A lot of people struggle to get their head around the idea of a lesbian having sex with men for money. Sex workers are often either viewed as victims forced into the sex trade (“prostituted women”) or they are seen as sexual deviants choosing to profit from seducing men. The idea of a lesbian who chooses to sell sex without being subject to physical force or threats is unfathomable to many because this experience cannot be easily placed into one of these boxes.
I have always seen a huge number of bisexual women and lesbians among the sex workers I have know. Part of the reason for this is that early on in my time selling sex, I viewed myself as a lesbian and sought out others with similar experiences – the rest is that there are simply a significant percentage of women who sell sex who are lesbian or bisexual.
The idea of a lesbian (or asexual person for that matter) who sells sex to men should not be hard to understand for people who already know that sex workers are not usually attracted to their clients. Selling sex is not about the enjoyment of any given sex act or attraction to the clients, it is done for the purpose of earning money just like any job. A straight woman is not attracted to every man she sees and thus is not attracted to most of her clients if she sells sex. In that respect, lesbian women who sell sex have a similar experience to straight women, in that neither is generally attracted to their clients. A straight woman has a higher potential for attraction on occasion, but this makes up a very small percentage of experiences.
Despite their prevalence, it is rare that I see testimonials from lesbian (full service) sex workers. A lot of that will be that practically any sex worker on a client-facing account is going to self-censor and won’t speak about being a lesbian, because this makes them less attractive to clients. Clients want to be able to indulge in the fantasy that the sex worker they are seeing is genuinely attracted to them and that the money they are paying is more for the convenience than anything else. This leaves sex workers with only anonymous online accounts or in-person spaces to be able to discuss their sexuality openly, and they are often hesitant to produce works on their experiences.
The Christian Rescue industry for sex work are going to avoid testimonials from queer sex workers in general, since their business model relies on appealing to conservative Christians who want to feel as though they’re really making a different with regards to sex trafficking and abuse. A story from a lesbian sex worker only works in that context if she’s also being subjected to conversion therapy and is willing to denounce her lesbianism as well as her engagement in prostitution. Not only does this mean the stories are going to be made inauthentic by the meddling of an outside organisation, but necessitates that we see less of them.
The history of lesbians selling sex goes as far back as people selling sex at all, though of course the further we go back the more the way sexuality was viewed at the time is subject to change. I read a copy of Psychopathia Sexualis several years ago with the intent of learning more about queer history, and happened upon an extremely short chapter about lesbians specifically. Included within was the claim that many sex workers seemed to be lesbians and that the reason for this was “repugnance for the most disgusting and perverse acts (coitus in axilla, inter mammae, etc.) which men perform on prostitutes”. Krafft-Ebing says this “is not infrequently responsible for driving these unfortunate creatures to Lesbian love”. Prostitutes being referred to as “unfortunate creatures” is probably more polite language than you’d get from any other book which speaks about prostitution in the 1800s, and this text is almost sympathetic, but the fact this phenomenon is noted at all is astonishing.
Obviously sex workers aren’t being turned into lesbians by disgust for their clients, though some sex workers might joke about it. What does seem to occur in some cases is that bisexual women experience a lot of continuous trauma from male clients to the degree that this trauma associated with men causes a lack of desire to date them in their civilian life. This leads to the practice of lesbianism, even if there is no change to the base level of attraction to different genders, and I see no reason these women shouldn’t be able to call themselves lesbians. It is, however, interesting to see how this sort of thing is viewed from the outside by people who presume straightness as the default.
For the lesbian trans women in sex work, decades of a specific type of anti-trans rhetoric keep many of them from speaking up about their orientation outside of trans circles. Blanchard, a predatory hack who invented categorisations for trans women essentially based on their sexualities and whether he was attracted to them, argued that there were different types of trans women who were attracted to men and to women. Those are attracted to men are characterised almost as a follow-on from the historical belief in some cultures that trans women were an extreme version of gay men who went so far as to become women (with gay men being seen as men with “female” attractions). This transphobic idea positions trans women who are attracted to men as seductive and the type of trans women who are assumed to engage in sex work in a way that is sympathetic, out of a need for money and desire for sex with me, whereas trans women who are attracted to women are framed as autogynephiles who enjoy their own abuse.
There are so many trans lesbians who are denied the ability to express their interest in other women at all within sex work, where cis women may be granted the ability to express attraction to women even directly to their clients as long as they do not admit that their attractions do not include men.
I spent a lot of time when I first started escorting believing that I was a lesbian, before I realized several years later that I am in fact both bisexual and also a trans guy. Accounting for the fact that some of my complex feelings about being a lesbian sex worker were that my attractions and feelings about my gender were not actually aligned with that label, I still felt very alienated from the popular depictions of sex workers as straight women. We cannot rely on mainstream books or television to depict us accurately, but there are ways we can create works for each other which mean that individual sex workers do not feel so alone.
The idea of “gay for pay” is used semi-frequently to describe straight people who engage in gay porn or specifically men who sell sex to men (because women make up such a small portion of clientele). However, people often claim that those who are willing to film gay porn or sleep with people of the same gender for money must secretly at least be somewhat attracted to them. The implication this has when we discuss people who are “straight for pay” is that it could be viewed similarly, that they must have some sort of underlying attraction. People making these claims obviously do not understand that sex workers lack attraction to their clients, or to other actors in porn, all the time regardless of sexuality, but their incorrectness doesn’t change what we can assume their opinions will be upon finding out about people who are “straight for pay”.
Selling sex or porn or stripping are things people do almost exclusively for the money and rarely simply for the enjoyment of it, so it should not be a shock to anyone that sometimes the people who do it don’t have the capability of attraction to their clients.
Jack Talks About Sex Work 