The Walking Dead 16

I have known a lot of survival sex workers and drug dealers in my day, or, you could say the White Trash Exhibit, even if a lot of them weren't entirely Caucasian. But this is not about race or colour, but about what we often have to do in order to make a living and what a mess we're all really in. During my many years of Christian street ministry (1983-1995, more or less) I met and interacted with a lot of the kinds of folks my mother would not have wanted me to play with when I was a kid. It was a very interesting time. Usually, I would have to work long and patiently with these individuals in order to persuade them that I was not a customer, neither was I in business for myself; that I was not a narc; that I was not there to judge or reform them. It was a long hard and grueling process, but in many cases they came to see me as a friend, as a kind of resident brother there to keep a caring and watchful eye on them, to hear their stories, to feed them either in local restaurants or in my home if times were lean, to pray for them and with them. It was a very rewarding and very challenging time in my life, and I do believe that people's lives were meaningfully touched and in some cases transformed through these interactions. Never once did I seek to convert them or pressure them towards the Christian faith, nor even invite them to church. The idea was to be present, as Christ, among my brothers and sisters, who also, in their way became Christ to me. These, by the way, were persons of all genders, before they were really talking much about gender and identity. It wasn't all Kumbaya. There was conflict and there were misunderstandings. I sometimes was unclear about my boundaries and theirs, as they were also often equally uncertain about my own boundaries, and, no, Gentle Reader, I didn't go to bed with any of them, in case you are wondering! I particularly came to appreciate, for my sex worker friends, the very strong feelings of contempt and loathing they often harboured towards their johns, or their male clients whom they would service. It wasn't usually outright hostility they expressed, but there clearly wasn't a lot of fondness in most cases. I also really came to loathe the predatory male john, seeing them as venal exploiters who ought really to be castrated. Most of the sex workers were using or addicted to drugs. Some of them also sold drugs. I remember one conversation I had in a coffee shop once, and I may have written about this elsewhere on these pages, but it bears repeating. I became particularly good friends with a gay male couple who were also sex workers. One of them was a cocaine vendor. One day I confronted him about his product, after having read some rather horrible things about how the product is obtained in South America. In this case, during the early nineties el Sendero Luminoso, or the Shining Path, a violent Maoist movement of largely indigenous guerrillas wreaking havoc in Peru, were also involved in procuring product from the local coca farmers, were in charge of manufacturing cocaine and distributing the product for sale, much of which was going up the first world nostrils of North Americans. So, I told my friend about this, and that by selling this product he was also making himself complicit in the murder of many innocent people in Peru. He was quite upset with me for telling him that. A couple of weeks later, in said coffee shop, I was buying breakfast for one of the local street punks, and my friend came in. I introduced him to my teenage punk friends as a man who does bad things, and I was smiling of course. He did accept the ribbing but was clearly red-faced about it. I haven't seen any of these people in many years now. I think a lot of them would be dead by now, unfortunately, as longevity simply rarely happens in that industry. These were not sad, disempowered folk, by the way, regardless of the many socio-economic dynamics at work in their life situations. They were in many ways more alive than the losers who sought out their services and by extension, more alive than a lot of regular folk also prostituting themselves through legitimate day job drudgery. This isn't to say that I endorse prostitution or the drug trade. Of course I don't. My reason for distancing myself from the progressive human rights organization, Pivot Legal, here in Vancouver, was because of their push towards legitimizing the sex trade. By the same token, I often wonder if, here in Zombie Nation, most of us are also prostituting our souls for a pay cheque at occupations that might be legal but because their main purpose is for a regular paycheque and little else, could also be equally soul-destroying as selling your body or drugs or both.