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gays being together, men treating them like women. I’ve been a prostitute all of my life …
[This] was where I could go and people would accept me. (L3)
For many, friends and acquaintances that were already engaged in this type of work introduced
respondents to the trade. When asked how she first got started with the work at age 21 in the mid-1980s, a
49-year-old sex worker from Denver responded:
Meeting people, and you know, they said it’s a quick way to get money, and I say okay, I’m
down with that. I was meeting escorts, some pimps, other women … At that time, I just
needed money, no [drug] addiction at the time. On the streets, that’s where I first met
clients. (J10)
A 49-year-old sex worker from Washington, DC had a similar experience. She began trading sex in the late
1980s after spending time with individuals at clubs who were already selling sex. She explained,
After [clubbing], [I saw] girls were going somewhere else. I wanted to know where they
were going—“curiosity killed the cat.” I saw that they were being paid for things. I didn’t
need money [at the time] because my family was supporting me. I didn’t know that the
girls I was with were doing it at the time. I got closer to some of the girls. I wanted them
to teach me what they were doing. (L2)
Friends and acquaintances taught each other about how the street-based sex market worked and even
helped connect new sex workers to johns, as captured by the following exchange with a sex worker from
Dallas:
Respondent: I was at a friend’s house and they were like, “This is what we do and this is
what we do and this what we do” and I am like, “That sounds cool.”
Interviewer: [Were they] all women Or
Respondent: Yeah.
Interviewer: And what did they tell you
Respondent: Well, I don’t know how you explain it … They had customers. They had …
certain people that they seen every week. And, I didn’t want to go out on the streets. So
they were like, “We’ll introduce you to this person, we can introduce you to this person,
we know you need money for your kids and blah blah blah.” That time I wasn’t doing
drugs. I did drugs on and off. But, at that time, I was straight. They introduced me to
some people. (M3)
Another individual from Atlanta began trading sex when she was 17 after she and a friend approached a
pimp she knew in their neighbourhood: 70
This guy. You could tell he had a lot of money and nice stuff. We knew what he did. We
were talking to him and then we started working for him. We worked for him a couple of
years … He didn’t really know us. We knew him, because we heard about him on the
streets. We talked to him about it. (N3)
Street-based sex work served as a natural continuation of involvement in other areas of the lawful and
unlawful commercial sex economy. A 36-year-old individual from Seattle began dancing at strip clubs
when she was 19 years old. A man approached her while she was dancing one night, and asked her, “You
want to do something out back” She ended up earning $150 on this date, which became the first of many
70 Seven sex workers (19 percent) interviewed for this study worked with pimps at some point in their careers. Their experiences are
described in subsequent sections of this chapter.
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