For me, becoming a phone sex operator was a freak coincidence. A friend and I were bemoaning our huge graduate school debts and kidding around about finding a way to make a lot of money with a part-time job. She suggested prostitution—definitely a joke. I made an off-hand remark about how I knew I couldn’t have sex with strangers, but that lots of people had told me over the years that I should do phone sex because I have a throaty, sexy voice. I was also joking, but she told me that a friend of hers was doing it and loving it. I had never thought about it seriously, but the next night we had coffee with her friend to talk about it and I decided to give it a try.

I wasn’t doing it for a living, but on the side, and just about everyone in my life knew. I hadn’t intended to tell my mother, but it just got too complicated to keep it from her. Suddenly I was never around when she called, and I was doing better financially for no readily apparent reason. So I told her. I knew she would be open-minded, and she was. She was a bit worried about my safety until I convinced her that no one who called would ever know my real name or where I lived, and then she was fine with it. The people I worked with at my regular job didn’t know until I wrote a book about it.

For some of the time I was doing it I had a boyfriend. I was a phone sex operator before we met, so he knew from the beginning. He always thought it was a little sexy, and asked if he could listen in on some calls. I let him, and it was fun for a few minutes. He got bored pretty quickly, though, and decided that if someone else was going to be the center of attention, he’d rather watch the basketball game.