Janice Tomlin was 22 years old and fresh out of UT Austin when she started working the street corner. The idea came to her in 1976, when she read a news story about a female officer posing as a sex worker to bust Johns, the reverse of the usual way cops tried to snuff out the world’s oldest profession. She often saw women trying to make a buck near the Cedar Springs grocery store where she shopped. What if she went undercover to see what the streetwalker life was really like? Tomlin took her freelance pitch to the editors of D Magazine and got the green light.
If there was any discussion of process or safety, she can’t recall it. On the street, at least, Tomlin felt safe. Motorcycle cops were usually parked across the street, waiting for their opportunity to cuff a working girl. And, of course, she never did any deeds, always telling prospective customers that she was waiting for her regulars. But then things changed. “As I got more into it,” Tomlin tells me, “I thought, where do you graduate from being a streetwalker?”
She inquired about work at a massage parlor (“If a guy wants ‘the works,’ I don’t think I’d take less than $100,” a seasoned masseuse told her), hung out at a hotel bar near the convention center (a man who tried to hire her ended up getting into a scrape with his date that trashed the hotel room), and then she responded to an ad for a business that offered nude modeling—the latter outing being the only time she felt truly scared…