Sex work in the lesbian community was birthed long before Stonewall and has come to be almost as much an everyday occupation in dyke demographics as a straight girl’s downtown office job. But the lesbian and feminist community has had historically mixed feelings about sex work, traditionally labeling the profession as exploitative.

Enter feminist writers Carol Queen, Susie Bright and Annie Sprinkle, all outspoken cultural icons who have been inducted into the canon of women’s studies, and in many ways have laid to rest the issue of sex work for lesbians and feminists.

In 1990 writer Carol Queen went to work at a San Francisco peep show called the Lusty Lady and wrote about it as a most titillating, exciting and empowering experience. Shortly thereafter the word was out in the dyke community: Sex work was a hot way to become an empowered powerhouse of a lesbian who was both liberated and comfortable with her sexuality and her body. Suddenly, there was no reason to feel shame or even question one’s motives for filing in line behind the countless sex workers who came before.

It’s called sex positive, and the approach has been a welcome position for feminists to take in the fight for equality and rights. Power needs to be reclaimed and patriarchal stereotypes about victimized sex workers have needed to be replaced by something with more agency and aggression.

But a distinction needs to be made between the sex worker’s real-life experience and the feminist theory that politicizes it. Within the anthologies written by the sex-worker celebrity feminists, workers should be able to reference their experiences and gain a sense of community. Instead, it seems many sex workers still feel isolated, their stories lost and undocumented like the thousands before them.

Now that lesbians have permission to be sex workers, it’s time to explore the totality of the sex worker’s experience – because it’s not all easy money and seductive taboo. Recently, the Gay & Lesbian Times set out to find lesbian sex workers – most of whom requested being referred to on a first-name-only basis – to learn about the reality behind the profession for lesbians.

The workers we found expressed the belief that sex work comes at a price, and often an emotional price. That does not mean sex work is good or bad, or that women should or shouldn’t do it, it is just important for everyone to know there is a flip side – that there is always the coming home from the glamour, the fast cash and pretty lights.

Candye Kane is a local San Diego musician and blues diva who tours internationally with her band, and whose show has been described as “a revival meeting in the parking lot of a porn store.” Kane also identifies as bisexual and speaks openly about previous experiences in the porn industry, though her four-year stint making videos, posing for magazines and conducting phone sex happened 20 years ago. Having appeared on the covers of more than 200 magazines like Hustler, High Society and Juggs, Kane still seeks to educate people about sex worker issues by speaking out openly about her experiences, by organizing vigils like the recent vigil in San Diego for sex worker crime victims, and by … playing a mean blues piano with her boobs.

“For me it was empowering,” says Kane of her previous experiences. “As a single mother on welfare, it was a ticket out of the ghetto. It was financial freedom and emancipation. It enabled me to do what I really wanted to do: Music.”

The lesbian women interviewed for this article — Renee, April and Jane — agreed that their straight sisters have a rougher go because their boundaries around men, money and attraction get messy and confusing. Renee danced for nine months at The Gold Club, the only upscale topless bar in San Francisco’s financial district. For years the club was set apart from the Déjà Vu monopoly on Broadway Street, until Déjà Vu bought them out last year. April stripped the past four years at Garden of Eden, a smaller all-nude club operating under the umbrella of Déjà Vu’s Broadway street cartel. Two of those years she had a boyfriend, the rest of the time she dated girls. She hasn’t been to the club for the past six months both because she wants to quit and because her current girlfriend hates it. Jane is a former independent escort. She worked for two years on her own and now does erotic massage out of her home while working on a professional development degree.

“I can’t imagine being with boys and going to work,” says Renee. “Dancing is kind of my only interaction with guys. It’s totally alien from the rest of my life. With straight girls, they are getting a different image of men but with us, we only have one interaction.”

Renee talks about the social subtleties she picked up from her mother about the cost of sexual transactions with men. “My mom really early on sold me the idea that if anyone gave you something in the context of boys or in a sexual context, you owe them something,” Renee says. “The thing about dancing was that it was up front. There’s an actual conversation that says, ‘This is what I can do for this much money,’ and you’re talking about an exchange. It’s not covert. With my mom, getting a ride home from soccer practice implied that you were gonna have to pay for it in some way.”

April says, “It’s easier to separate what’s for money and what’s recreational if you’re a dyke stripping because you’re not looking to meet someone in the club. You hardly ever think, ‘I’d like to spend more time with him and not charge him.’”

Crawling into bed with a woman at the end of the evening makes sex work not only manageable, but allowable. Jane said she can do it because her girlfriend “allows it or accepts it in a way that a boyfriend wouldn’t.”

“It changes the way you think about men,” says April. “Whenever I’d be at a straight bar and a guy would hit on me, I would think, ‘I can get $80 out of that guy, I can get $100 out of that guy.’ That would suck if you were straight because you’d be around guys all the time and try to categorize what kind of lap dance they would be.”

Numerous feminist umbrellas have tried to politicize the sex worker’s experience. Ironically, sex workers are difficult to profile because their work is considered the ultimate taboo in mainstream culture. This creates a double life kept private and quiet.

Second wave feminists like Andrea Dworkin espoused the notion that sex work and pornography were detrimental to the feminist state of mind. Dworkin, with feminist lawyer Catherine MacKinnon, drafted an anti-pornography law in 1983 defining pornography as a civil rights violation against women – a law that passed in Indianapolis and Minneapolis before eventually being overturned by the Supreme Court in 1986. The third wave feminists, or sex-positive feminists in the 1980s had spokeswomen like Susie Bright, Annie Sprinkle and Bettie Dodson who spearheaded a movement around the idea of the empowered dyke feminist sex worker. This branch of feminism accepts pornography and prostitution as freedom of expression and a valuable way to gain sexual gratification as long as it is safe and consensual.

All of the women I interviewed agreed that sex work is both demoralizing and promising at the same time. “There is a sense of glory and power in taking money from the man,” says April. “If someone whistles at me they better give me 20 bucks, but when you’re broke and you go in and you’re having a bad night, that’s not very empowering. You feel pathetic and small and you doubt your self and you don’t have confidence and you beat yourself up and you pick apart your body and there’s nothing empowering about that, but I think women have the right to choose if they sell their body and for how much.”

Regarding the sex radical feminist, Jane says, “Based on my experience, I would call it a misguided movement. It’s not for me to judge other peoples experience but my feeling is there is something dishonest in portraying it as empowering.”

Renee believes it’s an “oversimplification that most movements do when they are trying to sell something. It’s not that easy. Any time you start talking about sex, be it within your own personal life, or selling it, it gets really personal and highly individualized.”

The feminist movement fails to make distinctions between liberated female sexuality and women’s work. Women definitely need to have the choice to do as they please with their bodies, and that means a woman should be able to legally use her sexuality to make a buck, if she chooses. This choice, however, is a far cry from the concept of a sexually liberated woman. The mere fact that a woman has to comply with patriarchal standards of beauty and male gaze fantasy in order to walk with a chunk of change shows the lack of expression and freedom around her sexuality. The battle is not about legalizing prostitution, it is not about the body politic – these are band-aid issue masking a deeper injustice. The choice to use one’s body to make money or not to is a narrow set of options. This issue alone is not pivotal enough to make feminist headway. By limiting the debate to the idea of whether a woman should legally get paid for selling sex or not, a larger issue is neglected. There is still no choice or option for the woman who doesn’t want to sell her body but wants a sex worker’s wage. With such a wage accessible to a majority of women, women might drop from the ranks and diminish the now $7 billion dollar a year sex industry business.

There are books on sex workers and books about abuse, but little on the links between sex workers and abuse. Sex work and a history of abuse are a natural association for most. It is a common stereotype that the impoverished, destitute and abused woman is the one who finds herself on sex work’s doorstep.

Now that we’ve passed our third wave of feminism and entered post-feminism, perhaps we’re all healed, sex positive brazen whores, pompous of our prostitution, carrying no shame, no dirty secrets with nothing to keep quiet about. We’ve dispelled the stereotypes and buried the rumors, so why write books on the outdated thought that sex workers are abused victims when we’re busy rejoicing in our new liberated sexuality and fighting for the legalization of prostitution? Perhaps there is no reference to this stigmatized phenomenon of sex work and abuse because it is too difficult to weed out the minute discrepancies between sex workers who were sexually abused and women who were sexually abused.

“All sex workers come from abusive backgrounds,” says Jane. “But you’d have to use the word abusive in broad terms. I feel that all women have suffered some measure of inappropriateness of some kind at some time. I didn’t come from a family with overt abuse, but definitely covert.”

“I think most people come from abusive backgrounds so I don’t know what makes sex workers different,” says April.

Unfortunately, statistics support their consensus. Naomi Wolf wrote in The Beauty Myth that in a 1983 survey of 930 San Francisco women, “44 percent had survived rape or attempted rape as defined by the FBI, 88 percent of those knew their attacker, and 1 in 7 had been raped by her husband or ex-husband. Thirty-eight percent of women had been sexually abused by an adult relative, acquaintance, or stranger before age 18; 28 percent had been seriously abused before age 14, 12 percent by someone in their family.”

Renee was attacked on the street and raped when she was 8. “There is the horror of being raped,” she says. “I feel like I’ve been through it so many times, but the beating stuff is really hard for me, it comes up for me all the time. Even if it’s the middle of the day, and it gets too quiet, I’m always looking over my shoulder.”

Fear of men is a handbag of fear women are forever gripping. It keeps women thinking about what outfit to wear and whether they will be safe wearing it.

“I think there are some men who think that any woman who wears a short skirt deserves to be raped, much less someone who had sex on film,” says Kane. “That worries me sometimes but I don’t lose any sleep over it.”

Renee says, “I feel like I’m not sure at any second what men are capable of. They can seem completely sane one second and psycho and evil the next. I can’t gauge it. It takes me too long to figure out so I’m always on guard. I can’t put gay men in the same category, because if you remove that sexual dynamic it goes away. All the violence I’ve seen has come from men. I’ve been hit by guys and I felt like, ‘This fucker could kill me, maybe I could hurt him on my way out,’ but I always go right to dying.”

Everybody wants to date a stripper at least at some point. But being in an intimate relationship with a sex worker is no easy task. Most of the women interviewed agreed that the work is simpler when you are single.

First of all, there’s the perception that all sex workers are wild and crazy in bed.

Candye Kane remembers this pressure. “I often felt like I was performing both on and off camera, both in and out of the bedroom,” says Kane. “I felt pressure to be great in bed; kinky, uninhibited and multi orgasmic all the time. As a result, I had problems with true intimacy.”

After a couple of weeks or months, most people lose interest in the sex-worker allure and the problems set in. “I think Paul would have asked me to marry him if I wasn’t dancing,” says April. “It was something that kept him from ever taking me seriously.”

Jane adds, “It is highly likely that I’d go back to whoring if my relationship ended, because I equate sex work/ escorting with a certain measure of freedom, as in not having to be accountable to anyone in terms of a relationship.”

Renee started dancing when she and her girlfriend of five years were splitting up.

“I think it would have been different if I was in the thick of some heavy relationship,” she said. “I needed to be by myself before and after a shift.”

Because sex work takes such a toll physically, mentally, and emotionally on women, it’s not surprising that it often takes a toll on their relationships.

“I don’t even dance [any more] and we fight about it,” says April about her current relationship, adding that she often fought with her ex-girlfriend on days after working. “Going to the club would suck the life out of me,” she says. “I felt like I was giving, giving, giving and getting walked all over, so the next day if anyone asked anything of me I would lash out. I was so worn thin and stretched out that I couldn’t handle feeling vulnerable. If I was dancing all week I would be so self-righteous when I wasn’t at work. My shit just did not stink, and I was really difficult to be around. I was also a little bit shut down.”

“Shutting down” is a catchall phrase used by the women to describe one of the byproducts of sex work. It is the invisible battle gear, the emotional chain mail, and psychic shields put in place before putting on face.

“I had to shut down many times and just get the job done,” says Kane. “While on camera, I envisioned myself sitting at a nice restaurant with linen tablecloths and would often treat myself to a wonderful dinner in a classy restaurant to cleanse myself after a shoot.”

A common problem is that the armor tends to stay on and in place in a more permanent way the longer one is on the job. Lovers begin complaining or distancing themselves because their beloved seems to be continually shut down, not just on working days.

“The less and less I do of any sex work and the further away I am from escorting,” said Jane. “I am aware of how much shutting down was required. I am aware that there are effects of sex work that haven’t been made manifest yet, that I will have to pay the piper at some point psychically.”

Renee refers to this same idea of shutting down when she talks about what kept her from going into the club. “As soon as I had a major crisis in my life, I couldn’t walk in the door. I didn’t decide to quit, I just couldn’t go in,” she said. “My brother dying was the last leg. The idea of going in there and being really raw made me realize how much armor I had to put on just to get through a shift.”

It seems the opening and closing of vulnerability isn’t so easy to switch on and off. The more it goes off, the more it stays that way. April says, “The character I have to assume to work is not myself at all. She has a whole different set of values and motives and objectives that I disagree with and sometimes I had to use alcohol to shut down, and even if I didn’t drink, it definitely took a while to come down from work. I’d say that I’m just now not as shut down because of work and I was shut down about my body too because you’re having strange guys touch you.”

It is hard to determine what makes a whore, especially when information on sex work is ambiguous and enigmatic. Sex workers are an unlikely demographic to organize or speak out on who they are and their needs. The subversity, not to mention illegality, of the profession keeps most women closeted. Furthermore, repercussions of being found out threaten physical safety as well as potential harassment at future employment opportunities. The nature of the business requires a double life as well as the ingenuity and creativity to quickly chameleon between the two.

Most people think women find their way into sex work during desperate financial times. But April, who comes from a poor working class family and has a degree in English Literature, believes sex work is a form of rebellion.

“There were rich girls who didn’t dance out of necessity but to get attention from their families who ignored them at home,” April says.

Renee decided to dance because she wanted financial independence from her upper middle class family who always told her to marry rich. The women who initially began sex work for the money quickly realized money doesn’t buy happiness. Even with extra cash and a more luxurious lifestyle, the women agreed they feel happier when they are not doing sex work.

“It’s easy to project that people with money have happiness,” says Jane. “I’ve seen first-hand how money can distort and complicate.”

April agrees, “When you don’t have money you think if I just had money I’d be happy, but really you just have stuff, you have access to stuff.”

Since money isn’t always the motivating factor and sex work can demystify wealth, there must be something deeper that drives women toward this profession. Physicality is another common reason used to explain why women enter the adult entertainment industry.

Kane, as a woman of size, draws from her personal experience to discredit the commonly held belief that sex workers must be thin, blonde, big breasted, beautiful and dumb. Not every skinny beautiful woman flocks to the strip clubs, whorehouses, and massage parlors just because their exterior gives them a free pass for employment. Despite their perfect qualifications they still choose not to become sex workers.

But feminist sex workers like Kane support the idea that sex work can be a powerful and empowering experience.

“For me,” Kane says, the positive empowerment came from off the strip stage or away from the cameras. The power came from traveling to NYC for the first time and making more money than I had ever seen before in my life. For the first time in my life, I felt like a sex symbol. I got marriage proposals and fan mail. Because I was a big girl, I was not always taken seriously as a singer in thin-obsessed Hollywood. In sex work, I was taken seriously and my size suddenly became a commodity.”

No sex worker denies the power rush or ego boost that can result from a turned trick or lap dance and a pocket full of cash. April says, “The power rush is a high. When you’re having a good night, when you’re making a grand, it’s so beyond the money. It’s reparation for all the shit you’ve had to go through. Like being poor in school and being harassed for being cute.”

Jane adds, “For that moment in time, I’m the one in control and I’m rendering these otherwise dominant men helpless. For that moment, I’m calling the shots. Their desire of me is a huge component of the rush and what’s ‘satisfying’ for me, but it’s never truly satisfying.”

It is important to distinguish between feeling powerful and feeling empowered. Despite all the power rushes and highs, the women agreed that sex work was not the most empowering occupation.

April says, “It’s like trying cocaine, even though you know it’s hard to come down and you’ll have a headache. But, now I know it’s out there if I really want to escape, or if I want a pair of shoes or just feel like being an exhibitionist. So yeah, dancing hurts me and it feels bad, but there’s a part of me that believes I don’t deserve respect or a good life, so I could understand why some people could say that they could never do it because they value themselves differently.”

If it’s not the looks, the money, the sense of power or feeling empowered, why do women do it? Are sex workers made or born? Perhaps it is in their blood. Maybe today’s sex workers descend from the ancient lineage of sacred whores like the devadasis of Hindu temples or the ghazye of Egypt or the horae of Greece who commanded high social status and were revered and worshipped by men as embodiments of the Queen of Heaven and as a way to connect with the spirituality of the divine. With the onset of Christianity these practices were deemed immoral and the holy whore was lost with many pagan traditions. This speaks to the turn in history responsible for much of the current animosity toward sex workers. By the 17th century, English apprentices were raiding whorehouses and beating the inmates. Obviously, it is no longer the social honor and reverence that lures women into sex work, nor the calling to be brides of God possessed with the spirit.

Instead, most of these women felt being unconditionally sexualized as children is part of what made them consider sex work.

“I’ve been fascinated and obsessed with prostitution since I was old enough to know what it was,” said Jane. “There is something deep-seeded that compels me to want attention for my looks. It’s really one of the only ways that women can have control over men. And I hate them for it. I have some kind of twisted drive to be objectified. I learned early in my life that I got power from my beauty. Some subconscious part of me needs to play out that scenario of being objectified my whole life. In junior high a family friend wanted to paint me and was gushing about how beautiful I was, and some model scout in the mall stopped me, but I’m sure it was going on long before that.”

Renee agrees, “I felt over sexualized for most of my life so it didn’t feel like a huge leap to get paid for it. I felt like it was something unavoidable. It was the norm and I played into it to get attention. The one area in my life that was not ever complicated was that someone always wanted to fuck me. What else would I possibly be good at?”

Renee got most of her attention from adults who thought she was a beautiful mixed-race child. Her mother’s friend wanted to have mixed babies, and therefore paid more attention to Renee than her own child. Renee remembers, “She told her daughter, who had red hair and freckles, why can’t you look more like Renee? I would eat up the attention and affection. I remember what her body and breasts looked like. I wanted to look like her and wanted her attention, but her attention was attached to the fact that I was beautiful and mixed.”

April remembers the attention she got as a little girl from being pretty and blonde. “In some way it seems I was born for this work,” she says. “I’m a pretty girl who makes people feel good. There aren’t a lot of jobs that pay you comparable to a man’s salary for that. And that’s the sad truth.”

Kane felt her teenage motherhood and the need for money was more the reason she went into sex work, but also remembers having a D cup in seventh grade. She says, “I was harassed by boys at school. Then one weekend I went to Las Vegas with my mother and aunt. In Vegas, my large breasts got me into the casinos without ID. All I had to do was wear a low cut dress and at 14 I was able to gamble. This was the first time I realized my large breasts could be an asset.”

Quitting is what every sex worker says they will soon do, followed by an excuse as to why they haven’t. All the women interviewed honestly explore the pitfalls and highs of a career as a sex worker. Their discoveries are tragic, inspiring and hilarious. They aren’t blindly walking into strip clubs or hotel rooms, but are armored with self-knowledge, intelligence, humor and a whole lot of hustle. This is what they go to war with, because this occupation is so much more than a day job. It is a battlefield where they expose their bodies, their not so perfect past, their deviant sexuality, their confusing desires, and conflicting drives without much community to support them.

For all the unpleasant reality of their work, none of them is prepared to quit.

“Quitting is threatening and it’s not just because of the money,” said April. “It’s assuming the slutty, bitchy character who is self righteous and manipulative. I would miss her. I love that there’s a space where she is valid and important and vital. She has to be there otherwise you don’t make any money. She’s appropriate there. There’s no other place where there are nice lights, loud music and you’re allowed to walk around in stupid shoes and cheesy lingerie and be seductive. People would laugh their asses off if you tried to do that anywhere else but a strip club.”

Even though the women admit the work to be more unempowering than empowering, the pull to do it is a stronger force.

“There are a whole lot of things in my life that aren’t good for me but serve me in some way,” said Renee. “I think if anyone told me I couldn’t do sex work again, it would make me bristle.”

Within the unshaped profile of sex worker, there seems to be a specific drive to do sex work. Whether she is born that way or made through life experiences or circumstances, for her it is an option in a way that other women would never entertain.

“It was something I had to do,” says Jane. “I was driven to do. Even if I married a millionaire tomorrow some part of that drive would still be there. I think it’s doing silent damage and I think it’s born of a wounded place. I don’t think it’s healthy and I wish I could say I’m the pinnacle of health and I didn’t self sabotage. But rather than looking at it as something wrong or taking some moral view that it’s damaging to women, I’m more interested in deconstructing the reasons that motivate me to do it.”

Sex work is circumstantial and highly personal. There is no illuminated path, no easy way out, and no right or wrong. But there are side streets of seduction, desolation, and promise.

It is a devastatingly gallant journey that only the strongest of women undertake.