HELL’S KITCHEN: GROWING UP LOVING A WORKING MOTHER
Syd V.
ISSUE 5.2 (2010)
When I tell people that my mother was a stripper and a professional dominatrix, and at one point owned her own escort service, I usually get the “Wow, that’s so cool” response, or a blank stare and an “Oh shit, really?” By the time I was born, my mother, at twenty-six, had been stripping for eleven years, but after all this time I’m still figuring out how I feel about the memories and experiences I had growing up. It is cool when I can call my mother and get help with a paper that I’m writing about sex work or kink, but it’s painful when I think back on the economic hardships we faced, the problems she still faces, and the evenings I spent wishing my mother was at home reading me a bedtime story or making me dinner instead of spending time with strangers.
Like most children of single parents, I spent much of my time with babysitters in the evenings watching soap operas. My babysitter, Meche, was an elderly woman who I suspect was surviving off the little money from all the single mothers in the building who could afford to pay for a sitter. I remember crying and running after my mother with my plastic Tina doll in tow down the hallway of our prewar building in Hell’s Kitchen in the early 1980s, begging her to stay home and put me to bed. The flickering hall light above reflected a greenish tint over my mother’s face as she tried not to cry for fear she would ruin her makeup.
By the time I got to preschool, we had moved into my grandmother’s apartment on the Upper West Side because we could no longer afford rent in Hell’s Kitchen. There in our new apartment I watched my mother getting ready for work, intently examining the way she would burn the ends of her black Revlon eyeliner, and how she would pout her lips to apply her reddish-orange lipstick. Something about the routine was comforting for me. I would sit on the toilet seat, my knees up to my chest, and move my lips with hers, feeling excited. When I told my mother I was writing this piece a few days ago, I reminded her of the fascination I had with watching her get ready. Over the phone, my mother explained to me that whenever she would get ready for work, I would cry because that meant it was time for mommy to leave.
Sometimes my mother let me play dress up with her mostly handmade costumes. I would get all dolled up in her deep blue sequined robe and slinky dresses and parade around the house in her heels like I was a famous dancer. My mom once told me she used to dance ballet and regretted stopping. I always wondered, aside from the need for quick money to support us, was dancing on a nightclub stage as close as she could get to that lost dream? Did receiving all of that attention somehow make her feel special, beautiful, or important?
I remember going to work with my mother on two occasions. The first time was when I was about four and she had arranged for Linda, another dancer who lived above the club, to watch over me. I either managed to convince Linda to bring me downstairs or I snuck down by myself so I could peek through a door by the right side of the stage to see my mother dressed in a beautiful costume and dancing provocatively. She didn’t see me and I was probably only there for a moment, but I did see plenty of men in the audience watching her. I don’t know what I thought then. I probably missed her and was curious about what she was doing so I decided to find out. I know that I always thought she looked beautiful, no matter what she was wearing.
When I told this same story to a friend in college, he began laughing and asked me if I had ever seen Striptease. When he told me about the scene when Demi Moore’s daughter sneaks upstairs to peek through golden foil and watches her mother dancing, I knew I had to watch it.
The second occasion was the first time in my life that I ever danced onstage. It was during the daytime, but she had taken me with her to put in some dancing shifts at this little club in Jersey. I don’t even think it was a bona fide club. There were windows everywhere and it was daytime so the place was brightly lit. As I was enjoying my second Shirley Temple of the day at a table near the bar and waiting for my mother, a Madonna song came on the jukebox and I ran up on stage and started dancing like a little girl might do to a song she knows. I wasn’t shy and loved attention. I danced the whole song, and by the end of it I guess the owner or a customer made a joke that I should be paid for dancing. Someone gave me a few dollars. The next day, my mother took me to the bodega near our apartment and, with my hard-earned money, I bought my first set of Crayola bathroom chalk. To this day, my mother is terrified that if I write about this someone will arrest her twenty-five years later for the one afternoon she let me dance like a little girl onstage to Madonna.
Once I began going to school, my mother stopped dancing, but she continued to work in bars. She would work late, come home, usually drunk, and sleep in. I would get ready for school by myself most mornings or my grandmother, who we still lived with, would help out. On the weekends, I would go downstairs and get my mother the usual (a liter of ginger-ale, a pack of More cigarettes), come home, and make her a cup of coffee.
When I was about eight years old, the fantasy world I had created of working in clubs came to an end and I began to resent both my mother and her work. I had learned how to make up stories about her profession. I worried the kids at school would ask what my mother did for work, and if they did I would lie. I would stay home from school on Take Your Daughter to Work Day. I was already one of the only kids in my group of friends who was being raised by a single mother and I surely didn’t want to add to the stigma by admitting I had a barmaid, ex-stripper mother who came home drunk and angry most nights. I wanted to be like everyone else who lived on the Upper West Side of Manhattan in the late 80s. I wanted the artist mother, the blue-collar working father, the life that so many of my friends had.
Illustration by Sadie Lune.
It wasn’t until I was in my teens, when my mother became a professional dominatrix and owned her own escort service, that I began to really hate her job choices. This was not something my mother was excited about either. She took the gig purely out of desperation. I myself had already been exploring my sexuality, having first slept with a female friend of mine when I was twelve, and spent many late nights on rooftops, doing too much perhaps too soon. I always knew more about sex than most of my friends, probably because my mother told me when we had one of many “talks” that I shouldn’t wait until I was married to have sex. “What if the person you choose is bad in bed? Then you’ll never know what good sex is.” With that, I marched into adolescence ready to find good sex, whatever that meant.
At the age of fourteen I partied at the S/M club where my mother eventually worked, and my best friend dated the owner’s son. I came to know, even before my mother was working there, how to flog someone, about suspension and piercing, and that certain older men enjoyed spanking young girls. Even before then, at the age of thirteen, I had my tongue, nipples, and navel pierced and knew which clubs in the East Village would let me in. My mother did not have to be a domme for me to know these things; growing up in New York City was enough. What I did learn from living with her was how to hide her employment.
She once took professional photos for the domme job and told me the photos would be in the back of newspapers where all of the other sex ads were. I imagined my friends flipping to the back of the Village Voice to look at the half-naked women (what most adolescents do for kicks) and seeing her suited up in leather, holding a mini crop. I was terrified that they would recognize her and call her a hooker. But what was I going to do at that point? I was already angry that my mother hadn’t gotten her shit together, but I loved the fact that I could talk to her about anything and it wouldn’t faze her. When friends’ parents asked at the dinner table, “So, what does your mother do?” I just made up elaborate lies about my mother being a real estate agent (which she did dabble in) and hoped that the truth would never get out.
Not surprisingly, throughout all of this, I became my mother’s confidant more than her daughter. In the morning, over coffee, my mother would go over her encounters with her clients in detail. I quickly learned the difference between submissive and dominant, since my mother made it a point to remind me she would never be a sub. She could never let someone tell her what to do, but: “Kick the shit out of some guy: Why not?”
It was creepy imagining that my mother was now working in a club I had hung out in, or that I had been high on ecstasy in one of the rooms where she tied people up. I squirmed when she told me about one client who liked to be peed on and another who liked to pick condoms out of the trash with his mouth. She would talk with disgust about these men, some of whom were married and had kids, were teachers or politicians, and would then get into how much I needed to use protection and condoms when I had sex. What a strange way to be taught sex ed. At the time, I didn’t even understand fetishes. All I could imagine was my biology teacher being hog-tied and whipped by my mother.
When she ran the escort service out of her apartment in Inwood (I was living with my grandmother at the time), I learned a tremendous amount about sexual stereotypes and the dangers call girls faced. I saw pictures of the girls or my mother would describe them and they each fulfilled a very racialized and hypersexual woman. I realized men fetishized different ethnicities. My mother then called it “picking your flavor” and explained that each girl she employed had to be able to fulfill some kind of stereotype. They had to be the thin busty blonde or the caramel Latina with an accent but, as customers would often say, “not too ghetto.”
I met some of the girls when they would stop over at the apartment while I was there. All of them were really sweet, some a little ditzy, and most were either going to college or trying to just get by. My mother also explained to me that each girl went out with a driver who had a pager. They would page the driver a certain number if everything was OK with the customer. If the driver didn’t hear from them within five to ten minutes he was supposed to try to contact the girl or get into the building. This safety system was unfortunately too costly and eventually mom shut it down.
My mother explained that she was trying to run a business where the girls were being paid fairly and protected. She said her “being a feminist didn’t work for sex work.” The only way she could make money in the business was to exploit the girls and pay them less in order to pay the drivers, or cut the drivers out and offer them no safety. Both were out of the question for her and so the business ended.
After my grandmother passed away, I eventually had to move back in with my mom, still struggling to make ends meet. We fought constantly. I was experimenting with drugs but my mother always knew where I was, who I was with, and what I was doing. We had built a strange trust. I would probably never do anything more stigmatized than she had done, so I could tell her anything.
Seeing what my mother went through all those years—the late nights, the drinking to please customers, the frustrations of never making enough money to support me, and her hardened attitude toward life—lead me to choose against going into sex work. But as I went off to college on scholarship and jumped into sociology, gender studies, and sexuality studies, I began to make sense of mine and my mother’s lives. I read Annie Sprinkle’s Post-Porn Modernist and Live Sex Acts by Wendy Chapkis, and I began to understand that my mother was not alone and that what she had done for a living had a place in meaningful discussions. I learned that I did not have to be ashamed of her work. I began to find a community where I felt safe to share my stories with people who I thought could understand.
While I find power, control, and erotic beauty in the positive sex and sex worker communities, a part of me still wonders about those women out there who don’t blog extensively about their customers and experiences, who didn’t get to go to college and become an empowered sex worker. I’m thinking of the women out there like my mother, who did sex work to survive and did not really enjoy it, who would have rather been a ballet dancer or engineer or teacher.
The relationship I have with my mother is complicated, as you can imagine, and my memories are only pieces of a much larger story. My mother taught me to be critical of institutions but compassionate to individuals and their circumstances. I now keep a copy of the photo of my mother in the leather outfit that was printed in the Village Voice, framed in my living room. As complex as my feelings are about sex work, I will never feel ashamed about my mother’s profession again.
SYD V. works with young adults around issues of gender, race, class, and sexuality through the use of social media, advocacy, teaching, and youth/adult partnerships to promote healthy, pleasurable sexual lives and social change. She is a photographer, writer, feminist, educator, activist, daughter, femme, lesbian, Latina, sister, and lover interested in youth-led research, photography, sexuality education, media, female empowerment, and all things that come from the ocean. Find her current work at Taintedlenzphotography.com.
SADIE LUNE is a multimedia artist, sex worker for over fifteen years, and pleasure activist. She has won awards for her films and performances, appeared in feature films and queer porn, exhibited explicit whore-positive work in venues from a former army barracks latrine to the SFMOMA, and shown her cervix internationally. She is currently coediting WhoreLover (forthcoming), an anthology of writing by the romantic partners of sex workers, with P. Crego. Sadie lives in Berlin with her baby.