Sex work takes on forms as diverse as sex itself, both in terms of services provided and service providers. While female service providers have globally been viewed as the mainstream practitioners of sex work, in India sex work has traditionally been one of the few opportunities for employment available to the hijra community. The stigma associated with the hijra identity, or even with effeminate yet male expressions of gender, leads to ugly forms of harassment faced by the gender and sexual minority community. In turn, this chases most hijras out of conventional workplaces, driving many to choose between begging, extortion and sex work. The latter offers an opportunity to retain hijra identity, to live fairly freely and to make a relatively stable living, independent of the whims of discriminatory employers and co-workers.
Male sex providers, meanwhile, exist as a less visible minority within the sex-worker community, providing services to a male clientele and to a limited number of female clientele. In both cases, the relative invisibility of their clientele – women interested in hiring sex workers and men interested in paid sex with men – makes it difficult to find clients and ply their trade, and a significant amount of this trade is thus set up through word of mouth and private parties. Such a situation also contributes to difficulty in finding a critical mass of male sex workers to set up a functional union or organised collective.
This writer recently sat down to talk with four sex workers, one male and three hijras who identify as female. These individuals all belong to the Karnataka Sex Workers' Union, a group of 700 sex workers with a sizeable number of hijra and male members in addition to a majority-female population. The interviews were done on an evening when the four, along with other members from the union, had gathered for medical check-ups, an occasion that also provided a social opportunity to gather, dance and hold an impromptu beauty competition. The diversity of this community is considerable, ranging from primary-level schooling to those who had finished their master's degree; it also spans linguistic borders and the rural-urban divide.
These four individuals – Soumya, Veena, Arundhati and Dilfaraz – say that there were many factors, including education and gender identity, that led them to take up sex work. However, the primary attractions were its relatively lucrative nature and the relative safety in numbers offered by the profession.