Figleaf's Real Adult Sex

Laura Augustin’s essays on migration and sex work, like this one on her blog Border Thinking on Migration, Culture, Economy and Sex resonate for me because of my own experiences with counter-culture homelessness back when I was a very young man. We weren’t exactly “undocumented” and the people I traveled with were almost entirely citizens, but our cultural status (draft-avoiding, long haired, “hippie” clothes before such clothes had retro chic) meant we had to be very wary of police, citizen vigilantes, and often of conventional employers.

Photo “Homeless, November 1974” uploaded by
Flickr user figleaf (hey, that’s me!) Distributed
under a Creative Commons license.Her descriptions of the experience of arriving somewhere new, with just a name or address, often no money, and having to take what work was available, often at the convenience of our local “hosts” or people who were willing to work with “you people” sounds very familiar to — including the paradox of unlicensed employers often being the least safe and most exploitative.

Same with one of her points, the vast majority preferred to do anything other than sex work (and, ironically, take a “straight” job… assuming in the depths of the Nixon-era oil embargoes such work could be found.) Most of us preferred to do something else, including day labor, informal agricultural labor, and even being drug “mules,” but others, ranging from very reluctant to almost enthusiastic, would agree to sex work. And, as Augustin says, in those circumstances you wouldn’t be able to say any of us were outright trafficked either for labor or sex. If any of us were by contemporary standards then at the time, at least, we probably wouldn’t have seen it that way.

But living as we did, as on or close to the street as we did, we were also aware that there were others almost like us, sometimes in factories or on farms but mostly in sex or maybe drug work, who didn’t have a choice. And often even they weren’t really that different from the rest of us, not mindless, not thralls, and sometimes very nearly as locally independent… and sometimes even with warmer clothes or more spending money… as we were. But they were the ones who had to “get back” to someone, “had arrangements” with a guy they couldn’t “cross” or mess with. It was all really vague but sometimes they’d be pretty stressed or, when they were on the move, even desperate not to be found.

Anyway, when I hear people say “all ‘X’ are trafficked” I think that’s wrong, and wrong the way Augustin documents in her work. Instead when I hear the word “trafficked” I think about that small subset who really didn’t have the same choices we did, who had more than law enforcement to worry about, and who sometimes suffered much more dire consequences.

It wasn’t all of us, as maybe an outsider might have concluded, and it wasn’t even one percent of us, but they were there. More complicated, sure, and way less common, but there. I know my experiences were only somewhat analogous to the undocumented/migrant communities you work in, but I can’t imagine it’s so different that there isn’t the same kind of small subset of people who need… maybe not so much “rescue” the way “anti-trafficking” people mean it but… still in their circumstances need a lot more than relaxed document requirements or more open borders or more local tolerance to regain their autonomy.

Anyway, I left a comment at her site asking if she had any insights into that particular kind of condition and if she knew what might best help them out of their circumstances.

I actually wasn’t sure she’d have an answer — she tends to study trans-border, migratory populations and, at least in my former subculture, the people most likely to be “trafficked” or “pimped” were, perhaps ironically, the least likely to be transients — often there when we arrived, almost never able to “head west” or “head back east” when invited to move on and check out rumors of new possibilities. And so to that extent I wonder if they really even show up in genuinely migrant communities.

Turns out she’s traveling (not surprising given the nature of her work) but she sent a link to an opinion piece that, by coincidence, showed up in todays Guardian Online. It’s not exactly an answer, but it clarifies nicely why, at least when they’re on the move, it’s so hard to identify, let alone rescue, actually trafficked people.

Heck, speaking for myself, even though I was sometimes sleeping under overpasses, in cars, or “crashing” at other people’s apartments, and even though my diet was so meager I developed nutritional deficiency diseases, it wasn’t until the 1980s that I realized I’d been homeless. And it wasn’t till very recently that I realized the people we thought of at the time as “in some kind of hot water” probably qualified as trafficked or pimped. So I’m guessing the same is true for a lot of people still in those situations. And not because they’re not there but because there’s there’s so much overlap between the aspirations and difficulties of migration/transience, smuggling, and trafficking that sometimes it’s hard to tell even when you’re in it, let alone from the outside.