When your body is your portable workstation, you fear for its safety. You're alert to the many bugs, glitches and unwelcome problems that can endanger its health, put you out of work, make you less marketable. For many prostitutes, AIDS is just one of these hazards and it's not even the largest threat in our sex lives.

Safe sex means more than preventing infection with HIV. It means increasing protection of your cervix from HPV (human papilloma virus) and cancer by using a barrier like a condom or a diaphragm. It means protecting your throat against gonorrhea, guarding against pregnancy, protecting your clients from infections. Nobody wants to expose a customer to an STD.

When it comes to prostitution and illness, it's the transmittable ailments that get all the front-page coverage. But for many hookers, the biggest health problems are work related yet noncontagious. So, safe sex can also mean abstaining from vaginal intercourse -- with lovers or clients -- to reduce the mechanical irritations leading to nonspecific urethritis and recurring bladder infections.

"I had a UTI [urinary tract infection] that was actually caused by my boyfriend -- we were having too good a time -- and I couldn't work," one girl told me. "My doctor ordered me to stop fucking for two entire weeks. I didn't listen to him because I felt better -- the infection was gone. And then the problem came back a month later. I lost more time because I was too greedy to give my body a rest."

The second time around, she stuck to oral sex during the recovery period and was able to return to work.

In each case, then, "safe" takes on different meanings. Many readers of my fiction series have asked why fictional call girl Nancy Chan doesn't kiss. Is it, they ask, because kissing is too intimate? Not exactly. Refusing to kiss clients on the mouth is, for many professionals, a form of safe sex.

Many working girls say that kissing increases their chance of catching a cold, and most prostitutes I know worry more about catching a cold than they do about contracting an exotic and deadly virus. The STD problem they've got covered -- with condoms -- but other bugs are harder to dodge. Many prostitutes say that being exposed at close quarters to so many people is a challenge to the immune system. They fanatically dose themselves with vitamin C and coenzyme Q, keep boxes of homeopathic cold remedies on hand and sleep a lot.

Even though a cold won't kill you, it will put you out of work for a week. Prostitution is demanding: You are required to look and act alert, happy, healthy and pretty at all times. You cannot do this with a runny nose or a sore throat. In some jobs, you might be regarded as a hero for struggling into the office with the remains of a head cold. In this job, you just look desperate.

When your body is your business, you don't find it insulting to be told about the latest new STD test -- you actively want the latest and the best in prevention, detection and (if need be) treatment.

A friend of mine in the business says, "If you don't get an HIV test, if you don't sit down and think about every sex act you perform, you're unprofessional. If you don't use condoms, if you don't get your blood tested, you're an incredible slob. It's piggish not to care if you're a pro. But if you're not a pro, it's romantic; it's a sign of your innocence perhaps or your purity."

In 1992, one of my closest friends, an editor in her 20s, was still on the Pill. I knew what this meant: She wasn't using condoms! How relentlessly I nagged her, and how merrily she resisted my finger-wagging warnings. "Oh, I'm just being very fin de sihcle about it," she said, cheerfully. "Besides, I'm not as much of a feminist about this condom thing as you are, Tracy."

That really shut me up, since I regarded myself not as a feminist but as a post-feminist. God, was HIV turning me into one of those preachy militant friends -- the kind of female friend who advises you not to lose weight because she fears you'll develop an eating disorder (even though you really need to lose 15 pounds)?

I was somewhat pissed off with her. A prostitute who decides to take risks with her body would be viewed as a social menace in need of rehab, a dangerous vector of disease, perhaps even a felon in some parts of the United States. Only a shameless amateur could get away with this.

It was indeed a very fin de sihcle moment: My "virtuous" friend had never disapproved of my sexual conduct, was quite supportive of my right to do it, and I was the scandalized, self-righteous one. I wanted to be a good sexual citizen and she didn't care one way or the other. In reality, I was more preoccupied with sex-based "virtue" than she was. I consoled myself with the thought that I, the responsible sex professional, was taking proper care of my intimate equipment.

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