Even in those early years I knew the work was not how anti-sex-work feminists described it. I knew it was as good and as terrible as other, lower-wage work I’d done. I knew, too, how quickly people stopped listening when they began to feel pity. So I pretended. I pretended all of it was a kind of adventure. That what I gained from it was more than rent. I dismissed how much that rent meant to me. I pretended that I was not so poor, that I had not grown up poor. That I had not cried out of fear of not knowing where the money would come from next. That I did not steal food from every restaurant I ever worked in. That I never ate the food people left on their plates. That I did not watch movies about “college kids” with a gripping, painful yearning in every part of my body. That I did not come home from every sex-work job giddy at the possibility of ordering more takeout Chinese food than I could eat, giddy at having enough money to commit the thrill of waste.

But I also knew that the idea that I was “empowered” by trading sex was a lie. In the early 2000s, as some sex workers were organizing and holding public events in San Francisco, calling on queers and whores to unlearn our shame—intimating that it was our responsibility to the movements to unlearn our shame—I struggled with mine. There were days when men paid me less than they’d promised and I took it and said nothing. There were days when men wheedled me into something extra that I’d have charged more for if I’d been better at negotiating. There were days when men intentionally crossed every boundary I’d tried to set, and I felt ashamed that I had not stopped them. I felt shame when I didn’t want to go to a job I’d booked, when, instead of going to work, I sat down on the floor of my apartment and watched the phone ring. I admired the women I saw speaking in public, admired what looked to me like their power. I tried to mimic them, and there were moments when I thought I could. But more often, the ideal of the unashamed, empowered whore—the sex worker of the liberal imagination—was discouragingly unreachable to me.