“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. She is also one of Portland’s best-known strippers. Her memoirs are long awaited.

Last year while looking for a publisher, Viva discovered she had breast cancer. Viva wrote about her diagnosis and mastectomy in a piece for the Portland Monthly: The Last Days of My Left Breast She describes the piece as “a travelogue of my journey through the wilds of breast cancer, and an ode to a body part that always more than did its job.”

Now, recovering, and retired from the stage, having made her last appearance at Mary’s to the soundtrack of The Stones’ “Doncha Bother Me”, Viva publishes her memoirs Magic Gardens this month.

Audacia 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.

As if she weren’t busy enough, Ray has a new project: reading series The Sex Worker Literati is a free monthly event, co-hosted with David Henry Sterry, featuring “sex workers, former sex workers, and people who will read, monologue, perform, and shimmy their ways into your hearts, minds, and naughty bits.” The inaugural event is scheduled for August 6th at New York’s Happy Ending Lounge but if you are in San Francisco you can catch a reading featuring Carol Queen and Lorelei Lee at Modern Times Bookstore on August 4th.

Ray has also contributed to Sterry’s related Hos, Hookers, Callgirls and Rentboys, a recently published collection featuring writing from sex workers including Dr Annie Sprinkle (nsfw), the Happy Hooker Xaviera Hollander and Nina Hartley (nsfw)

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. …more

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).

Burana has also:

-been interviewed on CNN about her burlesque school for military wives: Operation Bombshell.

-written for the LA Times about a new policy under which families of fallen soldiers will be able to decide if outside photographs or videos will be allowed.

-Given a 4th of July reading on C-SPAN.

-And been interviewed by Diablo Cody for Smithmag.

Rachel 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. Rachel is also the host and curator of monthly erotic reading series In The Flesh, held at New York’s Happy Ending Lounge. …more

Lily Burana is the founding editor of Taste Of Latex, the author of stripper memoir Strip City and Western novel Try. …more

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. Fountain would later meet, have sex with and then interview this man on video and give a report to the following show’s audience. Inevitably the show caused something of a scandal in the press, with the Daily Mail even devoting an entire page to it under the headline “Curtain Up on Depravity” Following the uproar, Fountain, who claims to have slept with 5,000 men and 40 women, decided to find out if everyone in Britain was “as depraved and kinky as him or if he was utterly alone.” The result is Rude Britannia, one man’s journey around the highways and byways of sex.” …more

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. But now that Tokyo is bidding for the 2016 Olympics, …more

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. Such apparent lenience with this particular brand of discrimination has prompted journalists to ask “is gingerism as bad as racism?”  In response, British artist Jenny Wicks has photographed and filmed victims and produced an exhibition dedicated to red hair, its genetic and geographical aspects, and the social attitudes it inspires. More after the jump. …more