Back in the 2010s, Michelle Gurule had big dreams of writing a book but was facing mounting bills from bad teeth and student loans. She was also helping support three generations of her family, with whom she shared a tight two-bedroom apartment in Denver. As her new memoir, Thank You, John, makes clear, Gurule was under a lot of pressure.
Denver has always been a city of blatant contrasts, a place where some neighborhoods are cooled by tree-lined canopies while others simmer in concrete-cracking heat. Gurule’s book showcases the even deeper division between affluent citizens and the people who labor to make ends meet. Everyone in her apartment is touched by economic injustice: Her parents understand they will work until they die, and Gurule strips at night at a local club to bolster what she earns working at Whole Foods. “Like most women,” she writes, “I lived my whole life subliminally receiving the message: When all else fails, your body can be used for bread.”
So when a lonely older man named John offers to pay her an entire dancing shift’s earnings for one conversation over dinner, she says yes. And when steakhouse chitchat quickly progresses to more, Gurule veers down a path toward financial relief, lodging herself in the rich and storied tradition of sex work in Denver. She writes, “I lived in a world that saw my body, sex with my body specifically, as bartering gold.”
That has been true in Denver for more than a century. In the late 1800s and early 1900s, not long after the violent displacement of the Cheyenne, Arapaho and Ute tribes, Denver became a bustling mining town. Market Street, known as “The Row,” marked the epicenter of sex work, lined with establishments run by savvy businesswomen like Mattie Silks and Jennie Rogers. Situated in parlors just downhill from the mines, sex workers offered baths along with their bodies, providing a relaxing escape for their working-class customers. But the reality could be grim: On payday, some serviced up to 50 customers. Still, the work afforded hard-to-find liberties: lifestyle and economic gains, bodily autonomy.
“Like most women, I lived my whole life subliminally receiving the message: When all else fails, your body can be used for bread.”
Queer sex workers faced obvious obstacles, and yet, as Western historian Peter Boag told High Country News, sex work gave lesbians a chance to survive without male control, “making a living separate from men by catering to men.” Work that has often been seen as exploitation has also been used to find independence in an oppressive society. As a queer woman in a modern-day strip club, Gurlule sees this firsthand: “Men often wanted to know if this type of work turned me on,” she writes, “neglecting the possibility that I might, too, be captivated by the naked women swaying around us.”
In many ways, her experience shows how little has changed about sex work in Denver since the early days: “Commercial sex work offered many women a means of survival and better wages than that of menial factory work or other low-wage occupations,” wrote Ann Sneesby-Koch in an article for the History Colorado Museum. Women whose professional options were extremely limited could forge a semblance of agency in a male-dominated world through sex work, putting in less hours for more money. Despite the genuine dangers they faced, including the risk of violence and disease and the constant pressure of public opinion, many found it to be a logical trade-off.
Thank You, John
By Michelle Gurule
210 pages, hardcover: $28
Unnamed Press, September 30, 2025.
Historically, fearmongering and judgmentalism has pushed sex work into the shadows. And this bleeds into Gurule’s experience, too. With accessible yet searing prose, she paints a haunting picture of the shame and terror she felt, worrying how she’d be perceived if people found out what she did for work. But she isn’t entirely alone with her secret; her affable family knows about John, and she makes sure they, too, benefit from her good fortune, with takeout and gift cards. While Thank You, John tackles serious issues of class injustice and gendered morality in contemporary Colorado, it brims with tender-hearted humor. Gurule’s loving “salt of the earth Chicano father” delivers laugh-out-loud lines like, “Perv alert!” after learning John is several years his senior, and later asking his daughter, “Do you have daddy issues?” But his view on her arrangement remains pragmatic, rooted in the belief that all work is exploitative.
Thanks to her gig as John’s sugar baby, Gurule pays off her dental bills and finishes college without loans. Throughout the book, she acknowledges the reality of people born without generational wealth who grind away at jobs that require all-day sitting or standing or lifting or bending. In many ways, Gurule’s story is reminiscent of Maid, Montana writer Stephanie Land’s blockbuster memoir about the physical and emotional costs of making ends meet as a housekeeper. Ultimately, Thank You, John is a hopeful book, the kind of story Americans gravitate toward: that of an underdog, a young woman harnessing available resources to claw ahead, bootstraps and all. Luckily for us, Gurule — now based in Albuquerque — bought herself the time and space to write, and this gripping book asks why we don’t do a better job of celebrating the dogged tenacity of American sex workers.
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Photo illustration captions: A group of sex workers sit together at an outdoor table in the 19th century. History Colorado/Fred M. Mazzulla Collection, 2022.57.8066; Saturday’s club in Aurora, Colorado. JT Vintage/Glasshouse via ZUMA Wire; Brick parlor houses and brothels along Holladay Street, later Market Street, in early Denver, Colorado. History Colorado/Fred M. Mazzulla Collection, 2022.57.8533
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