Warning: This article discusses drug use, attempted sexual assault and may be upsetting for some readers.
Two men pulled up in a car next to 16-year-old Allan in central Wellington. It's the 1980s and the teenage sex worker is decked out in drag and ready to make some money. He didn't usually wear drag but he was on the run from the police and trying to disguise himself.
Normally he would never get in a car with two people, but they were young and "quite good looking" so he hopped in.
At the time Allan Heta Cleaver, now 56, was working as a street-based sex worker so was expecting a fairly straightforward transaction.
He started discussing business when the crackle of a police radio interrupted the conversation and his heart sunk - undercover cops.
Sex work was illegal at the time and Cleaver was expecting to be taken off to spend a night in the cells.
Instead, what happened was much worse.
"They took me out to Mount Vic and tried to rape me but they couldn't. I managed to get away and run down the road and out into the middle of the street.
"I had ripped stockings and stopped this car and they dropped me back into the middle of Wellington City. I straightened myself up, got my makeup on and went straight back out on the street."
It wasn't Cleaver's first run-in with undercover police but it was the worst. At the time police in Wellington generally left sex workers alone, which was very different from the police in Auckland - where Cleaver first started sex working two years prior when he was just 14 years old.
Newshub contacted the police about the allegations but they declined to comment.
Street-based sex work in the 1980s was a rough world that pushed the teen into the underbelly of society and saw him mingling with drug addicts, gang members and criminals.
A sense of belonging
It was a completely foreign world for Cleaver who had a fairly traditional upbringing in suburban Auckland. But it was the first time he felt he had a community. Growing up as an adopted, queer, Māori boy in Mount Wellington, he never really felt he belonged or had any connection to his whakapapa.
He got into trouble at school and ended up leaving home at 14 and couch-surfing with friends. He was too young to get a job or benefit and had no way of making money until he met Sheila.
Sheila knew the flatmates at one of the places he was crashing at. She was the first whakawahine transgender person he met and the first sex worker.
"She was sex-working and told me about it and I thought that was something I could do. I could make money, it gave me autonomy and I loved sex…I still love sex, it's a good thing. So I could get paid for something I enjoy," he told Newshub.
Even at 14 Cleaver had already started having sex and knew he liked it. He said he matured faster than everyone around him and had started going to clubs and pubs when he was just 12.
Sheila was a key reason he was able to work on the streets as a man. At the time in Auckland, transgender sex workers, known as Queens, ran the streets and cis women worked in brothels, the ships and massage parlours.
The Queens generally didn't allow men to work on the streets with them. But Sheila took him under her wing and showed him the ropes.
"She took me along Ponsonby Road and K Road and showed me clients driving past and how to work the streets, " he says. "That was my introduction and it was cool.
"I really enjoyed it but it pushed you into very unsafe situations. It pushed you into the criminal underworld of Auckland City and that underbelly."
He quickly found a community with the queer sex workers. They were the only other LGBQIA+ people he had ever met and for the first time, he felt like he belonged. It was a hard and fast life full of money, partying and eventually drugs.
At first Cleaver managed to avoid drugs but they were strongly tied to the lifestyle and after a few years he started using them.
He mostly used prescription drugs such as Rohypnol and Valium, which he was introduced to by another male sex worker he fell in love with.
It wasn't all partying and fun. It was also illegal and dangerous. Street-based sex work meant Cleaver had to get in a car with a stranger and trust they wouldn't assault or rob him.
"You had to read very quickly before you got into the car, is this person an undercover policeman? Am I safe? Has this person got ill intentions? What are their intentions? And you've got to make this decision in a couple of moments because you've got to drive away in case the police come back and arrest you.
"Then you go somewhere dark and dodgy and [you worry] are they taking me somewhere to set me up and someone else is waiting at that spot? So there are lots of different angles you have to read and then deal with."
Once Cleaver got in the car with someone he thought was a client, only for them to turn around and demand all his money.
"I said, 'All I've got is this' but I had a lot more hidden. I actually took off and managed to get out of the car and run down the road.
"I didn't really get too much of that happening thankfully. But other people have been assaulted and sexually assaulted."
Over the years he watched several burly men try to rob or assault Queens, only for it to all go wrong for them.
"You've got to remember, they may have looked like women but they can fight like men… and they've still got those male abilities.
"People would come up and [harass them] and then next minute they would be in a fight and you would see this guy getting beaten up by this Queen."
It was funny and exciting
"It was funny but it was also dangerous. That was part of the edginess and the excitement of it. Just that comradery of street-based sex work. Of being out there and everyone is all glammed up and looking fabulous."
Sex workers banded together to protect each other because police wouldn't help and sometimes were the ones harming them.
"You had that sense of belonging and community so definitely on the streets if there was any sense of trouble, everyone banded together really fast and looked out for each other. "
Cleaver was automatically pushed into a certain section of society because up until 1986 it was illegal for men to have sex with each other and sex work was also illegal.
"You were doing an illegal act of sex work that made you a criminal straight away and being homosexual, that's another illegal thing straight away so you were breaking the law double."
Police harassment
In Auckland during that time, the police were cracking down hard on sex workers. An undercover vice squad would roam the streets trying to catch out sex workers and arrest them, Cleaver said. He was arrested "often" while working in Auckland and spent many nights in the cells.
"They would do blitzes and we would have undercover police trying to set us up by pretending to be clients and all that kind of stuff.
"They had undercover police cars that would come up and you kind of knew who the undercover cops were because of the type of car, so that was often a telltale. But they also generally had a certain look about them, kind of clean-cut.
"But you could be in the car and then it's too late and then they would take you to the police station and charge you and lock you up. Often they either locked you up all night to keep you off the street or they would let you out in the early hours of the morning when they knew everyone had gone."
Most of the times he was arrested was when he was using drugs and he often woke up in the cells with no recollection of how he got there.
"I'd wake up and think, 'Oh my God, oh, God, I'm back here again. Oh, my God, What did I do?'"
Cleaver still has convictions for soliciting and prostitution from before sex work was decriminalised.
"They're still with me now so when I travel I have to take all my stuff with me and a copy of all my records. All of my criminal records and everything was from when I was under 20 but it still sits with me now."
Eventually, the arrests caught up with Cleaver and he went down to Wellington to avoid the police.
While in Wellington he started working in drag to avoid the police which opened up a whole new clientele to him - straight men.
After six months of working in Wellington, the police caught up with him and he moved back to Auckland.
He stopped dressing in drag when he got back. He never identified as trans and was no longer running from the cops so didn't feel any need to.
Sex work in a post-decriminalisation world
Twenty years ago in 2003, Aotearoa became the first country to decriminalise sex work when it passed the Prostitution Reform Act. It made sex work legal for all New Zealand citizens and permanent residents aged 18 and over, but it is still illegal for migrants on any kind of temporary visa.
Decriminalisation was life-changing for sex workers across the country, including for Cleaver. Instead of standing on the freezing streets in the middle of the night and playing a dangerous guessing game about which clients are safe, the 55-year-old now works out of a Nelson premises.
He works during the day and has control over his space and the clients he sees.
"I'm not restricted to just street based because that's where the danger is because you're pushed into the darkness when it's criminalised.
"Because you've taken that criminal aspect out of it, now you're not having to do something that has that feeling of, 'Oh I am doing something wrong and it's dodgy and seedy' because that adds a whole other element of darkness into it. But now it's in the light and my clients can come in and use my service."
But decriminalisation didn't just change the work, it is changing the social stigma sex workers face.
It's known as the world's oldest profession, but judgement and discrimination towards sex work have been around for a long time and are still prevalent.
Cleaver says it's slowly changing, and decriminalisation plays a huge part in that.
For him, decriminalisation was important because it meant he no longer needed to work in secret. He could be open about what he did without fear of arrest.
"We've been so led to believe what we do is horrible and nasty and wrong and not right [but] I know it's right. My whole life I have had to go against society and what society is telling me is okay and is not okay. I've known within my heart and my tikanga, my spirit, my wairua that what I do is a good thing.
"I want all my work delivered from a space of light and not in a dodgy, seedy manner. This is actually a beautiful thing."
Different clients
Decriminalisation has changed not only the type of clients Cleaver sees but the services they want too.
"I get such a wide range of clientele of ages, genders, all that sort of thing and it's beautiful because it's not just sex, it's intimacy. That is what everyone craves, it's that human-to-human contact.
"That's what people want and that goes beyond your shell, your exterior and what you look like, what you do, what you're wearing and all that kind of stuff. "
But it's not always emotional, people are still looking for the basics, which he's happy to provide as well.
"It's not all about emotional trauma either, sometimes it's a raw, physical f**k and that's okay too. People come for different stuff and it's just working out what they're there for and their boundaries and consent."
