A selection from Mack Friedman's Strapped for Cash: A History of American Hustler Culture. This selection of Friedman's broader exploration of hustlers in the United States tells many forgotten stories of the hookers and hustlers in the streets and clubs of the 1950s and 1960s. It is a tale of how informal networks of self-defense and mutual aid allowed for gender-variant hustlers to survive and revolt against the society that was killing and imprisoning them, of the complicated feelings of hookers themselves about their work, and about how the counterinsurgency of the police, social services, and redevelopment smashed these networks to recuperate these struggles and convert them into paltry reforms and 'transsexual advocacy". (From Introduction)