This is a specific version of Living a Double Life in which that second life is being a sex worker of some kind: stripper, prostitute, High-Class Call Girl, cam girl, phone sex operator, rental Dominatrix, Compensated Dating, etc. This character is primarily concerned with keeping their two lives separate, or at the very least, keeping their sex work from bleeding into their non-sex work activities. They might have a more typical 9-to-5 job that they work most days and engage in sex work for the "nightshift." Or sex work is their primary job, however, they try to keep that information from those in their life that are unaffiliated with the industry.
If troubles arise—and they always will—it'll be because this character can no longer keep their two lives separated. Often, the issue will be a character who knows them in their "daytime" mode finding out about their "nighttime" activities and judging or criticizing them for it. Sometimes this will go so far as publicly outing them and opening them up to public ridicule and Slut-Shaming. Frequently the character who finds out is a Love Interest, adding romantic rejection to the betrayal. Another common problem is when the seedier aspects of being a sex worker encroach on and threaten this character's public lifestyle and image. Controlling pimps, obsessive clients, and police officers trying to identify and arrest them may harass them even when they aren't on the clock. Any incriminating Shady Lady of the Night-related activities might demand that they engage in criminal activity, even in their daytime mode. Pictures, videos, and other recordings of them while working can get leaked, jeopardizing their careers.
Note, what's important to this trope is that the character must be actively trying to hide the fact that they are a sex worker from others. A character simply not knowing someone else is a sex worker and finding out about it later doesn't count unless the character was trying to conceal that information. Similarly, a character being a sex worker as a side gig doesn't automatically count if they're not trying to hide it from others.
Sub-Trope of Living a Double Life. May overlap with Seemingly-Wholesome '50s Girl and Naughty by Night. Compare Single Mom Stripper and Don't Tell Mama, the former having some examples involve the mom trying to conceal the fact that she strips from her family (especially her children) and the latter overlapping if the child is trying to hide their sex work from their parents. Contrast Unproblematic Prostitution, as the job being treated as problematic in-universe is part of the reason why these characters feel the need to hide doing it in the first place. A popular variant for teen dramas focuses on a Troubled Teen or School Idol becoming this trope. See Porn Creator Going Mainstream for cases where sex workers later try to make it in Safe For Work entertainment.
Examples:
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Anime & Manga
- Booty Royale: Never Go Down Without a Fight!: Recurring character Goujima Sara uses her career as an extreme porn star to fund her undergraduate degree in physics under her birth name Kojima Akiko. She's proud of her porn career and considers it her real identity, but still conceals it from the other students and her professors behind a Clark Kenting disguise.
- SPY×FAMILY: Yor Briar is a subversion. By day, she's a civil servant working at city hall, but she's often called away to give people "massages", leading some to spread rumors that she moonlights as a prostitute. They're half-right: Yor is indeed Living a Double Life, but as a Professional Killer known as the "Thorn Princess," with those "massages" being assassination orders.
Comic Books
- Sin City: Becky is an Old Town Girl (Old Town being the red-light district of Basin City run by a Band of Brothels) who apparently lives with her mother, but keeps her job as a prostitute hidden from her. This is one of the reasons why Becky ends up betraying Old Town, as she refused to move her mother to Old Town for protection because it would expose her secret.
- Watchmen: The woman who lives next door to Rorschach is a single mother and prostitute who hides her work from her young kids. The fact that she tries to hide this from her kids actually keeps Rorschach from killing her (despite her lying about him trying to rape her to the news), because it proves to him that she cares about her kids, unlike his mom who was also a prostitute, but didn't shield him from her work.
Films — Live-Action
- Angel (1984): Molly is a quintessential 15-year-old good girl and model student who also secretly is a teenage prostitute with a close-knit group of other sex workers and performers on the street. The careful separation she has between her two lives begins to fall apart when a necrophiliac Serial Killer starts going after local prostitutes, with Molly and her friends as the next targets.
- Belle de Jour is about a picture perfect Housewife who is a secret masochist, craving to be sexually dominated. On the recommendation of a friend, she begins to prostitute herself during the daytime, while her husband works and is none the wiser.
- Cam: Alice doesn't tell her brother or mother that she's a cam girl for fear that they'll judge her. This becomes a problem when Alice is replicated and her online and real lives start to collide, and one of her brother's friends finds videos of fake-Alice camming and gets punched for laughing about it. Her mother doesn't take it well, but her brother is much more understanding.
- From Straight As To XXX is about a young woman named Belle starring in porn movies to pay her college tuition and how difficult her life becomes once her secret career is revealed to the students of her campus.
- The Gauntlet: During a phone conversation with her mother, Mally, the prostitute Ben is escorting so she can testify in an upcoming court case in Phoenix, mentions her work as a secretary, indicating that Mally is hiding her actual work from her mother.
- Guilty of Romance: Mitsuko is a professor at a university during the day and a prostitute by night. She's managed to keep her prostitution so secret that it is only discovered during the police investigation about a brutal murder in a Red Light District of Shibuya that is the main framing device of the film.
- Half Moon Street: Lauren Slaughter, Ph.D. works at a Middle East policy institute in London, barely scraping by because it doesn't pay well. She secretly starts moonlighting as a High-Class Call Girl at the Jasmine Agency and gets caught up in life-threatening political plots and intrigue as her clientele ends up being wealthy diplomats, policymakers, and foreign dignitaries.
Literature
- A Song of Ice and Fire: Shae is required to hide the fact that she's a prostitute after Tyrion hires her as his personal mistress and brings her to King's Landing. This is in spite of an explicit command from his father, Tywin, to stop hiring sex workers and Tywin threatening to have any sex worker he catches Tyrion with killed. She works as a maid in the castle so Tyrion can keep her close by for secret rendezvous.
Live-Action TV
- Baby: The Very Loosely Based on a True Story series focuses on wealthy School Idol Chiara befriending Troubled Teen Ludovica at her elite high school and falling into the world of teen prostitution with her. Chiara struggles with maintaining her good girl, Academic Athlete public image for the entire series until she publicly confesses to being a prostitute at the very end.
- Castle:
- In "The Mistress Always Spanks Twice", the murder victim Jessica was a college student doing her thesis on bondage who was secretly doing the bondage herself as the dominatrix Mistress Venom.
- In "Love Me Dead", Scarlett is secretary to the murder victim, a NY Assistant District Attorney. The detectives discover she is secretly part of a prostitution ring, which the victim ran on the side. She later turns out to have colluded with a career criminal to kill the victim so she could take over the prostitution ring, then killed the criminal to take the fall through a Wounded Gazelle Gambit.
- Desperate Housewives: Maisy Gibbons keeps the fact that she's an escort a secret from her Stepford Suburbia of Fairview. It only comes out when Bree learns that her husband, Rex, is one of Maisy's clients.
- Euphoria: After her hook-up with Wes is posted on the internet, Kat decides to make the most out of an awful situation by using her new internet fame to become a Dominatrix cam-girl. She is unexpectedly good at it and starts raking in a lot of money, buying herself a new sexed-up wardrobe and adopting a confident persona to go with it, all while keeping it a secret from her friends and Love Interest, who are left wondering where this new money and confidence is coming from.
- Forensic Files: In the episode "Deadly Knowledge", Tina Biggar was doing a college thesis on HIV and AIDS in sex workers when she became a call girl. She became a valued employee for the escort service and later quit her job as a waitress because she was making more money as a call girl, all while keeping this information hidden from her family, friends, and boyfriend. Sadly, she was murdered by one of her clients.
- The Killing: Rosie's aunt Terry is revealed to be a sex worker who kept it quiet from her family (especially her judgmental sister, Mitch, who views her as a screw-up), and it's implied that Rosie contemplated sex work (it's ambiguous if she went through with it) to get the money to leave town. Since Rosie would've only been a teenager, she hid it due to legal problems. Though Terry does face condemnation when it's revealed that she's a sex worker, it's implied that the main reason she kept quiet about it was because she was in love with one of her clients and killed Rosie to protect him — though she didn't know it was Rosie at the time.
- Law & Order:
- In "Girlfriends," a college student is found murdered. The cops find items in Bridget's room that are too expensive for her given her reported job at the campus store. One clue leads them to a bar where the bartender recognizes her from a picture and says she is a sex worker. One of her college friends, also in the same prostitution ring, begs the detectives not to tell her parents.
- In "Working Mom," the victim made company card charges to two well-to-do soccer moms whose "interior design" business is a front for escorting. One's expensive, niche lipstick brand is found to be a match to traces on his body, leading to her arrest. It is speculated that McCoy achieved her conviction by Slut-Shaming her for being a sex worker.
- Scandal: Season 1, Episode 2 "Dirty Little Secrets" sees Olivia & Co. hired to protect Sharon Marquette, D.C.'s most powerful Madame for High Class Call Girls, from a life sentence in prison for pimping. The investigation reveals that President Fitzgerald's frontrunner for Supreme Court nominee is on the Madame's client list, much to the nominee's surprise and frustration since he claims to have never even heard of Madame Marquette. The Reveal is his wife was a call girl on the first day of her job when they met at a bar. She never revealed this to him, instead paying for their "sessions" (re: dates) herself and even using the money she made to help put him through law school, all while telling him that she was just "working the night shift." Long-retired, she planned to take that Dark Secret to her grave, but she is now forced to tell her husband the truth to get him to withdraw his name from consideration to protect his reputation.
- Twin Peaks: Laura Palmer is the School Idol of her high school, so her little town of Twin Peaks is turned upside down when her body turns up wrapped in plastic, her having been murdered. Over the course of the series, you learn that hidden from her friends and family, Laura was a drug-addicted, Troubled Teen prostitute.
Music
- Michael Jackson: In the music video for "Who Is It?", Jackson discovers a nametag for someone named "Alex" in his girlfriend's room and suspects that she may be cheating on him. As the rest of the video shows, she's secretly a High-Class Call Girl who's slept with multiple men and women while dating Jackson, and "Alex" is one of many aliases that she uses with her clients to make her harder to track down.
Theatre
- La Nona: Martita is heavily hinted to be a sex worker. At first, it's something milder —like being a waitress or escort— that still requires her to "take night shifts at the pharmacy". She becomes a full prostitute when her family's situation worsens and there's barely any money to get by. This is indicated by the fact that her shifts (now "at a bakery") take longer, she returns more tired, and she eventually contracts a fatal sexually transmitted disease. Her loving family is grateful for the much-needed money she provides them but remains none the wiser until the very end.
Video Games
- Persona 5: Joker's homeroom teacher Ms. Kawakami moonlights as a meido-style call-girl. She does this to pay the relatives of a kid she once tutored who died tragically, as they are suing her for his death. Although she's never explicitly stated to have sex with her clients, her profession is still considered a form of Platonic Prostitution, with her arriving at clients' homes to cook and clean for them while wearing a maid outfit. When Joker first finds out about her second job, she has him promise to keep it a secret, as anyone finding out about what she does after school would obviously be scandalous.
- Yandere Simulator: Kokona is secretly engaging in Compensated Dating to pay off her father's debts. If this information is revealed to the rest of the student body of her high school, it leads to her being bullied and being Driven to Suicide.
Web Comics
- A long-term subplot in Moon over June concerns Hatsuki 'Hats' Akagawa (later Winters), her steady upward progress in academia from undergrad to mathematics professor, and her concurrent efforts to keep people at Greenbird University from connecting her to the often perverse lesbian fetish porn she continues to perform in. Well before things come to a head Hats avoids showing her face on campus without wearing a Fat Suit rather than give up on a rather lucrative side-job/hobby she honestly and greatly enjoys.
Web Video
- Gloom: Played for Laughs in the "She did AWFUL things to ESCAPE JAIL... in BitLife" video, when her character Amelia gets a job as an escort. She is also very stupid, so when she attempts to hide her job from her much smarter but crazier boyfriend Logan, all she can say is that she paints giraffes for a living. He questions this, but she changes the subject every time. She also goes out of her way to not make a big deal out of it when they discuss the subject of the Fake Orgasm because she doesn't want to give any hints about being an escort.
Western Animation
- In the American Dad! episode "G-String Circus", Stan, in an effort to convince Hayley that she should listen to his advice, attempts to get strippers out of their current job by having them run a laundromat. When this inevitably fails, he ends up becoming a stripper himself so that he can pay off the debts that the laundromat has incurred. Naturally, Hayley finds out after she goes to the strip club and sees Stan stripping with a painter outfit under the alias of "Michaeldangalow"
Stan: Hayley, this isn't how I wanted you to find out, but your daddy is an excellent painter.
- King of the Hill: In "Transnational Amusements Presents", a "foot doctor" convinces Peggy to let him take pictures of her especially large feet for a website under the guise of "empowerment" for large-footed women. It turns out it's actually a foot fetish porn site, but she continues as it makes her feel better about her foot size while keeping it a secret from Hank (using flimsier and flimsier excuses while she's really attending the Sleazy Photoshoots). She ultimately learns a Be Yourself Aesop and tells Hank, who threatens the "doctor" into taking down the website.
