, Inc.