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.

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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)

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Arguably one of the most famous former strippers, Diablo Cody published Candy Girl in 2005; her memoir of one year spent working in several Minnesota strip clubs and a peep show. Cody’s statement about strippers being the most fascinating animals she has ever “observed” is telling; throughout the book Cody’s attitude seems to be that she is different to ‘them,’ her fellow strippers, and beneath her self deprecating commentary there lies something of a superior attitude. Of course Cody, like many strippers, considers herself an “unlikely stripper” who at moments feels “at home, like I was meant to watch these glittering freaks”.

For an observer she has few insightful comments on strippers, her observations are limited to a string of remarks about silicone and sweeping, harmful, generalizations: “Most sex workers… cite a past incident of sexual abuse in trying to explain the illicit path they’ve stumbled upon.” And: “I envied the girls who’d been stripping for years, even though they all had hammertoes, coke-worn sinuses and intimacy disorders as a result.” The resulting impression is that of an attempt to reveal the dirty truth about stripping without going much further than a reinforcement of stereotypes. Candy Girl is well written and a very funny memoir but not the most perceptive comment on the industry. Although, to be fair, Cody never claims that figuring out stripping was her intention; she writes that she became a stripper “for sport”.

While in Candy Girl Cody’s workmates are usually little more than background noise, Nickie Roberts gives over half of her memoir to her colleagues as she realizes that it is “not enough just to tell my own story; other voices need to be heard too.” Published in 1986, Roberts’ The Front Line was written because, she says: “Everybody it seems has an opinion about the sex industry and what should or should not be done about it; everybody except us, that is.” The first half of The Front Line is Roberts’ own story and the second consists of monologues by her friends and co-workers: strippers, peep-show dancers, prostitutes and club managers. The diversity of the writing gives us a broader picture of the London sex industry during the 60′s and 70′s.

Roberts addresses a motivation often overlooked in writing about the sex industry: The money. All of the sex-working men and women in The Front Line have come down to London from ‘The North’ leaving behind a certain life of drudgery. Issues of class are notable and discussed angrily in this book. Roberts has scorn for the middle-class women who call her choices immoral: “Why should I have to put up with a middle-class feminist asking me why I didn’t do anything — scrub toilets, even? Rather than become a stripper?” And the Judges who one day are soliciting sex workers and the next handing down hefty fines and sending those same women back onto the streets to earn the money needed to pay them, their “legal pimps” back. Roberts highlights the hypocrisy of middle-class ‘morality’ and the reality of what lies underneath; “the middle classes are the weirdest,” she says. Roberts’ anger is palpable, and at times weighs down the book, which is understandable given that she was writing at a time when strippers were marginalized even more so than today.

Reading this book, although at times angry and upsetting, one gets a sense of solidarity between the men and women in the sex industry. Roberts and the others often talk of their respect for one another because they are in it together: “Every time one of us speaks out about our lives, another connection is forged between us, sex industry workers everywhere.”

Class remains an issue, with the majority of recent memoirs coming from white, middle class, educated women, sometimes dabbling in the sex industry to satisfy a curiosity or even for the purpose of publishing a book or thesis. Furthermore, class is at times used as a starting point; “why would a girl like this (educated, middle class etc…) do this?”  This narrow perspective of stripping has not gone unnoticed; when asked in a Rumpus interview what angle she would like to see in a book about stripping, Lily Burana answered that she would like to see one by a woman of color, “what’s up with all the whiteness?!”  she asked.

Like Roberts, Burana dedicates part of her book, Strip City, to the voices of other strippers but she attempts an even deeper understanding of stripping by delving into its history although this is not always easy: “Stripping is an outlaw profession, with but one prevailing philosophy: Take the money and run. As a result, the long and colorful history of exotic dance is overlooked and under-recorded.” Burana succeeds in meeting and sharing the stories of strippers from recent American history; from Dixie Evans, former ‘Marilyn Monroe of Burlesque’ of the 1950′s and creator of the yearly burlesque pageant Miss Exotic World, to Pillow who started stripping as a minor in 1970′s San Francisco, and Scarlett Fever who worked in Times Square between ’75 and ’86. Burana herself worked during some momentous points in stripping history; in the “dawning days of sex-positive feminism” at San Francisco’s Lusty Lady, and at the mid 90′s introduction of House-Fees and reclassification of dancers as Independent Contractors at The Mitchell Brothers’ O’ Farrell Theater, who she subsequently helped to bring a class-action lawsuit against.

The result of such a historical perspective is that the reader is witness to the changes that have occurred in the stripping industry; from choreographed routines and costumes in the old burlesque halls to it’s current incarnation of  hustle, competitiveness and “contact sport” in the corporate ‘Gentlemen’s Clubs’. “The atmosphere became more competitive,” says Pillow, “it became downright mean.”

Strip City begins with a statement similar to The Front Line: “While I’ve had ample exposure to what everyone else feels about stripping, what eludes me still… is how I really feel about it.” Burana doesn’t have an agenda to provide the last word on stripping or confer judgment upon the sex industry; her cross-country strip-trip and subsequent memoir are for her alone, it is a case of “needing to do this for myself.”

The success of Strip City, and it is one of the most respected stripper memoirs, is in its balance; as Burana says herself “I no longer have anything to prove… now I’m just here to bear witness, no illusions, no agenda, no filter of idealism.” This stance allows Burana to honestly illustrate what stripping is like, from the highs: “..indescribable bliss resting on the blade of a knife… I would be  helpless to try to explain it, but if you had ever known that sensation you’d never want to leave that warm, wet spot on the lip of the maw.” To the lows: “I regret knowing that some club owners and managers… refer to the dancers who work for them, and fill their pockets, as ‘bitches’ and ‘whores.’” Indeed Strip City is shot through with realizations and re-examinations of things previously missed while she was a stripper the first time around, thanks to her “selective vision.” Burana subsequently struggles with how stripping will be represented in her book and hesitates to include the bad stuff in the fear that negative information will be used against her, the clubs, the dancers and to advance a conservative agenda. Nevertheless she is honest: “Sure, I want to show the world that strippers can be capable, thinking, feeling people, able to set boundaries, to care for other people and ourselves. But taken too far, such emphasis on the positive casts me as a Paglian caricature — all triumph and no clue. When I think of all the times I huffed out, testily, ‘I’ve never been degraded! I’ve never been exploited!’ I wish I could reach back in time and put a hand over my own stupid mouth.” Burana doesn’t cheat her readers, she gives an honest account of the stripping industry.  The polarization of many debates on sex work overlook the fact that this is a complicated business; Burana shows us that it is not all good, not all bad and can not be summed up by either extreme of ‘empowering’ or ‘degrading’  and as such Strip City is the most honest stripper memoir I have read.

Early on Burana writes: “People look for themselves in books and movies. They count on those touchstones, not so much for gospel as affirmation that others have walked the same path. But for strippers there is no Giovanni’s Room, no Easy Rider, no Basketball Diaries, no Well of Loneliness. Perhaps if there were an intellectual tradition, a floozerati that inspired a body of work to consult and a philosophy to impart, I’d feel less marooned.” With stripping edging closer to the mainstream there are more and more works to consult, none may answer all our questions or share our view on the industry, but the body of work and shared experience assures us that others have been there too.

**

illustrations by Laurenn McCubbin

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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.

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Held on the third Thursday of each month, readings usually keep to the particular theme of the nights, which in the past have included ‘true sex confessions’, ‘erotic memoirs’, ‘GLBT erotica night’, ‘comedy sex night’ and ‘revenge of the sex columnists’, but on any night you can expect “erotic writers sharing stories to get you hot and bothered…from erotic poetry to down and dirty smut.”

In The Flesh expanded last year to include the West Coast on the second Wednesday of every month at Hustler Hollywood, Sunset Blvd. The May 13th event’s subject is Feminist Sex featuring a line up of authors and performers who “present a modern view of Feminist Sex that proves sexiness and feminism can go hand-in hand and is empowering to men and women alike”.

The next New York event takes place on May 21st and promises a “mix of steamy erotica, kept women, an orgasm quest, the mile high club, real-life sex adventures and an intriguing look at Superman’s fetish art” with readings from, among others, Anna David, Mara Altman and Jeremy Edwards as well as sex toy giveaways and complimentary candy and cupcakes.

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The Rumpus: There is a sense that becoming a military wife was a step into a foreign culture and you mention reading up on the available literature on the topic to prepare yourself; when you were writing the book did you have a particular reader in mind, were you consciously writing it for other military wives or for whom?

Lily Burana: It certainly was a step into a foreign culture for me! Given how alienated much of America is from the military nowadays, I understand that it is, in fact, a foreign culture to many. People always asked me tons of questions about being a military wife, and I welcome that curiosity. In some ways, I treated the writing of this book like the writing of a travel guide—Here’s what it’s like in This Strange, Exotic Place. I very much wanted to give total access to my life as a new Army wife, and take people through every step of the entry—from meeting my (future) husband and finding out he wasn’t necessarily anything like what I’d imagined an Army officer would be, to how you assimilate into the Army bureaucracy after your wedding, to the aches and pains of deployment, moving, and even post-traumatic stress disorder, which doesn’t visit every military household, but sure made itself a place in mine! So, I definitely had an investment in reaching out to civilians who are curious about what it’s like to be a modern military wife.

Additionally, I wanted to reach military girlfriends/fiancees/wives who would be interested in a book that goes beyond the readily available “How-To” books. There’s so much more to being a military wife than the mechanics of moving, deployment, reintegration (that’s what they call it when he comes home after deployment), and meeting and working with other soldiers, wives, and their families. There’s a whole emotional world that has largely gone unexplored in literature. That was what interested me most. Granted, it’s different for every military wife—there’s so much variety and so many different ways your life as a wife can go—that there was no way anyone could write “THE” military wife memoir, but there were certain things I wanted to express that I hadn’t yet seen expressed in any of the existing books that are more “how to” than “what it feels like.”

Rumpus: In your blog you mentioned the recent spate of fake memoir scandals making things difficult for memoir writers like yourself. Was establishing your bona fides in this book complicated by the necessary confidentiality of military affairs?

Lily Burana now

Lily Burana: You know, not really! That’s largely because if something is truly confidential, as in classified, even *I* don’t know it. As far as OPSEC and PERSEC (Operations Security and Personal Security), there wasn’t anything included in the book that violated Operations Security. It was okay to write about my husband’s deployments because they were in the past, so no one was left vulnerable and writing about it didn’t compromise anything. I do take certain precautions around personal security that I will leave out of the interview because it’s, um, you know, a security issue! Suffice it to say, what I write about is easy enough to verify—my husband really was deployed, and came home, and we really did live at West Point. When push comes to shove, it is VERY hard to sustain a lie about a military career because those claims can be verified, or disproved, with a minimum of effort.

There is, however, the not-small matter of writing about other military people and their business. I was careful to disguise people who appear in the book. One woman’s husband had an affair—or at least telling evidence of one at the time—and women I know keep coming up to me going, “Oh my god, it’s so-and-so, isn’t it?” And I’m proud to say they’re always wrong. That’s a gray area I’m happy to let be. And if you really need proof about my life, I’ve got it, right down to my therapist’s phone number and my DEERS card (military dependent’s ID).

Lily Burana then

Because my husband has 20 years experience as a military intelligence officer, he possesses a wealth of information that I will simply never have access to. It’s kind of like being married to one of the Men In Black, except the uniform is camouflage instead of a slick black suit and big shades. He doesn’t have a memory-erasing Neuralizer, though. If he did, there are a couple bad outfits that I would have had him erase from my memory.

Rumpus: In I Love a Man in Uniform you say; “Nowadays, you can’t watch a movie, TV show or video without some reference to stripping.” Do you think that stripping has entered the mainstream and lost its shock-factor? If so what has allowed this to happen and is it for the better or worse?

Lily Burana: It has edged closer to the mainstream as a titillating visual effect, but by no means is it a non-controversial business. There’s more visibility now than ever because of music videos, the Internet, and even pole dancing classes taught to housewives, but there’s only marginally more acceptance. I don’t think anyone, particularly a woman working as a stripper, should be naive about this. As a pop culture hook, we’re all “stripping? been there, done that.” But in day-to-day life, it can still carry a hefty social tariff and present a real professional liability down the line if you move into a more conservative career like teaching or white-collar corporate.

Rumpus: It seems like dozens of stripping memoirs sprung up in the wake of ‘Strip City’, is there any angle you would like to see in books about stripping that has not yet been approached?

Lily Burana: I’d like to see one by a woman of color. What’s up with all the whiteness?!

Rumpus: Your description of the strip club visit in Uniform is a little sad and you leave the club “thoroughly depressed.” Would it be accurate to say that you are somewhat disillusioned with the industry and the “Starry-eyed cultural critics (who) insist that in a strip club, the dancer has all the power”?

Lily Burana: Wow—that was just a spectacularly crappy night at the club. I think anyone with a beating heart would have come out of there feeling down in the dumps. That said, I’m still a big believer in the “art of the dance,” so to speak. I think stripping well is a genuine talent—not one that I possessed, I freely admit as a clod-hoppin’ fool—and there are some wonderful dancers out there who deserve full credit for their ability to entertain, enchant, and amaze. And I will never think differently about that. It hasn’t changed from the first time I ever saw a real strip club floor show in Las Vegas when I was nineteen, sitting slack-jawed at the bar with my “I’m Underage” bracelet around my wrist. A good stripper is a delight to behold.

I don’t think I’ve ever been particularly entranced by the business or social dynamics of stripping, like, ‘WOW, it’s so amazing and healthy for everyone and, by golly, nothing ever goes wrong! It’s just fun, fun, fun in a sparkly dress!’ I started in the sex industry in the days before it was even remotely “cool” (arguable status, even today) so I was never “illusioned” enough to become disillusioned. I think I’m now more candid about what’s good, what’s bearable, and what sucks.

Rumpus: What is your best stripping memory?

Lily Burana: Oh, there’s some real competition here! At the moment, I’m missing Alaska, so I’ll say the current best memory is the night I saw a stripper in the dressing room at The Great Alaskan Bush Company (I’m not making this up. Great club in Anchorage!). She had this HUGE black bruise on her thigh, so I asked her, carefully, what it was, and she was all, “Oh, I was shooting some nudes in this big stream that was full of salmon and one of them kept bumping into me!” It turns out that in late July, silver salmon, which are very aggressive, are milling around in streams and things, waiting for the perfect temperature to begin their spawn. They’re very feisty fish, and they can grow to over 20 pounds, so with one of them all hopped up and agitated swimming at you repeatedly, you can end up with a bruise the size of a softball.

For some reason, I cherish the memory of this girl nonchalantly telling this story of being so invested in taking nature pictures that she tolerated getting roughed up by a bored salmon. I don’t think that happens to accountants.

Rumpus: In Try you write about ‘Buckle Bunnies’ and in I Love a Man in Uniform there is mention of ‘tag chasers.’ Is there an equivalent in the stripping world?

Lily Burana: Yep. They’re called “customers.” Haha. Sorry, couldn’t resist! I know, I’m terrible.

Rumpus: In Uniform you describe tour buses pulling over to point at the cadets at West Point “as if they were set dressing, and corral them into posing for pictures”, this reminded me of certain points in Try where the rodeo cowboys were impelled to put on something of a show for the tourists looking for the ‘West.’ I got the impression that there was a kind of romantic idea about both the cowboys and cadets, quite different to reality; did you notice any similarity between the West and West Point in this respect?

Lily Burana: Sure! We simply love our Mythical Manly Men—cowboys, soldiers, firemen, policemen (wait, is this starting to sound like I’m describing The Village People?). I’m always, always interested in the truth behind a myth—even a mythic identity, and separating out the threads of truth and fiction that sustain that myth. A myth can’t survive without its element of truth, but there’s always so much that stays out of view most of the time, and I like teasing that out. I’ll never get tired of it—it feels like the ultimate detective work.

We respect, more than anything else, men who work very hard, however, I think we lose sight of how hard these Manly Men really do work—usually tirelessly, often thanklessly. That doesn’t mean they’re not proud of what they do, or that they’d trade it away for something easier, but I’m interested in those unguarded moments when they’re not fulfilling the image requirement of their uniform—be it camouflage or chaps—and showing something else. Something more authentic to how they feel as an individual, in a particular moment, or series of moments. When they break out of the role.

Rumpus: In one chapter of I Love a Man in Uniform you describe relationships between women and the women in uniform that they love, are you optimistic for advances in the acceptance of same sex relationships within the military?

Lily Burana: I am optimistic. The military is a huge organization that is conservative on many levels, and therefore moves slowly and cautiously, however, that doesn’t mean that change is out of the question. It’s simply a matter of pacing, timing, and governmental support. In the past decade, we’ve seen such tremendous movement in our culture toward acceptance of same-sex relationships, I feel that the military simply will not be able to ignore it as an issue. One of the things that surprised me most as an Army wife was seeing how many otherwise “conservative” soldiers have a very progressive, tolerant view of their fellow soldiers who are non-heterosexual and struggling to make their way through their career within the constraints of Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell.

Rumpus: Is Operation Bombshell still going strong? How does one get you to teach a burlesque class on base?

Lily Burana: Op Bombshell is very much alive and well! I just received a generous donation from a Secret Hollywood Source, and Pin-up Girl Clothing in Los Angeles is hosting a big burlesque benefit with Diablo Cody as a special guest in Los Angeles on May 15th. I teach at the wives’ request, so it’s really no more complicated than a wife emailing me with her interest in setting up a class and the two of us figuring out when and where to host the group. I don’t do a background check or anything—if you tell me you and a group of friends are all waiting at home for your deployed husbands, I believe you!

Rumpus: What are you writing next? And do you intend to return to writing fiction?

Lily Burana: I’m doing the silliest thing possible–I’m writing a screenplay. Fiction, of a sort. I’m calling the project “COMING SOON (to a slush pile near you!)”

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