Four lives

Sex work takes on forms as diverse as sex itself, both in terms of services provided and service providers. While female service providers have globally been viewed as the mainstream practitioners of sex work, in India sex work has traditionally been one of the few opportunities for employment available to the hijra community. The stigma associated with the hijra identity, or even with effeminate yet male expressions of gender, leads to ugly forms of harassment faced by the gender and sexual minority community. In turn, this chases most hijras out of conventional workplaces, driving many to choose between begging, extortion and sex work. The latter offers an opportunity to retain hijra identity, to live fairly freely and to make a relatively stable living, independent of the whims of discriminatory employers and co-workers.

Male sex providers, meanwhile, exist as a less visible minority within the sex-worker community, providing services to a male clientele and to a limited number of female clientele. In both cases, the relative invisibility of their clientele – women interested in hiring sex workers and men interested in paid sex with men – makes it difficult to find clients and ply their trade, and a significant amount of this trade is thus set up through word of mouth and private parties. Such a situation also contributes to difficulty in finding a critical mass of male sex workers to set up a functional union or organised collective.