After meeting Dawn, Kate Iselin realised there was a lot she didn't know about street-based sex work. Dawn is 54 and she's a sex worker. At the age of 19, Dawn caught her first glimpse of sex work when she moved in with a friend who was working in a brothel doing sex work. Despite knowing "nothing about the industry", she began to pick up on the ins and outs of the business through her friend, and later took a job as a cleaner in a brothel.
And identifying as a gay woman, I felt like it sort of went against what I stood for," she tells me. Those who had done it mentioned it only in passing and rarely elaborated on it: even in the relatively open-minded world of sex work, street-based work still felt like a taboo topic. So I went to meet with Dawn to ask her about what it was like to do street-based sex work. Is it scary? Is it hard? Is it as fraught with danger as we might imagine?
For example, Dawn tells me, she rarely has sex in a car. The majority of her regular clients she would see at her house or theirs, using her place on the street as a meeting point, rather than a working space, as much as possible. Her preferred working hours aren't late at night but early in the morning, around sunrise, when her clients are on their way home from the night shift, or on their way to the gym, or seeking a bit of fun before their working day begins.
She talks about the clients she's met, and the few seconds she might have to size up an interested man in a car before she takes the job or declines it. She looks for nicer, newer cars as an indication of the client's ability to pay for the booking and says she prefers older men to younger ones β the younger ones, we both agree, can be too energetic and physically demanding. Like the people who drive past Dawn and other workers just to gawk at them, or to pelt them with eggs that they throw from their car windows.
She recalls her first time working, as a teenager, how it felt both exciting and scary to step out on to the street for the first time. And then, she tells me: "The first car I got in to was a police car. I don't think I went back for a long time after that.
