Dear Mom: A Letter about Whoring

Dear Mom,

Now that you’ve been dead for almost five years, it’s too late to ask what you hoped I would be when I grew up. I think what you most wanted for me was freedom of a kind you never had. But you didn’t know enough about freedom to help me yearn for it—except by your example: All the while as I watched and lived with you, I promised myself, “I will never grow up to be like that. I will never take after her.” I know you loved music; I took piano and art lessons at your instigation, though your dream of being a pianist was thwarted when you became a wife and a mother. I don’t recall you ever mentioning that I would grow up to be either of those things.

Still, you probably never thought I might grow up to be a whore.

I had been racking my brain for months over how to tell you about this new phase of my life (well, new then, over five years ago) when I got the call that you had died. What a great relief (I wouldn’t have to have the conversation with you); what a loss (I would never know how the conversation would go, what it might open up between us). I know you saw sexual libertinism as little more than whoring—you once snapped that a woman of your acquaintance was “nothing but a nympho”—and so I never let you know how important sex was to me, what a journey I was making of it.

Sex was a painful, problematic mystery to you. You could never conceive of your daughter in a three-way, at a sex club, giving head, taking money, getting fucked, any more than you could imagine wanting those things yourself. Could I ever have led you to understand that I embraced whoring partly to have experiences you could never have had, to be in control of sexual negotiation and commerce as you never were (for what were your marriages but sexual commerce?)—to show myself that I would never take after you?

Sex was so profound a problem to you that it became a path for me, mingling growth and individuation, spirituality and materiality, passion and politics.

I knew I had to tell you I was a whore because I intended, from the very first trick I turned, to talk about it in public. My first client completely pulled from under me the rug of assumption about male sexuality I stood on: I figured if I could learn from him, others could learn from my talking about it. And sexual learning—or, rather, its absence—kept you trapped your whole life, kept you in the dark even in the proximity of choices that, had you made them, might have changed you.

I realize now that my surprise (that my first client had a complex, fantasy-based, non-intercourse-oriented, emotional sexuality) came from you—from what you taught me about men. That they only want one thing (then why not have them pay for it?), that they’re all alike, that giving them what they want is unpleasant. I wonder how much my clients’ wives reflect your sexual prejudice and pain; I wonder how I could have talked to you about whoring when you would have identified with those wives more than with me.

Talking to you about my sexuality was hard because your eroticism was such a closed-off place, like a rosebud half-blossomed that’s died for lack of water. I know you and Dad read Shakespeare to each other and wrote each other love letters during your courtship, but did you ever fuck, did you ever even lust for him? The first time I told you something about my own lust, it was to tell you that I was a lesbian, and that, too, was in preparation for going public, as a gay activist in the small city where we lived. That was twenty years ago, but I remember how worried Dad was, convinced you’d freak out. You didn’t, but was it because you were liberal and loved me, or because you couldn’t even conceive of lesbian sexuality, seeing nothing in it to be upset about? Later you told me how wonderful it was that, with a woman to love me, I didn’t have to “worry about all that sex stuff.” You said, with a straight face, that it must be such a relief to only have to kiss and cuddle.

I could not find a way to speak to you about eating pussy, the electrical jolt of a tongue on a clit, the slick wet silk of cunt juice. I realized with a deep, desperate sadness that you had never felt anything like that, never would. I had dreams of making you come, only to heal my broken heart: that I had come from such an icy place.

You loved and supported me and my gay friends, maybe never thoroughly getting what made us different from you. You got death threats right along with me, in that little town (our last names the same and both of us listed in the phone book); you were unflappable when I was on television or in the paper, you gave money to gay-rights organizations, and at least one of my girlfriends called you Mom.

How would it have felt to you, by contrast, to see me on Donahue or Joan Rivers, talking about whoring? What would you have said to your friends when they called? What kind of pictures would have filled your head, what kind of assumptions would you have made about my life, hearing I have sex for money?

Of course most of us worry about what our families would think. It keeps a lot of us off Donahue. There’s little cultural support for sex workers to help us debunk the myths about our lives—our friends and families almost can’t help but swallow them. There are many other people I worry about having to explain myself to, but none with whom the conversation would have been so hard as with you—not because I cared so deeply about what you thought of me, but because the very explanation would have so challenged your understanding.

That being so, every other coming out has seemed easier than the one I never had to do. And each one has stood in for me for the talk I will never have with you. Other people’s misperceptions seem easier to debunk. Other people’s judgments don’t affect me the same way. But every time I answer a question about sex, about being queer, especially about whoring, I am talking to you, trying as hard as I can to articulate, teach, explain. The vast gulf between our experiences as women: Would I ever have been able to bridge it?

And every time I see a client, I know I am intervening in a marriage possibly as sexless and unhappy as yours. Alas, I don’t intervene on your behalf. I have never found a way to do that, except, possibly, by speaking out about whoring, to plant questions and possibilities in my listeners’ minds. Because to talk about whoring I have to speak pragmatically about sex (and relationships and marriage). Most people, especially women of your generation, find it hard to talk about sex that openly. Essentially I have to show them your example, explain how whoredom thrives in compulsory marriage and unrealistic dreams. I have to show them Dad’s example—except that, ironically enough, Dad may never have availed himself of the services of a whore.

How might that have changed things in our family, I wonder? For at least one of us, a way to let off some steam. The two of you suffered so much because you couldn’t talk about sex, and he was so very frustrated and hungry for it. I suffered too, just from watching you.

Twice a year I lecture at a Catholic college to a class of undergraduates. Much of my public speaking about whoring is done for students, in fact. I don’t exactly avoid more media-heavy opportunities to speak out, but I’m grateful that I rarely fit into the Circus Maximus talk-show atmosphere. I’d rather have a clean interaction using my body for sex work than prostitute my entire being to Geraldo’s ratings. Next to that, Catholic school is easy.

I see myself as having several types of responsibility when I speak in public: I debunk myths about prostitutes (while trying not to create any new ones), challenge my listeners’ whorephobia, educate future clients, support future (or current) sex workers. I also remind the students that their own relationships might fall within the territory in which whoredom thrives. I suggest ways that traditional heterosexual marriages make space for prostitution (thus giving support to people who might want to structure nontraditional partnerships). I tell my audience that if everyone could communicate comfortably and get the kind of sex they wanted within their relationships, that I wouldn’t mind at all being put out of work. (I also tell them most whores, utilitarian and business-minded as they are, wouldn’t necessarily approve of that perspective.)

My audiences occasionally object to my message on religious grounds. Mostly I encounter little objection of any kind, I believe because no one can talk about sex more pragmatically than a whore (unless it’s a whore with a degree in sexology), and they are hungry for this talk. But when I do have to field real objections to my profession, most can be summed up simply: “Money for adultery.” Their dads, after all, fit my client profile perfectly. Their moms are more like you, Mom, than they are like me. They themselves are still planning white weddings, happily ever afters, two-point-five kids, and most of them would rather not imagine their vaunted monogamy secretly infiltrated by whores. In fact, I practically infiltrate it just by being there. By the end of the hour lecture, it is clear to these wives-to-be that there are women—and men!—perfectly willing to provide their future husbands blowjobs for a price.

I make sure to ask why it’s men who hire whores for their sexual pleasure and entertainment, not women. Why, in fact, it sounds more normal for a woman to be a whore than to engage the services of one. In fact, I’ve been struck by how almost all the women I know who’ve exchanged money for sexual service have been sex workers themselves. I hope the Catholic schoolgirls take the time to ponder what they’d be willing to pay for, if the opportunity was theirs.

What would you, Mom, have been willing to pay for? What did you want? What sort of eroticism hid in you, locked away from everyone? Have I, unwittingly, acted it out with a client, with a lover, with a stranger? Or would you regard all my sexual adventures with the bewildered lack of understanding I always attribute to you, that was the only face you ever showed me?

The audiences gape when I tell them my lover knows I’m a whore and supports me in choosing to do sex work—but it’s also beyond most of their powers to imagine an openly nonmonogamous relationship. How poisoned they are by notions of what constitute “normal” sex and partnering. I, by contrast, tell them the story that most amazes me: of my whore friend whose husband has no idea how she earns her money. Because I watched how hurt you and Dad were by the things you couldn’t talk about, I am suspicious of secret-keeping in relationships, yet my friend leads an entire secret life. She has a voice-mail number he knows nothing about; she makes up a story every time she goes out to see a client; she insists he suspects nothing. I wonder what kind of intimacy they do share.

That, though, seems more comprehensible to the audience. They understand sexual secrets, the keeping of which can provide a framework for a person’s whole life.

At my last visit to the Catholic school, just a week ago, a man asked whether I intended to have children. This is another question that occasionally riles the public. In fact, I know plenty of whores with kids, but I’m not likely ever to join them in welcoming the next generation into the world. My audiences are roundly relieved to hear this, but I refuse to leave it at that. More children are scarred by too little sexual comfort in the home than by too much; more kids are abused by the lack of sex information than by inappropriate touch (and in saying that, I don’t for an instant mean to minimize how much abusive touch children must endure). You yourself finally told me that you had been abused by your older brother, and I wonder how much sway that experience continued to hold over your experience of sex, your silence about it, your helplessness in it.

I wonder about that, but I know your silence and pain scarred me, as if it was transmitted to me as you gave birth to me. You asked me once if I thought you had been a bad mother, and oh yes, you were, but only because that wound went all your life unhealed, because the example you gave me was pained, powerless. Do the young Catholics, starry-eyed with reality-obscuring dreams, understand how much hurt can go down the generations?

As if a home filled with the challenge of sexual truth-telling is a worse place than the hermetically sealed house of lies and omissions in which I—and so many of them, not to mention you—grew up.

They also ask me whether you are alive, the audiences, and I can’t summon as much regret as would be proper when I answer, “No, she’s dead.” They always look surprised when I tell them I was planning to come out to you, just as I did as a baby-dyke of nineteen—that I was prepared to have a painful confrontation in the name of honesty, prepared to trust you to accept me, and equally prepared to let go of my dream of you: as a mother who might someday understand me, learn from me, teach me something positive about being a woman. That we never had the conversation means our relationship is frozen in time; I am unmothered always. My journey into womanhood was steered by me, away from your image, into places I explore eagerly partly because they would have been so foreign to you.

But I could only have been honest with you because your opinion had no real sway over me. I still do not believe the gap between our experiences might have been successfully bridged. The toll your life took on you was too great, and so was my determination to make the gap wider.

It surprises the audience to hear I would have told you the truth because they all have secrets from their parents, their other loved ones. Some things were not meant to be talked about in public, they think; or, at least, not at home. Obviously, I don’t agree. The secrets that thrived between you and me are not so different than the ones that hover between husband and wife, that create the space in which I work when I whore.

It is certainly easier not having to talk to you about it, I agree, closing the gap a little between me and the surprised faces I’m lecturing to. They are mostly faces on which I can read the belief that not talking about things is an easier course than addressing them—no matter what kind of painful secrets that belief creates, nurtures.

There’s another thing I don’t say, but I can say it to you now. I have wondered whether you died when you did because you didn’t want to know. Reading my intent to shock you; carrying a protective shell of denial to the grave. I speak out to crack that shell. Maybe, even now, my words make a difference to you. They make a difference to me. I have created a life I can speak out about.

Love,
Carol