'Reinventing The Oldest Profession': New York Sex Workers Step Out Of The Shadows

PHOTOS: The Sex Workers Of New York

By Noah Rosenberg

“When I got raped,” Jodi S. Doff says plainly, as if talking about a mild bout of stomach flu, “I went to work that afternoon. I’d been kept in the house for six hours and raped and tortured and I just called in late.”

Friends and colleagues of Doff’s had been murdered, kidnapped, beaten, slapped, spit on. This was early ‘80s New York, and these were strippers, “hoochy-coochy gals,” as Doff calls her former self, working the poles at places like Robbie’s Mardi Gras and the Lollipop.

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