Published in LiP Magazine
[http://www.lipmagazine.org]

EMAIL THIS ARTICLE TO A FRIEND

'Pimps and Hos' -- Selling an Illusion, Stealing a Dream

by Kari Lydersen
11.05.04

IF ONE OF "HIS LADIES" SHOWED UP wearing an outfit he didn't buy for her, Homer King would know she was stealing. That's because she wasn't supposed to have any money of her own. "Just enough to make a phone call for me to pick her up," he said. He paid for everything else she needed -- food, housing, lingerie and "costumes," minks, jewelry, even a car if she was one of his favorites.

To earn this kind of treatment, she would work every night turning tricks on the street, and give all her money to him.

"I'd say ladies stack up, and they'd give me the money, or if they came home when I was out gambling or something they'd leave the money on their dresser and I'd go through and clean out the traps," he said. "Things would be said like, 'Bitch, you don't need to wake up with no money. What do you need money for? You're crazy anyway.'"

King was a pimp.

He's not anymore. Now, at age 46 and still retaining his tailor and his dress style from his pimp days, he spends his time talking to people about "the lifestyle" and doing what he can to atone for his years of "being a predator, seeing women as prey."
For about a quarter century, from age 17 until about 42, King made his money off women. He controlled them to the extent that if they held onto any of the money they were paid for sexual services, or the money they stole from their tricks for that matter, they were "stealing" from him, taking what he was rightfully owed as their "manager" and "protector."

King was introduced to pimping by a woman, an older woman who he said molested him as a teenager growing up on the west side of Chicago. She essentially made him her pimp.

"She'd go out and turn tricks and give me the money," he said. "She could see I had all the qualities," including "the gift of gab."

The lifestyle seemed a natural to him. It seemed like the answer to all his dreams.

"Growing up my idol was James Bond," he said. "He had all the cars, all the women. It was an illusion. But I saw the guys with the cars, the women in teeny skirts, and I thought I could get that illusion. It wasn't about money, it was about the power, about being cool, about being socially accepted."

To do it, all he had to do was sell women on the dream as well.

"I was their ticket to fame and fortune, 'together we can conquer the world baby!'" he says, slipping into a smooth voice, leaning forward provocatively to display his technique. "It was all about the money, cars, jewels, furs. It was like Oscar night every night on the strip."

The sell worked, many times. "Most of them weren't hard to convince," he said.

He didn't actually get tricks for them. He was the muscle, the one who would make a trick pay up and come after him if he tried any funny business. More than that, he convinced the women they needed him. "I was daddy," he said. "I was the one who could make everything wrong right. They needed me emotionally, and I needed them, because we were all emotionally devastated."

Some were doing it mainly for the money. Some were not.

"Lots of them could ask mommy and daddy for whatever they wanted," he said. "They were women of all different races, that was one of my specialties. Some just wanted to get out of the routine of their everyday lives. One of my ladies, her mother was one of the most prestigious doctors in Florida, she had her own car and a trust fund. She wanted to break the boredom. Rich kids do things sometimes as a cry for attention."

It was easy to get in. When the illusion began to wear off, it wasn't so easy to get out.

"It was like the roach motel," King said. "You can check in but you can't check out. This was a business I was running, and this was about power. I would do whatever necessary to hold onto that business, to hold onto that power."

Violence was the norm. King took some extreme measures to keep his women in check and to make sure they didn't leave. He doesn't want to go into too much detail about his own actions, but he says they are things he isn't proud of. He'll talk more about the industry as a whole.

"The tools of the trade included coat hangers," he said. "We're talking about a world with no values, no boundaries. We're operating on a non-human level. It's sticking a gun in someone's mouth and saying this is what will happen if you don't do it."

Early on King had asked a more experienced pimp for advice.

"I said, 'I've got her doing it, now how do I make more money?'" he said. "He said, 'Beat her ass.' He's standing there with all these jewels and the Cadillac so I knew he must be right."

He didn't find it hard to take the advice.

"My parents were from a different time period," he said. "They were from a farm, they plowed fields, then they came to the city with a big city dream. The way it became so easy for me to hit my lady was that I had watched my father hit my mother for many years. It was handed down to him from his father and to him from his forefathers. It was handed down to them from our slave-masters. We're talking about a tradition."

Physical abuse seemed like such a natural part of male-female relationships that he was surprised when a few of the women he was pimping refused to put up with it.

"When I was 12 I told my mother, 'Let's go, I'll take care of you.' But she wouldn't leave. I know he loved her and she loved him. They never separated. So I thought, 'OK, that must be love.' So I hit my lady-friends and when they left I was thrown for a loop. I really could not understand what the problem was and there was no one to explain it to me."

He traveled around the country pimping, and earned the name 'Fancy.' There were times he got rich. He was even named Pimp of the Year once in a national competition. But then he'd blow the money on getting high. All in all, he found out the pimping business wasn't all he had hoped.

"I had seen the guys with the fancy cars, but what I hadn't known was that a lot of them were hiding their cars from the repo man, that a lot of them were sleeping in their cars," he said.

The onset of the HIV epidemic put a damper on the business. King, for one, was health conscious and regularly took women to the doctor and gave them condoms.

"Partly it was self-interest, because I would touch them too," he said. "But money changes people and if someone says they'll pay a few more dollars to do it without a condom…I've been tested and thank God I'm negative."

Around the same time, the business suffered another blow.

"When crack cocaine came on the scene, that virtually destroyed the life," he noted. "You can't pay two pimps. Women wouldn't be doing it for the glamour and the excitement any more, they'd just be doing it to get high. You had to get the money before the drug dealer got the money."

And, he added, "all the women on the street start looking like men. Baseball caps, no sex appeal. No glamour at all. It was different before."

However these changes aren't what caused King to leave the business.

"When a pimp starts to feel emotions, it's time to get out," he said. "They come to you in the middle of the night like a vampire."

He started to feel ashamed in front of his parents.

"It got to the point where my mother wouldn't even let me kiss her, my father wouldn't shake my hand," he said. "You have no idea how emotionally painful that was. It only sent me deeper into my addiction to cover up the pain, because I couldn't let these ladies see that I'm human."

Even worse, he started to feel too much sympathy for the women working for him. And jealousy.
"When you start caring about whether she'll make it through the night safely, it's time to go. There's always one you care more about, that's just human. You watch her go through this metamorphosis [getting ready for work] and see her change from Holly to Sparkle and you start asking, 'Did you enjoy that one?'"

He had had enough.

"One day I just threw my alligator shoe at my lady and said, 'Leave.' I thought I was going to jump off a freeway overpass. But then I started thinking what would happen if I jumped and didn't die, I'd be in a wheelchair with no one to push me around. A pimp has no friends. No one's lonelier than a pimp."

So he went to counseling, entered a 12-step program and began to deal with his demons.

"I began to do analysis, to see why I had treated women as prey," he said. Eventually a woman he had known from the streets introduced him to a project organized by the Chicago Coalition for the Homeless and other Chicago organizations called the Prostitution Alternatives Round Table (PART). The project brings together survivors of prostitution, residents of areas where prostitution takes place, social service providers, law enforcement and even pimps and johns to develop progressive and inclusive strategies for dealing with prostitution. King connected with the project instantly. He started to put his gift of gab to good use, speaking to various groups about his life and finding his way out.

"I'm providing an example," he said. "I'm a different person now. I made some bad decisions and I stuck with them way too long, but I'm different now. We're all ex-somethings. I'm just more honest about it than most."

King is part of a speakers bureau organized by Coalition for the Homeless staffer Sasha Simonitch.
Simonitch is a former sex worker who discovered the price of trying to avoid being exploited by pimps.

"A friend and I were working in a medium-sized city for a service run by a man we knew well, who owned a lot of services," she said. "We'd been having ongoing problems with him, so we broke off and started running our own ads. He basically ran us out of town. We'd show up on a call and it would be something he'd set up. One time I was on a call and was kidnapped. I was getting high at the time and none of the dealers would sell to me. He would use all these underhanded tactics. We basically had to leave. It's an example of how things are so male-dominated, and controlled."

She also paid the price for trying to buck the system in Las Vegas, where she got her only arrest.
"There were certain people who had to be paid off, certain bartenders and other people who ran certain areas, and I wasn't doing that," she said. "I was doing things on my own. So I was arrested. It was really bad."

When Simonitch got clean and started becoming more involved in feminism and activism, she found it harder and harder to keep going on calls (she worked mainly for escort services). Eventually she quit the business.

"It's like coming back from a war or something," she said. "There's post-traumatic stress disorder."

Now she's working to raise awareness of the inequalities, violence, racism and exploitation in the sex industry. And to erase the stigma placed on sex workers, and provide supportive programs for women in the industry and women hoping to leave. (Many men and boys are also employed in the sex industry in Chicago and around the world, but for the time being PART is focusing mostly on women.) "There are real barriers to leaving," Simonitch said. "Survivors and women in the sex trade really need to be supported."

One of PART's strategies is getting men like King -- pimps and johns -- involved in the process. The group recently completed a survey in bars and nightspots in Chicago, surveying men on their use of the sex industry, their knowledge of sex workers' situations and whether their attitudes would change if they knew most sex workers are survivors of sexual and physical abuse and have experienced homelessness.

"About half of them said that would change their attitude and half said it wouldn't," said Samir Goswami, a senior policy analyst with the Coalition for the Homeless who helps spearhead PART.

"A lot of men are really desensitized," said Simonitch. "When I was doing the survey I had men complaining to me about the lack of quality prostitutes on the street, like they're just not satisfied with the product available to them."

Bill (who asked his last name not be used) was one of those men.

He spent his 20s and early 30s consumed by "sex, drugs and rock and roll." He didn't want the hassle or vulnerability of a relationship, so most of the sex was paid for.

"For me and my buddies sex was a charge, a release, we were like gods, we could do anything we wanted," he said.

He made good money in corporate real estate in a southwestern city, so he had lots to spend on partying.

"I was kind of living a double life, going to the trust office in the daytime and talking about opening warehouses, then in the evening hanging around with prostitutes and petty criminals. It was kind of sick when you think about it but to me it was exhilarating as hell." Like King, he bought into the fantasy world of prostitution, becoming a low-level part-time pimp and a frequent john.

"It was easy, I wasn't thinking about what I was doing to her, to myself, to my ability to be intimate," said Bill, now 50. "It was all about my satisfaction, my self, my money and my thrills. I had a pretty crappy attitude toward women then, and toward the poor, toward people in general. I'd see people on the bus and look down on them, thinking they must be losers if they didn't have a car." Like King, he also began to realize that his reality was based largely on illusion, to notice the frustration and desperation on all sides of the equation.

"Some girls might make a lot when they start out, but as they get older they make less and less and give more and more to someone controlling them," he said. "Most of them have drug and self-esteem issues. Many of them have histories of abuse and trauma that were never addressed. And you have this idea that the Mafia who are controlling it all are rich, but most of them are just making a subsistence living too."

He was also disillusioned with himself. "I was a disaster in relationships, I gave up even caring, I though all women suck."

He eventually hit an emotional bottom, and tried to kill himself. He failed in the suicide attempt, but succeeded in launching himself into another chapter of his life. As he faced his own demons, his attitudes about others began to change. About five years ago, he had what he calls a conversion experience. Instead of buying up buildings cheap and profiting off them, he began restoring buildings for community arts programs and affordable housing. Instead of going to bars, he went to church. Instead of using prostitutes, he began to listen to them.

"One building I did was a community arts hub which we opened up to street people, some of them prostitutes," he said. "I started hearing their stories, relating to them in different ways."

He eventually moved to Chicago and began working as a community organizer. "I'm not too good with some things, but I know how to fight."

Like King, he sees his current crusades as part of atoning for what he has done to people in the past. Including himself.

"When I realized all the pain I'd caused I said how do I heal that, how do I fix what I did and help people get out of that. I still had to deal with a lot of issues, of inadequacy, self-hatred, greed and corruption."

At a PART training in July for supportive housing providers whose tenants may work in prostitution, a participant brought up the fact that she dislikes 12-step programs because they focus solely on changing the self, as opposed to changing society as a whole.

Simonitch, King, Bill and others involved in the project see the violence, criminalization, humiliation and other problems rampant on all sides of the sex trade as part of a larger picture -- of a society where men feel validated in using and abusing women; where police arrest women but not men for prostitution-related crimes; where sex workers of color earn far less and face more abuse than white sex workers.

"You have to realize this is about a system," Simonitch said at the training. "We have to stop talking about someone being a prostitute or not being a prostitute and start talking about changing the system." [ L i P ]