The Daily Rumpus
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From Stephen Elliott
Writer, performer, educator, and activist David Henry Sterry talks about the deep cultural roots of shame associated with the American sex industry, and how freeing it can be to bleed out the truth about our lives as buyers and sellers of sex.
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Antonia Crane sits down with sex blogger and erotica writer Lady Cheeky for an interview about her journey to passion, positive body image, and orgasm via True Blood.
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Years later, Bombay is still fresh in my mind and in my bones. As a visitor, I was naïve and lost. When I hear bells, I still see statues of Ganesh in a cool, stone temple and smell sandalwood incense.
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Daphne Gottlieb talks about Dear Dawn, a collection of letters written by Aileen Wuornos to her childhood friend from prison prior to her execution in 2002 .
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I was dying to interview Oriana Small about her porno memoir Girlvert.
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Every Halloween, the ghost of my 11 year-old self haunts me. She’s in the candy aisle at Rite Aid gorging on fun-size Twix bars. She’s wrapping candy corn lights around her neck. She’s trying on a vampire costume grinning through plastic fangs with a scraggly black wig in her eyes.
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I didn’t analyze production levels or consider marketing strategies. I didn’t say to myself, “Tonight you’re going to get with the jack-off program.” I was a dime-a-dozen girl doing a customer service job, and that job demanded more and more of me whether I liked it or not.
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To use a tennis analogy, I played all four corners in an attempt to interview clients. I hit up escort friends of mine with long-terms regulars, old clients who were articulate and thoughtful and guys I’d never met who had contacted me with sex work-related questions.
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The Polk Inn stood out in the tenderloin because of all the beige and glass next to junkies selling stolen bicycles and gizmos out front.
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The following interview may not be safe for some workplaces.
In 2010, in New Orleans, thousands of Saints fans danced wildly in the streets in black and gold jerseys and ribbons, blowing horns and smacking tambourines. I commuted from LA to New Orleans to dance at Penthouse Club during the playoffs and arrived to work early to watch the game at the bar with the other dancers.
Mardi Gras was uncharacteristically dismal in 2010. I met a group of curvaceous, saucy strippers at 10 a.m. on Bourbon Street, where the air was thick with pizza and Red Bull vomit, 24-hour margarita shops and hot dog stands.
[Editor's note: Some photos NSFW.]
I write between clients. There’s a yellow wall behind me, and fuzzy leopard print pillows on the floor.
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“Poetry never sleeps.”
-John Sinclair
The best music and art erupts from immense suffering and revolutionaries are guided by great feelings of love.
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A Conversation with Cheryl Strayed, who is against sex work, and Antonia Crane who agitates for sex worker rights, about sex work and feminism.
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This is a response for Bedelia, who commented profusely about sex work, house moms, and her experience as a hooker for ten years on an earlier piece I wrote for The Rumpus.
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New Orleans has a textured and macabre history when it comes to the sex industry, particularly regarding house moms–that hybrid of manager, referee and babysitter.
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Angela Eve and I work together at a topless joint on Bourbon Street. We spoke in the locker room while she brushed her hair and I applied gloppy eyelash glue.
Angela Eve’s the hardest working stripper at Rick’s. She lures convention goers and Saints fans from their seats with the ease of a seasoned pro and marches them into the $60 dance area all night long.
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When you have a gender, you enjoy certain privileges. You don’t get stared at, laughed at, egged or beat up on the street because of how you appear.
“The early messages in my family were that women are the source of power. They made the household decisions, held the purse strings, and if the woman of the house was not happy, no one was happy. “
Courtney Trouble’s no pedestrian pornographer. She’s a pale, femme, riot girl with squiggly tattoos and rocker bangs.
When I met Elle in San Francisco, we were sleeping with the same tattooed Puerto Rican stripper in AA. Ten years later, she contacted me on Facebook and asked if I’d like to work with her. “Work” would mean erotic sensual massage: naked strangers, happy endings, making out with Elle and cash.
If I’ve learned anything from interviewing JT, it’s that “no one ends up in the adult industry by accident” and “when you fall, you have to land somewhere.”
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“They thought to use and shame me but I win out by nature, because a true freak cannot be made. A true freak must be born.” –Geek Love by Katherine Dunn
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I met Mandy Morbid while working at Cheetahs in Hollywood, a bikini bar that attracts broke slackers with a soft spot for suicide girls and strippers who don’t think they’re strippers.
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Dancers always want to quit but rarely do. The cliché is that sex workers are stuck. But, it’s more complex than that. Dancers quit for years but always come back because leaving the sex industry is difficult.
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