Queer Life: February 2005

The Lesbian and the Hooker

October 2003

Why am I so often mistaken for a prostitute?

A drunken male pedestrian two-stepping home after a night out once tried to hire me for an hour. He jingled the change in his front pocket as he responded to my simple no: "Oh... rats."

I've always thought of hooking as a femme profession. I had no idea there was a market for portly butch gals in red plaid shirts and army boots. But there is.

Research by Vancouver-based professor Becki Ross has uncovered women like the post-war stripper "Klute," who apparently loved to show off how butch she was on stage.

There's a difference between strippers and prostitutes, but it is all sex work.

Ross discussed her research with a newspaper reporter in the year 2000. At the time, Ross was studying the connections between homos and "erotic performance" after both world wars. "The presence of queers at all levels upsets the image of striptease as a strictly heterosexual business where straight women perform to entertain straight men,” Ross said.

Studies have found a disproportionate number of homos involved in the burlesque and pasties scene. Gay men made wigs and costumes, and helped choreograph. Lesbians stripped, while others (mostly butches) were patrons.

But, as I assumed, Ross did find that stripping was a mostly femme profession. That goes for much sex work, I'll bet.

Thing is, many women are only "butch" to het men when set against a contrast. Paired up with a femme date, I'm clearly the "guy." But heterosexual men treat me quite differently when I’m alone. When there’s no comparison to be made, I’m all girlie again -- even with big boots and oversized shirts, so protectively gigantic the guys can’t even see a hint of real body.

Clothing has often been regulated for both prostitutes and lesbians. In the distant past, hookers were often ordered by the state to wear a white scarf, or a specific dress or color. "I was reminded of the warning older lesbians gave me in the ’50s as I prepared for a night out: "Always wear three pieces of women's clothing so the vice squad can't bust you for transvestism," wrote the US historian Joan Nestle in "Lesbians and Prostitutes: A Historical Sisterhood."

Eons ago, many prostitutes wore an article (or more) or men's clothing. "[A]s in lesbian history, cross-dressing signals the breaking of women's traditional erotic, and therefore social, territory," Nestle wrote.

Of course, as with the contradictory "logic" of all stereotypes, women are pegged as prostitutes no matter what we wear. Tight and revealing clothes shown off in a bar gets a woman called slut, too.

When I get mistaken for a hooker -- and it happens a few times every year -- I see it as being mistaken for a girlie-girl. But more likely I'm just seen as a single female.

Even if I am seen as a dyke, it doesn't so much matter to the guy, because lesbians and prostitutes have always been intimately connected in the hetero male imagination.

There is also a truth to that connection. Prostitutes in ancient Athens were said to "induct" younger female protégés into their mystic profession. And at special annual women's-only banquets, bodies could be briefly purchased.

Indisputably, many prostitutes were and are lesbians. (So were, and undoubtedly still are, customers. Nestle has written of her female clients, and there's some historical data on lesbian bordello customers.)

In the 1950s, pop culture hipsters noted the "prevalence of lesbianism in brothels throughout the world," which (rather tiresomely) "has convinced me that prostitution, as a behavior deviation, attracts to a large extent women who have a very strong latent homosexual component. Through prostitution these women eventually overcome their homosexual repression" (as paraphrased by Joan Nestle).

More likely lesbians were attracted by a lifestyle that allowed a titch more freedom than marriage and domestic slavery 24/7.

Nonetheless, throughout modern history, prostitutes and lesbians have been treated as subhuman or sick -- certainly in law and bourgeois society, and even by some of the hookers' hypocritical clients.

We were brought together as outlaws. The expression to "go straight," as a prostitute once noted, is used by both whores and by homosexuals.

As Nestle so ably pointed out, the very existence of lesbians and prostitutes questions the mainstream. Or at least, lesbians did until very recently. With the newfound acceptability of homosexuals, the vast majority of us find that we can, and indeed must, leave whores behind in order to continue to garner respectability.

Yet Nestle wrote that only 50 years ago, in the dyke bars of her youth, lesbians sat next to hookers at the bar, and many were lovers.

How easily we forget.

A guy at a bus stop who hassled me for a quickie a couple of years ago got a long look at his crotch. Then I laughed at his manhood, and he slunk away.

I realized later it was a cruel thing to do. A simple "no" would have gotten the point across, and avoided his humiliation (later undoubtedly growing into rage). It would have also allowed me to show respect for the trade and by extension working women. I was ashamed of my behavior that night.

But why do I keep getting mistaken for a hooker?

It all comes down to the way hookers and lesbians deal with men. Wrongly, many see that relationship with men as one of contempt. (As with all generalizations, I'm sure some women, hetero and homo, see men with contempt. But not the majority.)

For hookers on duty, men are a job. If he won't pay, she's not interested. In turn, lesbians have no sexual interest in men at all.

That businesslike indifference is what lesbians and prostitutes still have in common (identifiable prostitutes, that is -- this is only true when a straight prostitute is at work).

I look straight into men's eyes. Not with desire, but with the interest of one human being in another. To a straight guy, for whom that sort of relationship with a woman is complex and blurred, a stranger's unashamed and direct gaze is sexual.

It's the gaze of the prostitute.