FIGURE 12.2
Protestors affiliated with the Sex Worker Education and Advocacy Taskforce (SWEAT) march in a demonstration in South Africa, wearing t-shirts that read, “Stop harassing us and tackle real crime.”
Although some sex workers overcome a great deal and may become advocates for others, they may well live through a range of complex and painful experiences that have profound and lasting effects. The participants in the present work stressed the recursive relationship between sex work and their sexual and emotional lives. While men who took part in the work certainly had various strategies for delineating boundaries between commercial sex and their sexual and emotional lives more widely, many also had established enduring romantic and emotional relationships with clients that blurred the boundaries between their work, love, and emotional lives, and which disrupt any simplistic or reductive definition of male sex work.
Advocacy, Sex, and Work
The MSWs who participated in the present study compared their work with other professions, such as nursing, noting some similarities in the context of work. They identified intimacy, touch, and healing as the binding theme and often referred to sex work as a form of “therapy” for clients, who might have relationship concerns, “intimacy deficits,” and sexual preferences that could not be expressed elsewhere. They cited one key difference with many other professions—the lack of legislation, including labor and occupational health rights, around appropriate working practices for sex workers. Many of the men saw this as a good thing, as it could keep them free of surveillance and registration that might be used to control sex work. The men shared a strong desire to see sex work decriminalized, with health and human rights seen as symbiotically linked, and they shared the view that sex work is work.
Another consequence of putting restrictions on male sex work is that, if MSWs were to seek rights as sex workers, it could be difficult for activists to claim such rights if these men did not necessarily identify what they do as a profession or even conceptualize what they do as work. These issues may differ somewhat between male and female sex work, as unionization has been much weaker among male sex workers. However, in Kenya and South Africa, there is a move toward mobilizing male sex workers and their joining political movements.
The participants identified some of the strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, and threats involved in sex work and the potential for stronger advocacy among MSWs in Africa. Some characteristics of the work were understood to be both positive and negative. Fun and play, for example, were identified as a positive aspect of sex work but also a weakness and potential threat in that too much emphasis on fun or the immediate gratification of needs among some male sex workers stops them from taking sexual health and the threat of HIV seriously. Forming coalitions with other sex workers was another opportunity/potential threat in terms of competition from female sex workers, which could prejudice them toward one another and get in the way of common activism, organizing, and advocacy. This subtle view of sex work, including gender bias, highlights the need for further research on the topic and for a greater focus on HIV prevention and sex workers’ rights.
Discrimination toward male and transgendered sex workers and intercommunity hostility varies between countries, though all are influenced by sociopolitical factors, human rights movements, and other contradictory realities (Wojcicki et al., 2002). South Africa, for example, has passed laws that protect the rights of LGBTI people but are only partially effective in reducing prejudice, and they do little to protect or change attitudes toward male sex workers (Dunkle et al., 2007). Male sex workers from other countries reported working in pernicious political and religious contexts. MSWs from Zimbabwe, for example, reported some direct hostility from the Anglican Church, and men from Kenya also have experienced prejudice from religious groups, but more from people of the Islamic faith than from Christians. Some in each country have experienced xenophobia, especially migrant sex workers, including ostracism and exclusion from other sex workers.
Secrecy, Intimacy, and Power
One of the key attributes of sex workers (both male and female) is that they often keep clients’ secrets. Of course, the sex work transaction itself may be a secret, but clients also share secrets with sex workers about their lives that they do not share with others (“the unseen patron”; Sullivan & Simon, 1998), which can create a certain kind of intimacy beyond the intimacy (or otherwise) of sexual acts. This paradox holds the diverse expressions of intimacy, sexual needs, private fantasies, and especially power, as keeping secrets may give the sex worker a certain kind of power, although the client in many ways will determine the parameters of what is shared and concealed in the sex work relationship.
Male sex workers’ experiences cannot easily be classified or characterized through associations with poverty, survival sex, and HIV. The landscape of male sex work is more than a sexual transaction and is composed of powerful and intricate interactions and strategies that involve issues pertaining to masculinity, gender variances, relationships of care, and what might be thought of as unconventional liaisons. This is portrayed in the following stories:
I met one man who told me how he was not paid the night before by a client. The client also verbally abused him. He seemed traumatized and I offered to take him to a clinic for counseling. While at the clinic we took an HIV test and he found out he was HIV positive. We went to a government hospital. The nurses just stood in front of everyone and shouted out loud to the people waiting for assistance: “If you have HIV, go to room 9, TB room 12, and STD room 8.” Everyone left at that moment. (workshop participant from Nairobi)
I introduced Josh to sex work. Peter, a client I knew well, wanted a companion, and he and Josh established a serious relationship. Sometime thereafter my sister told me that Josh was sick. I decided to visit him at his house.
When I saw Josh, I could not believe what I saw. He had a gorgeous physique and it was all gone. He had found out that I was sick too and he would not talk about his health. He kept asking me if I was fine. He was so concerned about me when all I had was a cold and he was in a really bad state. Every time I asked him if he was fine he would dismiss it and claim he is fine.
Later, when I was at training, I received a message that Josh was taken to the hospital. To his last moment, he didn’t tell anyone that he was HIV positive. To go for testing he had to be accompanied by a supportive person, otherwise the clinics would not allow it. I found out that at one point Josh had sought help from my sister to go for testing, but it never happened.
I found out thereafter that Peter always refused to use a condom, so [he] intentionally infected Josh. The memories of leaving the HIV course, introducing Josh to Peter, Josh refusing to talk to me about it [is] still on my mind. (workshop participant from Windhoek)
The present study focused on understanding sex workers’ life experiences beyond cultural labels or stereotyping, or accounts of risk practices or vulnerabilities, and toward a more personal, psychosocial view of research participants as people engaged in their own worlds who address risk and vulnerability in their own lives and the lives of others in complex ways. Male sex workers (and sex workers in general) not only sell sex but also are involved in nuanced relationship trajectories of power, intimacy, and control with their clients and other stakeholders, such as health-care providers and police, which can result in exclusion, for example, from mainstream health services and orthodox routes to social justice. MSWs may be the bearers of secrets, which can empower them but also limit them; for example, if a sex worker reveals secrets about clients, he will likely lose them.
In-Country Work
After the initial workshop, we followed up with MSWs in two of the five countries, Kenya and Namibia. The purpose of this aspect of the research was to find out more about the lives of male and transgendered sex workers from their own points of view as the initial stage of a longer-term strategy to develop new research conducted for and by sex workers in Africa. It also was intended to inform and improve representation of male and transgendered sex workers in regional bodies, such as ASWA, and within national HIV prevention and rights-based action groups.
We spent time working with local MSW activists, socializing in bars, cruising areas where men work, and conducting interviews, informal discussions, and so on with men who sell sex. These activities took place within a six-month period and focused on seven questions, each one having an underlying hypothesis. Here we present some overarching themes that emerged from these enquiries, which explored some core questions.
How did you get into sex work?
The majority of the research participants in both Nairobi and Windhoek used the word “introduced” to describe how they got into sex work, the introductions having been made by an older person, in many instances a male or female sex worker, in the context of clubs, bars, and
shebeens
(township pubs). Some respondents had also introduced others to sex work:
I have introduced a few people to sex work. One of them was a 22-year-old boy, John. I recommended clients to him and told clients about him. John was bright, outspoken, and attractive. We became good friends and [had] a close relationship. He was one of my best friends. (respondent from Windhoek)
Some research participants described financial/transactional rewards as the motivation for doing sex work, and one transgendered sex worker in Namibia spoke of early teenage sexual experiences in which a form of barter took place—in this case, sex in exchange for the necessities of home. An overarching theme was that sex work is bound up with self-realization and familial rejection and/or community hostility due to same-sex sexuality. Most study participants revealed that they came to understand themselves as being attracted to men in their late teenage years and that this catalyzed a move away from the natal family, either because they were rejected or as a matter of choice, although this “choice” may have been made under constrained circumstances, given the lack of opportunity for sexual expression, familial pressure to marry, and so on. One respondent from Kenya mentioned his family chaos and explained that running away from home took him into the streets, where he quickly “learned the trade, specifically becoming apprenticed to mature and experienced female sex workers.” Many have completely severed family ties, but some maintain contact with their families, including visits home. Indeed, some maintain heterosexual marriages, although their wives and children typically live in other towns.
The participants commonly reported that they took up sex work as a means of survival in the absence of any other way to earn a living. In discussions with MSWs in Nairobi and Windhoek, the men reported that they had entered sex work primarily as a way to earn a living. However, most also said that it was a form of self-expression and a context within which self-understanding as someone who is attracted to their own sex can be explored and consolidated. Sex work thus offers these men a way to “be oneself” on a profound level; indeed, participants often described the selling of sex as inseparable from a sense of themselves as sexual in any terms. This is not to sanitize sex work as a positive construct of self-realization. In fact, most respondents reported that the work could be hard and in some ways alienating; for example, for some it exacerbates a sense of difference and disconnection from their families, partners, and peers. Nevertheless, for many participants, the selling of sex also engenders a sense of freedom and existential choice, even as it might also be bound up with a sense of abjection and low self-esteem. Such feelings were closely linked to the experience of same-sex attraction and the complexities pertaining to self-actualization in a hostile and “homo-prejudiced” society.
What has sex work brought into your life?
The study participants have mixed feelings and experiences related to sex work, given their complex reasons for entering sex work in the first place. Earning money was a significant and obvious reason, even if attenuated by other motives and factors, but the relationship to money earned doing sex work is far from straightforward. Some men reported that money earned in this way came and went quickly, in part because sex work costs money—to buy clothes, drinks in bars, etc.—in order for sex workers to look attractive and hang out in places where they might meet clients, as well as some private spaces. Lack of privacy and geographic spaces added to this burden, as several sex workers described the mobility of their work, which took them from one location to another. Moreover, sex workers do not always feel good about or take ownership of the money they earn this way, so spending it on clothes, having a good time, etc., acts a strong antidote or form of self-pleasuring to mitigate any sense of debasement, humiliation, shame, or pain they might experience.
Given the commercialization of “gay” and transgendered spaces—for example, particular bars in large cities—self-expression through consumption is an intimately interconnected facet of life as a sex worker and as a sexual and/or gender minority person. Research participants regarded sex work as both a positive and negative life attribute within this context, as something that might allow a certain kind of freedom but also could be a restraint. The majority reported that sex work keeps them “ticking over financially”—that is, they earn enough money to live on, pay rent, drink, use substances, and generally get by, but that is essentially it. Few had any savings, and most admitted to having periods of financial insecurity; for example, when clients were scarce and they couldn’t pay the rent. Sex work brings significant insecurity into the participants’ lives, and many were worried about the future. Immediate gratification and the constitutional illegitimacy of sex work created a sense of a foreshortened future.