Sex Work Economy Breaks Down

Text by Joey Plaster. Copyright (©) by C. Joey Plaster, 2009. All rights reserved.

The economic basis for the Polk Street “family” of bartenders, street youth, and bar patrons began to disintegrate towards the end of the of the 1980s, and had all but ended by the mid-1990s.

The fear and confusion surrounding AIDS led both to a decrease in the number of clients and a growing dependence on methamphetamine, which sapped the community of its health and economic strength. This led to an increasingly desperate street population that began competing for less and less money, eroding the cooperation and camaraderie that was a hallmark of the 1970s and leading to a more exploitative relationship between street sex workers and clients.

Polk Street youth. Courtesy of River Sims.

“[AIDS] makes me more scared and I don’t make as much money,” said a 26-year-old white transvestite street sex worker in 1987, who worked in the transgendered sex work zone in the southern section of Polk Street, up O’Farrell and down to Larkin Street. “There used to be a time when I could make $3000 a week. And you’re lucky if you can get half now. See all you’re going to get now is these cheap street trash dates. These rich guys that came from upper [?], where they’re rich they won’t spend money anymore because they’re scared.”

“I can say about a good 60% of clients I had have do not, they don’t come around,” said one 30-year-old transsexual street worker interviewed in 1988. “It’s very skiddish now so you date more than you have to cause the money is not there now cause they’re scared of AIDS and I don’t blame them.”

“The feeling back then was that there was no cure for this disease,” James Harris said. “And a lot of people felt that, well, if this is what it is, then I’m gonna go out in a blaze of glory, and I’m going to just party and have a good time. And most of those people did do that. They did exactly that….So some people just woke up one day and had lesions on them and stuff like this, and so it was a scary time, as we started watching these younger people start to disappear.”

At a time when people were terrified and confused, speed was especially attractive to gay men and sex workers, producing feelings of euphoria, a sense of invulnerability, focus, and a desire for sex. While had been used for decades, with the onset of AIDS it became epidemic. The more robust the methamphetamine economy became, the more the community spiraled out of control.

Ethnographer Toby Marotta, who worked on several federally funded research projects in the Polk Gulch, said that by the mid-1980s “the whole southern end of Polk Gulch was being transformed because of methamphetamine use.” While the drug “produced long mind-escapes” for people who used it, Marotta said, it “completely undercut the personal relationships and social obligations essential to functioning community.”

“It used to be that people up and down the street would have money all the time [in the early 1980s],” said one street hustler interviewed in 1989. “But now you go out there and nobody has money.” He attributed this to AIDS, “the vindictiveness of the addicts,” and money spent on speed, which ate up resources and forced sex workers to work harder and for less money.

“The money was a lot less at that time,” Rob Bennet recalled, “‘cuz at the early ‘80s where it was going sixty dollars was good money for a trick, they were only offering twenty dollars at this point….You had the meth coming from the Johns, and the crack coming up from the Tenderloin, and alotta the boys were starting to do the crack too.” The street’s upscale drug economy left for the Castro and South of Market areas, leaving “the cheaper stuff” on Polk Street, he said.

“For those of us that depended on the street to survive, the money was harder and harder and harder to make,” Kevin “Kiko” Lobo said. “And that's what [began] the downward spiral. Some very pretty boys have become very ugly people because of the ... loss of the great community.”

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