With the recognition that sex workers constitute a key population at higher risk for the acquisition and dissemination of sexually transmitted infections (STIs) has come an appreciation of the central role that they might assume in policy solutions to the global HIV epidemic. Since then, the activist approach and to some extent, the academic gaze have shifted from mere disease control to a more comprehensive accounting of sex workers’ lives. Policies and strategies for interventions, however, have largely lagged behind. Most interventions treat sex workers as a focal point of an infection network, while the daily realities of women and men who do sex work are often placed on the back burner of analysis.