Sex Workers in Crime Fiction: Sex Work is Work
When I realized that I was probably never gonna get the chance to moderate my sex worker protagonist panel at any of the big crime writer conventions we all attend each year, I decided to take matters into my own hands. One of the writers I would have wanted to participate in that theoretical discussion is the wryly observant, fearlessly outspoken and wildly prolific Greg Herren. Seriously, I think he wrote three novels in the time it took me to type this intro, but he still took the time to share his thoughts on this topic.
GUEST POST by Greg Herren
I grew up in a very conservative family. Sex and sexuality were dirty dark secrets to never be discussed. Being a gay child born into this kind of environment, I had some serious hang-ups and issues around sex and my sexuality that took years to unpack and unlearn and finally let go of as I came into my own as a gay adult male in a homophobic, sex-stigmatizing society.
As I often like to remind people, of course the American society has issues about sex and sexuality. The country was originally colonized by Puritans, and that puritanical mentality carried over to sex and sex work.
This stigmatization, this refusal of Americans to feel free to talk openly about sex and sexuality, has led to some repression — women, queer people, people of color, and most especially of sex workers, who are often demonized and rarely appear in crime fiction as anything more dimensional than a stereotype, and certainly never as a fully developed, complex character. Sex workers, or those who did the work in their past, are always stigmatized; how many times has a soap opera heroine had her life ruined when her past as a sex worker was exposed? And they were never really given any back story about the sex work — it was always depicted as degrading, humiliating, something they should be ashamed of, and the good decent people of the town should shun her for her horrific past.
And how many times have we seen the proverbial hooker with a heart of gold? While it could be said these are more positive portrayals of sex workers than we usually see, it’s still a stereotype — she’s clearly a good girl gone bad for some reason.
When I include sex workers in my own work, I always try to make sure they are fully developed characters — sex work is just another aspect of who they are as complicated, complex human beings just like every other character in my work. There’s no hard or fast rule governing gay male sex workers, either, for that matter. Sex workers come in all shapes and sizes, from all kinds of backgrounds, and the definition of “sex work” can certainly be expanded to include strippers, go-go boys, porn stars — anyone who takes money from someone else for physical contact of some sort. I’ve known sex workers who go for five figures a night for closeted actors and politicians (discretion is part of their price) to guys who dance in bars in their underwear to hustlers working the street or the hustler bars. No two are the same, no two went into the field for the same reasons, and not all of them are tragic victims —which is often the case when they are depicted in gay crime fiction.
When I created my ex-stripper Scotty Bradley (he was still stripping in the gay bars in his debut novel,) I didn’t really think of him as a sex worker — he never had sex for money, preferring, in his own words, to keep his amateur status — but of course he was; he was shaking his ass and swinging his thong-clad dick for dollars on the bar. He enjoyed being an object of desire, and he enjoyed sex, which was very important to me. I felt that one of the things missing from gay crime novels (at least the ones I had) was the very idea that a gay man could embrace his sexuality, who enjoyed and embraced having sex, and not feel any shame about his sexuality. I wanted him to be as well-adjusted as possible—which was a rarity at the time. (It was also the early days of the protease inhibitors that were changing the face of the AIDS epidemic; I think HIV/AIDS had a lot to do with how gay sexuality was depicted in fiction.)
I don’t see sex work as something shameful or disgusting, nor do I think that sex workers deserve to be stigmatized and victimized in queer fiction — being queer, to me, means embracing sexuality in all of its forms and recognizing that sex work is valid. Yes, there are downsides to it (as there are in every field of employment), but not everyone who does sex work was forced into it unwillingly.
You don’t make five figures a night at something you were forced into.
My very first novella, “The Nightwatchers,” had a male sex worker in it. I am currently working on a novella where one of the main characters is a young sex worker in the early 1990’s and a novel where the primary love interest for the main character is a sex worker.
I’d never really thought about sex workers in my work before — when I need one, I write him in — but when thinking about the role of gay sex workers in crime fiction, I realized that I have written a lot about sex workers — and not just in my erotic fiction, either. I used to think of sex workers as those who have sex for money, but over the years I’ve come to understand that sex workers have a much broader and more interesting definition — they include on-line models, porn stars, strippers, or anyone who does fetish porn of any kind.
I’ve known all kinds of sex workers over the course of my life, and they are all different. But the primary takeaway is that none of them are stereotypes, or the stereotypes that most writers (puritanical as they are) try to box them into. They are people, and they do what they do for any number of reasons that have nothing to do with the assumptions most people make.
Sex work is legitimate work, and sex workers are real people worthy of respect and representation.
And aren’t real people more interesting than stereotypes?
Greg Herren published the first book in his first series on January 20, 2002. Since then he has written and published over forty novels, fifty or so short stories, three short story collections, a couple of novellas, and also edited about twenty or so anthologies. Among his pseudonyms used are T. G. Herren, Todd Gregory, Cage Thunder, and Valerie Bronwen, among others. He lives in New Orleans and also works as a sexual health counselor.