Former trans sex worker now minister
She gives voice to those rarely heard
Tiara Kelley woke up in a cardboard box behind a business on Orange Blossom Trail one morning in 2005. In the throes of a drug binge and having gone days without sleep, she’d been working as a sex worker to support her addiction to crack cocaine and so she’d have a place to sleep every night.
She wandered around that sweltering morning, walking into different businesses to ask for a cup of water. They all refused. Feeling isolated and desolate, she knew she had hit bottom.
“If I got sleep, it would be waking up, getting dressed and finding the first trick or first hit of crack that would get me awake that day,” she said. “There was several times when I’d be out there for 12 hours, trying to get enough money to pay for a hotel room so I didn't have to sleep under a bridge that night.”
Kelley had been in sex work for five years. What started as a way to make quick money had spiraled into something she was not expecting and could no longer control.
Kelley, 37, who is transgender, is now an ordained minister who advocates for women still working in the sex trade, many of them transgender.
Though the industry has changed — with more sex workers soliciting clients online rather than the streets — Kelley says she hopes to give the women to whom she ministers the support she never had.
“It was just chasing the money,” Kelley said. “All of the noise around me was drowning out the reality that I needed to get my [expletive] together, or else I was going to end up dead out there.”
Savannah Bowens, 30, said hearing Kelley’s story at church four years ago encouraged her to come out as a transgender woman.
“She’s a woman of straight integrity,” Bowens said. “She was so raw and down to the truth — it truly blessed my life.”
Kelley was born in Detroit to a religious but progressive household — her father a pastor, her mother an evangelist.
She says she grew up with both parents accepting her as transgender from a young age.
“I think beyond religion, my mother just loved me for who I was,” she said.
The family moved around several times so Kelley’s mother could escape an addiction to crack cocaine. Her mother was eventually able to get clean, and Kelley settled in Florida.
Kelley began using cocaine with two friends in 2000 — a habit she says quickly spiraled out of control. In the depths of her addiction, Kelley says she began seeing her mother’s cocaine use reflected in herself. She saw working the streets as a way to earn quick money.
“I watched what she went through and vowed that I’d never do it,” she said. “It creeps up on you. At that point, I was basically just working to get high.”
For the next five years, she worked the street, sometimes seeing as many as 10 clients every day. It was dangerous work, with Kelley once having been beaten within an inch of her life by a client outside of a motel on International Drive.
Facing a felony charge after a series of prostitution-related arrests in 2005, Kelley said it took sitting in a jail cell for her to realize she needed to make a change.
“Any time that I had a somewhat sober moment, that was my thought: ‘I gotta get out of this. This is not me,’ ” she said. “It took me being incarcerated for me to get a sober mind and realize that I need to make some changes.”
Kelley began working in the ministry after she was released from jail. She started her own ministry, Diamond in the Rough, after she was ordained by Affirming Ministries in 2007. She’s often referred to women who currently work in the sex trade. She’ll hand out condoms, tell them where to get tested or simply pray with them.
Kelley was recently driving near Orlando’s west side when she saw a woman and man arguing on the side of the street. She told the woman not to let anybody bother her.
The woman, whose name was Sasha Garden, approached Kelley and asked why she hadn’t seen Kelley around the area. When Kelley told Garden about her life, Garden said she hoped she’d have a similar story one day.
Garden never had the chance. She was found dead on July 19 behind an apartment complex southwest of Orlando. Her killing, which has not been solved, marked at least the fourth of a transgender woman of color in Florida this year.
After Garden’s death, the Orange County Sheriff’s Office initially described her as a man wearing a wig and a dress. Several media outlets also used the same language to describe Garden — choices Kelley said amounted to Garden being killed twice. The Sheriff’s Office later apologized for how it described Garden.
Since Garden’s death, Kelley has made it her mission to advocate for her memory and for an accurate portrayal of sex workers.
“If this is her story, I want it to be respected,” Kelley said. “Wherever you are is not the end of your story. The rest is still unwritten.”