A Walk on the Wild Side: Finding Street Workers in Manhattan [Gotham After Dark]
Posted at 7:25 PM Aug 19, 2008
On Tuesdays, Charlie Vazquez writes Gotham After Dark, a peek into what goes on in Manhattan's queer nightlife, with club and event reports and profiles of fascinating New Yorkers.
Manhattan has been the stage for bold prostitution since its earliest days—the word ‘hooker’ even originated here in Gotham, making reference to the nightshift sisters who once lurked in a long-gone, sleazy East Side neighborhood known as Corlear’s Hook. I’m a native New Yorker and clearly remember when a prostitute in a leopard-skin panties-and-bra-combo stopped me on a freezing winter night in the mid-1980s, on Park Avenue South. She asked me what I was up to. I smiled and kept walking—I was fourteen.
Fast-forward to the War on Sleaze in 1990s Manhattan— 42nd St is razed and rebuilt and the war on street workers is in full swing, with prostitution-related arrests skyrocketing (there were 6,535 in 1999 alone). Sex services shift to cyberspace and a new sex industry rolls forward. Yet prostitution is a complex phenomenon influenced by socioeconomics and race—among other things. This was not the end of the imperiled Gotham street worker. Plagued with drug addiction, unstable housing and harassed violently and sexually by both johns and the police, these gals continue to patrol, although less conspicuously (or not) than imagined. Ninth Avenue between 34th and 42nd Streets was an alleged “hot” spot—by the Port Authority and Lincoln Tunnel entrance, where sleazy Manhattan still breathes.
Dusk. Within an hour of wandering around, I snapped these two ladies working very different styles—and yes, I know the difference between a scantily-dressed woman and a prostitute, I grew up in the Bronx. The lady on the left was working the onramp to the Lincoln Tunnel and was fashionably dressed, chain-smoking and talking on her cell phone. She ignored a couple of morons that honked their horns at her and was waiting for the real thing—brave. The gal on the right was working a corner further up 9th Avenue and used her cell phone as a mask as well, but turned around every minute or so to wade through the traffic jam on 9th Avenue. A minute later, she was on the sidewalk again (I watched her do this four times). Constantly dodging police harassment, the street workers of Gotham just try to blend in a little more than they used to.
Charlie Vazquez is a Brooklyn-based writer, part-time fetish clown and the assistant to Diamanda Galás--but really, he's nice.
We discussed his new “Fratyr” (fratboy/satyr pictued above) and the recurring power of mythological creatures in erotic art and literature throughout the ages. Clarke’s own arsenal includes the aforementioned satyr and a multi-armed dancing Indian Shiva, in a previous work. I was delighted to learn that he, like me, finds clowns sexy and not scary. We went on to discuss the violence and sadism inherent in “fairy” tales such as on Pleasure Island in Pinocchio. 
On Tuesdays, Charlie Vazquez writes Gotham After Dark, a peek into what goes on in Manhattan's queer nightlife, with club and event reports and profiles of fascinating New Yorkers.
