Two names regularly bring forth tears and anger in the Philadelphia LGBT community: Nizah Morris and Stacey Blahnik.
The deaths of both women have gone unsolved, years later. But their names are among a disturbingly long list of transgender women of color who have either died under mysterious circumstances like Morris or been brutally murdered like Blahnik.
Mo’Nique says she met Blahnik, a leader in the Philadelphia ballroom community and by all accounts a remarkable woman, a few months before her October 2010 murder. Mo’Nique, who named herself after the Oscar-winning actress, said Blahnik’s murder “broke my heart. Just broke it. I looked up to her. I wanted to do all the things she did for everybody.”
Mo’Nique looks away when she talks about Blahnik, her deep brown eyes sparkling with tears. But Blahnik is not the only person Mo’Nique has known in her 22-year-old life who has been killed. Mo’Nique has witnessed both a shooting and a stabbing. Two members of her family of origin were killed. Violence has been a part of Mo’Nique’s life as far back as she can remember.
Unfortunately, much of it has been directed at her.
Like most of the transwomen sex workers I’ve interviewed since March, Mo’Nique has had conflicts at school, at home and on the streets, many of which have ended in violence, most of which have been because of her transgender status. Her family threw her out “years ago” when she was barely 16 but already living her life as a woman.
She’s mostly been on the streets since then — nearly a third of her life, searching for help from people like she says Blahnik was for her. When she talks about Blahnik, I’m reminded of the classic “Paris Is Burning,” in which families are created among the people who no longer have family.
Mo’Nique wants to be a performer. I can imagine her beautifully dressed, like Blahnik, but I can hear in her voice that what she wants most is family.
“I had to leave out my house, leave school, leave everything and everybody,” she says, an angry edge to her voice. She was frequently slapped, punched and called names. It was supposed to make her “manly.” Mo’Nique’s family is large and religious. “‘No he-she son, no,’ that’s what my mom told me.” Everyone in Mo’Nique’s family insisted on calling her by her given, male-gendered name. “You want to know, for your story?” she asks. I tell her no. She’s been Mo’Nique since she first saw the actress on TV years ago, hosting “Live from the Apollo.”
“I loved her name, I loved how she looked,” she says. “But no one would call me that.”
After a suspension from high school for fighting, Mo’Nique never returned.
I tell her I was expelled from my high school for being a lesbian and put in a mental hospital briefly to “de-gay” me. She laughs, and asks me how they knew. We both laugh.
The back-and-forth feels friendly and easy. We both forget for a few minutes that I’m a reporter and she’s a street sex worker getting ready to go out and trick all night, risking her life, because she doesn’t feel she has any alternatives. We both forget she’s telling me her story because her friend Tiffani is afraid she’s going to end up dead. Like Morris and Blahnik.
Or like pretty, much-beloved 30-year-old Ashley Sinclair, an Orlando transwoman murdered in April. She is one more murdered woman of color for whom justice has been eluded.
Like Sinclair, Mo’Nique is a big, curvy woman. Light-skinned, with a soft, breathy Marilyn Monroe-style voice who leans into you when she talks and holds your gaze, Mo’Nique can’t remember exactly the first time she had sex for money, but she knows she was very young; it wasn’t her choice and it hurt her.
“Everybody got an ‘uncle,’ you know? One of them men who be hanging out with somebody in your family, but nobody can say exactly who he with — he just always, always there, that Uncle Boo. ‘Kiss your Uncle Boo, now,’ somebody says, and then he’s all grabbing at you, this and that. That was him. That was the guy.”
She turns away again as we sit in a booth at the McDonald’s near Hunting Park. It’s dark outside, and the lights feel too bright in the too-loud fast-food place. We go outside and the spring air feels good, there’s a strong breeze. Traffic whizzes by on the way to the Boulevard. We walk toward the park where I know there are benches and less traffic.
I try not to look at Mo’Nique, because she’s crying and we’ve only met one other time, with her friends Tiffani and Kendria, and I’m not sure if she wants to tell me more or not. I don’t want her to feel embarrassed. The time these women spend with me is time they aren’t making money, they aren’t looking for work. But it’s early still. I don’t want to rush her. And it was her idea to meet with me again.
Tiffani and Mo’Nique have both told me they can make hundreds of dollars a night if the weather is good and they are in the right place for a walking date or a car date or the occasional motel date. Rates for their services fluctuate from $40-$60 for oral sex to $200 for “everything.”
Mo’Nique has been using Twitter and Facebook to help find dates and has signed up with a local escort service. The last time we met, she showed me photos on her phone of her on the website. She’s dressed in fishnet-style pantyhose and a very tight, short black dress that exaggerates her curviness. She has tattoos up and down one leg, but I don’t know if they are real or fake.
She asked me if I thought she looked pretty, a question I am asked by these young women again and again. They want to be told they are pretty, sexy, dressed well; the one part of this work they like is having men tell them how good they look. Just like any other woman out on a date where there’s no money involved.
Mo’Nique does look pretty. She also looks even younger than she is, just like the other young women on the sleazy website. Prostitution is a job with an age ceiling: The women are younger and younger, the competition between 20-somethings and teenagers, fierce.
The service does “out calls,” which means the escorts — not one of whom looks older to me than Mo’Nique — go where they are sent. To motels, hotels, apartments, houses. Tiffani thinks this is dangerous. I don’t know if it’s more dangerous than the street or the cars. But I know everyone on that site, trans or not, of color or not, is at risk. There are way more men looking for youthful bodies and specific services than there are people able or willing to help these young women get off the streets.
Beacon of Hope is a Women’s Way-supported agency with outreach to victims of sex trafficking like Mo’Nique. Project Safe is an all-volunteer “harm-reduction” agency providing advocacy and support for women in prostitution. The Polaris Project also provides outreach for victims of sex trafficking. The Mazzoni Center (see next week’s installment of this series) has a panoply of health-care services, including referrals to specialty providers.
Women in Transition, located above the Mazzoni Center at 21 S. 12th St., is one of the oldest continuing services for abused and endangered women in the country. Executive director Roberta L. Hacker has been at the helm for more than two decades. Before she was at WIT, she headed Voyage House, Inc., which served dependent and neglected youth of all statuses, but many were gay, lesbian and transgender.
Hacker has special concern for young transwomen like Tiffani, Mo’Nique and Kendria, who she says are at serious risk on the streets because of their isolation from family and community, and because abuse makes teens and 20-somethings more susceptible to sexual predators.
Getting sex workers off the streets is not easy for many reasons, Hacker notes. But the risks posed to them are high, she says, including not just physical and sexual abuse, but substance abuse — “self-medicating” to numb the pain of their circumstances.
When I was with Tiffani, Mo’Nique and Kendria, Xanax was the drug of choice — Z-bars or Xany-bars — readily available and sold on every corner at Broad and Erie, outside Max’s steak place and the Eagle Bar. All three said they used “occasionally.”
“The trauma that sex workers experience can be extreme,” says Hacker. “The less time they spend on the street, the less hard it will be for them to begin to recover from that trauma.”
That trauma is multifaceted.
Tiffani is afraid Mo’Nique will be arrested again; she’s already been taken in for solicitation twice, but only booked once. Both women know other prostitutes who have gone to jail. Once there, they have been stripped of their femaleness, incarcerated as men and endured yet more trauma.
Mo’Nique is one of Tiffani’s best friends and the one she says “makes me feel safe.”
Mo’Nique, despite her size, looks fragile to me. She has a soft, round face and hair straightened to her chin, with fluffy bangs. She looks younger than 22, but that’s the look she’s going for. Because her competition for “dates” is teenagers.
“Somebody should have helped me,” she says suddenly, and puts her hand on my arm. She may be soft-looking, but her hand is strong, urgent. “When he hurt me, and gave me some money, nobody ask where that money come from. Nobody ever ask me.”
Hacker says a history of abuse is common among sex workers. “As an advocate for women who are being abused sexually and physically, it broke my heart to read about the true lives of young trans people in sex work on the street in this series. It’s past time somebody tells their story.”
Having worked with at-risk LGBT youth and endangered adult women for decades, Hacker concedes that “help” is neither a one-size-fits-all, nor does it always work.
“The alternatives that we all know and recommend are so off the radar for these young people, like getting a job in a retail store or going for job training,” Hacker explains.
WIT “serves anyone who identifies as a woman,” says Hacker, who established one of the country’s first programs for lesbian domestic violence.
She explains that for a woman like Mo’Nique, “we’d try to get her into a shelter or appropriate housing, get her counseling. What we strive for is to get women grounded and safe.”
But women have to be ready to make the radical shift from sex work to something mundane. “As cliche as it sounds,” Hacker explains, “a job at McDonald’s would be better for these women. There are benefits, they have a program for college tuition. But you’re not going to make $100 a day.”
For women engaged in sex work, Hacker asserts, “even if they are still on the street and they want to come in, there are a lot of strings attached, a lot they have to let go of. They have been so hurt and so damaged. They need trauma therapy. And not everyone is ready. Some women never are.”
The abuse Mo’Nique experienced was not an isolated event, and she says she began to associate unpleasant sexual encounters with money from an early age. The suspension for fighting that led to her dropping out of school was because a classmate had said he would pay her for oral sex and then refused to give her the money.
As Mo’Nique talks, the story she reveals is one of trying to break free: of the family who disowned her, of past physical and sexual abuse, of the work she’s doing now. She wants her own apartment, a dog, to sing. She sings a little for me as we sit. She wanted to sing at church, but her family kept her quiet, afraid of what others would say about the boy who was much more like a girl, even in the Sunday suits the young Mo’Nique was dressed in. It’s hard not to think of all the famous African-American singers, from Whitney Houston to Jennifer Hudson, who started their careers in church choirs, something Mo’Nique was deprived of.
It’s nearing 10 p.m. We’ve been talking for a couple of hours, but now Mo’Nique has to work. I ask her if she could forego a night, or more. If it isn’t time to do something else instead. She says she can’t. She’s staying in a room in a boarding house on the other side of the park and her rent is due. She pays weekly. The rent seems high, but there’s no cheap places to live in the city anymore. Even in the YoNo area near Temple, which isn’t that far from where we are, studio apartments rent for $1,000 a month. Mo’Nique doesn’t have a bank account.
Finding a place to live with no credit and where gender issues have been raised for her before because her only identification has that other name on it, the one we don’t mention, is one more part of her struggle.
It’s not easy for any 22-year-old. But with limited education and no family to provide so much as a credit reference, Mo’Nique is on her own.
Tonight, Mo’Nique is going to meet someone down near Temple University. As I drive, she asks me again, as she did when we first met, if I can help her. I tell her I will try, but she has to want to leave the street. She says she knows, she’s just not sure how.
I drop her on a dark corner at 11th and Diamond. She tells me once more that she will think about my offer of help. Before I can even pull away, a car pulls up and she gets in.