My brothel's keeper.As a kid in small-town Canada, Tracy Quan Tracy Quan is an American writer and former call girl. She is best known for her Nancy Chan novels. In addition, Quan writes on issues related to sex and sex work and is involved in the prostitutes' rights movement. Biography Tracy Quan was born in the Northeastern U.S. wanted to be three things when she grew up: a librarian, a writer, and a hooker. The librarian gig never panned out, but Quan has managed to combine a talent for high-class hooking with a gift for turning out irreverent, witty novels on the sex trade. Quan's characters are not victims but entrepreneurs and like herself challenge Western cultural stereotypes of sex work. After 15 years as a prostitute in London and Manhattan, Quan put the trade aside to focus exclusively on writing. Her first book, Diary of a Manhattan Call Girl, is being adapted for the screen by Sex and the City creator Darren Star; a sequel, Diary of a Married Call Girl, was published in October. Quan-probably the only chick lit "Chick lit" is a term used to denote genre fiction written for and marketed to young women, especially single, working women in their twenties and thirties. The genre's creation was spurred on, if not exactly created, by Sue Townsend's Adrian Mole diaries which inspired Adele writer to discuss indentured labor, sex worker rights, and the proper purse in which to carry a dildo--has written on sex and gender issues for Lingua Franca lingua franca (lĭng`gwə frăng`kə), an auxiliary language, generally of a hybrid and partially developed nature, that is employed over an extensive area by people speaking different and mutually unintelligible tongues in order to , Salon, and Congressional Quarterly Congressional Quarterly, Inc., or CQ, is a privately owned publishing company that produces a number of publications reporting primarily on the United States Congress. . Assistant Editor Kerry Howley spoke to Quan in November. A longer version of this interview is online at reason.com/links/ links11070s.shtml. Q: Do you support complete legalization LEGALIZATION. The act of making lawful. 2. By legalization, is also understood the act by which a judge or competent officer authenticates a record, or other matter, in order that the same may be lawfully read in evidence. Vide Authentication. of the sex trade? A: If legalization means that you're going to be regulated in a way that is unfamiliar to the currently working prostitutes, there is going to be a lot of resistance from prostitutes themselves. Q: What regulations in particular concern you? A: Zoning. Zoning can be helpful, but it can also be abusive. We've seen how corporations have colluded with government in New York City New York City: see New York, city. New York City City (pop., 2000: 8,008,278), southeastern New York, at the mouth of the Hudson River. The largest city in the U.S. . Have you looked at Times Square lately? It's a gigantic scare on the population. Times Square is much more vulgar and offensive-looking than it was before. Architecturally it's a disaster. It's completely wrong and unnatural. What person would want their children to be exposed to this sort of thing? I'd be in favor of some kind of zoning if I thought it was informed by something rational and realistic. The problem is that zoning in this country, given the fearful religious climate, might be misused to try to put prostitutes in dangerous places where they can't be accessed. Zoning is sometimes used not to support a concept but to try to make it go away. And that's a sort of violence against the market. Q: What do you make of claims that sex workers are motivated by deep-seated psychological problems? A: All human beings have deep-seated psychological problems. That's what makes us interesting. I would hope a prostitute has deep-seated psychological problems. I think those claims come from people who have been brainwashed brain·wash tr.v. brain·washed, brain·wash·ing, brain·wash·es To subject to brainwashing. n. The process or an instance of brainwashing. by the medicalization medicalization Social medicine A term for the erroneous tendency by society–often perpetuated by health professionals–to view effects of socioeconomic disadvantage as purely medical issues of therapy; they want everyone to be flat and have no problems. But that's never been the goal of serious psychotherapeutic thinkers. |
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