Hypocrisy Is So Sexy In a Call Girl
By JOHN TIERNEY
There's a hilarious scene in Tracy Quan's new novel, "Diary of a Manhattan Call Girl," in which a $400- per-hour call girl attends her first meeting of a group fighting for the rights of "sex workers." This call girl, who shops on Fifth Avenue and can pass for a socialite at the best hotels, gazes in horror at the lower orders of the sex industry clad in rubber and leather. She's appalled by the assorted activists with buttons that read "Lipstick Lesbians Against Globalization."
"Why," she wonders, "do lipstick lesbians always have such bad taste in lipstick?" She endures the politically correct language until a tattooed activist announces that a pornographic film star named Lisa Marquis is leading a movement to attack patriarchal movies containing a negative depiction of prostitutes.
"Hello?!" the call girl says angrily, and proceeds to give a graphic description (unprintable here) of an act performed by Lisa Marquis in a video now available for rental by Lisa Marquis's parents.
"Since when do porn actors have any idea what should be portrayed on screen, when they're doing stuff in front of a camera that no self-respecting hooker does in private?" The call girl goes on to lament, "Porn is ruining a good thing. The guys see all this disgusting stuff on video, and it gives them ideas."
You might think this is the voice of the author, who is herself a former call girl with a conservative wardrobe and a distaste for politically correct rhetoric. But it's not that simple with Tracy Quan.
She also happens to be a spokeswoman for Prostitutes of New York, a group that lobbies for sex workers' rights. She calls herself a lingerie liberal =97 an affluent call girl who identifies politically with oppressed streetwalkers =97 but she also sees herself as a libertarian entrepreneur. She considers her call-girl self to have been a successful independent businesswoman, not an exploited victim.
"I identify more with the heroes in Horatio Alger novels than with the prostitutes in contemporary literature," she said.
Like the heroine of her novel, she is a woman of mixed Asian ancestry in her 30's who knew from age 10 that she wanted to be a hooker. She ran away from home at 14 and worked her way up from hotel bars to an escort service to her own private list of clients. She became publicly active in political and literary circles while remaining personally discreet.
Ten years ago, she participated in a debate about legalizing prostitution in the pages of Vox, a literary magazine in New York started by my wife, Dana. She became friends with Dana and then with me, but there were barriers. She and I never mentioned her past even though I knew that she knew that I knew.
Things were further complicated when Dana introduced her to someone who became her boyfriend =97 a guy somewhat like the heroine's boyfriend in the novel, although the real boyfriend knew all about Ms. Quan's past whereas the character in the novel is clueless. But I wasn't supposed to talk about her past with him, either, even though he knew that I knew that he knew.
Why, when she was publicly crusading to make prostitution more legitimate, was she secretive about her own career? The publication of her novel gave me a chance at last to ask her.
"In our society, there's a weird liberationist but puritanical attitude that you must be honest," Ms. Quan said.
"Some members of the sex industry put pressure on call girls to come out of the closet. People who are secretive are seen as victims of repression. But I didn't feel like a victim when I kept secrets," she said.
In her circle of call girls, she said, it was taboo to tell a boyfriend about your past. "I had to pretend to some girls that my boyfriend didn't know even though he did," she said. "It's a little double standard, a macho attitude so your peers think you're snowing your boyfriend. "Secrecy is important to the call girl mystique. It gives a girl charisma, especially in New York. Gossip travels so quickly here that it takes real skill to keep a secret and pass in the best circles. Clients are turned on by the idea that you're moving in all these interesting circles and they could run into you."
While call girls continue preaching discretion, other prostitutes are brazenly advertising on the Internet and in mainstream publications. "Prostitution was practiced openly in New York in the 19th century, and now we seem to be returning to those days," Ms. Quan said. "In many ways that's good, but the change is traumatic for some call girls. It's so unsexy to have everything out in the open. There's something erotic about hypocrisy."
Leo Casey United Federation of Teachers 260 Park Avenue South New York, New York 10010-7272 212-98-6869
Power concedes nothing without a demand. It never has, and it never will. If there is no struggle, there is no progress. Those who profess to favor freedom, and yet deprecate agitation are men who= =20 want crops without plowing the ground. They want rain without thunder and=20 lightning. They want the ocean without the awful roar of its waters. -- Frederick Douglass --
.