LORELEI LEE
All the buses stopped at Old Town. We didn’t have cars or telephones, so we waited there and watched. We sat on the cement medians in close circles, smoking. We wandered off to fish for change and tequila, to beg for wax cups from the snack bar. We were fourteen and fifteen and sixteen. Liam had his ankle monitor on. His hair glued up high. The cops were watching, and we felt their eyes on us—a stiffening in our backs, a tamp on our laughter. The buses unloaded and we stood to see if one of us was getting off. A slow exodus of grown-ups working day shifts at the Old Town restaurants that just left baskets of chips or bread on the outdoor tables, their bright plastic grease cloths beckoning, but we could never swipe the leftover food there. We were not surreptitious.
We’d spent so much time invisible, so we’d made ourselves impossible to ignore. Our hair was purple and our pants were ripped. We wore necklaces of beer tabs strung on twine, we draped chains around our necks and waists. We rattled when we walked. We had armor, but no stealth. Because of this, we could see each other coming. We could keep track of each other.
I kept count. I counted us all day and night, no matter how stoned I was. Our crew was eight girls. Eight of us meant safety. If there were seven, we had to go searching.
WHEN I WAS nineteen, I paid my way to San Francisco with pornography. I answered an ad for the cheapest room I could find, and when the girl who lived there asked me, I lied and said I was straight. I didn’t know anyone. Men or boys asked me to go places, and I went. At a party in the fall, I wore tight red pants and no bra. I drank what was handed to me. I fell asleep on a bed and woke up and this boy was fucking me. His smell and skin and my teeth grinding and I was drunk or high, I don’t know which, and I couldn’t move. I could not make him stop. I passed out again and woke up and his body was there on the bed and I inched away and it was so gray, San Francisco was always so gray, always so predawn, and I did not want to jostle anything, gathered my limbs, my fragile center, slipped out to the gray street and the shivering bus and stepped gently on the stairs up into my rented room and washed myself with hot water and drank hot coffee to burn the inside of me and began the work of pretending it had not happened.
THAT SAME YEAR, my boss at the coffee shop left me five messages in three days:
“Hey, just wanted to see if you want to go to that show on Friday at Great American Music Hall.”
“Hey you haven’t called me back so just checking in again to see if you want to go, or maybe get a drink.”
“Hey you know it’s pretty rude of you to just smile at me like that and then not even call me back.”
“You can’t just be nice to people and then act like it doesn’t mean anything.”
“You think you’re so special but you’re not. You should be more careful.”
At work, he did not mention the phone calls. He watched me. I laughed at something a coworker said and he yelled, “less talking, more working.” He started scheduling me so that I only worked alone. As I wiped down counters, he stood close to me, holding a clipboard, not looking at me, just keeping his big body next to mine.
IN OLD TOWN and in Ocean Beach the cops were always watching us. Were always stopping us in the street. Were always making us empty our pockets and backpacks. We felt them coming, we could see them from a block away and we stiffened, tried to duck around corners, tried to avert our faces. At night, they shone their flashlights into our eyes. Some nights they made us stand in a row. They held photos of missing children up beside our faces.
We were not missing.
THE BOY WHO raped me had paid to see my naked pictures on the internet. He’d done this with his friends, the group of them together at the computer with someone’s brother’s credit card. I knew this because one of them told me. They told me he wanted to fuck me. This was intended as a compliment. I have tried to imagine what they said to each other in that room, hovered over the screen. I can’t hear them. I come up with nothing.
“YOU’RE STUCK IN your trauma.”
At the Brown Jug, they always kept the lights on. The woman who tended bar leaned her chest onto the wood counter and didn’t smile. The time never changed, and we put our quarters in the jukebox and peeled the labels off bottles of Pabst and pretended we were not hiding. I had met Adam in a writing class. He bought me a knife to carry and told me my stories were “good,” were “almost there.”
I was always almost there.
I was twenty-two, and for a year I had been meeting men at bus stops and train stations and getting into their cars and checking the locks and going where they took me and taking what they would pay me.
It was 2003, and in San Francisco, whores were organized. They had community meetings. They shared tax tips. I went to these meetings, and I tried to feel as though I knew my business. As though I were a business. I didn’t know what I was. Sometimes I thought that I was just not a good enough whore. I could not feel the confidence those other women seemed to feel, though I tried to pretend that I did. I needed the money too much. I believed it too much when people told me I was worthless, that being touched for money reduced me, subtracted piece by piece.
Adam played guitar and wrote stories and made farm wine and knew about art. He was twenty-seven and he had read a lot of books. He had a college degree and a girlfriend and an admittance to a university that would award him a master of fine arts. I wanted all of the things he had.
That entire year, I spent days when I was not making rent walking and walking and walking around the city. I bought Styrofoam cups of coffee and chewed the edges in parks. I walked miles at a time, the city so small I had to turn around at Fisherman’s Wharf or the windy piers beside the ballpark and cross it again. Everywhere there were people passing me in a hurry, people who had places that they needed to be. I thought all of them—carrying their shopping bags and eating their salads at outdoor tables and talking seriously in high-buttoned coats—were connected to something, were inside of something I could not even see the edges of.
I thought that if Adam loved me, it would get me inside.
“You’re stuck in your trauma,” he said, “that’s why you let men ejaculate on you for eight hundred dollars.” We were sitting on bar stools, our beer wrappers shredded, he had put some slow song on, probably Steve Earle, Someday I’m finally gonna let go, and he pulled my legs over his lap and I knew he did not love me and still, I cried as though he did.
IN TRUTH, I had only made $800 once. I thought that man was just too stupid to know that I would have done it for much less. I feared that he would change his mind, and when he handed me the envelope, those eight thin bills felt as precious and unexpected as the jewelry boxes men gave to women in the movies. Later, I realized that $800, to him, simply wasn’t very much.
SEX WORKERS, says Catharine MacKinnon, are “the property of men who buy and sell and rent them.”1 She says that to rape a sex worker means simply to not pay her.
WHEN MEN EJACULATED on me it did not feel like trauma, it felt like money. Like rent. It was not painful. It was not confusing. I did not hate them. I felt nothing about them. I knew what I was agreeing to. I knew what I would have when I walked away. I knew that I would walk away. I knew that I owned myself. That owning myself meant having a way to make my money and walk away. That the walking away, more than anything, was the thing that made this work different.
SEX WORK, tweeted Ashley Judd, is “body invasion.” It commodi-fies “girls and women’s orifices.”
“Cash,” she says, “is the proof of coercion.”
ON MARCH 11, 2019, the New York City chapter of the National Organization for Women (NOW-NYC) held a protest on the steps of City Hall, demanding the continued criminalization of sex work. Decrim NY, a coalition of New York sex workers, had recently announced efforts to introduce a state bill to get rid of New York’s “loitering for the purposes of prostitution” law, a law that overwhelmingly targets Black and brown trans women, who can be arrested for simply standing on a sidewalk, wearing “revealing clothing.” Speakers at NOW’s protest called the decriminalization bill the “Pimp Protection Act.”
NOW-NYC’s president said, “Yes, you’ve heard it right, the sex trade could be coming to a neighborhood near you.” New York City, she said, could become the “Las Vegas of the Northeast.” As though sex work were not also illegal in Las Vegas.
A small group of sex workers came to counterprotest. They held signs that said, “Sex Workers Against Sex Trafficking.”
The anti-decriminalization protestors stepped in front of them to cover their signs. Speakers said that the sex workers were “ignorant of their own oppression.”
ONE AFTERNOON IN Old Town, a man walked up behind me and I felt his hand suddenly grip my ass and run down between my legs. As he continued past me I realized there were actually three men together, all of them grown-ups. All of them laughing.
The cops were watching, like always. Something inside of me broke and I shouted.
“That man grabbed my ass!” I pointed at the three men receding across the parking lot.
“Which one?” said the cop.
“I don’t know,” I said.
The cop shrugged. “Maybe if you didn’t dress like a homeless person, men wouldn’t do those things to you.”
I DID NOT tell anyone that I had been raped. I did not tell anyone and still they said, “What is wrong with you that you allow men to pay to touch you.”
They said, “What happened to you that made you like this?”
I heard these things again and again.
I heard them so often that I feared that they were right, that I had only tricked myself into believing that there was a difference between the things I’d chosen and the things I hadn’t.
In my bed, not sleeping, Adam’s heavy arm over me, my body between him and the wall, I thought: I am broken.
I did not know what I was, and I did not know how to be anything else.
I knew that to become a person that men like Adam could love would mean making myself visibly weak. Would mean performing the kind of weakness that other people—people inside of the place with invisible edges—could find lovable. Would mean claiming ignorance so they could see me as worthy of being remade.
I knew that the weakness they wanted was nothing like the real weakness inside of me. The real weakness inside of me could only be healed if I trusted my own rules. If I did not give my pain away for other people’s stories.
IT WAS IN a porn studio that I first began to feel as though my body was a thing I could love. I did not take the job in order to feel this. I did not even understand it as it was happening. It happened slowly and also all at once. I showed up to shoot and the man that I would be working with asked me, “What are your limits?”
I had no idea what he was talking about.
“What do you not want to do?” he asked. And on that day, I could not tell him. No one had ever asked me that question before.
“We’ll try some things,” he said, “and you just say ‘red’ if you want to stop.”
So I tried things. Some of them I liked and some of them I didn’t and some of them I didn’t care about one way or another. Every day when I came to shoot, they asked me the same question: “What do you want to do today? What don’t you want to do?”
Eventually, I could answer. I could make a list. This is what I want. This is what I don’t want.
There was a day when I was tied up, suspended in rope in the middle of a warehouse in downtown San Francisco, and a man was hitting me all over my body with a deerskin flogger. I was in midair, ropes pressed into my hips and thighs and chest with measured tension, leather thudding rhythmically against my back and breasts and I felt a kind of elation, a swelling in my center. I felt strong. I felt myself getting stronger. The scene ended, and they lowered me to the ground and they untied the ropes and blood rushed back into my knees and elbows and I felt suddenly clean. I felt whole. More than whole, I felt unbreakable.
They handed me a check, and it did not feel like coercion, it felt like safety. It felt like I had taken something from them.
“IT IS IMPOSSIBLE,” says Andrea Dworkin, “to use a human body in the way women’s bodies are used in prostitution and to have a whole human being at the end of it, or in the middle of it, or close to the beginning of it… . And no woman gets whole again later, after.”2
IN LOS ANGELES, the days were all the same but also they were all different. We were Moretti’s girls and he gave us rules to follow. He told us when to be home and who we could or could not date and he took us to work and to the grocery store and to the Starbucks and to Malibu for fish tacos and to DiMaggio’s for steaks and wine. We walked behind him in the restaurants and at parties and at go-sees at the Vivid and Wicked offices, a line of us in glitter and spandex and Pleasers and fishnet and lamé. I loved being one of his girls. I felt like I was inside. Not inside of the place that other people were in, but still, inside of something real.
I worked. All of us worked. We lived to work. We called it the “porn dorm” and we called it “porno boot camp” and we got up at five a.m. and worked until two the following morning. We worked two-a-days and we worked seven days a week and there was not a single day of the year when someone, somewhere, was not making pornography.
There were bad days.
I was booked for a solo and the director kept trying to fuck me and then finally just jerked off onto my leg even while I told him to stop. He laughed and put his dick away and then later he put me on the box cover. I was nominated for an AVN award for the scene.
I was booked for a double with my friend Annette and the director sent the photographer and makeup artist home so we’d be alone. He wheedled at us all day, trying to keep us there, trying to make us drink things from cups in his fridge, telling us he’d been watching all our films. Annette and I kept eyeing each other, trying to figure out where this was going, trying to figure out how to get our money and get out of there. Finally, he set up a tripod on his bedroom desk and sweated away on top of us like we were not even there. We didn’t even pretend. I lay there limp and let him drip and groan on me. He put us on the box cover. I told Moretti not to make me work for him ever again.
One day on set, a male performer grabbed me suddenly by the throat and pinned me to the wall when no one else was looking. “You like it,” he said, and laughed. On another day, in the bathroom of a hotel, he hit me so hard my face bled.
One day I worked with a man I was certain wanted me dead. We were in a basement, there were concrete stairs and he dragged me down them. He ground my head into the concrete floor and stepped on my face and I thought my skull would crack. I just held my breath and waited to see if I would live.
THERE WERE GOOD DAYS.
There were days when I got to work and suddenly, wordlessly, I connected with the other performer and the thing we made on those days was a kind of magic. I learned to feel exactly what the camera could see. I wore bandit’s-mask makeup and knee-high athletic socks in a bathtub and squirted rainbow-colored water out of my asshole and we played in the water like it was a summer sprinkler and laughed until we could not laugh any more. I walked through the sunlit terrace of an abandoned mansion and turned my body perfectly to the light and became a museum statue. I filled my own eyes with spit and laid my head upside down over the back of a pool table and cried black bubbles and contorted my limbs so that every part of me was bent to the edges of bodily possibility. I pulled men’s bodies into mine and watched their eyes change and knew for a few moments how I owned them, how I had taken away a kind of power they were so used to having that they’d forgotten how tired they were of having it. I stood on top of a mountain naked, draped in bits of fabric that flew in the wind but never covered my nakedness. I pissed in the dirt and screamed and bared my tits and came like rockets and gripped my own body like it would keep me from falling. I put entire fists inside of me and then the six-inch stilettos of my high heeled shoes. I was everything but pretty. I screamed and spit and grunted and moved in impossible ways and made the crew gasp. I’d made art or won a race, I wasn’t sure what. On those days I felt as though my body were a sharp tool, as though my craft were unmatched. I felt utterly human, as though I had laid plain the thing I was made of.
“A SEX WORKER,” says Dorchen Leidholdt, is a “de-individualized, dehumanized being … stranger after stranger use her body as a seminal spittoon.”3
THE GOOD DAYS and the bad days were overwhelmed by days when everything went as expected. Days when I showed up and laid out my clothes and we chose something and I put my makeup on and took the stills and waited for male talent or waited for the light or waited for the dialogue and did six positions and a pop and took my check and went home. I felt bored more often than I felt anything else. I felt bored and I felt as though the thing I was inside of was invisible to everyone who was not inside of it.
When I was not working, I was exhausted. I was more exhausted than I had ever been. Some mornings, when it was time to get up to go to work, I cried.
“You cry now, but you’ll cry when you have no money,” Moretti said.
I cried and then I went to work.
The day would be good or it would be bad or it would be neither and I would collect my check and Moretti would come and pick us up and take us to Jerry’s Deli and we would eat chicken soup and black and white cookies, and I loved him. I loved these women around me, each of them with their bodies like weapons. I felt as though I did not belong anywhere but there.
I’VE RARELY TALKED about my rape and I’ve rarely talked about violence I’ve experienced while doing sex work. I have not talked about these things because I am afraid. Because I know how stories like mine get told. Because I know exactly how good anti–sex work “feminists” are at carving out the pieces of our stories to make them mean something else, something less complicated and more easily sold. I know how good they are at flattening us, at excavating our experiences to make stories that are only an imitation of the things we’ve lived. I know how good they are at making us no longer human but symbols of this thing they call womanhood. This thing they’ve made that I do not see myself in.
I’m afraid, but also I’m angry. I’m angry that I could not talk about violence without fueling descriptions of me as an object, written by women claiming to be my allies. I have survived violence in sex work and also I have chosen again and again to do this work. I have performed sex and femininity and also I am not a symbol of anyone else’s womanhood. I have been poor enough that sex work seemed like a gift, poor enough that sex work changed my power in the world by giving me the safety that money gives. To say that I needed the money is not the same as saying I could not choose, and to say that I chose is not the same as saying it was always good. I have been harmed in sex work and I have been healed in sex work and I should not have to explain either of those experiences in order to talk about my work as work.
“WOMEN MUST BE HEARD,” says Ashley Judd. And I know that when she says women, she does not mean me.
NOTES
1. Catharine MacKinnon, “Prostitution and Civil Rights,” Michigan Journal of Gender and Law 1 (1993): 13–31.
2. Andrea Dworkin, “Prostitution and Male Supremacy,” Michigan Journal of Gender and Law 1 (1993): 1–12.
3. Dorchen Leidholdt, “Prostitution: A Violation of Women’s Human Rights,” Cardozo Women’s Law Journal 1 (1993): 138.