My First Brothel Experience

First of all, I should clarify what I mean when I say brothel, since what people imagine and what the law defines as a brothel are two different (but technically overlapping) ideas.

A brothel is any premises where more than one person is selling sex. This means that if you live with a housemate and both sell sex from your home, that’s legally considered to be a brothel. If you work in a massage parlour with a dozen other sex workers, with more than one of you selling sex under that front, it’s a brothel.

When I was 20 (pre-transition, presenting myself as a cis woman), having been selling sex already for 3 years independently, I decided to seek out brothel work. I badly needed money, so I used a site to find an agency or brothel near myself. I responded to an ad, offering premises and clients and suggesting that working there you could earn up to £500/day if properly motivated. I assumed I’d be earning less, but even if I could earn half of that in a day and do that for a week, my money issues would be vastly improved. By the end of the messages I’m posting here, I was working there, and I did so for a few months on-and-off.

I messaged the number on the ad, including several pictures of myself as requested.

Before the car arrived, I was incredibly nervous. I remember I’d arrived early but didn’t send the text saying I’d arrived until around ten past 6. When the brothel manager told me he’d be late, I wandered around outside the station literally shaking with panic. I kept going over the fear-mongering stories you hear about people getting kidnapped and sex trafficked and telling myself it would be entirely my fault if I got into a random car only to be driven away and sold off. In hindsight, quite dramatic.

When he arrived, he slowed the car to a stop on the road by the station and was driving again pretty much the second I had the door shut. He tried to put me at ease, in a way that’s sort of foreign to me now. I was wearing a skirt and a low-cut top, which was the sort of thing I wore almost any time I went out back then, and he called me attractive and joked around a little to put me at ease. The guy was sexist, not really cognisant of the power he had and the harm he was doing in taking so much money from desperate people, but he wasn’t some monster. If anything he was less sexist than the average man I might randomly meet in North London.

So, in summary, I got into the car of someone I didn’t know and whom I had barely texted in response to an ad about working in a brothel. Sounds like the start of a story someone would tell as a cautionary tale where someone ends up dead, but I was fine. He showed me around a London flat, where I’d be working alone initially and then several other women would be working in the same two-bedroom flat on certain days. One would be there for a couple of weeks, the others on and off in shifts. I set up a profile on a new escorting site I hadn’t used before when I was escorting independently, and I got to work.

I was given a phone by the guy running the flat, who was taking 50% of what we earned in exchange for providing the premises, who we’ll call G. G provided clean towels, CCTV and security when we needed it (which seemed more like security theatre to me, since the place a client was most likely to harm me was the bedroom and security were in a car outside). I took the money I was given at the start of a booking, into the living room which had CCTV, and put it into a pot. Every few days, G would come and take half, check the sheet where I wrote down all my appointments to make sure the money matched, and then leave my half.

I was aware of the exploitation going on. After 3 weeks, I’d made £3000, roughly, meaning G also earned £3000 from me. That was over double the cost of the rent and utilities for the month for the flat that I’d covered alone, and there were 3 other women making similar amounts. G had earned from just our flat, despite running many, £10000 in profit at a minimum. And frankly, I wasn’t much safer there than I would have been taking incalls alone.

The positive was that I could work at all, because I had housemates. I couldn’t work from home with them there, so I didn’t really have other options. It was amazing to be able to vent to other sex workers straight after an appointment and to always have a supply of condoms and an insane number of towels.

On one occasion, G made a booking for me. I was kind of tired and hadn’t planned to see anyone until at least late that evening. In the afternoon, I was given an appointment with someone G wanted to impress. I agreed, and absolutely could have said no, but I didn’t want to lose my place of work and there was a degree of pressure. That sucked. It wasn’t traumatic, just mildly frustrating and I stared at the clock for most of the encounter, bored and vaguely annoyed. I was living at the brothel while I worked there, so there was pressure to see clients every day or else a girl might be given my place and I could be sent home. I couldn’t take breaks like I would at home.

My clients were no different as people than when I’ve worked anywhere else, doing incalls at my home or outcalls, other than maybe the demographics because of the location. The lack of control was the main drawback. I can’t say I’d never do it again, but I seek to avoid it when I’m earning enough money to do so.

In terms of client interaction, one of the biggest differences to independent work happens when they realize you work in a brothel. It’s interesting what people will let themselves believe, even when the premises they show up to is so bare bones that there’s only a bed and side table there, but if you project the right image and know how to talk then most clients won’t ever know it’s a brothel. However, inevitably some of them do work it out or know before they arrive because they’ve seen sex workers at the same flat, and in those cases they tend to treat the experience as much more professional. I’m not saying I never had clients at the brothel want to “Pretty Woman” or rescue me, or catch feelings, but generally they were more likely to arrive and fuck and leave. In independent work, there were far more exhausting conversations where they’d ask me personal questions.

I’ve worked in other brothels since, most of which have been much more obviously brothel environments. That shifts the dynamic. As it was, at the first place I worked, as long as the living room door remained closed when I let them in I could act like I was a student who’d just move into the flat and who was selling a little bit of sex on the side.

In between clients I’d watch Peeky Blinders in the living room with some of the other workers, smoke on the balcony, talk to the others about our personal lives. Anything. One girl I met there told me all about how she’d immigrated from her home county under complex circumstances, why she was selling sex, and confided in me how demoralized she felt by how little money we were making per client when she’d imagine making so much more in the UK. After factoring in G’s cut of the money, we’d be getting fucked for half an hour for £35 if they didn’t pay for any extras… so I can see why she felt that way.

It’s somewhat difficult to compare the experience of brothel work to other jobs I’ve had, since I lived there for over a week at a time and regularly did cocaine with other people there. I procured my own clients, so I didn’t have work unless I created it for myself and entirely managed my own time. It was less physically exhausting than bar work, but each client was a lot more mentally draining than working behind a bar for that same amount of time would have been.

While I worked at the brothel I had a mixture of experiences. I was significantly sexually assaulted twice. I use this distinction because there were many instances of pushing boundaries or what I’d call more “minor” assaults, with a client trying to pressure me into anal and getting a finger less than a centimetre inside before I told them that wasn’t okay and they stopped. Those experiences weren’t acceptable, and for anyone else that’s happened to you’re more than justified in being upset and/or traumatized by it. Some people freeze and aren’t able to push back, even weakly like I did, and sometimes people don’t stop. For me, these incidents annoyed me in the moment and then after venting to other sex workers I was over it.

I don’t even remember a lot of incidents of more “minor” assaults after they happen, and am only reminded when looking through old texts or talking to someone I knew at that time. The two more significant assaults had a real impact on me – one client who was very rough even with me repeatedly asking him to calm down and who spat into my mouth without my permission and pressed on my throat to make me convulsively swallow it. I still can’t look at porn or any generic media with a lot of spit in it without feeling sick and being reminded of that. I don’t want to leave those sorts of things out, as uncomfortable as they are to talk about, because they were part of that reality. The other incident was with a police officer who showed up without announcing he was police at first, and I’m not going to put myself at risk my getting into specifics.

Throughout my time working there, on an average day I’d make just over £200. It’s still taboo to talk about numbers, but I don’t think most people have any idea about the money side and so I think it’s important. Some people assume I must be rich from selling sex, others assume I’m in extreme poverty and making almost nothing. My rate was £140/hr or £80/hhr when I started, with those amounts each fluctuating by £10 or so. I often saw 2 clients for an hour each, and 2 more for half an hour each, earning me £220 in total for that day (and 3 hours total of work). A few times I managed to do 5 or 6 hour-long appointments in one day and to earn £350 or so, with one memorable day where I earned upwards of £700 working practically non-stop because I’d done a lot of cocaine.

In roughly my first 3 weeks, I earned around £3000. So £3000 in roughly 21 days, with a few of those being days off, makes sense with the kinds of earnings I remember. I know I took home £3000 in notes rolled up and tied with a hairband, but I do remember going out and buying food often, so it’s very possible I made a few hundred more than I used to pay for things in cash. I paid for a lot of things in cash back then.

The next time I went back, I spent a noteworthy chunk of my earnings on cocaine and clients were scarce because of the heatwave, so after a month I went home with around £3000 more.

When I contrast this with working independently, which I did again when I moved house, it’s frustrating how little that is compared to the amount of risk and stigma and trauma I was taking on. Once I lived in a flat where I could see clients at home, I could make over £2000 in the space of a week and then stop working for the rest of the month. I made more money per month whilst working in the brothel, but at the cost of so much more work and feeling like I was being constantly watched. I didn’t even get to sleep in my own bed, instead sleeping on the sofa in the living room so that others could keep seeing clients in those rooms through the night.

The brothel got raided not long after I stopped working there, which happened when I finally moved house. I worried for the women I’m met whilst working there, some of whom might be risking deportation. It terrified me that I’d almost been caught up in the raid myself, and that could’ve impacted my job prospects forever. It scared me off of brothel work for a little while, so I defaulted to independent work again.

I’ve been reflecting on these experiences a lot recently as I look for brothel work again. It’s a lot harder to find somewhere now, needing to be accommodated as a trans guy. I can’t work from my current house and outcalls are very sparse in my area, and frankly I’ve become exhausted with doing my own advertising and wish I could just work somewhere that I can show up to and have clients provided for me even if that means making much less money per client.

Brothel work isn’t how it’s portrayed, but it’s also not easy, and as time goes on I realize that when I reference it casually people have no accurate depiction to refer to. My first brothel experience wasn’t something sensationalist or extreme, it was just a job I had that included more mistreatment than the average workplace and was more weirdly laid-back.