I worked at an escort agency. This is how it changed my attitude to sex

For a long time, I believed intimacy was for other bodies. Healthier bodies. Prettier bodies. Whole bodies. Mine – diagnosed with Crohn’s disease at 13 – didn’t seem to qualify.

When you live with a chronic illness, your body doesn’t feel like yours. It’s a vessel of pain and unpredictability. It bloats, bleeds, scars. You miss milestones – first kisses, first dates – replaced with blood draws and a growing list of medications you can’t pronounce. While my friends were figuring out how to flirt, I was learning how to manage a colostomy bag. My body felt like a ticking time bomb, and desire? That was something reserved for someone else.

Jade May: “The belief that chronic illness and sensuality can’t coexist stayed with me well into adulthood.”

Crohn’s is an invisible illness. From the outside, I looked “fine”. But internally, my body was waging war against itself. I was exhausted all the time. I had a complicated relationship with food. I battled bloating, pain, bleeding, surgeries, and all the shame that comes with a digestive disease. While my friends explored dating, I was in hospital wards trying to work out whether this round of medication would leave me with “moon” face or hair loss. I didn’t just lose confidence – I lost any sense that my body could be desirable.

That belief – that chronic illness and sensuality can’t coexist – stayed with me well into adulthood. It wasn’t until years later, working behind the scenes at one of Sydney’s most-exclusive escort agencies, that something inside me began to shift. I wasn’t a sex worker myself, but I handled bookings, marketing, client conversations – the unglamorous admin that keeps a high-end agency running smoothly. What started as a side hustle born out of curiosity, became a window into a hidden truth: everyone wants to be touched. Everyone craves connection. Everyone desires. And I do mean everyone.

I began to see the sheer breadth of people seeking connection — and the assumptions I’d internalised about desire, age, ability, and worth started to unravel. I spoke to clients in their 20s and clients in their 80s. One elderly gentleman in a wheelchair had his adult daughter arrange the booking for him. Another, a middle-aged man with motor neurone disease, needed help with logistics, but still sought intimacy. A respected psychiatrist would ask for “absolutely no talking”. A retiree just wanted to be cuddled and told that everything was going to be okay. Some requested elaborate fantasies. Others asked for nothing more than to feel normal – seen, desired, held.

It was, frankly, beautiful. And confronting. Because it shattered something I’d long believed: that only certain people get to be sexual. That desire is reserved for the abled, the attractive, the young. That illness cancels it out.

These clients weren’t ashamed of their needs. And neither were the escorts. There was no judgment. No awkwardness. Just honest, practical conversation around pleasure, intimacy, logistics and respect. It was the opposite of the silence I’d become accustomed to – the kind of silence that wraps around chronic illness like shrink wrap. You’re taught to downplay it. To mask. To be grateful you’re alive, but never to suggest you still want more – especially not sex.

But watching clients navigate these bookings, often with vulnerability and humour, was a turning point. I realised: if they believed they still deserved pleasure, why didn’t I?

It didn’t happen overnight, but it sparked something. I stopped seeing my body as broken and started seeing it as complicated – and still worthy. I began questioning the cultural messages I’d swallowed: the myth of the “asexual disabled person”, the idea that people like me were supposed to settle for gratitude instead of joy. I wanted joy. I wanted intimacy. I wanted my body to feel like mine again.

Reading had always been an indulgence of mine – an escape from the long hospital stays. During my sickest years – when I was too unwell to leave the house, too exhausted to socialise, and too embarrassed to date – I turned to romance fiction. It began as escapism. Paranormal romance, fantasy, enemies to lovers. But eventually, I discovered the spicier stuff. High-heat books where women took control of their pleasure, or handed it over willingly. Books about power, kink and messy, complicated intimacy. These weren’t just guilty pleasures. They were medicine.

Through them, I explored the parts of myself I thought were lost to illness. I learned what I liked, what I fantasised about, what made me feel powerful. I learned that desire didn’t have to mean perfection – it could mean vulnerability. Surrender. Curiosity.

And eventually, I started writing those stories myself.

Now, as a romance author, I write the kinds of stories I needed in my twenties: kinky, sexy, angsty books with complicated women who don’t wait to be “fixed” before they claim love or pleasure. I write high-heat contemporary romance because I want chronically ill and disabled readers to see themselves not just as survivors, but as lovers. As people with rich, erotic inner lives. As people who can be deeply desired – and who are allowed to desire in return.

Writing these stories is not just an act of creative expression – it’s an act of rebellion. Because the erasure of disabled desire is still everywhere. TV shows reduce us to side characters, if we’re there at all. Sex education rarely includes us. The assumption that illness means celibacy still lingers.

And yet, desire is everywhere. It’s human. It’s universal.

When I tell people I used to work at an escort agency, they often blink. There’s discomfort. Curiosity. Politeness.

JADE MAY

We see this more clearly than ever right now. Erotic fiction and romance sales are booming, especially among women. Romance was the highest-grossing fiction genre in 2024, and seven of the top 10 bestselling titles in Australia were romance, most of them spicy. Meanwhile, 94,000 Australians live with Crohn’s disease alone — and yet how often do we see ourselves in those stories? How often do we read about disabled people having complex, joyful intimate lives?

We need more narratives that allow chronically ill and disabled people to be seen as whole — not in spite of our bodies, but within them.

When I tell people I used to work at an escort agency, they often blink. There’s discomfort. Curiosity. Politeness. But the reality is this: seeing people seek out intimacy – regardless of age, ability, gender or background – taught me more about human nature than any health professional ever could.

It showed me that pleasure is not a luxury. It’s not a reward for being healthy. It’s a human right. And it’s not just about sex. It’s about connection. Affection. Being met in the middle. Being wanted, even when you’re tired or stitched or bloated or scarred. Especially then.

If I could go back to the version of myself curled up in a hospital bed at 15, ashamed of her body, I’d tell her this: you’re still allowed to want. You’re still allowed to be wanted.

And you’re not alone.

Because even in the quiet corners of society – between inboxes and booking forms and whispered stories – there are people living full, erotic, complicated lives. People navigating pleasure with grace, humour, creativity and zero apology.

I think about that middle-aged man with MND. About the father whose daughter organised a booking out of love, not embarrassment. About the woman who told me she’d rather pay for intimacy on her own terms than sit through another mediocre date. They changed me.

They reminded me that intimacy isn’t about having the perfect body. It’s about showing up in the one you have, and believing it’s enough.

So if you live with an invisible illness, and you’ve ever wondered whether desire still belongs to you, let me offer this: it does.

It always has.

Seduced by Eden by Jade May is out now.

Get the best of Sunday Life magazine delivered to your inbox every Sunday morning. Sign up here for our free newsletter.