This Hollywood Pope and these well-heeled and well-appointed television men want to make a TV series out of a book I wrote. It’s about when I was seventeen years old, turning tricks not more than a stone’s throw from where I sit now, in the heart of tony money. They’re discussing handsome young actors who could play me and beautiful starlets who could portray the women who gave me money to have sex with them. My head is reeling, surrealing; my mind can’t quite wrap around this full-circle moment.

I flash back to 1974, standing in front of what was then Grauman’s Chinese Theater, alone with nothing but twenty-seven dollars in the pocket of my nut-hugging elephant bells. A very nice man wearing a Tshirt that said sexy started talking to me as if he was my best friend. At a certain point, he asked me if I’d like to come back to his place. To have a steak. That steak would cost me a lot more than sixty-five dollars. In fact, it was the most expensive steak of my life. After he used me in ways I hate to remember but can’t force myself to forget, I escaped with my life. As the sun was coming up, I was in a dumpster about to eat some fried chicken garbage when another very nice man approached me. Turns out, he was a talent scout for the sex business. A week later, I was having sex for money.

I was only in the business for nine months. One human gestation period. At the same time, I was attending a college run by nuns. Naturally,my favorite subject was Existentialism. When I retired from the business, I left Hollywood and I never again wanted to think about the fact that I’d been a prostitute. Over the next twenty years, I tried to bury it so deep inside of me that I’d never have to face that part of myself. But I kept putting myself in situations where death would be a likely outcome. Luckily, my skull is as thick and strong as my will to live. Nevertheless, it became clear to me at a certain point that I was going to have to go faceto- face, toe-to-toe, tête-à-tête with the demons that were eating me alive from the inside. Or I was going to die.

After a search that took years, I finally found someone to help me. A hypnotherapist. At a certain point, my doctor said that since I was making my living writing screenplays, perhaps I should try to write my own story. Due to my sick persistence, and using many skills I acquired in the world of industrial sex, my writing found its way into the hands of a literary agent in New York City. She was very curious about the fiction I’d written, which was not my true story at all. I still couldn’t face the truth at that point. I couldn’t write down the worst things that had ever happened to me. We started dating. Me and the agent. In fact, on our first date we ended up back at her place. Suddenly it was four o’clock in the morning, and she asked me those questions you have to ask these days when you are interested in someone.

“So,” she said, “have you slept with a lot of people?”
“That depends what you mean by ‘a lot,’” I smiled.
“Well,” she said, “have you ever had sex with a prostitute?”

Normally this is where I would lie about myself. Hide behind the veil of charm I have worn since I was seventeen years old. But after all that hypnotherapy, I had finally hit rock bottom. About three months earlier, I had been dumped by a fiancée I didn’t even like. That’s when I made the decision that I would no longer hide my true colors.

So in my normal, calm, big-boy voice, I said: “Actually, I was a prostitute.”

Instead of running horrified, screaming into the night, my New York literary agent got a quizzical, but definitely sympathetic look on her face and asked: “Wow, that’s interesting; tell me about that.”

So I did. SEXY, the steak, the sex business talent scout. The rich Beverly Hills ladies. The Hollywood Hills lesbians who hired me to wearnothing but a black see-through French maid’s apron and clean their house while they humiliated me and made furious love to each other. The Pacific Palisades woman who paid me to dress in the clothes of her dead teenage son and have sex with her.

When I was done, my literary agent said: “That’s the book you should write.”

So I did.

• • •

Writing down the worst (and the best) things that ever happened to me completely changed my life. The demons that had been feasting on me for so long were exorcised; they flew out of me as the words poured onto the page. At times, when I was writing Chicken, I’d suddenly realize there were tears streaming down my face. I was weeping and I didn’t even know it. The release was so complete it liberated me in a way I could never have imagined. And when the book was published, many members of my family didn’t speak to me for quite some time. The shame in our culture associated with being a prostitute is so profound it affects people in ways they don’t even realize.

After Chicken came out, I was invited to a gathering with some writers and literati types, many of whom were college professors. My host was introducing everybody. He said, This is Harvey Shlmeel, he wrote a fabulous book about the 1919 Black Sox scandal. And this is Barry Shlmozzle, he wrote a marvelous book about the mating habits of the Tasmanian mole. And this is David Henry Sterry, he was a prostitute.

Deafening silence filled the room, time standing still, discomfort hanging heavy while feet shuffled, eyes averted, and throats were cleared. The whole rest of the night I was an object of curiosity, a sex freak geek in a traveling side show. Some wanted to talk economics, how much was I paid, how much work did I do? Some wanted to talk sex, tell me about the judge in diapers. Some just gawked. But they all had a certain overentitled, condescending, smarter-than-thou-ness that simultaneously made my balls shrivel and my fists clench. It is that automatic assumption that an industrial sex technician is a) a drug addict; b) illiterate; c) uneducated; d) a slut. It slaps you in the face when you announce in public that you are a ho, hooker, call girl, or rent boy. Well, I finally told someone there that night, Look, I’m not a drug addict, I know lots of big words, and I got a very expensive education. Okay, I may be a slut, but I’m not alone there.

Nevertheless, for every painful incident, there were amazing, lifechanging people, places, and things placed in my path. I still get emails from people all over the world in response to Chicken, telling me about ridiculous, abusive, crazy sex things that were done to them without their consent. After I do a performance of Chicken, there are always a couple of girls or women who linger after everyone is gone. They have a hard time looking me in the eye. They clearly have something very, very important to say, but they can’t quite say it. Finally, they unload their stories. An uncle, a grandfather, a soccer coach, whatever. Somebody who knew better did something terrible to them, and they’ve never been able to tell anybody. It’s counterintuitive in a way. I used to think that if I revealed the worst things about myself, people would be repulsed and would try to make me feel repulsive. And yes, some people do that. But the real result—and I have a large data pool to choose from at this point—is that people are drawn to someone who’s willing to reveal the monstrous truth. Let’s face it, the longer you live, the greater your chance of having suffering inflicted upon you, of having something dark, poisonous, and ugly living inside of you, making your life miserable. Since Chicken came out, I have become the poster boy for freaks. People feel they can reveal their freakiest shit to me. Because they can. Because they know I’m not going to say, I don’t believe you. I’m not going to say rude things behind their back. I’m not going to reduce them or make them feel repulsive because they have revealed that they are a freak. It’s my contention that we’re all freaks. I just choose to fly my freak flag high.

• • •

Coming out as an industrial sex technician in such a public way led me deep into the billion-dollar sex industry, which I had not been a part of for twenty years at that point—except as a customer. It is a fascinating world divided into two camps. On the one side are people who claim that prostitution cannot be work: It is exploitation. Prostitutes are all victims. It should be illegal. On the other side are people who claim that prostitution can be work, if it’s done with consent and respect, safely, in the spirit of cooperation. It is a way for independent business people to earn a lot of money very quickly. On this side of the sex worker fence, people have been trying for decades to decriminalize prostitution. They argue that prohibition doesn’t work. We saw what happened when they tried to prohibit alcohol: It just put the means of production into the hands of gangsters. And this is certainly happening in the world of sex for money.

The people who toil in that trade have no recourse if something goes wrong—if they are beaten, raped, ripped off. Oftentimes, they can’t go to the police because the police, sadly, are so often part of the problem. In fact, when one of the recent serial prostitute-killers was finally caught, he said he killed whores because he knew no one would miss them. One of the saddest things I discovered as I penetrated deeper and deeper into this sex business war was that neither side seems to be able to easily acknowledge the truth of the other. On the prostitutes-as-victims
side, there seems to be no room for people who want to have sex for money in safe, sane, sanitary conditions. On the prostitutes-a-sempowered-sex-worker side, there seems to be very little acknowledgement that many people are actually trafficked, abused, and exploited. In my experience, there are many people who, given the state of the world, choose to have sex for money. And there are abused victims and humans who are trafficked against their will.

Of course, much of the divide is driven by money, class, and race. Many of the people in the prostitution-as-empowerment world come from middle- or upper-class families. People who have money have choices. They have better access to education. They’re much more likely to end up as high-class call girls than ten-dollar crack hos. It’s like the difference between working in a restaurant that serves sixty-five-dollar steaks and being held against your will, toiling feverishly eighteen hours a day in a sweatshop. Yet both those things are called prostitution.

As I tried to decide what was right and what was wrong about this strange new world into which I had thrust myself, I did what I have done my whole life: I leapt first and then looked. I reached out to both these sex worker camps. Since I was living in San Francisco at the time, I began by establishing a writing program in the basement of Standing Against Global Exploitation (SAGE), an award-winning organization that offers medical, emotional, and vocational help to people who’ve worked in the sex business. This in turn led me to work with girls who had been exploited and victimized. At the same time I accepted an invitation to be the token breeder white man on the Sex Workers’ Art Show (SWAS), a traveling menagerie of musicians, artists, spoken worders, exotic dancers, and madcap activists, all of whom have worked in the sex industry, that bumped, ground, and belted its way all across the USA.

So after having been in the basement of Sage doing these workshops, and having been through the blood, sweat, tears, and rapture of the survivors conference in Washington, DC, I decided to make an anthology of writings by people who’ve exchanged sex for money. I put out the word through the myriad of social connectors that exist in the world of sex for money. These are networks that very few civilians have access to, whether they be Internet or word of mouth. And it is a word-of-mouth business. Lots of words. Lots of mouths. It was quite magical how pieces of writing began to appear. From everywhere. From street hustlers to Ph.D.s. From some people who wanted to be anonymous. From some people who wanted their names to be public for all to see. I have been impressed over and over with this sense of community amongst whores, this spirit of generosity, of networking, that’s woven into the very fabric of people who have sex for money.

This book is, I hope, a way of showing how people who make money in the sex business come in all shapes and sizes. They are mothers, fathers, uncles, aunts, brothers, sisters, and children. I wanted to put a face to people who are glamorized and vilified, worshipped and hated, sexualized and arrested; to celebrate, illuminate, and humanize humans who have lived in this ancient, yet completely modern, billion-dollar industry.

Oh, and by the way, that sixty-five-dollar Sunset Strip steak was very,
very good.