Before you get vomited out, you must first pass through the belly of the beast

it’s official.  i hate sex work right now.  and i think i have for quite a while now.

but i am not trying to “get a job” either.  I am working hard on my art, submitting proposals, actively seeking new opportunities on a full time basis, doing the work to become the artist I want to be, as Gandi would say.  I wish that I wasn’t such an idealist, i am so suprised it hasn’t been burnt out of me.  I remember this feeling of nausea, of hatred of each day…of the impatience at the same shit on a different day.

2 bum calls and one Black guy who had such scary energy I was super glad I got out of there when I did and not a second sooner.  He was the kind of man who looked like he wanted to kill me but couldn’t find a reason to.  I shined all my golden light into him but he never received me.  He was evasive and didn’t want to answer my questions and he had the death look in his eyes.  This death look is what you see when you think someone could kill you.  You may have seen this gaze in a lover or a partner’s eyes before.  I’ve seen it before.  Nothing that I could say, me the master of de-escalating myself out of violence over and over again, was going to make this guy WARM UP to me.  And that was what made me nervous.  I did not want to have sex with him.  I upsold the sex so he wouldn’t do it.  The truth was I was sick to my stomach of Asiaphile Black dudes with their Asian fetishes and varying annoying personalities.  I did a hand job/body rub with one and then actually turned down his money because I just would not allow myself to sit through a situation where I would feel molested for money again.  At least not in such a short period.  Is it their racist imperialism?  Or is that I can’t stomach faking it more than once.  I’ve concluded that that was part of it.  I actually kind of HATE regulars.  And the guys that I am actually attracted to, I just end up trying to date or discount and so it doesn’t really last long either way.  But fucking the same dude that I didn’t like the first time gets super hard for me pretty quickly.  I remember doing mushrooms with one of my sugar daddies who insisted saying “I love you” to me all the time and I literally started vomiting.  It was a great way to get out of having to be close to him or have sex with him.  I chose to hang out with my best friends instead of make $1500 a day.  They thought I was crazy.  They were worth more to me though.  I know more than ever since doing so much sex work what in this life is PRICELESS and what is not.  I knew i couldn’t stomach him anymore is why.  Throwing up was the last resource I had.  I used that money well.  But it’s gone now.  I launched my solo theatre show with it and funded a cabaret.

This Black guy wanted me to be his personal travel assistant, around the world rubbing his shoulders, Thailand, Japan.  Bleah.  That would be my equivalent to sex slavery.  I can barely work a regular job with a boss., let alone be a sugar baby for longer than a week.  My true colors shine through and I throw off their patriarchal (they usually can’t help it, they’re in their 50s) shackles and usually walk out with my last donation liberated and relieved.

I drove to this tweaker’s house 30 minutes away and the way he talked to me was so cold.  He did not care that he had wasted my time.  He didn’t have weed, or a beer to offer me, nor gas money for my time.  He wasn’t going to give me shit.  just a bongful of shit.  Bleah.  No thank you.  I just gave that up for the last time, nasty horrible fucking shit.  I won’t even try it for kicks like I used to.  Sometimes I would do it just to see if it would do anything for me.  I would take it in a few hits and marvel about how I felt nothing, compared to a few hits of smoking a bong of weed.  I was boggled by how much power it had over so many people!  I use it as a tool of hopeless self injury when I have done it, not in the ways of how many tweakers use it.   I tried to understand the mind of a tweaker but I could never do it.  I am too strong and healthy.   Never again.  The vultures they call you to partake, they have no intention in paying you.  Just getting you high and fucking you to death.  I’m so sick of all the toxic drug addicts.  I am no longer content to just take their money and exploit their addictions, because this becomes my addiction too.  It’s a form of codependency that I have…and I am trying to kick it…Because the nature of SEX WORK includes dependence on money, it a really hard addiction to kick, especially in my personal economy when love and money are in constant need.

When you are doing sex work with a partner that you despise and you hate every second that they are intimate with you, it feels like you are being molested.  (I have only been date raped so I can only imagine this is what it feels like).  Me, the survivor is always trying to push myself to the limit, to the edge….I have pushed myself for nearly 5 years now and now I would like to be done.  I have danced with the devil and burned in the belly of the beast, fought off its invitations, corruptions, and henchmen.  I have seen my potential and realized some of my dreams with this work.  I have fought hard to create normalcy and justice for myself, for other sex workers who hated me, for those that never knew.  I’m done.  But i’m just done in my head, because as you know this transition can take months or years.  I did almost transition in 2009 when I was on probation, I quit one of my agencies and had a hard time of going indy and faced the famine which led to the nearest I have ever come to suicide in my life.  I have NOT truly considered it since but i often use it as a reference point so it concerns people sometimes. I was on probation, had just lost my teaching rights and just ended a horrible relationship and quit swop-la the first time.

My facebook friend Wendy Babcock recently died.  They said she committed suicide but I don’t believe it.  She was alive and well when I was “talking” to her through her facebook posts. She was actively writing, being interviewed, doing activism and reaching out to me.  Not the kind of person who is hopeless, depressed or suicidal.  Perhaps we don’t really know what suicidal really looks like then.  It scares me.  She was born on May 29.  We have the same birthday.  When she died, a part of me died too.  She was a valiant sex worker activist in Toronto, Canada.  She and I had just connected on how negative I felt about sex work and she was a thread of hope and support for me in this time when I do need it and continue to need it.

I am trying to date men and women on various internet dating sites with very little luck.  I am experimenting with telling them I am a sex worker on the second date.  I don’t blast it in my profile.  I used to just say, fuck you, i am a sex worker, love me or leave me!!! but the kind of men I attracted were just losers and abusers so I thought I’d try a different approach…

last nite someone stood me up and I knew it was NOT about me but it just bummed me out hard because I have been working so hard on creating these loopholes, revising my profile, trying to ease someone into the idea of dating a sex worker, testing the boundaries by talking about porn, hiding the true details, accentuating the minor into major to cover up the sex work…

there are still good days and good clients.   great clients and good times to ease the pain.  thank the universe for that.   Unlike my stripper days, I am older and wiser and I know how to take good care of myself better…but it is still hard.  I am single and dealing with this on my own.  It is sort of unfair to bring a new romantic date into my chaotic mix because I am really negative and emotional…it’s hard not to just unload on someone that I want to just hold me…

I think my reverse escorting days are done too.  I tried to make it work time and time again, but in the end, it never did.  It was just a long, drawn out, unpaid or low paid session.  I was never their girl.  Never qualified and they let me know it.  In Gun Hill Road, the trans woman character (who is not a sex worker) has a lover that just fucks her but won’t take her out to restaurants or movies.  Sadly, I could identify with my last lover that I would find myself gushing wetness under every month.  twice a month at most. I knew it was abusive.  But more self abusive though.  I was complacent in going over there and indulging in what he was offering.  I do not blame myself at all because I WAS better off than alone.

I still stay in their arms if they’re decent and willing and we are exchanging good energy.  I ended my 9 month unhealthy affair with the above mentioned former client turned lover who was really just a PnP addiction.  It was just a little bit of money, lots or orgasms, affection, and a little bit of drugs.  I trained him to go from 0 to hero in 3 sessions.  I used to hate having him go down on me and soon i begged for it.  9 orgasms was the most I’d had in perhaps ten years!  Do you blame me?  In my 30s, the combo of sex love magic stays in my body and warms my spirit for a good 24 hours afterwards.  I don’t remember being that conscious of it in my 20s of even having the kind of relationship I have to body and energy as aI do at 35.

Gay boys and hookers PnP for the same reason.  Toxic people, mutual loneliness, trying to live up to beauty and sex machine standards, remnants of past trauma and the emotional deficit collide.  he didn’t call me for the last time and I wanted to injest him for the last time until he cut through my veins and caused every muscle in my body to hurt and tense up in soreness for over a week.  And then I blocked him from being able to call me (My wireless carrier allows you to do that now! I wished they had this service when the crazy white trash girlfriend was texting me cussng insults once she found out i was fucking her man).

I did a cathartic sort of Amy Winehouse-esque memorial ritual the weekend she was found dead and I learned that I was stronger than letting your addictions kill you.  stronger than drug addiction.  stronger than sex work.  stronger than rape. robbery. arrest.  racism. conspiracy theories.  mental illness.  rape culture.  pimps.  I’ve learned my lessons and it is time to move to a different chapter.