From Prostitute To Preacher: The Story Of One Woman's Transformation
From Prostitute To Preacher: How One Former Sex Worker Became A Reverend & Advocate For Black Women
An unidentified woman (not the subject of this story) in Boston’s “Combat Zone” in the 1970s. (Source: Spencer Grant / Getty)
In the waning hours of a tranquil summer night, a young woman holds the dawn at bay with sheer grit. She has work to do. That is all that’s on her mind as she expertly navigates the shadows in stilettos. Breasts and head held high, eyes determined, and lips parted, she zeroes in on the task at hand—feeding herself, her children and her pimp. Like so many other nights, she and the young women like her line up in Boston’s notorious “Combat Zone,” where sex and drugs thrive in the shadows of the city’s monuments and state buildings. The year is 1976 — America’s bicentennial. But while the country’s “City On A Hill” is drawing thousands in to celebrate two centuries of ‘freedom,’ for this young woman, the definition of the term is far more complicated. Her truths are among the city’s darkest, where lust and violence walk hand in hand with pleasure and the almighty dollar. But it’s hardly a deterrent for her and her fellow sisters of the streets. She’s a hustler and a businesswoman, and sex is her trade.
Forty-two years later, she sits down with me to share the good, the bad and the in-betweens of her experiences. After more than four decades of holding tightly to her secrets, she releases her truths. She’s open about her life as a sex worker, a life that is not only dark and dangerous but also empowering.
“Some of us were forced into it, while some of us turned tricks by choice, addicted to the money, excitement and glamour of it all,” Juanda C* tells me in a voice filled with excitement when we speak one Monday evening after her long day at work. Now a mother, grandmother, author and reverend, she requested that her name be changed to protect the identities of her family members.
“We were beautiful and broken,” Juanda says. “A secret society of women made up of women from all walks of life. We knew each other’s names and we frequented the same clubs and after hours. We shared the necessary information, what were the popular vices of the tricks, any crazy we needed to look out for. It was industry information, and this was all in a night’s work.”
Though Juanda has long left the streets behind, the aftershocks still linger, and the residue of pain clings to her like a well-worn coat. She’s ready to tell her story not only to unburden herself of the secrets of her past but also in the hopes that women like her, both young and old, will know that they are not alone. There is a life after the “the life,” and she is a living, breathing testimony.
“I’ve talked to certain people about certain episodes. I have 3 daughters and 2 granddaughters and, since I can remember, I’ve protected them from all of this. When they were growing up, they didn’t know. It wasn’t until just recently, when my 20-year-old granddaughter simply said to me, ‘mom-mom, what happened to you? Tell me your story’ that I thought maybe they were finally old enough to know my truth.”
Juanda was born in Boston, Massachusetts in 1956. Her mother’s first-born, she was just 15 years younger than her. It meant that they not only grew up together but that there was tension in that process. Her childhood was a lot of things – easy wasn’t one of them.
“I was 14 when I left my mother’s house and I didn’t go back,” she tells me. “She was with someone at that time who was an active heroin addict. He was abusive—verbally, physically and emotionally. He was a mess and all I wanted to do was get the hell away from them. This guy was so abusive, his energy was bad and it was concentrated on me because I was the oldest and I was verbal about it. He was stealing my shit and shooting dope in front of me when I was 11 years old. I had already been traumatized by the world … before I even walked out the door.”
And walk out the door she did – still a child, with no one to help her. She didn’t know much, but she knew she wanted out.
“He was beating me one day and I had just had enough. I just left,” she says matter-of-factly. “And I went to the streets. There was nowhere else to go. When a judge came back and told me my bond was a dollar—that I could literally go home for a dollar—I said, ‘No thanks. I’m not going home.’”
For Juanda, the devil she didn’t know offered freedom.
“I started out boosting,” she tells me. But it wasn’t long before she was “dancing on barroom tables, gathering the attention of patrons and receiving money.” Within a few short years, she would become an exotic dancer, and from there, graduate to selling sex for money. She learned the power of sex early and by the time she was 17, she was a professional.
Juanda’s experience in this context is not unlike so many other girls like her. According to a recent study conducted by the Beazley Institute for Health Law and Policy at Loyola University Chicago, many girls who find themselves in the sex trade come from abusive homes and are runaways. By some estimates, up to 80 percent of sex trafficking victims have been a part of the child welfare system.
Moreover, she recalls her pimps less as the ostentatious, volatile “Hollywood” types, but more as part of an adopted “family” unit.
“We didn’t sleep around with men in the community,” she says. “We had our men, our boyfriends and our pimps, and we didn’t blur those lines. The streets were a job.”
What Juanda describes is a system run by men who are often referred to as “Romeo Pimps” by law enforcement and journalists alike.
“Individuals that consider themselves gentlemen of leisure really don’t use their hands to get their point across,” one former pimp referred to by the name “Terry” told the Los Angeles Daily Times. “They do it by finesse, by speaking to a woman, telling her exactly what you want her to know, what you want her to do.”
It’s a game of manipulation, experts say. Especially for women who grew up without stable male figures in their lives. In comes a Romeo Pimp, who treats them with a perceived amount of respect, while simultaneously manipulating them into the life.
Juanda’s pimps, along with her customers, fed her growing addiction to a seductive limelight that bathed Boston’s underbelly in its glow. She was making money every night, whereas other girls her age, trapped in a punitive, anti-Black system had nothing to their names. She was able to come and go as she pleased, as long as by nightfall, she was on the streets turning tricks.
(Signs in Boston’s “Combat Zone,” 1976) Source: Boston Globe / Getty
The geographic region was part of Boston’s notorious “Combat Zone,” known for its adult entertainment – strip clubs, peep shows and adult novelty stores. Moreover, it was known around the country for its prolific prostitution. It began in the 1960s after city officials moved the red light district from Scollay Square as part of a massive urban renewal campaign. The denizens relocated from there to Washington Street, where the cost of living was much lower, and nightlife was already booming.
But when the city began to ease up on obscenity laws in the 1970s, the movie theaters began playing adult movies and prostitution began picking up steam, especially on Juanda’s old haunt, LaGrange Street. So prevalent were the hookers and adult businesses that even the politicians famously seemed to take a relaxed approach, for the most part.
A 1998 Boston Globe piece notes:
In the mid-’70s, prostitution in the Zone was so uninhibited that police reported rush-hour traffic snarled by streetwalkers reaching inside cars to fondle male motorists. Dozens of sex industry enterprises thrived. In the alleys, in the bars, around the corner and up the stairs, Boston’s 7-acre tenderloin was sizzling. The police turned a blind eye. Business boomed. In 1976, the Wall Street Journal called the Zone “a sexual Disneyland.”
(“Boston’s “Combat Zone”) Source: Boston Globe / Getty
For Juanda and the woman like her, their youth, just as their bodies, was a commodity.
In 1975 alone, nearly 100 girls under the age of 17 were arrested for prostitution in the Combat Zone. Dozens more were arrested but ended up charged with being a Child in Need of Services. Still, the young prostitutes were often the ones to take the charges in the place of the Johns.
“We were young and we were on a timeline because we knew we didn’t want to be hustling at 25,” she says.
I stop on this point, asking her what happens to women after 25, assuming that it was a question of ambition or simply growing tired of the lifestyle. She pauses thoughtfully before offering me an explanation.
“There was this OG pimp – although looking back now he was probably about 35, maybe 40 — and he would tell me every day: ‘don’t nothing depreciate faster than an old whore.’ There are some people who never come out of it – they die there. Their children go in. It’s like a spirit that can affect generations.”
“And what happens to those women?” I ask her.
“The ones I know of are dead,” she says, matter-of-factly, her voice completely devoid of emotion. “They’re dead or nondescript. No one knows where they are.”
It’s a shift in the conversation that, while maybe not unexpected, is drastic. But Juanda is quick to remind me that when the life was “fun, it was really fun. But then you flip it to the other side and it’s dark. It’s disgusting. It’s degrading. We had our money, yes, but we also knew this life could very well kill us.”
In her recollections, the danger was always there – a silent partner in the lifestyle she was living.
“You don’t want to remember the nights you got beat up or they stole your money or you were violated,” she tells me, speaking in general terms. “No one could rescue you. Who were you going to tell?”
She recalls one instance where everyone was on edge:
“We had a guy who would catch the girls. He would rob the girl and the trick at gunpoint, and then rape the girls. Violently. And this was something we knew about, but again, who could we tell that to?”
“I had another experience when I got in the car and the guy put a gun to my head to demand I give him head. Thank God, when I went down the police came up and stopped him, because there’s no telling what could have happened.”
(The shadow of a stripper in the Combat Zone in Boston, 1973. ) Source: Boston Globe / Getty
It was in this environment that Juanda learned she pregnant with her first child. She was 17-years-old and in a relationship with her first love.
“He was someone I met through the juvenile system. He was my age … and he came pre-me going into the sex trade. He happened to be very much a criminal; he still is. Even back then he was very involved with the law,” she tells me.
For a moment, there’s a wistful quality to her memory of two people in love, living in the tornado of their own Bonnie and Clyde romance. It was a partnership that, while toxic, offered her an acceptance she had never known. They were young, wild and free of secrets, living completely on their own terms.
“I married him when he was in jail and then got into a whole other piece with him. Just holding onto that life of when I was this gangster with him, I was this hustler,” she says.
But like so many storms, the tumult and danger were too strong for her to withstand. Of the end of their romance, she simply says: “his life finally broke me.”
Three weeks after giving birth, her daughter’s father was sentenced to ten years in prison.
“I looked at the judge and I said, I’m 17 with a 3-week old. What the hell am I gonna do? I didn’t wanna deal with life. I didn’t wanna deal with kids. I gave her to my mother and I left to start really hustling.”
For a year, Juanda tried her hand at dancing in LA’s party scene. But the city’s lights and lure of prosperity belied a dark world of serial killers like the “Hillside Strangler” and the “Skid Row Slasher,” all of whom killed multiple women and had suburban housewives and sex workers shook alike.
“In the 70s, they were finding women’s bodies in canyons and all types of crazy stuff,” she remarks, clearly aware that for a single black sex worker, her future there was far from stable.
Boston, she decided, in spite of all of its demons, was still the preferable option. She knew that devil now and could navigate his streets with ease and familiarity. She was a woman now, and one with a growing ambition.
(Continued on next page)
It would be two more years of hustling before she would decide that enough was enough. During that time, she became a mother a second time and began to feel the itch that life could offer her and her children more. For her, it was a gradual crescendo, built up over years of realizing that she had the power to move forward. And, of finally admitting to herself that though she loved the excitement and money, she was also carrying around the heavy burdens of guilt and shame.
“It wasn’t one day I woke up and there was this epiphany. Even when I thought it in my head, I had no way of figuring out how to do it with my hands,” she says. “Every time I would think, ‘ok I need to do this,’ it would be followed with ‘the bills need to be paid.’”
But even harder than the realization that she needed to provide for her family was the knowledge that the Boston scene wasn’t going to let her go without a fight.
“Everything in Boston was about who I was. If you knew me, you knew that [hustling] was how I lived. I had to move my whole everything. I had to run away.”
And so, once again, she left the city that seemed to haunt her every choice. This time, she went south to D.C.
“I grabbed my babies, a trash bag, got on a Greyhound bus and went to D.C. I just ran,” she says.
Her arrival in the nation’s capital came with high hopes for herself and a resolution to look to her faith in order to change her life around. But without money or contacts, she would first need to hustle to get a head start, as well as turn to the community to help her get back on her feet.
“When I got to D.C., I moved my family to Virginia and knew I still had to hustle until I got an apartment and was able to move them back over. Then I enrolled in business school. I was 22, in school and hiding.”
For her, hiding meant throwing herself into the church, working and studying and not telling a soul about her past and her real identity.
“I hid,” she says, her voice tinged with just a hint of pain. “I didn’t tell nobody nothing. Because the one time I did tell people at church, they told people to stay away from me because my spirit might get on them.”
It’s the second time she’s mentioned a “spirit” of sex, which I ask her to clarify for me. She explains that many of the church elders – the very people who promised to help, protect and uplift her on multiple occasions – made the assumption that her past life as a sex worker was an affliction from some kind of unclean spirit. Worst of all, its corruption was contagious. A darkness from which no one was safe, especially those who associated with her.
“I shared my story with the pastor’s wife. I didn’t even tell her a whole lot, but she told me, ‘You stay away from my daughter because that spirit might get on her.’”
It’s a devastating assertion that had a lasting impact on Juanda, even down to the way she describes women who never escape “the life” in an earlier conversation.
“In my head, I deserved it, because I thought I was just a bad girl. I am the girl who your mother told you to stay away from. And so I had mothers tell their children to stay away from me. I remember telling my mother once, ‘I’m a good person. I’ve always been a good person.’”
It was moments like these, full of deep humiliation and complicated internal feelings that shaped her decision to become a reverend in order to help women like herself. The young women whose lives had led them to dark and difficult places, but whose desire to overcome life’s barrage of challenges was paramount to their circumstances.
“So many women are going to make these choices regardless of what you say. So I just tell her, ‘I’ll be right here to talk when you’re ready. I’ll never judge you and I can help you move forward when the time comes.’”
In this capacity, she has dedicated her life’s work to running youth centers and mentoring at-risk young women, many of whom are victims of sex crimes before they are even old enough to understand what happened to them.
Source: Sandro Di Carlo Darsa / Getty
“I had this one girl [in one of my centers] and people kept saying about her, ‘oh Reverend Juanda, she sleeps with everyone. She put all the boys’ penis in her mouth,’” she recalls. “She came to me and said, ‘Juanda, my brother and my father …’” she says, stopping short of detailing the young woman’s abuse. “And I just took her and said, ‘ok, they’re not here with you anymore. You’re repeating a behavior you learned and you could choose to stop.’
“And she said, ‘nobody ever said that to me before.'” It’s a declaration so simple, and yet, for so many women, all too complicated.
Still, even more complicated, is often the weight that comes after “stopping” – and the almost inevitable shame. For Juanda, her driving motivation is the reversal of the stigma around sexuality and women’s desires, while simultaneously helping young people to understand that true sexual liberation cannot be achieved without self-reflection.
“Some of these young women who are engaged in sexual acts have no idea about sexuality or who they are,” she said. “I mean I’ve had young girls who had babies who didn’t know how to use hygiene products. I’ve had girls who don’t understand when it’s time to go to the doctor. All they know is that they’ve been introduced to how cute it all seems and not all of the other stuff that goes with it.”
She’s also intent upon emphasizing to young women her belief that when you lead with your sexuality, it is often all that people can see.
“To put it bluntly, when you sell pussy, you become pussy, and everything you do after that is irrelevant,” she says, her candor no doubt the product of experiences whose grip on the darkest corners of her memories took decades to release.
“For a long time, I dealt with the remnants of not being able to talk about what I wanted to talk about – about who I was,” she says. “But if you can’t remember where you’ve been, you can’t go to where you need to go.
“I spent years with this gap inside me that if someone found out who I really am, they would treat me badly. And I walked around with that for so long. Every mistake I made, instead of it being just a mistake, I looked at it with the weight of everything I ever did wrong in my life, you know? And so I had to deal with the psychology of it, and that’s why I talk about sexuality the way I do. Because a lot of times, people do certain things and flaunt certain things and act like it doesn’t affect them psychologically. But I know it does. And if it doesn’t today, eventually it will catch up to you.”
Still, keeping all of that in mind, she is clear that sexual empowerment is critical for women, and especially women of color. It’s a topic on which she is clearly an expert, and she’s quick to emphasize to me that empowerment cannot be achieved without the ownership of one’s choices, both past and present.
“I don’t deny that I did what I did. I ran from a life in the sex trade, but until I took ownership, I could never get away from it in mind. It kept repeating itself and repeating itself, taking control over me until I said, ‘hey, hold on. I made those choices. They’re my choices.’ And I’m ok with that. I’m empowered.”
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