So You've Found Out Your Adult Child is a Sex Worker

A couple of years ago, I wrote a piece for Tryst’s Blog where I interviewed my adult child about what it was like to grow up with a sex-working mom. As someone very open about being a sex-working mother — including to my children — this wasn’t a difficult article to write. My kids were raised by a mom who has worked in the industry for as long as they can remember. They have witnessed the way that the sex work community has been there for our family. They recognize that our friends have various names and they code-switch easily. Most importantly, sex work has been demystified for them. They know sex work is a job, and they know sex workers are just people trying to make a living like everyone else. Talking to my kids about my work has been relatively easy. They have been raised in a world where sex work is normalized.

My parents, on the other hand, grew up in a world where sex work stigma has colored their perception of who sex workers are and what it is we do. Talking to them about my work, as it turns out, has been one of the hardest things that I’ve ever done. This is not hyperbole. The rift that my work caused in my relationship with my mom, who I was closest to, has been so devastating that I have not (until now) been able to talk about it publicly. I also haven’t been able to talk to her about it. Indeed, there was a time when we couldn’t speak to each other at all.

But as the saying goes, time heals all wounds. Or at least that’s what I hoped when I reached out to her recently to ask if she was ready to talk to me about her feelings about my work. To my surprise (perhaps, to my joy), she welcomed the opportunity. I have captured the conversation in the interview below.

I am grateful that I have a space to publish this heartfelt and healing conversation. I hope that it will reach other parents and their sex-working children who are trying to understand how to relate to each other, and perhaps how to heal from any pain that their relationships have undergone, in relation to sex work.

NB: The interview has been edited for clarity and length.

Good morning, Mom! I’m happy that you were willing to talk to me about my work and how it has impacted our relationship.

I'm really glad that there's an opportunity like this because when I first found out about your work, I searched everywhere on Google and couldn’t find any useful resources. Everything that I found was written by parents who were uniformly supportive and that just wasn’t helpful, Jess! I wanted to see other parents who were blown out by the news like I was, and I wanted to see how they got through it.

You say you were blown out, let's talk about that. What does it mean when you say that and how did you feel when you found out that I was doing sex work? To be honest, I was surprised that you were “blown out” because I thought you already knew.

I knew that you and your partner PJ did a lot of writing, organizing, and podcasting about sex work, but it didn’t occur to me that you two were sex workers yourselves. Finding that out blew me away. Part of that disconnect is probably that I’m a social worker so I have been advocating for a long time for communities that I am not a part of. I remember, years ago, PJ saying that you two couldn’t do the sort of work you do without being sex workers yourself, that you wouldn’t have any credibility. Today, I agree. But seven years ago, I remember thinking, “That's bullshit. I've advocated for so many people that aren’t like me and been a part of so many worlds that are not my own.” We were relating to things from completely different angles.

I hadn’t thought of things from that perspective before. It seemed to me that our different interpretations of feminism also contributed to our rift. Would you agree?

Absolutely. My view of pornography and the sex industry was very much shaped by second-wave feminism. I didn’t have a problem with it morally, or at least that wasn’t my main concern. The major thing for me was that second-wave feminism came about in my prime. I was 18, 19, and 20 years old when Betty Friedan and Gloria Steinem came into prominence; these women were incredibly influential to me. All these changes were coming about culturally with feminists and civil rights leaders fighting very hard against oppression.

At that time, in our minds, porn and the sex industry were something women did when they had no other opportunities. We worked so hard to say, “No, we're getting into the mainstream and we’re playing with you big, white boys; we don't have to suck dicks for a living.” We thought about sex work through the lens of submission, as in, the only way women could make money was on their knees. Fighting against that wasn’t about morality, it was about power.

It’s interesting to hear you talk about this from the perspective of power and oppression because I think about it in the opposite way. I have much more autonomy and freedom as a sex worker than I would if I were chained to a traditional job. Jobs feel more oppressive to me.

Absolutely. Valid. Define oppression. Define that. And you can't overlook the money, right? I'm sure it's like any other business and takes time, but once you build it up, you just can't make that kind of money elsewhere. I mean, I’m sure there are lawyers out there that make $400, $500, $1000 an hour, but they're the crème de la crème. Most of us cannot gain access to that kind of income.

Speaking of oppression, many sex workers do this work precisely to escape economic oppression and interpersonal violence and abuse. Over the last seven years, I’ve interviewed so many sex workers who’ve said that sex work got them out of their abusive relationships and granted them financial independence when nothing else did.

I see that. I just listened to your podcast interview with trans porn star Trip Richards and he brought up a profound point that you've made many times — he talked about the flexibility of getting injured but still being able to keep the lights on. When your sister got in her car accident recently both of us flew to help her, and it was really hard on me. Much harder on me than it was on you. I’m still financially recovering from that. Trip asked, “Wouldn’t it be nice to be able to take time off when you need to and still keep the lights on?” And I thought, “God, isn’t that true?” Most of us with traditional jobs can’t.

You said you were influenced by 2nd wave feminism. You’re also the mother of daughters. There are so many cultural messages that suggest that the worst thing that can happen to your daughters is that they can become sex workers. I’m thinking now of Chris Rock’s famous skit about the importance of keeping his daughter “off the pole,” among others. Did messages like this — about the horrors of having a daughter who works in the industry — impact your feelings?

I think we need to go back to our relationship before I found out. You and I talked a lot about your work. We talked about what you were studying, and I was always very invested and very interested in what you were doing. When you became a sex worker, there was grief because that was gone. That was gone. How would you and I talk about your work now? How would we talk about your life? Sex work was so foreign to me. I thought, “How would we ever be the same?”

That's been the hardest thing for me, too. We were always very close, and I felt cut off from being able to have a relationship with you. For the most part, I like what I’m doing, but it is shrouded in this stigma that makes it very difficult to talk about. It cuts me off from many people (including you) who don’t understand it or want to pretend that it doesn’t exist.

Except with your people, right? Other sex workers. But yes, the connection we had was seriously severed because I no longer knew how to relate to you. I couldn’t. I take responsibility for that.

That's something that sex workers talk a lot about. It opens our world in a lot of ways. There's more money, more freedom, a lot of interesting people, etc. But it narrows it in other ways. There are consequences to everything and the biggest consequence for me has been this: it makes it hard to be a full person in the world. That's a high price.

A very high price. Yeah, I think it would be really hard to compartmentalize yourself like that.

You and I had never had a superficial relationship. It became superficial because I needed that time; I had to sort out my feelings about sex work. I had to work on myself because I grieved our relationship so much, and I needed to do that on my own. Until I could come to you — as I can now — with genuine emotions that I could express without evoking pain or humiliation, I couldn’t engage with you how I used to.

The whole time we didn’t speak, I knew we had a very strong bond that wasn’t going away. I wasn't afraid of losing you completely, but I did need time. Gradually, I got to a place of letting go, I could feel it as it happened. I was detaching from the emotions that didn't serve me.

I also realized that I don't know what it's like to be you, I don't know what it is to be a sex worker. All I knew were my fears and my prejudices, and I had to get over those.

The pandemic gave me time, a lot of time, to think. I just kind of felt a loosening, a loosening of the grip on my heart. I remember one time I called you because I felt this loosening and I said, “You know what, I don’t think this is a very big deal.” And you responded, “No Mom, it really isn’t.” Neither of us approached it again, but that conversation felt like a milestone.

I don’t remember that, but I do remember you sending me a letter and that felt like a milestone to me. I think you were trying to talk to me about the way that sex work is criminalized, and you said that your dad — who ended up being a career fighter pilot — slung Moonshine with his brothers during prohibition to make ends meet. You said that you aren’t sure what he would have thought about sex work, but you think that he would have been proud of my willingness to follow my own path and create something for myself.

I remember writing those words because they were so true. My dad was an interesting guy. You would think he'd be patriotic [having a career in the Navy], but he had a pretty severe disdain for the government and the rules. I knew that he would be proud of you, especially of your ability to make something out of nothing. You've never asked me for a dime, you've always taken care of yourself.

As weird as it sounds, when I first found out about your work I thought, “Oh God, Dad, you'd be so disappointed in her now. You wouldn't want that for her.” He was always so proud of your academic achievements — he was just so proud of you. But then when I was writing that letter, it came to me: How do I know what he would have felt? Who knows what happened back in his day? Who knows who he knew or what he did?

He always did what he had to do to survive and to make more money, right? And that's what I thought as I wrote that letter. I had to connect you two in my mind to make sense of your decisions because you two are some of the most important people in life.

I think it's important to be aware of how these influences carry on after death, they are still so much a part of our lives.

Let me get back to some of our relationship. You said that you needed time to process your feelings about my work. What did that time give you? Did it change your feelings?

The biggest thing for me was recognizing the value of our relationship. Also, I realized that I just want to love you. I just want to love you. I wanted you back in my life.

My Buddhist leanings and readings also freed me from having to judge you. I don't have to judge you; I can just love you. Coming to that felt like having a ball and chain lift off me. I don't know why I felt that I had to hang onto judgment or make it clear that I don’t condone what you do. I finally realized that I don't have to have an opinion one way or the other, I really don't. When I reached that, I was ready to reconnect.

As I’ve gotten older, I’ve thought a lot about my life ending. I'm not worried about dying tomorrow, but what I’m saying is that it’s made me reflect on what the important things are.

And, I just want to love you, and I want you to love me. I don't want to be your judge. I don't have the authority. I don't know anything, Jess! So, I think that was the pivotal thing for me and I needed time to work through that myself. There was no other way that somebody could have talked me into it or given me that. It was a very internal journey.

It sounds to me like what you’re saying is that for a long time, you felt like you had to take a stance about my life choices and work and that when you let go of this, you were freed up to have a relationship with me as I am?

That’s the thing! I finally asked myself, “Is that important that I take a stance, or do I just enter into a relationship with somebody who has made different choices than I have? Somebody who's important to me.”

At the end of the day, it just seemed so stupid.

I started to ask myself, “What do I want at the end of my journey? Do I want to be sitting on a deathbed trying to clean up a mess, apologizing to you as I transition into the next life?” I didn't want that.

I think that the point that you're bringing up is really important. We have this idea, as parents, that we need to take a stand, have an opinion, or impart our values to our kids. But we could also just approach our kids as people who are going to make whatever decisions they're going to make. But that's very hard, it takes a lot to let go because our feelings about our kids are often tied up in how we think their decisions reflect on us.

Yeah. They're an extension of our ego, and that's where we have to let go.

Have your opinions about the sex industry and sex work changed over time, or have you just decided that it’s not your place to judge?

I think my opinions have changed, my thoughts and feelings about it have changed. Part of that came from a letting go. I told myself, “Don’t sweat what people are doing.”

With every experience I have, I gain a broader perspective. Every time one of you girls hurls me into a new world that I know nothing about — and you’ve got three sisters, and you are all really good at doing that — it broadens my perspective and my worldview and I appreciate that. When I finally could let my heart go around sex work and all my fears and my prejudices against it, it just opened up a whole new perspective.

I don't look at sex workers the same. They're part of society; let them live. To me, being against sex work is like being against gay marriage. I thought, “What does gay marriage have to do with me? Nothing. It affects me in no way whatsoever. Same with sex work.” There's a freedom in that. So, what I'm saying is that by allowing you to be set free, I've set myself free, Jessie. I’ve set myself free.

Do you think there would have been an easier way for us to get through this process? It was very painful for both of us.

I regret many things, but I think that this chasm was important. I know it was for me because it allowed me a lot of time to grow.

Relationships, if they are healthy, must change. Roles have to change; interactions have to change. That is a really hard thing for humans to do. So, I don't regret the years that we spent apart. I didn't like them, but I don't regret them because I knew that we were going through a pivotal change, and it was necessary. For us to have an authentic relationship and to be the authentic people that you and I need to be for ourselves and each other, we both had to grow and mature. Sometimes growth only takes place after a blowout.

I feel like we're just now coming to a place of real change. In your mind, what does that look like for you? What kind of relationship do you want to have?

I want to have the one that we had before. I want you to call me when you're traveling and annoyed as shit by something.

In seriousness, my ideal relationship is one where we would just meet each other where we are, and with honesty. Your life doesn't scare me anymore. I trust you to manage your life and to take care of yourself. I do.

From a spiritual angle, I pray that you remain safe. I'm not so much worried about physical safety, I’m talking about emotional safety. Every time we let somebody into our life, we're accepting their energy. And you're letting people inside your body. That's a whole lot of energy exchange. You have to be discerning. That being said, I just pray for you to be able to do that.

I feel what you’re talking about is more broadly applicable to parents of adult children and not just adult sex-working children.

You know, we have this deep sense of responsibility to always be there as a parent for our kids. But when your kids become adults, that responsibility changes. My journey was to allow that to change because that's the only healthy way to continue. And I want a healthy relationship with you for the rest of my life. An authentic, real relationship.

It would have been nice if I had found something like this [interview] when I needed it. It still probably would have taken the same amount of time for me to get to the place we are now because things don't happen until you're ready. But it would have been nice to have heard somebody saying, “Yes, it was a huge problem.” And then it would have also been nice to hear someone say, “And we got through it.”

What do you want other parents who may be struggling to know?

I would suggest that they look inward and examine what is bothering them. In my experience, when I was really ready to let go of the things that bothered me, I was able to recognize that I don’t have to be a judge or a cop — that I don’t have to do anything at all. I could just love you. That may sound very trite, but there is a lot behind that statement.

That doesn’t sound trite to me, sometimes the most profound things are the simplest. Simple, but hard.

Yes, that’s it. But once you get there, it's a beautiful thing.

You can listen to the conversation with my mom on Episode 4 of my podcast When We’re Not Hustling: Sex Workers Talking About Everything But.

Are you a sex worker with a story, opinion, news, or tips to share? We'd love to hear from you!

We started the tryst.link sex worker blog to help amplify those who aren't handed the mic and bring attention to the issues ya'll care about the most. Got a tale to tell? 👇☂️✨