A habitat is a set of conditions for an individual or species that allows survival, though possibly a limited and crippling version of survival if there are bits missing. The desirable habitat for a child is a family with a home. Forces that destroy or prevent those conditions as a consequence eliminate or deform the creature, the child. It is possible to change the nature of the “family” and “home” rather radically without deforming the child. A child needs safety, listening, food and shelter, et al, but can get them from peers or from more than one or two “parents” whose gender is irrelevant, or even from an institution. Some people will claim that a wolf can raise a baby. (A wolf is unlikely to beat or fuck a baby.)
A vector is a carrier. We’re most used to it referring to something that carries disease, like a mosquito, but it can also be entirely dry and theoretical, like an algorithm, or benign like a pollinator. It is simply the fact of carrying something across that defines it the term -- whether that is good or bad depends upon what is carried.
An invasive species is something that comes from the outside, totally changing the balance of the habitat. Pre-existing creatures there may be destroyed. But maybe not. Anything that comes in from outside can endanger the habitat and therefore the creatures in it, but healing and improvement can also come from outside. Many of government’s operations are meant to change from the outside, though economics, providing services, and so on. Do-gooders can be invasive species.
It is less dangerous if change comes from inside the habitat since it will have more sensitivity, more “skin in the game,” and more knowledge about small details. Change itself is usually seen by residents of the habitat as dangerous, destructive and therefore to be prevented -- even if it’s pretty clearly likely to make an improvement. But some changes that are much craved by creatures in the habitat can turn out to be destructive or lethal, or even to crash the habitat.
Sequester, like vector, means to confine and possibly to hide away. Sex work is a sequestered vector. That is, people who do sex work are supposedly protected from the world at large and vice versa, by social stigma and the creation of things like “red light districts” but both worker and client are vectors. There are predictable results. The first is secrecy which prevents understanding of that habitat and causes the greater world to see it as one big blob, though in fact there is as much variety, as many levels of class, as many dynamics and ethical considerations -- even aesthetic terms -- inside as outside. Like any defined group, it becomes a country of its own. Like any unknown country, it becomes the ground of fancy.
The second is that access is controlled by outside authority figures who can profit from the boundary and who have in their hands weapons and authorization for destruction of the group or individuals. They are capable of collusion with pimps, warlords, corrupt politicians, and -- in fact -- reinforce their existence.
The third that the sex work world itself becomes a guerrilla society struggling to overcome outside control. It is well-suited to penetrate, seduce, enslave, deceive, and obsess outside forces. Therefore complex networks exist both among the separate groups inside and the outliers who are only connected to the inside. On the North American content these “sin networks” are hundreds of years old and they use the Medicine Line today much the same as the old-time bootleggers and renegade Indian groups did. Commerce always trumps government. Every set of bars creates spaces between them, a filter, a pass-through, an opportunity.
Then comes HIV which blasts the false confidence of those who had learned to manage the old fashioned VD’s with antibiotics and when the old-fashioned addiction was alcohol or maybe opium. HIV is a vector using human bodies -- an invasive species of virus that works like flu, which travels a complex of vectors through birds and pigs and which morphs all the time like designer recreational drugs. HIV is the result of vectors (bush meat hunters and eaters) breaking into a habitat (African jungle) and joining a global set of vectors: human travelers and adventure seekers.
Social structures are a combination of nature-based ecologies and overlays of interactions created by humans, sometimes purposely but not always. It is a social structure and cultural construct to tell men to take risks, to go where no one else has gone, to do something unexpected in defiance of too constricting society, to experiment with what is forbidden. Sex work is always part of this, the same as it is always part of war. Children are swept into it, enslaved by it, and produced by it.
In other ways sex work echoes the larger society, very clearly in the way we think about children doing sex work. On the one hand it serves the people who think of children as possessions, as expensive toys. Another part of society responds to the helplessness of children by emptying them of all value, making them disposable, preventing them from becomes valued adults or even from living long enough to become adults at all. Documentaries about these forces can cause outcries of protest which then make the children the pawns of government and the “mercy industry” which extracts money through pity. There is overlap. Some of the money gets to the children.
The US has sequestered great numbers of people. It appears to be our way of managing almost everything. Not content with zoning, walled communities, ghettoes, and economic red-lining, we never quite dare to simply euthanize troublemakers. Nor do we inquire too closely into why people would become defiant and violent, one reason being overpopulation.
When considering a vector like HIV, which thrives on sequestrations of all kinds, attention is usually focused on deaths, which are events that can be counted and compared. But the real wasteland is between infection and death -- a long gray plain of suffering that invites many illegal mitigations and fulminating vector dynamics. Match that with the social confusion of failed moral and religious systems (who were supposed to resist sexual violation instead of joining it), refugees, abrupt economic change, broken expectations, and changing climate.
The government wants to look as though it is addressing the syndemic of poverty, opportunistic disease, even more opportunistic medical systems, scrambled families to say nothing of those that fail to form in the first place, and economic systems based on fantasy. But it hates to spend money or hire enough people. All the while it supplies safety nets that become like oceanic drift nets that catch everything, kill everything, escape control.
Boys who do sex work are vectors for HIV-AIDS. They are also suffering human beings exploited by the powerful. There is no utopia where this does not exist. It always has and always will. But that doesn’t mean that our cultural evolution doesn’t urgently demand reforms. Nor does it mean that the boys themselves can’t participate in that reform.
If you knew you were going to die, wouldn’t you want your life to count for something? But we ALL know we are going to die. Why fuss about how far in the future it will be when we could use our present suffering to motivate change? It is hopeless to block change by denying suffering.
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