The Daily Rumpus
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From Stephen Elliott
“I’m a stripper, rocker, bartender, and writer. I had a lot of plans last year, but none of them involved breast cancer. The disease sidetracked my livelihood, threatened my life, and forced me to reinvent my chest. So far, I’ve lived to tell the tale.”
-Viva Las Vegas
Portland legend Viva Las Vegas has fronted a punk-rock band, Coco Cobra and the Killers, appeared in a couple of Gus Van Sant films and written for The New York Times and Village Voice.
...moreAudacia Ray is an admirably prolific activist, author, blogger, director and producer. She was formerly Executive Editor at $pread Magazine, co-founded the Sex Work Awareness advocacy organization, is Program Officer for the Online Communications and Campaigns division of the International Women’s Health Coalition and an adjunct professor of Human Sexuality at Rutgers University.
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Early on in her stripper memoir Diablo Cody declares “strippers are the most fascinating, inscrutable animals I’d ever observed.” If the number of stripper memoirs that have appeared in the past few years are anything to go by, publishers agree. For a marginalized profession strippers are surprisingly willing to publish their stories.
Back in April The Rumpus interviewed Lily Burana.
Since then she has been busy promoting her recent memoir I Love A Man In Uniform with a book tour that stopped in several US cities and military installations (although not West Point, where her reading was canceled for dubious reasons).
...moreRachel Kramer Bussel has written a sex column for the Village Voice, edited a number of anthologies including the Best Sex Writing series, Spanked: Red Cheeked Erotica, He’s On Top, She’s On Top and Dirty Girls and has had her own writing published in Best Lesbian Erotica and Best Women’s Erotica, amongst others.
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Lily Burana is the founding editor of Taste Of Latex, the author of stripper memoir Strip City and Western novel Try.
Tim Fountain has made a career out of talking about sex, most famously in his 2005 sell-out one-man show ‘Sex Addict’. In a sort of reality show built around Gaydar, Fountain would go on stage every evening and, using the Internet and a large screen, encourage audience members to choose his partner for the night.
If you have seen photographs of neon-soaked Tokyo streets, you have most likely seen Shinjuku, and if you know anything about Shinjuku, you will know Kabuki-cho. Kabuki-cho is Tokyo’s notorious red-light center, Nobuyoshi Araki’s ‘Lucky hole’. A stroll through this district is a hedonistic assault on the senses; vying for your attention are the Hostess bars, Image Clubs Pink Salons and the ubiquitous Yakuza members, touts and barkers.
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Being a red-head can be tough, at least in the UK where ginger gene carriers are relentlessly heckled with such epithets as ‘ginger nuts’ ‘carrot top’, ‘ginge minge’, even ‘ginger bollocks’ to name just a few. Newspapers reported last year of a Newcastle family so tortured that they had to flee their homes, the last resort after even their council suggested they dye their hair.