Christa Faust:
When I realized that I was probably never gonna get the chance to moderate my sex worker protagonist panel at any of the big crime writer conventions we all attend each year, I decided to take matters into my own hands. One of the writers I would have wanted to participate in that theoretical discussion is the wryly observant, fearlessly outspoken and wildly prolific Greg Herren. Seriously, I think he wrote three novels in the time it took me to type this intro, but he still took the time to share his thoughts on this topic.
Greg Herren:
I grew up in a very conservative family. Sex and sexuality were dirty dark secrets to never be discussed. Being a gay child born into this kind of environment, I had some serious hang-ups and issues around sex and my sexuality that took years to unpack and unlearn and finally let go of as I came into my own as a gay adult male in a homophobic, sex-stigmatizing society.
As I often like to remind people, of course the American society has issues about sex and sexuality. The country was originally colonized by Puritans, and that puritanical mentality carried over to sex and sex work.
This stigmatization, this refusal of Americans to feel free to talk openly about sex and sexuality, has led to some repression — women, queer people, people of color, and most especially of sex workers, who are often demonized and rarely appear in crime fiction as anything more dimensional than a stereotype, and certainly never as a fully developed, complex character. Sex workers, or those who did the work in their past, are always stigmatized; how many times has a soap opera heroine had her life ruined when her past as a sex worker was exposed? And they were never really given any back story about the sex work — it was always depicted as degrading, humiliating, something they should be ashamed of, and the good decent people of the town should shun her for her horrific past.
And how many times have we seen the proverbial hooker with a heart of gold? While it could be said these are more positive portrayals of sex workers than we usually see, it’s still a stereotype — she’s clearly a good girl gone bad for some reason.
