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2. Prostitution North
- Temple University Press
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- Additional Information
Watching the Game B y the time the federal government's street-based AIDS research and intervention project targeting Chicago's drug injectors was well established, nearly one out of four whose blood was tested was positive for HIV antibodies.' A growing concern for those whom injectors might be infecting through sex led to my being hired as an ethnographer focusing on their sex partners, which was a new epidemiological risk category. The multicity project was the scientific outgrowth of the late 1980s panic that the epidemic might spread from stigmatized risk groups to the so-called general population. Conceived in Washington, D .C., as the female noninjecting counterpart of male injectors, the sex partners included prostitutes who did not shoot drugs. Project field sites were chosen precisely because they were central copping areas for (male) injectors, so we found few prostitutes who did not shoot drugs. Field stations were set up at each site, and recovering addicts were hired as outreach workers. They created and nurtured the crucial communication channels ethnographers depended upon to find people willing to talk about illegal behaviors (Sterk-Elifson 1993). Forty-seventh Street and Martin Luther King Drive is a busy intersection in the heart of Chicago's southside. It is also the location of the field station administered and staffed by African Americans to target the African American community. (Just as Latinos were hired 23 Copyrighted Material o m iles 0 .5 1.0 SECTIO N O F SOUT H SIDE CHICAGO FIELD STATION scale 1:40 ,000 24 Copyrighted Material [44.195.47.227] Project MUSE (2024-03-28 11:39 GMT) PROSTITUTION NORTH . to reach the Mexican and Puerto Rican communities on the westside and whites were hired to reach the predominantly white communities on the northside.) Fifty years ago, the neighborhood around the southside field station was a booming center of diverse economic activity (Drake and Clayton 1970). By 1990, over half the people in the area were below the poverty line. The cement towers ofRobert Taylor Homes are nearby. One of the largest housing projects in the United States, it is home to tens of thousands of people who can barely glimpse the economic horizons enjoyed by those in the glass and steel towers in the center city loop (Johnson 1994). The illicit drug and sex trade has devoured this landscape and many of its people, and HIV is ragmg. George Lewis, also known as Loki, was an outreach worker for the project. He has since died. Loki's memory evokes in me the intense mixture ofjoy and pain, artfulness and decadence, that characterized my experience ofbeing with folks in and around the southside field station. He was a talented toast-teller.2 Although we didn't work together regularly, he did line up Jacqui, my first interview. Excerpts from field notes and interview transcripts offer a sense of the narratives of hardship I recorded.3 They knocked on his door at two in the morning asking for condoms . The twenty-two-year-old woman and her man worked across the street from Loki's house in the south Sixties of Chicago. Angry about being awakened, he told them he never has condoms after ten at night. After they left, his conscience got to bothering him, and he got dressed and went downstairs to give them the condoms. The couple had already returned from buying three for two dollars at the drugstore. They were upset about a woman working out there who was Hlv-positive and wasn't using any. Not long after that, Loki brought them into the field station on Forty-Seventh and Martin Luther King Drive. The man stayed in the Copyrighted Material 25 ~ o " ;II: • CHAPTER 2 ~ II: o ~ reception area with their two-month-old baby and the woman came into one of the back rooms to be interviewed. She was a slip of a woman with a gentle, beautiful, bruised face, and the raggediest skirt and blouse 1'd ever seen outside of the bus terminal in Peshawar. She said that she didn't inject drugs and her man didn't either. But half her tricks did and she did about ten tricks a night. Without counting for time off and seasonal variation, that was a total of about thirtytwo hundred tricks a year. First we went through the government's quantitative surveillance interview. I learned that she was a bisexual, Baptist, high school grad. She worked sex full-time and had her...