Am I My Brothel's Keeper?

Author and former sex worker Tracy Quan talks about human trafficking, legalizing prostitution, and 15 years in The Life.

Kerry Howley | November 7, 2005

In 2003, The Bush administration introduced the "anti-prostitution pledge," an oath required of U.S. aid organizations working overseas who hoped to continue getting government funding. Born out of a conviction that eliminating sex slavery requires a war on prostitution, the move provoked intense opposition from foreign aid organizations, human rights activists, feminists and sex worker groups. It's also revived an age-old conversation about the moral and legal dimensions of the sex trade.

Author Tracy Quan delves into this earnest debate through the unlikely medium of chick lit. Quan, whose work has appeared in Lingua Franca, Congressional Quarterly, and The Boston Globe, spent 15 years hooking in London and Manhattan before turning exclusively to writing. Her popular bi-weekly column for Salon, which grew into the semi-autobiographical Diary of a Manhattan Call Girl, introduced readers to independent, bourgeois hooker Nancy Chan. Diary of a Married Call Girl, a sequel published last month, is another behind-the-scenes look at a profession pushed underground.

Assistant Editor Kerry Howley spoke to Quan in November.

Reason: What's the ideal legal framework for prostitution? Do you support complete legalization?

Quan: What I would support is more nuanced. The U.S. is out of step; the laws are very backward. We need to learn from the way other countries deal with prostitution. I think it would be unrealistic to just say that you want wholesale legalization across the board—too sudden. There is a distinction to be made between what legalization means to people and what decriminalization means. If legalization means that you're going to be regulated in a way that is unfamiliar to the currently working prostitutes, there is going to be a lot of resistance from prostitutes themselves.

Reason: What regulations in particular concern you?

Quan: Zoning. Zoning can be helpful, but it can also be abusive. We've seen how corporations have colluded with government in New York City, in the kind of zoning crackdown. That was all to the benefit of a few huge corporations, not to the people living in those neighborhoods. There were small business owners who were completely railroaded by eminent domain laws. It has nothing to do with public good. Have you looked at Times Square lately? It's a gigantic scam on the population. Times Square is much more vulgar and offensive looking than it was before. Architecturally it's a disaster. It's completely wrong and unnatural. I don't know who would go there. What person would want their children to be exposed to this sort of thing? It's really vulgar.

Reason: And there are places a brothel would seem unnatural and out of place.

Quan: I am in favor of the idea that you wouldn't want a brothel next to a school; most prostitutes can see the common sense in that. But the interesting thing is that without all kinds of crazy zoning laws, human beings have been naturally inclined to do prostitution in places where there is say, theater. It's absolutely natural for human beings to buy and sell sex in a theater district. That's traditional. Adults are out late at night; actresses were traditionally involved. That's true in London, in the west 40s in NY. There aren't a lot of kindergartens next to the theaters. And this all makes sense, it generates income, it's a completely positive thing.

If you close something like that down, where are the prostitutes going to go? They're going to end up in some completely unnatural and strange place, maybe near a school. I'd be in favor of some kind of zoning if I thought it was informed by something rational and realistic. The problem is that zoning in this country, given the fearful religious climate, might be misused to try to put prostitutes in dangerous places where they can't be accessed. Zoning is sometimes used not to support a concept but to try to make it go away. And that's a sort of violence against the market.

Reason: Sex workers don't use the term sex worker.

Quan: The term is not really in use among actual sex workers on the street or in the bedroom. It's a clinical term; a respectable term; it's never been part of the lingo of the business. There is a schism of some sort—a difference between the language of the bedroom, the bar, the business; and the language of the activist circle. It's necessary for that language to be a little artificial.

Activism is something that you're inventing every day, whereas prostitution is very natural. Activism takes a leap of the imagination. It's a little bit abstract, the urge to create a more perfect world and talk about principles behind how you're treated. It's appropriate really that activist language isn't the same as the language in the street.

Reason: Your protagonist, Nancy Chan, is deeply skeptical of sex worker activism. Does that reflect your own views?

Quan: I've always been attracted to the hookers' movement, and I admire the advances of activism. But I have noticed that, though we're behind politically, prostitutes in America who are accustomed to working illegally are often more trustworthy people than prostitutes who have worked under a legalized system. The value system is an outlaw value system.