Hos, Hookers, Call Girls, and Rent Boys [Paperback]

Sex workers speak for themselves in this blunt collection of essays, "Hos, Hookers, Call Girls and Rent Boys" edited by David Henry Sterry and R.J. Martin, Jr. Sterry is best-known as the author of the memoir "Chicken" which describes the nine-month period he spent as a male prostitute at the age of 17 for wealthy and elderly women in San Francisco. Sterry points out in his introduction that participants in the sex industry range in character from the poor and abused who tend to be characterized as victims, to middle and upper-class women and men who enter the trade with their eyes open. He writes "[o]ne of the saddest things I discovered as I penetrated deeper and deeper [sic] into this sex business war was that neither side seems to be able to easily acknowledge the truth of the other." (p. 5)

The essays bring the perspectives of the abused to the seemingly empowered to bear on the timeless exchange of sex- for- money. Some of the essays are by sex workers who have earned advanced degrees and professions while others are by the most abused streetwalker. The essays describe the participants' attitudes towards their trade, their backgrounds, and their relationship to family friends, clients, coworkers, and pimps. Some of the essays show literary polish while others are raw. The latter essays have more of a sense if immediacy, passion, and, frequently, anger.

Sterry divides the collection into six chapters, the first four of which are captioned "life", "love", "money", and "sex". The final two chapters of the book differ in character from what proceeds. They consist of short paragraphs of largely anonymous writing which results from various outreach programs in which sex workers are encouraged to reflect upon their lives and put their thoughts on paper. These two final chapters include some of the best and most disturbing material in the book, particularly a harrowing essay of a little over one page called "Helping Daddy Pay the Rent."

The materials vary in tone and quality. The opening piece by Annie Sprinkle, PhD offers "Forty Reasons why Whores are my Heroes", but most of the contributors see considerably less to celebrate. Sterry's own essay, "I was a Birthday Present for an Eighty-Two Year-Old Grandmother and April Daisy White's "The First Time", which describes the difficulty of determining when one crosses the line to become a paid sex worker, are among the better efforts in the book's first chapter. The book's second chapter, which deals with a variety of relationships between sex workers and their families may be the most interesting of the four. Laura Shaw's "Mother-Daughter Day" and Anastasia Krylov's "My Daughter is a Prostitute" offer portraits of parental unhappiness when they discover their daughters' career choices. In chapter three, Sadie Lune's essay "Envelopes" and Dianna Morgaine's "A Little Crispy Around the Edges" are among the more perceptive in discussing their various perceptions of the relationship between sex and money. And in the fourth chapter, Matilda Bernstein Sycamore's essay "All that Sheltering Emptiness" discusses the thin line that sometimes separates consensual from nonconsensual paid sex.

The overall aim of these essays is to show sex workers and their clients as well as flawed but valuable human beings. Sexuality, and the portion of its expression that involves monetary exchange, are never-ending sources of fascination. This collection offers insight into the paid sex that is, for both sex workers and their clients, an embarrassing but seemingly inevitable part of human sexual experience.

Robin Friedman