Saturday, Sep 6, 2008
Nancy Chan: Diary of a Manhattan Call Girl
BY TRACY QUAN
(07/22/99)
This is the most painful and personal story I could have read. Some six years ago I was madly in love with the most wonderful person in the world. Kathy was an angel sent from heaven, a perfect match for me. I was working diligently as a creative person in the music business, and she ... well, was chronicly unemployed, but had the sweetest drive and ambitions. Kathy spent the beginning part of our relationship living with me, but then she moved back in with her roommate Percilla -- an odd type, who had just recently moved to New York City from Australia, and was Asian as well. Percilla's well-paying job was as a nude model. (I, of course, assumed she was modeling for art students.) Percilla harassed Kathy weekly to work for the same agency; and when Kathy decided to pose nude as well, she suddenly came into money. She explained it as ill-gotten gains from working at the Palladium, where she said she received hefty commissions for setting up drug deals. Three months later, I came home to my roommate and best friend crying. They explained that Kathy had been working as an escort; a mutual friend had hired her by calling her agency's phone number. After days of fighting, excuses, lies, and stories of sexual abuse by her father, Kathy came clean and told me the truth. Percilla was a call girl, and Kathy was working at the same escort agency as my boss's future wife, and he was aware of the whole situation. Kathy charged $600 per half-hour, of which she paid $200 to the house. She only went on 10 or so dates where she actually performed sexual acts for them. Most of the time she required her clients to wear two condoms, but she also admitted to having once john who offered her $1,500 to have sex without protection.
To the best of my knowledge, Kathy is no longer in this business. She caught Herpes 2 years later, and is now a seriously disturbed individual, full of self-hate. I had a nervous breakdown, and was unable to continue my career in the music business. The moral: An escort's life in New York is not glamorous. It is a long downward spiral of self-abuse. AIDS is upon us, and the glamorization of the sex industry will only instigate the continued ignorance practiced by heterosexual men and women.
Name withheld at writer's request
The unbearable whiteness of being
BY KATHY DOBIE
(07/19/99)
I can't believe the way the author practically justifies why these people did what they did. How is it possible that you can attribute the violent actions of these young, white males to the premise that they are disillusioned with the life they were born into?
As a Hispanic female, born into what is considered a working-class household, I find that notion ridiculous. Minorities deal with being excluded, discriminated against and ostracized on a daily and continuous basis. We encounter and deal with the same feelings of so-called exclusion, yet we minorities, for the most part, do not go out and shoot people for no reason. As a society, we realize that the cause of violence is the perpetrator's willingness to commit a violent and illegal act. So please, spare us the sob story about how these well-to-do white boys had such a hard life. Tell them if they really think life's hard, they should come stay in Brooklyn for a few days and see how the other half lives. They wouldn't last through the night.
-- G. Velez
Change every reference to race in this article from white to black (or Latino or Native American or any other race) and you have an article so filled with racist diatribes that I doubt Salon would have bothered giving it the time of day. Responding with hate toward what Dobie calls "lonely, none-to-pretty white boys" only feeds the hate and isolation they may be feeling. This articles continues the cycle of violence I'm sure the author deplores. These men and boys don't need more of our scorn, they need more of our compassion. But telling them that they might as well commit suicide because "their families would survive fine without them; indeed, they would be happy to see them go" is not an answer. This article is a misguided, ill-informed and ignorant attempt at addressing this issue.
-- Daniel Crandall
Kathy Dobie was inaccurate in her glib reference to "white supremacists in Sacramento accused of murdering a gay couple." The accused killers live in Redding, 200-plus miles north of Sacramento, and the murdered gay couple also lived in the Redding area. The tie to the Sacramento area was that the FBI has determined that the same men accused of the gay hate crime killing also allegedly torched several Jewish temples in Sacramento recently, illustrating the link between gay bashing and other, more racially motivated hate crimes.
As a resident of Sacramento I concede that we too have skinheads, but none of them has killed anyone -- yet.
-- Stacy Selmants
Get Salon in your mailbox!