Lisa pays for her addiction to crack cocaine mainly through begging. She usually begs in the Temple Bar area of Dublin, which is where I met her recently, along with a lot of other crack addicts, while making a podcast there. Temple Bar, I’ll explain to readers not familiar with Dublin, is a tourist-orientated area of the city centre which is full of pubs offering live music. It’s a busy drinking spot all day. Begging from drunken people is generally more fruitful than begging from sober people, Lisa explains, which is one of the reasons why she, like many such homeless people, chooses to live in a tent, rather than in a hostel. “If I have to be back in a hostel by ten-o-clock, I won’t be able to get me money and then I won’t be able to get me crack”. Best time and place of all for begging, says Lisa, is the Harcourt Street area of Dublin in the early hours of the morning as the night clubs empty out. Men are at their most reckless with their money at that time.
I can imagine Lisa being successful in getting men to engage with her. She is charming, witty, candid, articulate and friendly. And although her crack-addiction has destroyed the youthful good looks that she no doubt once possessed, now, in her early forties, she is still an attractive woman.
It was as if Lisa read the next question on my mind without me having to ask. “The main problem with night time begging is the predators. They want sexual favours and because you’re a crackhead they think you’ll do it for little or nothing.” So how does she deal with that? “You tell them to eff off or else sometimes you agree a price of fifty for a blowjob, bring them down a laneway, get your money and when they have opened their pants you run. Serves them right!”. And, as Lisa explains, such a man is not going to run out onto the main street demanding his money back.
All of which brings me to a comment on social media in reaction to that podcast interview from a listener saying that Lisa’s story proves that sex work is not work; a person who is cheated out of a legitimate service that they have paid for would have no hesitation in chasing after someone in public, calling the Guards or going to a solicitor or whatever it takes. Lisa’s predator-turned-victim won’t be doing any of that because he knows he shouldn’t have been looking for what he was paying for in the first place.
I agree with that listener comment. And this has got me thinking more generally about the claim made by many that sex work is work. I have spent many years standing outside social welfare offices talking to people attending there. You often meet people who, after a prolonged period of unemployment, get called in by the social welfare service for an interview to discuss their situation. Contrary to what activists who claim to represent jobless people will tell you, I have generally found that unemployed people welcome this intervention from the social welfare service and they give me a positive account of such meetings when they come out. Unemployed people who have been sinking into a depression through being idle take heart when a group of professionals take the time with them to discuss job or training options.
So let’s imagine such an interview with the social welfare service if sex work was really work. When the interviewee says they have been unable to find work to earn their living should they not then be asked if they have considered giving blowjobs? If sex work is work, why not?
If sex work is work, why did I never think of taking a sabbatical from my good job in broadcasting and go hiring out my bottom in the Phoenix Park instead, which brings me to the next story I want to tell you.
It was about 1996, I think, when a radio producer in RTÉ suggested to me that I should do some work on male prostitution. I said I would. I had done a lot of work over the years just outside the Phoenix Park main gate speaking to the women who lined the wall at Benburb Street (now no longer a kerb-crawling spot since the street was closed to traffic to facilitate the Luas tram). So why not go inside the Phoenix Park where, it was reputed, I would find men who were selling sex? I knew it would be a somewhat different type of prostitution scene to what I was used to. Those buying, I presumed, would be gay men, rather than straight men. Those selling would be desperate drug-addicted men, rather than desperate drug-addicted women. But, I thought, it would be basically an all-male version of the sort of prostitution scene I had been reporting on for years from Benburb Street or Baggot Street in Dublin. It turned out I was completely wrong.
I started off in the Phoenix Park late one afternoon at the car park at the hollow near the Magazine Fort which, I had heard, was the place to go to find the activity I was looking for. As soon as I parked, a prosperous-looking, middle-aged man who was sat in an SUV which was parked beside me started signalling to me to join him. I ignored him. No, Mister. I’m here to meet men selling sex, not buying it. I also found it surprising that he should mistake me for a seller. Surely, I didn’t look the part?
After a few minutes I got out of my car and climbed the hill into a wooded area overlooking the hollow. It was at that point that Caspar, who was with me, started barking into a thicket. Caspar was my dog. I looked beyond the thicket and saw two men (fully-dressed, I’m relieved to say) standing looking over the car park below. Both were athletic-looking and in their thirties. Both wore black leather jackets, the significance of which I hadn’t yet grasped. When I introduced myself they were jovial and friendly and spoke with strong rural accents. Undercover gardai keeping a watch on illegal activity in the car park below, was my first thought. When I told them I was working for RTÉ they started talking to me about people they knew in my place of work who they wondered if I might know too. A typical Irish conversation, I thought. Then after a few minutes the penny dropped with me that they weren’t just talking about random people in RTÉ. Every one of my colleagues that they mentioned were ones that I knew to be gay men, or ones that I hadn’t yet known were gay but did now.
No, these two men would not be recording interviews. They were here for the “action” they told me. They weren’t selling sex. They were here because they wanted to have sex with men who wanted it too. No money involved. Stay until nightfall, they told me, and I would see the action develop. “Married men are the best”, they assured me.
Caspar and I headed back down to the car park where, as the evening went by, I was repeatedly approached by men I had never met before who wanted to be sexually intimate with me. Many wore black leather jackets which, I came to realise, was a signal to show that they were men looking for sex. My eventual report for RTE included interviews with gay men from Britain who had heard that this was the place to come to in Dublin to get sex. I found no Irishmen willing to speak on record. And, as I would tell programme host Myles Dungan, I saw no evidence of prostitution.
That evening in the Phoenix Park was an eye-opening experience for me. Any notion I might of had of a career move into prostitution was now ended. I understood now that no man would pay for the use of my body for sex. Why should he when there’s plenty more men willing to provide their bodies for free?
Sex for sale is sex that is sold by women and bought by men. There is no heterosexual equivalent to the Magazine Fort car park (never mind the urban legend of “swinger parties”, to which nobody ever seems to have actually gone). Women, unlike men, don’t want to have sex with strangers. It can be frustrating to men but, men find, before a woman will be sexually intimate with you she has to like you first. If there were places where straight men could go on their way home from work where they would encounter women they have never met before who want to get naked with them and have immediate sex, such places would be popular. There are no such places. If straight men want anonymous sex they go to places where they pay for it, known as brothels.
So men can’t sell their bodies for sex unless, and this is an important exception, they are young. An adult male body is not marketable for sex. A young male body is. Such young males have been known throughout history as rent boys.
Before I left RTÉ two years ago, I compiled a number of archive programmes of my work, one of which included interviews I took with former rent boys whom I met at a homeless persons’ welfare office, then at Charles Street in Dublin, in 1990. A middle-aged man I met there told me how, in the 1950s as a kid who had fled his home in Cavan, he had arrived in Dublin with nowhere to live and had learned to earn his money at the public toilets at St Stephen’s Green where he sold his body to Trinity College students. A teenager I met, Thomas, had exited prostitution much more recently. He had run away from home due to an impossible situation with his mum’s new boyfriend. Thomas took me to the public toilets that were then at Burgh Quay, in Dublin City centre, and showed me where he had earned his money in the cubicles therein. Thomas got out of prostitution with the help of one Sister Fiona, to whom he remains eternally grateful whenever I meet him which I have done several times, by chance, in Dublin City over the years.
In the interview he recorded with me back in 1990, Thomas shows the same anger at predatory men who exploited him as does Lisa whom I met in Temple Bar just a few weeks ago. Thomas and Lisa have it in common that they have both been targeted by predatory men who would inflict sex on them that they would not choose to engage in if their situation were not so desperate.
So sex is something that is sold by women and by teenage males. Nobody would ever seek to pay me for sex because I’m an adult man. And this brings me back to my imagined social welfare office of the future at which sex work is considered to be work. I’m never going to have the option of providing blowjobs suggested to me because nobody would pay me to do that. So those who assert that sex work is work need to be honest about what they are saying, that is, that sex work is work for women but not for men. If sex work was really work then anyone should be able to do it, not just women and teenage males.
Which goes to prove that sex work is not work.