I met Sharnel on My Space after bumping into a saved
Hooker whose story interested me because I had been
walking the same fine line as her (trying to be
spiritual while working even coming out of the sex
industry).

I went to Sharnel’s page and instantly felt comforted
and swept in a circle of love. It made me want to
stay for a while…so I read about Jesus, her testimony
and looked at others on her page.

I was so ashamed and so alone in my wanting to leave
the phone sex company I worked for and so ashamed in
my need to honor my God and so ashamed because I had
acquired a new life but had done so through lies…that
I felt deeply isolated and didn’t even know it. In
fact I was starved for understanding, support and
encouragement when I hit Sharnel. It’s very difficult
to continue in the sex industry and call the abuses
that you see and the abuses that are hurled at you.
Very difficult. It’s much easier to do as everyone
else does…embrace the so-called accomplishments you
so-called have within it. In my industry, that was
how long you could keep a guy on the phone, how
realistic you could make a fake reality sound (lie),
how many you could get to call you back, how often you
could get them to call you back and how nasty, gritty
and spineless you could be as a fantasy girl…which in
the beginning, we all aimed to be. In the end some
continued to be. I couldn’t…I began snagging on the
ramifications of what they wanted. Where they might
take this…later. In the sex industry, thinking about
consequences is just a mood killer. And a money
killer. It is the sign of a somewhat untalented
girl…many then try to run with the lie, that all that
is expected…is GREAT!


Unfortunately, I’ve always valued honesty…even as I
developed my ability to lie. When I was honest I
wanted to be brutally honest with myself and others.
Brutally. Because it was like getting food after a
long time of not eating – having to lie so much. And
I was already a little bit of a veteran from dancing
(exotic dancing). It was my strength…I could have men
thinking I was just the regular girl who happened unto
dancing and who was accidentally sexy every night,
customer to customer. That they all knew me…the real
me, Tori who was married, Tori who was a mom working
for her kids, Tori who was working to pay for college,
to pay for a trip, breast augmentation, rent, for fun.
And I was always going to call them (when they’d give
me their number)…but I was so drunk, I lost the number
(of course). And that I was so sorry, and wanted it
again. Really.

But after years of spinning these stories and
mastering what there was to master…I’d look out of
that bubble at a party and envy people whose
professions could just roll of their tongues, got
tired of enrolling my friends who weren’t in the
industry to “cover,” for me, and got tired of making
up stories to tell my family that would explain my
weird hours. I got so hungry to tell the truth…it
made me feel bad. It began depressing me.

But I couldn’t tell the truth, cause I had met enough
um...enlightened people who told me to just ‘tell
people what you do,’…that it was a ‘part of reality,’
did it, and had people act accepting or accept, but
then turn around and look down on me because of it.
One friend who knew I worked in the sex industry
because I had met her at the present day EST training
(integrity/leadership program) advised me before
meeting her professional colleagues, not to say
anything about the sex industry…when she knew how
secretive I was about it and knew I told her only
because of the workshop we had taken together.
Another, a man I was dating, dabbled in illegal
situations expecting me to be supportive because I was
walking a line that most of society condemned too…and
another who seemed edgy and worldly, I told what I did
cause I thought for certain he would
understand…discarded me after two years of a deep
friendship, after one night of sex. And that is the
beginning of the disaster!

So making it to Sharnel’s page was a gift. Because
before meeting her and then, meeting some of her
friends who had left the sex industry and found Jesus,
I believed in God but it was a very ‘over there,’
experience…what I had gone through in my life was
‘over here.’

In other wards, I had experienced the “real,” and was
darkness incarnate…deep in my mind….because of where I
had been, what I had done. I was a bad girl…with a
good heart deep within, but that God couldn’t do
anything for, cause I had been “so bad.”

But I discovered through Sharnel and a network of
other ex-sex workers who had now found Jesus and were
having a relationship with God…that it was possible to
be blessed. It was possible to find happiness, it was
possible to be embraced by God, I found it was
possible to be given a love, to be given a blessing of
success (and one that wasn’t a hustle) and finally
that God wasn’t ignoring me. I had just lost the
ability to hear him.

He saw me, spoke to me, tried to guide me…but I had
lost the ability to hear. I couldn’t listen to the
tugging at my spirit when I was in the sex industry.
How would I survive in it? This is how I thought. It
took me a long time to reach the conclusion that I
wasn’t really surviving. I had to tuck me so much,
that me was in there somewhere but barely recognizable
on the face of the earth. I had become someone else’s
expression, fully and completely and all that I had
built was someone else’s dream. Hot Horny Girl or
Feature Performer who attracted repeat customers. I
had another dream, but this was the one I was
realizing and didn’t even know it.

But, eventually I got dead tired of being told what
was choice when I didn’t agree in my spirit. It’s
okay to talk to him about young girls as long as they
agree she’s 18; If a guy wants to shit all over you,
give him the best shit call ever, make it as nasty as
you can, make sounds, get creative. Make him want to
call you back cause he knows he can never do that with
anyone else. If he wants a gang-bang, tell him you
desire to do everyone!! That you love that!! I COULD
FEEL MY SPIRIT WAGING WAR IN MY BODY EVERY SINGLE TIME
I GOT ADVICE LIKE THIS, AND I’D GO FORWARD WITH ANGER
TOWARD A CUSTOMER FOR LEAVING ME NO CHOICE BUT TO DO
THESE THINGS CAUSE MY COMPANY THOUGHT IT WAS A GOOD
THING. (I GOT MASTERFUL AT MESSING UP THE FANTASY IN
UNDER THE RADAR WAYS. BEFORE THE PHONE SEX I HAD
REACHED A SIMILAR STAGE IN DANCING, WHAT I DID BEFORE
PHONE SEX. I STARTED SWIPING MEN’S MONEY, CURSING AT
THEM, HITTING THEM, LYING ON THEM TO GET THEM KICKED
OUT OF THE CLUB, THROWING DRINKS ON THEM….)

But to stay in both, I became an expert at ignoring my
gut…I’d silence that little voice within, where God
speaks. I did for soooooo long when I tried to
listen, I didn’t know where it should be coming from,
what it sounded like…the kinds of things God says, his
personality. And my world…my version of hope, my
version of dream, what I thought could happen in the
end become a very bleak picture. Pessimistic. But I
didn’t even know it.

It was incredible to meet people (Sharnel included)
who were not ashamed of their background, but who
openly talked about it. Who openly shared but more
importantly let God use it. Cause for me—it’s been
all about hiding and lies. And I thought God loved us
but thought of myself as God’s illegitimate child.
Not like God’s powerhouse of a child. Only now
looking at what these ex-workers who are Christian and
ministering by speaking about their pasts…am I
thinking this could be something. Before I looked at
my past as an ink stain on my life I had to hide, that
God would never forgive. But not only does he forgive
but he sends us to center stage with it, when we come
to him and changes the blot from stain to shine. It’s
a very different way to experience life…sets a very
different path before me.

I am out of the sex industry…but for once I am
beginning to think of myself not as some really bad
mistake…but as part of a plan. Not as a victim but as
a warrior. That maybe I don’t have to hang my head
low because of all I saw and did…that in God’s embrace
it might become something valuable.

I am still in the new life…I acquired through lies…so
everything is not perfect yet. But…I am aware that it
is not a habit I want to keep in my life. So I am now
planning another professional leap, and one where the
truth of what I am will be expressed. (No, not in the
sex industry…)

I’m not there yet, but thank Jesus for having the
opportunity to be a work in progress!!

~Tori Tyler