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"All my life all I ever wanted to be was shiny," said Brenda Myers-Powell, a 49-year-old African-American who remembers being a child looking out her grandmother's window at the hookers on the street below and saying, "I'll probably do that."
For Brenda, raised by an alcoholic grandmother and molested as a child by a beloved uncle, prostitution began the Easter weekend when she was 16, with two babies and no money in the house.
For Heidi Carlson, 45, the turn to prostitution was unexpected, almost accidental. From a middle-class Scandinavian family in Minnesota, Heidi described herself as "the perfect child," "a very, very good girl." She was a sophomore in college getting straight As at the College of St. Thomas when an argument with her mother on her 20th birthday led her to decide to lose her virginity to the first man who came along. That night in a hotel room she changed her mind, but the man who was with her didn't. With Heidi feeling "ruined," a period of intense sexual activity followed, including a meeting with the pimp who became her husband and the father of her two sons. Sonny was a jealous, demanding lover who forced Heidi to turn tricks and later interrogated her about what she felt about the men he demanded she have sex with. All the while, Sonny kept other women. At one point, there were eight women he was prostituting and had living in the same house.
Myers-Powell and Carlson were among four former prostitutes who described their experiences in riveting, often poignant detail to a circle of women who had helped fund their quitting prostitution. The four women told of being raped, beaten and their physical peril ignored by the authorities--even when in one woman's case she was pursued by a serial killer.
The stories were compelling. That the four women who were telling them seemed vibrant, courageous and likeable only added to their stories impact. Together, their accounts created a mosaic of the often-deadly temptations, hardships and risks that befall women who turn to prostitution.
Nicole, at 35 the youngest of the four women, described the lure of what, when she started, seemed easy money. She was 17 and living out of the back of her car after being kicked out of her parent's home, she said. Her first night as a prostitute she made $112. To a teenager who'd been stealing food to eat, that seemed pretty good, she said. "I was hooked," she said. Soon she was working in massage parlors earning $600 and $700 a night.
Olivia Howard, now the assistant director of recovery support services at the Haymarket Center in Chicago, spoke of 19 years of drug and alcohol addiction while pros tituting in Chicago. "I was so afraid. I would stay so high so I wouldn't have to think about what was going on," she said.
Olivia said she'd reached a point where she was praying for death when she stumbled across Genesis House, a Chicago residential recovery program for prostitutes started by Edwina Gateley.
Genesis House was clean and warm and she wanted to stay.
She told the circle of a dozen women listening to her that the first vacation she ever had was going on a retreat that they sponsored while she was at Genesis House. At the retreat, Olivia had her feet massaged and recalls thinking, "Look at me. I'm a whore in a monastery getting my feet massaged."
"That weekend changed my life," Olivia said, wiping away tears. "The nurturing and the love that was given me unconditionally helped break the bondage of both the heroin and the prostitution."
The women listening, former contributors to Genesis House, seemed almost as affected as she was. A box of Kleenex went round the circle, and one woman after another dabbed at her eyes. "I feel like you're a miracle," marveled one.
In one fashion or another, that statement was repeated throughout the weekend, as "good girls" and "bad girls" reached out to each other to explore their common identity as sisters and pierce the silence covering the sexual exploitation of women. Organized by the Sophia Circle, the weekend retreat this past fall in Warrenville, Ill., combined True Confessions, soap opera and celebration. It began with an evening performance by Gateley and Myers-Powell singing Edith Piaffs "Je ne regrette rien,' ("I regret nothing") to celebrate the totality of each woman's life journey.
The next day, in between the four women's personal stories, Carolyn Vogt Groves, a former director of pastoral care at Genesis House and codirector with Gateley of the Sophia Circle, invited all of the women gathered to get in touch with their inner prostitute. "If you're a woman in this country, you've been prostituted. You've sold your soul for something--whether that be a career or somebody's expectations."
Groves spoke of the joy working with prostituted women had brought her, describing it as a "salvation event" in her life. "I feel all of the women I've met have made my life authentic and real," Groves said.
Gateley, whose connection with Genesis House ended eight years ago, (see related story) echoed her words.
"These women are the most honest I've ever met. They have said yes to peeling away all the masks," Gateley said.
"They have to do a U-turn that requires such courage. All the props of drugs and alcohol, their neighborhood, their social circle, the way they have dressed, the way they have made themselves up, their turf, everything they have known. They leave behind 20 years on average," Gateley said.
Sophia Circle hosts annual retreats for women recovering from prostitution but had never before brought together donors to the program and its beneficiaries.
Judging from the responses, both seemed to have gained from the experience. "It's been inspiring," said Barbara Raymond, who lives and works in California.
"I didn't see you, but you were always out there. I'm so grateful that you're out there. I love you and I thank you," Myers-Powell told the women who had contributed to her rehabilitation.
The four women brought home to their listeners the personal dimensions of a problem that is both global and local and more often than not ignored. Prostitution is illegal in this country but often invisible to people until it's on their doorstep. The four women's autobiographies constituted powerful testimony to the damage prostitution does to women both physically and psychologically. An HIV prevention counselor who does outreach to prostitutes, Myers-Powell noted that in her 23 years as a prostitute she'd been raped, beaten, kidnapped, shot and knifed. Even when she was living the high life, frequenting Studio 54 in Manhattan and dating entertainers, she was beaten up, she said. "Just because people were in high positions, they still did the same things," she observed.
Nicole spoke of the sense of degradation she felt when trading sex for money. "I didn't like to be hugged I felt so dirty," she said.
"I used to call myself Walking Dead Woman. I was a zombie inside," Carlson said.
The stories were powerful, the emotional atmosphere thick enough to cut with a knife, intense and by turn anguished and exultant. "I'm no longer a survivor. I'm a liver!" declared Myers-Powell, whose spirited, sassy performance dramatized not only her own life story but also the remarkable ability of human beings to surmount trauma and tragedy and fred wholeness.
Conversation during the weekend retreat ranged beyond the particulars of prostitution to the general objectification of women in society. Howard said that her experiences had inevitably heightened her consciousness of where women stand in society and said American mothers should pay more attention to what they tell their daughters, whom they often teach to be secondary to men.
The women listening said they identified with what the four former prostitutes related, even if their own life experiences had been far different. They traded stories of events that had led them to sacrifice their integrity for gain or approval and seemed fascinated, buoyed and visibly moved by hearing from women who had lived through physical mistreatment, humiliation and disgrace and emerged strong, productive individuals who were helping other women leave a perilous way of life.
"I was scared of the women who were prostitutes just because they seemed so tough. Now, though, I think I'd stand up for them if I saw something happening to them," said Karen Bergmann of Whippany, N.J.
"Sisterhood is powerful" was the leitmotif of the weekend. For the time the retreat lasted, it really seemed as if it was.
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Bersh Pinhill
7023, Sunset Boulevard,
Los Angeles
