The Spirit Club
Misty and me
In the Black Rose
Central Towers
Transsexual student
Misty was a TS beauty who tended bar at the Spirit, and who befriended me before I moved to the TL. She took me along to her doctor who cheerfully injected a load of estrogens into my rump and wrote me a 'script for girlpills. My journey had finally begun! Misty took on an older sister role, passed along makeup secrets, encouraged me, and was, in general, my new best friend. I was envious of her because she had almost no beard, unlike me. I started the painful process of electrolysis, made barely tolerable with a joint, a halfpint, and a few Percodans. It was slow and I sometimes despaired it would take forever.
Although I now had the freedom to dress as I wanted, it took time to work up the nerve to go out powdered and painted, partly because I knew I did not look that good yet. At first I would rove only at night when the light was kinder and I felt more secure. My almost exclusive destination was the Spirit Club where my friends were and where the pace was more relaxed. The other main tranny hangout was the Black Rose, primarily a working girl's bar, where the prettiest girls did business. In the beginning I did not have the self confidence to venture in there very often. I would never be as pretty as them!
Even further discouraging was the reaction of the world around me. Total strangers mocked and cursed me on the street, family became distant and friends became former. The greatest blow was the reception of my buddies in Phoenix. After hearing a tape of my singing they'd begged me to come back and be their frontman, but when I confessed my situation they wrote me off as some kind of sick pervert. The only person from my past who offered me support and encouragement was a gay man, Damien, with whom I'd made acquaintance through my mom. He told me about his crossdressing past and, to my great intrigue, the men who used to pay for sex when he was dressed as a she.
To make a long story very short, Damien introduced me to a womanfriend who got me started in prostitution. My entry into sexwork made perfect sense to me at the time. I was: (1) a starving student who could not afford rent, food, clothes and hormones and electrolysis; (2) rebelling against the straight world that ostracized me; (3) pioneering my own sexual orientation and being paid to do it. Besides, most of my TL sisters were doing it. There were no other role models, no Dr. Lynn Conways back then. Despite my hetero past it was no big deal having sex with guys, not as long as I had a buzz on. (Besides, now that I was a woman, I was still being hetero.) The extra income got me into the nicest building in the TL, Central Towers. I felt like a highclass lady living there. And, best of all, it was only three short blocks to the Spirit and the Black Rose.
However, prostitution can be a feast-or-famine business, so I got a part time job as at a housecleaning agency to make up the difference. My life had settled into a convoluted rhythm: I cleaned houses and had electrolysis during the day, and when I wasn't in one of the two evening classes needed to finish off my AA degree in Computer Science, I was trolling the bars for tricks. By late in the semester I had taking to going out en femme day and night, and I was not well received on campus. Even some of the teachers openly smirked at me. And I continued to receive verbal abuse on the street. My self esteem was reeling, but I refused to throw in the towel. My grades suffered, but somehow I held on to finish the semester and became eligible to graduate with honors.
Honors? So what? There was no question of transferring to a university. I was ready, I needed, to start living as a woman full time. I would go crazy if I didn't. And the ridicule at junior college did not bode well for my continuing studies. I had no money anyway; I needed to work. Yet not even the housecleaning company I'd toiled for months, after all the hard work and satisfied customers, not even that company in "liberal" San Francisco would permit me to work as a woman. No way would I go back to being a guy, even part time.
And thus I made a conscious decision to pursue the World's Oldest Profession.