Rejection of the ‘whore-archy’

Cline has this idea for a television show. In it, a handful of sex workers split the rent on an apartment that they use for in-call appointments, allowing the characters to intersect with each other like passing ships.

She could write it from experience.

A middle-class kid from a good family, she nonetheless felt miscast in her country club high school and bolted after graduation. She moved to Hawaii, ostensibly to attend college. But her real desire was to strip.

She danced for a few years, but grew burnt out on the scene shortly after returning to California, where the rules are more restrictive. “I’m not really good at having a manager,” she said.

Still, she hadn’t considered sex work. “In the strip clubs, we always looked down on girls who did prostitution, which is typical whore-archy and classism,” she said.

Until one shift at the last club she worked, in San Francisco. A doctor hinted at seeing her outside of work. She was intrigued, but too nervous to pull the trigger and told him so. A month later, the doctor texted an invitation to join him for a two-night business trip in Orlando, Fla. She tossed out a price and he agreed. She made $2,000 that weekend, minus airfare.

“The money is unparalleled,” she said. “I’ve tried to have other jobs here and there, and $10 an hour doesn’t add up to real income … let alone trying to have an actual life.”

Cline says most of her regulars are businessmen of a certain age—lawyers are a staple—but she also counts couples, the kink community and disabled people among her clients. To Cline, sex work at its best is a healing art, not unlike midwifery or physical therapy. And it has afforded her the stability to raise her son and pursue other interests, like political activism and travel.

“That right there is why this business has always been attractive to me, because I had wanderlust and needed to see the world,” she said. “And this was the only way I could do it.”

Cline has also served as an advocate for sex workers’ rights by co-founding the Sex Worker Outreach Project in 2003. While she’s been arrested for civil disobedience and marijuana possession, she’s never been busted for her work. She and Doogan, both white, say prostitution laws are disproportionately enforced against women of color, making this an equal rights issue as well as a sexual privacy one.

Of the 13 women booked into Sacramento County Jail on prostitution charges from January 24 through February 16, six were black, one was Latina and six were white.

In her personal life, Cline has used her advocacy role as a vehicle to test-drive coming out as an escort to those closest to her. Just about everyone in her life knows, including her parents.

“I have a pretty thin veil between my two identities,” she said. “Now it’s new concerns. Now it’s like, ’OK, how many of the other parents at [my son’s preschool] have figured this out?’”

She’s also wondering when, not if, the time will be right to tell her 5-year-old son.

“I think I got lucky to have a co-parent who is on the same page with me about how not problematic my work is,” she said. “Because there’s not going to be someone here saying derisive things about sex workers in general, about me as a sex worker. I think that’s very hard for kids. But in our household, we revere sex workers.”

-- Modified on 2/20/2016 3:27:37 PM

-- Modified on 2/20/2016 3:59:07 PM