TRACY QUAN

"I've wanted to be a prostitute since I was 11 years old," says Tracy Quan. "I've also been a feminist since that age." It was Quan's involvement in the feminist movement that gave her the chance to realize her ambition. "After I graduated from high school, I moved to London, and it was actually through reading a letter from a prostitute in a feminist magazine that my girlfriend and I first started working. We tracked down the author, and she gave us steps to follow-- places to go and what to say." Quan later moved to New York, where she began to earn a very comfortable living. She also became involved in PONY, a sex workers' rights advocate group: "What I like about the sex workers' movement is that I meet a lot of people who are very different from me. Even in the industry, you are subject to certain prejudices-- like most call girls are aghast at women who work in the peep shows-- but PONY has changed my opinions. These are real people whose lives are going to be seriously affected by the city's new restrictive laws." Meanwhile, Quan (now a post-feminist) is taking a sabbatical to work on a book proposal. In the spring, she will publish an essay of [sic] in the Routledge anthology Whores & Other Feminists.
--Cathay Che


this article originally appeared in Issue 60 of Time Out New York - Portrait of Tracy Quan by Stanley Moss, copyright 1991