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Recently in Salon Mothers Who Think

Anyone for a poop daiquiri?
I can't do the stony-face thing when it comes to bathroom humor.
By Carol Hall
[10/14/99]

Bad fortune
When the nanny foretold disaster, my son gave me a lesson in blind faith.
By Allison Hoover Bartlett
[10/13/99]

My seeds are sprouting in two wombs
Hank Pellissier, giver of sperm, is about to receive. Last heard from while contemplating insemination, he's now got a girl coming with the wife and a boy on the way with the lesbian gal pal.
By Hank Pellissier
[10/12/99]

Dump the big bang, bring on the blue ox
Kansas isn't going far enough with changes to its science curriculum
By Vicki Rosenzweig
[10/11/99]

Cold plunges and sport singing: Life in a Russian kindergarten
A wee New Yorker is sent to Rodnik, a temple of rigidity and complex grammar. And he loves it.
By Mary MacVean
[10/11/99]

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Amanda assumes that, if she were a PONY spokeswoman, she would have to come out to her family. But many hookers with high profiles in the prostitutes' rights movement have never told their parents that they themselves are sex workers. Sue Metzenrath of the Scarlet Alliance is a rising star in the Australian prostitutes movement, a media-savvy political animal who makes no secret of being a prostitute. At first, I assumed that her ability to go public had everything to do with Australia's increasingly liberal prostitution laws. In fact, says Metzenrath: "My parents both died before finding out. My mother was a church-praying Catholic and would have totally freaked out." Her mother's death is still a painful subject for her, "but it was a relief in terms of sex work," she says. "In some ways our relationship wasn't that great. We were too different."

Losing her mother at 23 made it possible for Metzenrath to come out as a prostitute. Earlier, in 1993, she had appeared on TV as a spokeswoman for a Canberra organization, Workers in Sex Employment. "When my father saw me," she recalls, "he called to congratulate me." She nervously wondered if it was time to have a sticky conversation with her father. "But he assumed my activism was altruistic -- and I still couldn't tell him that I was a whore."

Another activist told me that after working for five years as a "window prostitute" in Amsterdam's red-light district she still can't tell her mom that she has been a prostitute. "My little sister is very proud of me," says Wendy, "but I've never had to say, 'Don't tell Mom' because we have a reciprocal understanding: If my mother found out, it would be horrible." I asked how she can flaunt her hooker-cred so brazenly in racy anthologies and trendy academic journals if she's serious about keeping it a secret from Mom. Wendy counts on her mother's bland reading habits -- "Catherine Cookson novels and historical romances" -- to protect the secret.

Sometimes, in the most dire scenarios, a prostitute has no choice but to tell or is told on. Former call girl Xaviera Hollander had to give up control of her secret life when she became entangled in a police corruption scandal. "A so-called friend of the family called my mother very early one morning to tell her she should have a good look at the front page of her morning paper. She was in absolute shock and could not believe it, until she called and found the phones disconnected." Xaviera's mother flew from Amsterdam to New York and "did a lot of crying," asking, "Where did I go wrong? We gave you a good education!" Her wayward daughter parlayed the disaster into a bestselling book, "The Happy Hooker." "My mom certainly was not happy with it," she recalls. "For her, I refused to get the book translated into Dutch." The embargo lasted about 10 years.

Four years ago, Julian, a part-time prostitute, felt compelled to tell his parents that someone was trying to blackmail him. "They were threatening to send copies of my escort ads to my parents, my former employer and my thesis advisor," he says. Julian's father insisted on knowing the details. "I finally explained that I was putting myself through grad school by working as an escort. He asked me not to tell my mother because it would upset her needlessly." He adds that telling his father "destroyed whatever relationship we had. I still feel uncomfortable talking to him, and I don't know what would have happened with my mother but I don't think I would want to find out."

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