Done Did Cum Came
A collection of writing about sex work from over the last 20 years
– Introduction –
I first started doing sex work when I was 18, answering a small classified ad in the back of a free weekly newspaper seeking models to make soft-core solo porn. I wasn’t quite broke, or desperate – I’d already been living on my own for a few years, and despite a wayward upbringing I had a decent job and relatively normal, healthy life that I enjoyed – but like many people, I’d always been curious. What was it really like? It seemed like a secret underworld, off-limits to me and most other nice girls, and I didn’t know much about it besides that I wanted in. How naive and uncertain I was back then, taking the long bus ride to this amateur photographer’s nondescript suburban home with a small train case in my lap, filled with cheap drugstore makeup and my sluttiest thrift store clothes. It ended up being exactly what I imagined it would be: an uncomfortable few hours posing in front of bright, harsh lighting that reminded me of airplane lavatories and a middle-aged man with fluffy blow dried hair snapping away endlessly on his camera. I remember laying there naked, in all my baby fat awkwardness, and staring up at his popcorn ceiling while I navigated my limbs around his big American furniture, spreading the lips of my inner labia. If I squeeze my eyes shut I can still see it all so clearly. The honey woodgrain and glass coffee table. Overstuffed pleather La-Z-Boy. It’s funny, the stupid little things you notice, when you’re on your back and wishing you were someplace else. At the end of the ordeal he handed me a sealed envelope full of cash; some unspeakably low amount, an amount that if someone offered me now, over two decades older, wiser, and much more jaded, I would laugh and feel sorry for them.
That feels like a million years ago, but I still think about this job, along with the many other jobs in the sex industry I worked after this – in peepshows, strip clubs, dungeons, suburban homes, motels, hotels, and more – nearly every day. I think about them when I’m out and about, shopping for groceries, walking around aimlessly, watching how other men look at women and how some men (still, sometimes, somehow) look at me. I think about the things I’ve done for money nearly any time I have any sort of meaningful interaction with a romantic partner, and I dread having to explain it while at the same time I am proud, because I know I am capable of a lot of things most other people are not. There is some strange, uneasy comfort in feeling confident that I could probably be dropped off on a random street corner in almost any metropolitan city with a pair of heels and some lipstick and that I’d eventually be able to figure something out. More lightly, I would be lying if I didn’t admit that I find some deep satisfaction in knowing that I have not only danced, but danced well, completely nude to almost every hard rock and rap hit of the 1980’s and 1990’s, on countless spotlit stages in front of hundreds of people. Maybe it’s stupid – I’m an accomplished person, relatively normal, with a successful, socially acceptable career now – but this ability feels hidden deep inside me, bright and shiny like a pearl, and I treasure it.
I started writing about sex work and the people I met on the job from the very beginning. It helped me process it all and also helped me remember – to believe – that the many things I saw and experienced alone really happened. Nearly all the work I ever did were part-time side hustles I worked alongside my regular, successful, “acceptable” career and told almost no one besides a few people about. Although I’ve been honest to lovers and close friends about the generalities of some of the various things I’ve done to earn a living, the details always felt like too much information, or like a secret I could never fully share, at least not completely. It was so personal, so intimate – many times too personal, too intimate – and it was impossible to share even when I was most desperate to. In the beginning, when I first decided to do sex work, I didn’t quite know what to expect, or if I could even do it. To my surprise I was not just good at it but great at it. Maybe more to my horror, later, I realized I was great at it even when I loathed it. Growing up, not once did I feel like anyone was there for me, or that I’d have any financial support beyond what I made from own part-time, happenstance jobs. My mom and dad weren’t bad people but they had each checked out by the time I turned 14, and I left home very early, barely attending a year and a half of high school before dropping out, getting a lawyer, and taking both of them to court to legally emancipate myself at 16. With the money from sex work I never felt like I had to rely on anyone, and it gave me a certain confidence, self-assuredness, and financial freedom that I had never experienced as a young woman before. Without much education or help from other people, I was able to travel all over the world and live an independent and adventurous life with few compromises. At other times, it allowed me to escape from the instability or challenges of my own personal life, and it made me feel valued and desired in a way that I sometimes didn’t with boyfriends. Other people always seemed to focus on the ‘sex’ part of it but I mostly did it for the power. The sex was just a bonus.
What was the trade-off? Was it worth it? Usually my answer is yes, but sometimes I’m not sure. It felt harmless, usually, but it never felt easy. What’s the cost of bearing witness? The life sex work allowed me to have is beyond value, but there are a hundred things I wish I could un-see, un-hear, un-feel. I’ve been touched without permission too many times to count, insulted, hit, half-heartedly assaulted by indifferent drunk idiots more than once. Somehow this is all forgettable, mostly, and the most frustrating thing about having it be a part of me are the assumptions from other people close to me who think they know what it’s like. After sharing the vaguest descriptions of an average job, I’ve had partners make a face of disgust, before saying, “Well, I could never have sex with someone I wasn’t attracted to for money,” as if it were a simple, casual, linear choice, or some terrible embarrassment, far beneath them. The opposite reaction is equally painful; one time, when a lover insisted on asking how much money I had earned in a day, and I reluctantly told him, he guffawed and said I was fortunate to get paid so well for something he’d do for free. Luck, sure, okay, maybe a little of it got me to where I am today, and like many people all over the world, I do love sex (fucking really is the great unifier). But luck or pleasure were not really what I was thinking about after spending the previous evening with the drunk buffoon who pinned me against the wall, waiting for the second I might stop squirming and move my hand, or the time I sold one of my used bloody tampons out the back door of my club to an elderly man for $300 (which covered half my rent), or the profound loneliness and isolation that some of the men who paid to see me radiated from the innermost core of their beings, and I sometimes fear infected me, despite all the rubbing alcohol I would desperately spray all over my entire body at the end of almost all my shifts.
Some of these stories I wrote a long time ago, as they were happening, and some I wrote years later. There were jobs I hated, jobs I loved, jobs I didn’t want to do, jobs I would have probably done for free, and some jobs that felt less like jobs and more like personal tests to see how much I could withstand. There were jobs I walked out of, never looking back, and other jobs I would return to over the years. Countless aliases, outfits, go bags, burner numbers, bottles of hand sanitizer, tubes of lip gloss. Stewing, stagnating, burning inside me, bottled up, until I thought I would nearly explode.
2. 7 Days at Rick’s
3. Fargo, North Dakota