Sterry’s memoir, Chicken: Self-Portrait of a Young Man for Rent, sold for six figures one lucky afternoon in 2000 and became an international best seller that was translated into ten languages. Not only is Chicken a heart-punching story about seventeen-year-old Sterry getting sucked into the sex industry while attending a fancy, private high school, it is also about a homeless kid in Hollywood with acting aspirations and negligent parents, digging food out of a trash can to eat. It’s a story that kicks with loneliness, vulnerability, humor, and terror. Chicken doesn’t read like a confession, but sings its redemptive heartbeat.

I expected Sterry to be brittle after reading his stories, but he is everything but. While discussing the publishing industry, words like “Zen” and “karma” came up. “After Chicken happened,” Sterry said, “I swore I would help anyone who asked.” Another rare, beautiful thing about Sterry is that decades after he left the sex industry, he remains dedicated to the stories of sex workers. His first anthology, Hos, Hookers, Call Girls, and Rent Boys: Professionals Writing on Life, Love, Money, and Sex, was featured on the front cover of the Sunday edition of the New York Times Book Review, and his follow-up to that book, Johns, Marks, Tricks and Chickenhawks: Professionals and Their Clients Writing About Each Other, contains stories by people who have bought and sold sex (including one by me, “The Man I Gave A Handjob in West Hollywood Will Surely Blow His Brains Out Before I See Him Again,” which was snatched up from my blog by Stephen Elliott in 2010 and appeared in a different form on The Rumpus at that time).

In addition to being a writer, Sterry is a performer, muckraker, educator, activist, and book doctor. He also authored The Essential Guide to Getting Your Book Published with his ex-agent and current wife, and his novella, Confessions of a Sex Maniac, was a finalist for the Henry Miller Award. He has written books about working at Chippendales Male Strip Club, the teenaged brain, how to throw a great pajama party if you’re a tween girl, a patricidal mama’s boy, and World Cup soccer.

Sterry and I talked on the phone about the deep cultural roots of shame associated with the sex industry and how freeing it can be to bleed out the truth about our lives as buyers and sellers of sex. We discussed the possibility of being loved and the necessity of giving voice to our secrets, even when the probability of being reviled is high—especially because it is so.

 ***

The Rumpus: Your first anthology, Johns, Marks, Tricks and Chickenhawks: Professionals and Their Clients Writing About Each Other, a collection of essays by sex workers and clients, is a follow up anthology to Hos, Hookers, Call Girls and Rent Boys: Professionals Writing on Life, Love, Money, and Sex (now in its fifth printing). How did you procure so many essays from clients and sex workers?

David Henry Sterry: When we did Hos and Hookers, it came out of two different avenues I was pursuing. First, I was doing a workshop in [San Francisco] centered on sex workers who had been arrested. Many were former drug addicts and street people. Every Tuesday for two years, we did this workshop. At the same time, I was being introduced into the sex worker artist/activist world because of my book Chicken. I did a one-man show in SF and Annie Sprinkle was in the audience. I was floored she came. Then I toured with the Sex Workers Art Show, where I meet this huge community of people. Hos are good networkers—you have to be. Very generous people in that world.

The two worlds had similarities: educated organizers, artists, and hard workers. And others were high school dropouts. The stories they told were very different. There is a great chasm—the abolitionists and the decriminalizationist. They hate each other. There are five-dollar blowjob-givers and five-thousand-dollar-a-night courtesans who get flown to Dubai in one book. I wanted to create that book. Once we put that book out, it blew up. So, I started a reading series called Sex Worker Literati, every month in NYC. I met a whole other crop of writers. People contacted me bummed that they weren’t included in the first book. So, people came to me after I put the word out and I thought, Wouldn’t it be great to have a book of people who sold sex with people who bought sex together in one book?

Rumpus: Why do you think it’s so hard for people to admit they have paid for sex? What does this mean culturally? Emotionally? Personally? I think that in the U.S., there is underlying respect towards anyone who hustles because of the materialistic nature of our culture, but also, historically, women mostly occupy the adult industry, so the current of sexism and disrespect also runs deep.

Sterry: I didn’t realize the enormous stigma attached to the statement to say, “Yes, I hire someone to have sex with me.” Easier to get people to admit they are a “whore” than to get people to admit they hired a whore. So I was looking for those stories.

I posted everywhere. I asked my friends. They were liberals, pro-sex artists, and yet none of them would admit it. I thought, Interesting. Here’s a billion dollar industry with no clients. A few gay men would say it publicly. It’s more accepted in the gay male culture for some reason, maybe because it’s so hard to be gay to begin with, they already are used to taking risk rejection in society to some degree. The worst thing you can say in any culture is “your mother is a whore,” but I agree with you that there is a certain respect for the hustler, somewhat begrudging towards someone who can make a living with their wits and their body.

Rumpus: Isn’t it interesting that early feminism embraced sexual freedoms and birth control, but kind of left sex workers out to rot? And what about the archaic shame that johns have? Should more clients speak out about their positive experiences with sex workers? What effect would this have?

Sterry: There were consciousness-raising groups in my parents’ generation and that empowerment has bled into the sex industry. Whereas you never hear yes, I have this empowered beautiful prostitute who made me cry when she gave me a blowjob and has opened my third eye. The shame surprised me. The only people who were heteronormal men who admitted to hiring pros used fake names. I mean, I am in touch with like 10,000 writers! Hardly any men would say they paid for sex and here’s my real name.

Rumpus: Have you ever paid for sex?

Sterry: Many, many, many times. I spent many years binging on sex. I was a problematic hypersexual. A sex addict. I would structure my days around when I could binge. I would work hard all week as a professional actor and screenwriter in LA and NY, and I would be off at five p.m. on Friday and I would line up a series of dates—some free and some paid for.

Rumpus: What kind of client were you as an ex-sex worker?

Sterry: Because I sold sex first in my life as a young man, I always wanted to be extra nice because I had clients who were mean to me. So, I was a competitive client. I wanted to be clear and nice—the nicest client. I didn’t want them to do a job with me if they were uncomfortable. At the same time, there were certain things I wanted to do and wanted done to me and I would tip nicely.

Rumpus: What types of things did you want from a sex worker?

Sterry: I liked to be more in control and dominating and I liked to have hard sex, not to the point of causing pain, but a little bit rough. So, that’s what I was looking for. I hired people from the top end—Beverly Hills, Park Avenue courtesans—to crack addicts in MacArthur Park and the Bronx. I’d get coked up and go on these benders. What’s interesting is that there are thieves on both ends that are masquerading as sex workers. Then there are beautiful, incredible sexual athletes at both ends. I did find that people at the lower end of the food chain tended to be more physically violent, but also more appreciative, as well.

Rumpus: Have you ever fallen in love or had a crush on a sex worker or a client of yours?

Sterry: I met this woman in the East Village. At twenty paces, she was a gorgeous blonde with a great body, and closer, she was beaten by life. She talked like a chainsaw, was so skinny and scarred. She was sweet, so I picked her up and she took me to her squat in Alphabet City. She was a crackhead, so she wanted to buy some crack first. “Yeah,” I said. “Let’s do some crack.” She smoked and mellowed and she was really into the sex.

So, I asked her, “Do you have any friends that want to join us next week?” Then she wrote my phone number on her wall. She put a star next to my name and I felt so good about that. This beautiful, fallen crack angel, writing my name on her wall with a star.

She called me the next day, and said she had some beautiful girl with her and she wanted a woman to make out with. We had this crazy threesome. I ended up painting her walls in her apartment and we became close friends. She kept saying she wanted a job.  She was so nice and so sweet, smart and funny. I hooked her up with a job. All she had to do was walk in the door and she would have a job. I even helped her pick out an outfit. But, she didn’t show up and I didn’t push her after that. I knew she was scared. Then I showed up one day and she was gone.

When I was a rent boy, I also had a big crush on a client who was a tantric sex practitioner. I was so untethered from reality in a certain way, I thought maybe I could just move in with her and be with her and her yoga friends. I wanted to be her son and her lover. I had a kind of love for the crackhead. It was a complicated relationship. I wanted to help her and I wanted to be with her, too.

Rumpus: It’s common for sex workers to leave “the life” and shut the door on their past. You have done the exact opposite. How and why did you end up in the sex industry? How long did you do sex work?

Sterry: I only sold sex for nine months, when I was living in a tiny apartment in Hollywood when I was in college at Immaculate Heart College. I was studying with nuns and focused on existentialism. They had no dorms and I had nowhere to stay and no money. So I wandered on Hollywood Boulevard. At that moment, I was on the streets. This guy had a t-shirt on that said “Sexy” and he asked me out to steak dinner. Of course I went. The steak was drugged, and he sexually assaulted me viciously, and I whacked him with my elbow and escaped. I was seventeen.

There I was at four a.m. on Hollywood Boulevard, where the predators were. I found a dumpster with a container full of fried chicken. A guy watched me and asked me, “Are you hungry? Are you looking for a job?” He was the manager of the chicken place, but also was the procurer of the sex industry in Hollywood at that time. He turned me onto the Hollywood employment agency on Sunset. This place was the most generic office you’ve ever seen in your life. Like, the secretary that worked there was so generic, you forgot her the second you looked at her. The man I met with was like Bob Newhart. The exact opposite of the pimp look—he was like a soft-boiled egg. And his specialty was underaged kids. So, he sent me out on my first job and the manager of the chicken place said if I pissed off the Bob Newhart guy, they would kill me.

The hardest thing about being a male hustler is that there are many things you can fake, but an erection is not one of them. I was very nervous that I would not be able to perform. This woman was very thin and very rich. She was mean. She would lay in a bed like she was in a coma. I was supposed to crawl under the covers and have oral sex with her. She didn’t move a muscle. And then she wanted my eyes closed. She was going to be on top of me. I was very nervous about that part of it. But I managed to do it. I found a mental porn movie. I would get into my personal porn in my head and disappear, and that’s how I was able to perform.

Sunny, my fairy godfather/employment counselor/pimp had me work for a week frying chicken. It’s horrible, miserable, greasy, stink work. After a week he gave me my paycheck. It was so small, it was horrifying. When he offered me real money to have professional sex, only a moron would turn down that money.

Rumpus: Where were your parents at the time? Did they ever read Chicken? What was their reaction to it?

Sterry: My mother had four kids and had just come out as a lesbian. My father had a mental breakdown and could not admit it. My mom was supposed to come live with me in LA but she never showed up. She decided to live in Oregon. I thought I could do all of this myself, which is typical innocent arrogance of a seventeen-year-old. My mother never read my book. My father read my book and didn’t speak to me for five years. He was angry. I never told anyone about my book until I had my deal. So I sent my family a galley of the book thinking they would be proud of me. My father called me, livid. “How dare you?” he said. He was screaming and shouting, completely beside himself.

Rumpus: How did you leave the sex industry?

Sterry: I wanted to stop working. It wasn’t making me happy anymore. The cash was intoxicating, so I couldn’t stop. I was scared. One day my pimp said to me: “I got you this job: it’s not sex, but you show up and smack this guy around and talk dirty to him.” What is sex? If it didn’t involve my genitals it was not sex to me, but it was a sexual exchange. The client was very presumptuous and told me to sit in his lap. He was sucking on my hair. It was revolting. My stomach turned over. I was so angry. All of the anger and rage came out and I beat the shit out of the guy. I thought maybe I killed him.

After that, I could not go back to working for those people. It was like I was a caged animal who lashed out. I hid out and left LA three weeks later. They never found me. I escaped to Oregon to where my mom was living with her lesbian lover. They accepted me back and I went back to school, Reed College for three years, and got my degree.

Rumpus: One thing I have heard a lot from people—from clients to people who are pro-sex and have a liberal view of the sex industry—is that it’s cool to be a stripper or escort as long as you don’t make a “career” out of it. Well, I did make a “career” out of it for twenty-plus years. The great thing about stripping is showing up with an empty gas tank and fifty cents, and leaving with four hundred bucks or more. Why do you think people say that? From where do these comments stem?

Sterry: The underlying assumption is the idea that it’s bad and bad for you. Another assumption is that the end result will not be a positive thing. If you ask a parent about their son or daughter—if they want their kids to be sex workers—they would never say, “Yes, I’d love for my kid to grow up to be a prostitute.” People believe it’s okay to dabble but not to get sucked in too deep. That shame is in our cultural DNA. I have friends who have sold sex, porn stars, strippers, surrogates, and some are very happy making their money doing this and some are looking to get out. The fact is, being a sex worker is a difficult job that is high-risk and high-reward, like my friend who works in the ER. Lots of people would not be able to do that job, or do the job of a firefighter. Not everyone is cut out to run into that building on fire. Sometimes you walk into someone’s life and his or her life is on fire, but you’re built for that job.

Rumpus: I am built for that job. I run through the fire of people’s lives all the time. Sometimes I forget to carry a hose.

Sterry: Important to remember your hose. It’s not for everyone, but for some people, it’s the best part-time job in the world if you are cut out for it. Meaning, you are emotionally and physically equipped to handle it.

Rumpus: Do you ever miss it? Would you ever go back to it? Have your views changed about the sex industry over the years?

Sterry: I was made an offer and I talked about it with my partner, and we discussed it and I decided to not do it. But, I seriously considered it. I never carried any shame about doing sex and getting money for it. The only immoral thing about the sex industry is when there is the lack of choice. That’s slavery. My main ideas about the industry have not changed. I feel sorry for those who try to shame sex workers. I feel bad for them for being an unenlightened, uninformed person.

Rumpus: I am currently heartbroken. Men I have dated seem to love my independence and sexiness, but eventually, they wind up using the fact that I have done sex work as a weapon against me, to hurt me or push me away. Is it a mistake to tell men I date about my history? Will I ever be loved and accepted? Male opinion, please.

Sterry: I never told anyone about myself for twenty years. But all of my secrets ate at me from the inside. Eventually, it consumed me. From the outside, I looked great: I had sold screenplays, I had a red sports car and all the trappings. And I was dying inside. I was married to this beautiful woman who was not very capable of giving love. I hated acting. I was a cog in a machine. My thought process was, Oh, you’re not happy? Buy a bigger TV.

I was a dancing monkey and I hated it. My addictions got bigger and my binges more intense. I found this beautiful woman in Harlem who asked me for a date. She took me to this crack house in Harlem, and her hands were big and her Adam’s apple, huge. In that dump, one crackhead hit me with a pipe and stole my money. Luckily, I come from a long line of hardheaded coalminers. They [the crackheads] all looked funny to me and I started laughing. Soon, we were all laughing. I just walked out.

That was my bottom. I vowed that I was going to tell my true story if anyone asked me and I was never going to hide again. Soon after, I went on a date with this literary agent, who liked a book I wrote, but then I told her my real story that became Chicken: Portrait of a Young Man for Rent.  I thought it would make people run from me, but that night, this woman—who was a well-educated, Jewish woman—thought it was so interesting. She told me, “This is the book you should write.” And, I did.

I believe that you telling your story will lead to someone giving you unconditional support and love. Antonia, you will find love.

***

Photograph of David Henry Sterry © 2004 by Lothian Photography.

***

Click here to read the first of four interviews by David Henry Sterry with some of the contributing writers from Johns, Marks, Tricks and Chickenhawks: Professionals and Their Clients Writing About Each Other.

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“Lady Cheeky” is her Anglophile cybersex identity name, where she is a servant/vessel/wench. We met on the floor at Marilyn Friedman’s essay writing workshop, which I signed up for during a dark time. After dozens of agent rejections flooded my inbox for over a year, I longed to sit in a room with other writers again, hoping to inject my writing with joy by learning new literary tricks from veteran journalist, Taffy Brodesser-Akner. Our assignment was to tell the group what our essay was about and then say one more line declaring what our essay was “really” about.

Lady Cheeky’s wavy, Lucille Ball hair matched her bright red lips. Her curves punched out of her ’40s frock, as she told a hilarious topsy-turvy tale about role-playing on a True Blood-themed, Twitter-based direct message and tweet stream, which led her to start her smart and sexy websites where she met “Lord Byron,” hired a P.I. to check another lover out, and divorced her husband. She also overcame a rare sexual disorder; started a popular sensual images blog; began writing and publishing real-life erotica based on her new, passion-filled experiences; is in the process of working on a memoir; has a new story in Rachel Kramer Bussel’s upcoming erotica anthology, The Big Book of Orgasm; and is currently speaking about body image and sensuality, as well as integrative sensuality.

Lady Cheeky’s story beneath the story was flesh and bone ache deriving from a phantom limb that was pummeled awake by HBO’s True Blood series. I wanted to know more about how True Blood was the springboard to becoming a sexually actualized woman, capable and deserving of passion.

 ***

The Rumpus: You talked about feeling misplaced from the get-go. Tell me where you grew up and your first sexual experience and how you felt so “other.”

Lady Cheeky: I was a white Jewish girl with a dry sense of humor who grew up in Santa Monica. I went to school with tan, athletic surfers and never felt like I fit in. I discovered my sense of humor helped me get by. I was reading all of my mom’s Fran Leibowitz books at the time, so I had adopted her New York-centric, ascerbic wit, which didn’t help matters in the “socialization with my peers department.” I was living with my sister and my mother in a tiny apartment. My mom was a funny, tiny, New Age-y performer trying to raise two girls after a divorce. She left my father and moved us out to California when I was six.

Rumpus: You mentioned that you had a rare sexual disorder. Tell me about it and how you overcame it:

Lady Cheeky: I had been diagnosed with vaginismus when I was about twenty. Victims of rape and molestation experience this, but I was not a victim of sexual assault. It’s characterized by the muscles in your vagina constricting and tightening up upon impending sexual intercourse so nothing can penetrate. It’s very painful to try and have sex with vaginismus. I was able to lose my virginity without incident, but after that I tried countless times to have sex and it was just a disaster. After that, if I was ever able to, it was because I got drunk beforehand. Not how you want to experience sexual pleasure all the time.

Before I met my husband at age thirty-two, I had only had intercourse a total of five times. I went to therapy for it and eventually was able to have sex successfully, but even so, it was not enjoyable. No one ever talked to me about sex as a kid, and the men I was with never took the time to ask me or help me discover what I liked.

Rumpus: When did you realize you lacked passion in your life? How did True Blood lead you into a world of passion?

Lady Cheeky: I always wanted to try different sexual things with my husband, who adored me, but it didn’t fly. I knew sex was supposed to be enjoyable and I wanted that to be a part of our life, but my husband was just not that into it. Eventually, I fell into a deep depression and could not get up or eat, and couldn’t figure out why. It seems I was only unhappy with myself, but was also realizing I wasn’t in love with my husband. He had some emotional problems and felt more like my pet. I felt like his mother, not his wife. I was on medication, but no “cocktail” seemed to help. I look back now and see I was on the verge of a nervous breakdown.

Then a friend called me to tell me to watch True Blood. “It’s really dark, sexy, and campy,” she said. “You’ll love it.” When I finally watched it, I felt the chemistry on screen. It was revelatory. I knew that this was something I had never experienced. I thought, “I’m forty years old and I don’t know what it’s like to know passion.” I wanted to be a part of something passionate.

Rumpus: What did becoming a tertiary character on True Blood’s role-playing site involve?

Lady Cheeky: I became unnaturally obsessed with True Blood, freakishly so, almost like a thirteen-year-old girl, and devoured anything I could find on it online. I came across people tweeting about True Blood and so I joined Twitter and started tweeting back. Not only were they tweeting about True Blood, they were role-playing. There were all of these different casts and some new characters with different names, and they were throwing virtual weddings and True Blood parties. So I created tertiary characters so I could play along, like Bill’s Pet and Bill’s Robe. People flirted and eventually asked to have cybersex with me as my character.

At first I was shocked, and then admittedly intrigued. I wanted to flirt [and] feel sexy. I’d never felt sexy before. This seemed like a safe way to do it.  Then I decided to branch out into my other areas of interest. Always an Anglophile, I found this other set of nerds like me where I played the handmaiden to Ann Boelyn (one of Henry VIII’s wives, whom he beheaded) and became “Lady Cheeky.” For the first time, my sexual self felt free. Meaning, I could move around and play. I could be sassy and say things like, “Why aren’t you undressing me right now?”

Rumpus: Did you ever get rejected on the sites? Tell me about one uncomfortable experience you have had while exploring this world.

Lady Cheeky: When you get rejected in cyberspace, it has nothing to do with who you are or how you look, so it’s “safe in that way.” You are a fake person. Completely free. I was flirting with a sarcastic, angry, funny “knight” one day, and we set up a phone sex date. Well, I was so excited, I left work early and when I called him he said, “I can’t right now. My mom’s home.” He was nineteen. I thought, Who am I? What the hell am I doing? But, I also felt alive for the first time.

The most uncomfortable yet freeing thing was when I became involved with a man I met on Twitter who called himself “Guerre.” He was a hopeless romantic, passionate…and married. I knew I shouldn’t be seeing a married man, but I was completely infatuated with him. After a few months of e-mails and instant messaging, we decided to meet, but before that, I hired a P.I. to check him out. I needed to know he wasn’t wanted in forty-nine states or otherwise had a record.

Rumpus: Is that when you asked for a divorce?

Lady Cheeky: No. I had already moved into our guest room and told my husband I wanted to separate. I knew I wanted a divorce, but thought the idea of a separation would be a smaller pill for him to swallow at first. He wanted couples therapy, which I agreed to for his piece of mind. In couples therapy, I asked for the divorce. I moved out shortly thereafter. I didn’t meet  “Guerre” until I had moved out.

Rumpus: Did that affair pan out? Where did your passion take you?

Lady Cheeky: When I met “Guerre” in person after three months of online courtship, our spark was immediate. Before we even touched we knew it was going to be incendiary. I felt something in my body that I had never felt before…a buzz…a tingle…hard to explain. It was intoxicating. I had struggled with body image issues and of course never, ever actually enjoyed sex, but now, with this man, I knew all that would be water under the bridge, and I was right.

What that night (and our subsequent ill-fated affair) taught me, was that passion is a life force from which so many positive parts of ourselves are able to flow. I discovered that “sexy” is something you are—not something manufactured. It resides in all of us. It’s as much a part of us as the shape of our face or our hair color. In that way, we can cover it up, manipulate it to a desired shape or ignore it completely…but it’s there whether we choose to see it or access it or not. This “satori” gave me a new paradigm in which to see myself and a confidence in not only how I approach my life, but how I approach dating and sex.

Rumpus: Why do you think people are so sexually repressed and afraid to explore sex and passion? Why are people so ashamed of their desires? How did you break those constraints?

Lady Cheeky: In my opinion, we are in an age (and hopefully coming out of it) where our personal sexual pleasure is somehow looked at as, at best, something polite people don’t talk about and at worst it’s looked at as deviant. This creates an atmosphere of shame and denial of a basic human need. This is especially sad today, in a world where most people have to work, scrounge and save to get any pleasure at all.

I had a male friend who said to me recently that he hadn’t come in three weeks. He said he didn’t deserve it. Who in the world doesn’t “deserve” to come? It opened my eyes to the fact that our human right to have desire, passion, and sexual gratification is something no one wants to talk about. We can read articles about women who have never had an orgasm all day long, but the bigger problem is that there is obviously a population of women and men who haven’t allowed themselves to experience sexual pleasure as a part of life, and lots of journalists are writing about just the mechanics of it. This is a big enough problem; it seems it sells magazines.

Rumpus: You are a writer and sex-positive blogger. You told me about the app of the week, a video program called Vine where you can send a six-second video that self-destructs, but I haven’t tried it yet. At the same time, you were nearly in tears when you talked about your friend comparing you to Melissa McCarthy and you wrote a beautiful essay about that. What is the connection between your self-image and your sexuality?

Lady Cheeky: Your body has nothing to do with how sexy you feel. In the trope of curvy women, I still get hurt and it’s hard. The feeling I have of being a sexual person is inherent. For better or for worse, no one can take that away from us. How we feel about our physical selves is linked to what society and advertising tells us is normal or acceptable, but it’s ultimately our responsibility to take our self-image back and reclaim it, as it were. I could be working on my self-image, still be self-conscious, still not want my lover to touch my stomach, and still tap into my inherent sexiness, because, as I said before, sexy is who we are. I had this realization when I felt bad about myself and looked in the mirror recently. I said to myself, “This is how I came out today. I’m cooked.” Then I click into my sexuality and I feel good. At some point you’ve got to give it up: This shirt is going to hike up my hips. Done. Let it. I’m going out.

***

Featured image of Lady Cheeky © by Gene Reed.

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Every olive-skinned forehead has a chalky red circle placed by the leathery fingers of holy men. They look like a collection of bulls-eyes. Black red garnets drip from earlobes to rouged cheeks. A woman walks with three small children. She is so stunning she could win beauty pageants, but she was born poor so she never will. Indira Gandhi has been assassinated. I am fifteen.

A sharp jaw is draped by a red sari. When the sun shines through it, the woman’s chin lights up like a neon strawberry. She bends over a camp stove on the sidewalk outside the Bombay airport. She twirls roasted chapattis— Indian tortillas— with her delicate fingers over the weak red flame. Her hands are speckled with the dried blood color of mehndi: henna temporary tattoos like blinking eyes on her palms when they open. The mehndi has faded over time, which means the woman participated in a wedding a week or more ago. The toasty nut chapatti smell competes with the stench of sweat and shit. My green ankle length skirt is too thick in the humidity and perspiration drips down my doughy armpits onto the ground.

I’m looking for my name on a sign. Petite men jump and shove each other to get at the white tourists who have money for motels and taxis. They call out “Rickshaw, Madame? Madame.” Their voices are low and sexual and pleading but harmonize like a choir. The men who call out “Madame” have red teeth. A boy with no legs whizzes past on a skateboard. His arms are extra long and knobby from polio. He has a collection of VHS tapes attached to the skateboard with a bungee cord. One of them is Michael Jackson. He doesn’t beg. Children approach with fingers cut off at the knuckle from leprosy. There is no blood—only bandages. They move their fingers to their mouths and say “kanna” and look into my foreign eyes. I don’t have to know Hindi to know what starving means, but “kanna” means food. The kids spit red. The women spit red. The small puddles remind me I’m bleeding. Where am I going to find a tampon?

Bombay is not just red. It’s also holy orange. A band of Hari Krishnas dance barefoot on dirt in big loose orange shirts and lungis that are like baggy pajamas. Their clothes are the orange that only the earliest morning sky knows. Their bald heads glow in the heat and they smile that crazy smile of bliss that makes me want to float on their orange cloud and never go home. The moon is amber and appears much closer and bigger here. From across the street, they come for me. I want to be orange like their lungis, not big and white because the men jump and yell while lepers scurry to surround me. Some of these men are my age or younger, boys really. My temporary sister with shiny black hair grabs my hand. She tells me her name “Jothi,” (prounced Joe-thee) means light. She says, “This way,” and interlaces her fingers with mine. Her father walks like his hips are sore or broken because they tilt as he walks in short brisk steps. He’s a doctor. He says, “Come,” and I do. His voice is nasal and hard to hear over all of the vendors calling “Pakora, pakora, pakora!” Pakora are salty orange fried vegetables in white bags sprinkled with saffron, cumin and cayenne.

Women carry giant baskets on their heads poised and dangerous but their faces are serene. The baskets are orange and brown and carry the smell of fish. Some baskets overflow with samosas and when one drops from the basket, beggar children scurry for it. Dried orange paste cakes the corners of their lips. Cars and bicycles heavy with chickens swerve around cows that rule the road. Fat, slow cows flaunt orange blossoms between their horns, swinging between them like a hammock. Their horns are painted with red and gold stars and flowers. My temporary sister wears an orange thread around her wrist that signifies that she has a brother and he tied it to her wrist in a ceremony that honors their bond. She interlocks her fingers with mine as we walk towards what looks like a toy car. The children knock on the window as our car drives away. They chase the car for several blocks yelling, “Ferungi!” which is Hindi for foreigner.

Bombay is also white. The bread rolls the vendors sell in baskets as they yell, “Pan pan pan pan” are wrapped in stiff white napkins. Milk is delivered in small bottles in grey metal baskets like in old episodes of Leave it to Beaver. I listen to my Prince “Under a Cherry Moon” cassette tape on my Walkman and walk along the gutter next to palatial marble houses. A man squats and shits in the street. I panic because I want to stare but I look away instead. I think about what it means to be white here, to have the luxury of white cotton underwear and a private poop behind closed doors. Visions of divine white toilet paper taunt me as I pass men in sandals and white turbans. They open their funny pajamas and take their dicks out and point them at me as they walk towards me. This happens so many times I lose count. It happens when I walk with my Indian host family and when it does, my sister locks hands and squeezes me tight. “This way,” she snaps. “Ouch,” I say. She pulls me into a store that sells saris and nose jewelry until the men walk past the store to the nearby marketplace. I want to ask why the men do that but I don’t. Jothi avoids my eyes and holds a green and gold sari. “How much?” she asks the saleswoman. My long skirt is white with gawdy pink and black flowers. We leave with my first-ever sari.

I’ve never been on a double-decker bus so I ride one all day and the men stare. I switch seats to wriggle out of their sight but they come closer, stand over me and clutch the handrail near my head. I wander into an indoor market and two men in turbans pinch my butt. I run to the nearest rickshaw and tell him, “Bandra Road.” When I walk in the front door, the family is sitting at a table for dinner. They are angry and silent. Later, my host brother tells me, “Women who come home after dusk are whores,” right away. He’s trying to explain why his father yelled behind their closed door earlier. The father yelled so fast, I couldn’t catch one familiar word. I can tell by my host brother’s slouch and the way he wobbles his head that he thinks it’s silly that his father yells but I’m afraid he will kick me out, send me back home. He wears American clothes a few years outmoded, but the best money can buy in Bombay. White Izod and blue jeans.

I’m supposed be in college here even though I’m a junior in high school. The first day, I am swarmed by kids. The only white girl there in my loose yellow shirt, I sit in the back of the class on a bench. Students stare and giggle so I walk to the train station where I follow children to their homes in the slums. I trust the kid who grabs my arm and pulls me into a snaky alley past metal scraps and piles of garbage. I’m pummeled by the smell of shit and piss near homes made of cardboard and dirt. Inside, I crouch in the dark around a small fire and drink spiced chai from tiny chipped glasses. The grandparents sleep on the ground on a single blanket and glance over at me. It’s so dark, I can’t tell how many people live inside. The kid giggles and his mother stares into my grey eyes for a long time and laughs. She covers her mouth when she does this. The kid writes an address on a white piece of paper. I promise to write. I never write. Two men follow me onto a train. Their bodies against mine harder and harder until a seat next to a woman was vacant and I squirmed into it. A couple stops away is a four star hotel so I jump off at the next stop and run inside where I won’t be followed, touched or flashed. I fill my backpack with rolls of plush white toilet paper. I get home after dark: white American whore.

Bombay is turquoise and gray. Monsoon rains with blue skies. Ganesh, the elephant God is on posters in homes and stores and in rickshaws promising triumph over obstacles, but in some sects of Hinduism, I am told, a woman is supposed to throw her body on top of her dead husband’s and allow the vultures to pick it clean. When I walk the streets in the morning with my Walkman, I look up at the roofs of gray buildings for the bodies of mourning women and the hungry vultures, but I never see them. I see gray hate and gray shame and red angry spit on the dirt every couple feet. I walk past cold gray shadows where the little girls are still sold out of cages. The gray spaces in the alleys filled with girls carrying gray tins begging for coins. Gray, dirty bandages on their hands. I see turquoise Ganesh on posters. Indian women feed their daughters sweets from a vendor on a train. Indian women twirl chapattis wrapped in gold and turquoise saris. They ask to buy my American jeans for their daughters. Fisherwomen keep their baskets perfectly balanced. Outside the train, families line up outside of the Indian Embassy, hoping to leave. I never write to the children from the slums.

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. If I sent a letter to one of the kids from the slums, it would say: Remember when I pointed to your bandaged knee and asked you what happened? I could tell by your khaki shorts and pressed white shirt that you were cutting class too. We exchanged grins. You saw the man press his hips against me and said, “We get off here,” as you reached above me to pull the silver cord. I followed you home and met your sister and mother. Lock hands with them and keep them safe before and after dusk.

***

Rumpus original art by Jason Novak.

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Bring on chilly revenge served by an armed prostitute with a hard-on for chicks. Bring on a blonde, butch, Quentin Tarantino-tinted vigilante drifter, rising from the lava with a clenched, wet fist. Bring on Aileen Wuornos.

Dear Dawn: Aileen Wuornos in Her Own Words is a collection of letters to Wuornos’s childhood friend Dawn Botkin, edited by Daphne Gottlieb and Lisa Kester. It is both empowering and heartbreaking, because Wuornos represents the fury of a wronged girl-gone-wild, whose rage was unleashed on men. She fought to survive within a system that refused to value and protect the kind of woman she was: five-feet-four inches tall. A Led Zeppelin-loving, hip-hugger-wearing hitchhiker who was raped by age fourteen and abandoned. When she became pregnant, her grandfather (who raised her) sent her away. After she gave birth, she hit the road.

The letters Wuornos wrote during her incarceration on Death Row are full of longing, laughter, and anger. As I read them, I ached for her. I also ached for the woman who was gang-raped in Delhi. I wished that Aileen Wuornos had more parental support, more love and a fighting chance in the judicial system. I wanted her to run fast to an open field outside the home for unwed mothers—far away from Death Row where she could listen to Pink Floyd in the warm sun.

***

The Rumpus: Daphne, tell me why you were attracted to Aileen’s story?

Daphne Gottlieb: I think in some ways, the same reasons as everyone—there are so many male serial killers, but who has ever heard of a female one? And a prostitute? And a lesbian?

As far as where I was in this, in 1991, the year Aileen Wuornos was arrested, I was a year out of college and I had gotten feminism the way some people get religion. And 1991 was the year Thelma and Louise—in which two women avenge an attempted rape—was released, and the debut of Hothead Paisan: Homicidal Lesbian Terrorist, a zine by artist Diane DiMassa, about queer/feminist vengeance on the unthinking and oppressive rest of the world. So I think female vigilantism was, to some extent, already in the air, and it fit with my personal and political aesthetics. I couldn’t identify with the experience of being a homeless prostitute, but I was pretty familiar with what it is like to have your body stolen and desecrated. I wanted to go back in time and lock-and-load. I couldn’t, of course, but I took some solace and got some relief from her self-defensive shootings. I couldn’t defend myself at the time, but out there, some woman could and did.

Rumpus: The early ’90s were a lush time for tough chicks, wasn’t it? I caught the same femme fatal fire at that time—seduced by feminist performance art. I loved the characters in the films you mentioned, as well as Mickey and Mallory in “Natural Born Killers” and “La Femme Nikita.” The ’90s was a time of resistance, spearheaded by female artists like Suzanne Lacy with her anti-rape billboards. I had a religious experience when I saw Diamanda Galas, with her tattooed knuckles that read “We are All HIV,” perform in the Palace of Fine Arts in San Francisco. Karen Finley’s Shock Treatment was my bible. And so I very much wanted claim Aileen Wuornos as a feminist superhero, but her story was far too sad. While reading Dear Dawn, I mostly felt sorry for her, because I think the violence and trauma she suffered shaped her actions and personality. She never had a fighting chance. She was not even given a fair trial.

Gottlieb: The thing about superheroes is that they don’t have problems, right? A feminist hooker superhero wouldn’t have to worry about assault, or pregnancy, or poverty, or disease, or eating and shelter, or police. In order to make her a superhero, you have to divorce her of the very context that makes her story possible. You have to gloss over the trauma.

There’s a widespread perception that prostitution is trauma. I guess I want to posit that prostitution was the best living that she [Wuornos] could make on her own at sixteen, when she was trying to escape sleeping in abandoned cars in freezing Michigan. The trauma, I’d argue, was with the abuse that preceded it, the poverty that she lived in, and the society that frames sex work as a moral issue and not a capitalist one.

Rumpus: Kids who are sexually abused often have survival sex later on, and I agree with what you said about Wuornos’s job choice. I don’t think prostitution equals trauma, either. According to Carl Jung, when a child is traumatized, they are in a state of confusion and terror, so they learn to disconnect and emotionally detach from themselves, causing a splitting to happen. What develops is an angry, threatened, self-debasing personality—a defensive field of swirling energy, like a black hole. The person acts out behaviors in a kind of explosive, angry way, in a desperate attempt to become whole. When I read Dear Dawn, I couldn’t help but see Aileen this way: as a kind of cataclysmic explosion due to early trauma, like a feral fourth-grader with a gun.

Gottlieb: Or a young woman with a personality disorder and a powder keg, looking for a light.

Rumpus: One striking thing about her letters was the choice you made to leave them in their most raw state, complete with spelling errors, grammatical mistakes, and funny verbal ticks like “nic nic nic” and “I’m all love!” Her voice was sometimes a pissed-off kid and sometimes very concerned for Dawn’s health and Wuornos’s ex-lovers. Her compassion came through. Was it your intention to show the ways in which Lee was a loving human being?

Gottlieb: My intention was to show Aileen, hopefully, in all her dimensions. Not as cartoon avenger, or abuse poster child, or the inevitable result of a society that condones lesbianism or any of that—but to let have a little relief. A shadow and a swell. Three-hundred-and-sixty degrees. And human.

The thing that appealed to me the most was the chance to give her back her own words. After the thousands and thousands of words about her in the news, and thousands more in books and movies, after all the words put in her mouth, she finally had her own chance to speak. Voice is a mark of privilege in our society, and a homeless lesbian prostitute doesn’t get much airtime.

Rumpus: Her voice! She was such a joke-cracker and was constantly poking fun at herself and others. She loved to tell stories about her wandering hippie days, running away from home at age thirteen and fourteen. There’s a sad quality underneath it all, because she was escaping the unbearable pain of her desperate, inhumane situation. She was also very hopeful about “heaven,” and she read the Bible a lot and quoted it. Her letters were her human connection, where she could laugh with Dawn, but I kept picturing her in her cell with “death knocking on her heart.”

Gottlieb: I think that when she was writing, the sound of her pen drowned out the knocking, just for a few minutes.

Rumpus: I love that image of her writing to drown out the knocking. Her writing contained many moving images. For instance, in a letter to Dawn dated 7/17/92, she wrote: “I remember winters, when I was a runaway. Sleeping in the snow. No money, no warmth, no where to go…I looked up and saw the hills sand turning to mud sliding down at me and swirling mud around me.” That image of the world closing in on her was like a warning of her future on Death Row, but she shrugs it off: “I said screw it! And went back to sleep.”

One thing that angered me was the obstruction of justice during her trial, and the inherent sexism in the judicial system. In the ’90s, serial killers like Ted Bundy, who preyed on nearly one hundred women, were given life without parole. Aileen Wuornos was fried after a speedy thirteen-day trial. She claimed to be killing in self-defense, but society believes that whores cannot be raped. Do you think the judicial system has changed for women? For prostitutes?

Gottlieb: Not enough. Ask Savannah Dietrich, the seventeen-year-old who broke the gag order that silenced her from naming her rapists in the trial verdict. Ask those close to Brianna Gardner, Danita Brown, or Ashley Lilly, three of the 125 prostitutes murdered last year. Or ask the gang-raped sixteen-year-old girl in Steubenville.

Rumpus: Or the women who disappear every day, get shot at and raped for disagreeing with their government. In her last letter to Dawn, Wuornos says it loud and clear when she asks Dawn to “get the word out”: “How they framed a raped woman down to a serial killer, and from the get go took advantage of, in the syndrome, to beat her down to one, for secrets of their own in books and movies. Evil!” Why do you think she didn’t plead insanity? Why did she shirk a psyche evaluation during her trial? Do you think it would have helped her case?

Gottlieb: I think there are a number of reasons she didn’t plead insanity—the chief one being that she didn’t feel she was insane. When she was arrested and subsequently confessed, she said that her crimes were in self-defense. To present evidence that you are psychiatrically unstable runs counter to a self-defense plea. During the appeals, to be found insane would have meant Aileen could not have been executed, but she didn’t want to spend decades waiting to die. She wanted to go. She did not want to sit on Death Row waiting and waiting to die, watching other women get executed. She was very religious, and was ready to go to her God, believing she would be vindicated.

From her time with all sorts of institutions, and with her growing paranoia, Aileen did not trust that anyone trying to get “inside her head” had her best interests at heart. And what would a doctor want to do with her head? Prescribe? Medication is a form of control. Aileen was resistant.

Rumpus: In a recorded phone call—a sting operation—to her ex-lover Tyria Moore, she confessed that it was in self-defense, right? They used her supposed “lack of remorse” against her in court.

Gottlieb: In some ways, I feel like she was expected to do penance for the fact that she was a whore and/or that she loved women, not that she killed men. She would not repent for the court, and she was not sorry for defending herself. Semiotically speaking, it’s for this and not for the killings that the state put her to death.

Rumpus: Yes. Wuornos was resistant and mistrustful of the patriarchal system, of people who were trying to help her or profit from her crimes. For instance, one of Aileen’s victims, Mallory, was a convicted sex offender, but that never was mentioned in court! The sexist attitudes in the case and the idea that whores cannot be raped and don’t deserve protection was the thing that enraged me.

The ways in which sexism guaranteed Wuornos’s execution was explained beautifully in Phyllis Chesler’s article “Sex Death and the Double Standard”, from On The Issues Magazine. Hollywood also misrepresented her. They portrayed Aileen Wuornos as a lesbian avenger of sorts, but in her letters to Dawn, she claimed she wasn’t a “lezzie” so much as she ached for companionship. She was so hurt by men in her life, it made sense she turned to women. While reading Dear Dawn, I became wary of even the women in her life. She was very loyal to women who seemed to be her undoing: they took her money and exploited her story. Like many victims of abuse, she was terminally devoted to those who meant her harm. Am I totally off base here?

Gottlieb: It’s true, although I’m wary of saying that she turned to women out of damage sustained from men. Plenty of women are eviscerated and still are squarely in heterosexual relationships. I do think it’s fair to say that the bodies of her female lovers were significantly different from the bodies of both those who sexually assaulted her and her clients. Whether or not that’s relevant, we’ll never know; she had at least two long-term relationships with women that she talked about, but she doesn’t self-identify as a lesbian in the letters. She had deep religious yearnings, and during her relationship with Ty, they agreed that it was a sin against God and they would live like “sisters.”

Rumpus: Yes, the point is not whether or not she was a lesbian, but I think it could have downplayed the fact that her deep, sincere friendships were her lifeblood. Her religious fixation was a bit puzzling, but her love and her persistent writing was inspiring. In the forward you wrote that what mattered the most was Wuornos’s capacity to sustain an exceptional, redemptive, sisterly love for the remainder of her life until the day she was executed in 2002 after ten years on Death Row. And it’s true, that friendship and love is the thing worth living for at times.

Gottlieb: And it seems so unfair that in interviews, I always talk about Aileen, not usually Dawn, but Dawn did something just as astonishing as killing seven men. She stuck tight to a killer, without needing to excuse or condone what she did. She didn’t profit off Aileen and, for the most part, stayed out of the media circus. She was simply there for her, right to her last breath and past that, even, when she brought the ashes home and scattered them with strawberries.

***

Photograph of Daphne Gottlieb © 2013 by Joie Rey Cohen.

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It’s possible that I first met Oriana Small at Literary Death Match in Los Angeles, where she was my favorite sarcastic judge—so mesmerizing, she made me lose interest in the competing writers. It’s also possible that I first met Oriana Small when I drew the blood of porn stars at AIM Healthcare Foundation, the clinic that used to cater to the adult industry. But, neither of us remembered each other from that time. She was on coke. I was depressed.

After Literary Death Match, we spoke about her porno memoir Girlvert, and I was dying to interview her about it. The tone of her book is frenzied with a dead aura like a Boogie Nights orgy with Philip Glass’s “Powaqqatsi” playing loudly in the background. Girlvert is not only a journey into Ori Small’s eroticized grossness as porn actor Ashley Blue. Sure, we see Ashley Blue suck. We see Ashley Blue fuck. We see ass-rupturing and fist-swallowing. But the most glamorous thing about Girlvert is Oriana Small’s unbreakable hopefulness in the face of sketchy circumstances. Small writes, after nearly being choked to death, “I am capable of being wrong and naïve and savagely hopeful over and over.”

And I think, Fuck. Kathy Acker would have loved Oriana Small.

***

The Rumpus: While reading Girlvert, I kept wondering about your childhood. For instance, how did you feel growing up as a little girl in your family? Were you aching to be seen? Why do you think little Ori was so eager to please? Why was she so hungry to be grossed out, and how did that transfer into eroticism? What did little Ori want more than anything?

Oriana Small: I didn’t want to dwell on my childhood because it would have taken away from the real story, the stuff I did as an adult. The chapter in my book about my mother includes both gnarly and nice things about her. I did learn the “fuck you” attitude from her, and I’m grateful that she was a rebellious teenager, even one that never grew up. What I wanted so badly was to be free and different—special, artistic somehow. I figured out that I couldn’t be a painter, because I didn’t like being broke all the time. That transferred into eroticism because I could live recklessly as a sexual circus performer, no problem.

I was never sexually molested. I like to be challenged and gross myself out, so that I come back for more, to see if I can raise the bar. I smashed bugs as a kid. I read Henry Miller as a teenager. It was my idea to try anal sex with a guy, way before I had ever seen it done in a porno. The first porn flick I ever watched was called Bridgette the Midget: Mighty Migdet. I think I just have an advanced sensual palate, or my mind has always been a blown-out mess.

Rumpus: The reason I never got into porn was because you can never hide. It’s out there for everyone to see: nieces, nephews, brothers and moms. I was always blown away by the courage porn stars had—to be revealed in such a permanent way. At the same time, I always wondered how it played out in families. Like, what happens if your brother or mom is alerted to your acting on the Internet? In Girlvert, you negotiate that moment with your mom and it made me cringe. Tell us about the phone call from your mom and the creepy boyfriend moment.

Small: My mom called and said she’d just seen me on the Internet with a “mouthful of cock.” Her boyfriend had shown her. I decided never to speak to her again, until Tyler forced me to call her a month later. We went over to her boyfriend’s house to see her, where Leon [Small's mom's boyfriend] proceeded to ask for help getting into porn. I said no.

Rumpus: Sexual power is a drug. While reading Girlvert, there’s something about losing it and reclaiming it. Losing it looked like disassociating while performing painful sex in scenes, leading a double life and the degradation you experienced—like the dry ass rape. But the part that made me ache the most was the love story between Tyler and you. He acted as a relentless and manipulative vehicle to drive you darker into your most primal erotic desires: to feel totally controlled. At the same time, you often wanted to control Tyler. Tell me about your relationship to power and pain.

Small: I feel powerful when I can take the pain. It’s just like when you can fist your own ass, which is a chapter in the book. With Tyler, I thought that going through pain would mean that we could be happier—drug happy, Ecstasy happy. There were moments of excruciating agony that seemed like the end of the world, and wanting to die. But I let him control me because I loved that excitement. I felt like I was living my life to the extreme, emotionally and otherwise.

Even though he was irresponsible and bad with money, I felt like he was rescuing me from being boring and ordinary. I let him make all the decisions, and at the same time, protected him from things that I knew he would completely handle the wrong way. For example, my first box cover shoot ended up an unwanted anal penetration, but I could never tell Tyler. He was too impulsive and passionate, therefore wouldn’t understand how I would just act like nothing happened. The things I loved about him were also the things I wanted to protect him from.

Rumpus: Your one-liners are poised and sharp. For instance, “I wanted to be the most beautiful thing that ever fucked.” While your toughness felt guarded, your insecurity and people-pleasing made you a flawed, sympathetic narrator that I wanted to root for. Do you think your people-pleasing and codependency made you an easy target for sociopaths in the porn industry? Do you think that sexism is more rampant in the porn industry than in other work places? Was it a relief to find your physical and emotional limits? When you drew the line in the sand at gangbangs and heroin usage, did you feel liberated?

Small: Thank you. I didn’t want to come off like a self-righteous victim or saint. I hate that more than anything! The easy target was an adornment I wore with pride. It was a stamp of youth that faded in time. It goes hand in hand with non-cellulite thighs and collagen. These are all things that I wish I could keep forever. I’ll always cherish and glorify that deer-in-the-headlights age. Not giving a fuck really worked for me, career-wise, but I never thought like that. I truly didn’t want to know about the world besides my boyfriend, porn, and partying. Someone back then asked me who the Vice President was and I didn’t know. I truly didn’t have enough room in my clouded brain to be concerned with politics.

Besides, I was experiencing the opposite of what sexism in the workplace was for everyone else. I was being paid four times as much as the men in the same movies as me. When I refused to do a bukkake and was fired from my movie contract, I felt extremely liberated.

Rumpus: One admirable thing about Girlvert are your unromantic descriptions throughout the book, especially the psychological disconnect that happens when our bodies are doing things our minds are catching up with. You embody that so well when you write, “My racing mind shut off, and my body came alive.” I loved your discoveries about yourself. It seemed like Pro Trusion and other horrid creeps were out to hammer out that innocence, but there it remained, even after you were choked out. Is it still there? Where is it now?

Small: I’m pretty jaded now. No one person has the credit of taking my innocence, certainly not Pro Trusion. I learned a lot about myself from the experience of being choked out by an ugly guy. There are creepy people in society everywhere, not just porn. Pro Trusion was a good place to practice how I could deal with other bad situations throughout the rest of my life.

Porn is very honest and “in your face.” It’s a safe place to just be yourself and confront disgusting personalities. As for my innocence, it looks like the butterfly tattoo I got when I was fifteen. Faded into something unrecognizable, but technically still in existence.

Rumpus: Although I could see you perform the acts of your porn and love life in a cinematic frenzy, I wanted to know the heart of Oriana Small. What did you learn about humanity in your decade debut of porn? How did it transform you as a person?

Small: I learned tremendously from my decade working in porn. I am still fascinated by everyone. The human experience within porn is so fucking interesting. I’m on a quest for more. I’m now writing for Hustler Magazine and reviewing for AVN. Porno people inspire me to write and connect to the raw, raunchy, and specific details of life.  My mind is open. If not for being part of pornography, I would be such a scared and powerless woman. Embracing sex gave me the reason to reject the life of limitation and ignorance that I was born into. Not everyone needs to be in porn to realize this, but this was my education. I needed those experiences to grow.

Rumpus: I loved the part about AIM Healthcare foundation and Sharon. I worked there with Chloe, Laurie Holmes, Paul Pardo, Helen, and Karim. Maybe we met there. I was trying to stay out of the sex industry but got pulled back into doing private “shows” with some pilled-out funny girl. But my intention was to help the adult industry folks stay clean, and I really liked the people I met. Do you think we should pass the condom law? Where is the adult industry going? Are actors still being paid well? How has the porn industry changed over time?

Small: The condom law is a bullshit reason for the Christians to finally shut down porn in Los Angeles. It’s disguised as the “Safe Sex” law, but it is a final blow to strike down this industry. The AHF [AIDS Healthcare Foundation] people and church activists worked really hard to close AIM, and they accomplished that a couple years ago. AIM kept all the testing in one place and was the only thing performers could really rely on. Now it is between different labs, and there is less of a sense of community than there was at AIM. The next step is to move the producers out of California. It’s really bad for business to enforce condoms on porn performers. No one will want to buy the product, since it is legal to shoot non-condom in other places (Florida, Arizona, Nevada). A lot of regular people are going to lose their jobs, too, not just the actors that are fucking. Office workers, graphic designers, warehouse workers, etc. will lose, as well.

Rumpus: I know this was no feminist manifesto 2.0, but how has your book been received by sex workers and other pro-porn feminists?

Small: My book has been well received by feminists, more than I could have ever hoped. I’m very happy about the praise it’s received from women inside and outside porn.  I’m very lucky to have my book published by Barnacle Books. I didn’t have to change my voice at all, or seek some phony redemption in the end. I hope that this book is empowering to anyone who reads it. 

***

First author photograph © 2012 by Dennis McGrath.

Second author photograph © 2012 by Dave Naz.

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I was eleven years old. What happened was, Mom loved the idea of my green M&M costume. Her name, Marilyn was shortened to “M” and that’s what her boyfriend called her. M&M’s were our favorite candy. We had gone shopping together for the fabric and glued the white letter M’s on the green felt with care. My costume idea was great for other reasons too. We sixth graders shared an inside joke: the green M&M’s were horny. Dressing as one would mean I was a sex-starved, flirty, love slave, ready to be kissed by boys. I was going to dazzle and delight my friends. My popularity would soar. I was crazy about Halloween.

Then, Mom cut holes in the bottom of my green felt M&M costume for my legs but they didn’t fit. “Your legs are too chunky,” she said sternly. Alerted to my fat thighs, I was convinced everyone would laugh at me, point at my legs in white tights like thick redwoods and sneer, “You are what you eat.” Then they would poke my chartreuse belly. My kissing scheme was shot to hell. I can’t pinpoint exactly when Halloween and M&M’s became my mortal enemies, but I do remember how the days grew shorter and the nights colder and how my weird body issues killed Halloween.

The kids in the sixth grade did not tease me for being a fat green M&M. They dressed as hobos and bank robbers. They carved jack-o-lanterns and played truth-or-dare. They were deeply entrenched in Tweenland, enjoying first kisses and spin-the-bottle. My friends rode the puberty wave into stubble and boobs but I was traumatized by it. My self-esteem plummeted and I began to starve myself. My body had exploded in places I wasn’t ready for yet. By ten my waist and hips expanded into freakish proportions. My 32A chest was sore and tender as it swelled to a 34B in one year. It hurt to run track. My face broke out into painful pimple clusters and I caked makeup on my face until my skin was orange and clownish. I felt a fistful of new, scary urges but wasn’t prepared for any of them, so I stuck my finger down my throat instead.

By my Doctor’s standards, I wasn’t fat. I was growing and it’s normal for women to gain weight during puberty. Still, in an effort to control my body’s agenda to become a young woman, I struggled with anorexia and bulimia for many years. My weight fluctuated and my body issues thrived. I went to group therapy with other teenage girls who suffered from anorexia and bulimia. I stopped participating in Halloween altogether. I didn’t want to be me, but I didn’t feel flamboyant enough to parade around as someone else either.

The expectation of girls to dress sexy for Halloween is partially to blame. Last week, while browsing dozens of costume stores looking for a Ravenna, the Evil Queen costume, I noticed that cheap, skimpy outfits filled the shelves and those outfits had nothing do with the pageantry of Halloween. Invention and imagination had vanished in a poisonous cloud of commercial pre-packaged, slutty getups. The costumes offered in the girls’ section were generic, sexed up and cheesy: vampires and monsters and ghosts (why would you want to be a sexy ghost?) and lots of naughty nurse outfits built for twigs. Our cultural obsession with selling sex, though not limited to Halloween had consumed it. I continued my search for The Evil Queen outfit but what I found instead was that All Hollow’s Eve had become hollow and plastic.

Determined to reanimate the corpse of Halloween joy, I had to exorcise the body issues from my past and mourn the ghost of my 11 year-old body. I walked away from the Halloween isle and opened my closet, brushed aside my fat girl skeletons and found an old silky robe with mirrabou feathers, which I would use to begin building my costume.

I looked to the past in order to start fresh. After all, Halloween wasn’t always this commercial. It is a holiday with roots firmly planted in the erotic and mysterious spirit world. What I have always loved about Halloween is that it is a day where child-like magic fills our adult lives and the boundaries between the human world and the spirit world collide. I enjoy the knocks on doors and the legions of visitors in costume: little girls in princess dresses holding star-wands and tiny snow whites with puffy sleeves.

A couple of years ago, on Halloween, I decided to dress up as Marie Antoinette and rented an elaborate Victorian costume. I fashioned a bloody neck wound out of latex and held a cake on a tray. I was going to celebrate Halloween at a friend’s home and spend the entire night handing out candy to kids in the neighborhood. In costume, I felt glorious and provocative, like the queen I hoped to portray. My wig was high, white and dripped with pearls. I wasn’t thinking about how my body looked. I was thinking about serving kids.

While securing my wig, my doorbell rang. In my doorway stood a little 5-year old boy— a Bela Lugosi vision in a long, black cape. He wore a pressed, white tuxedo shirt with a classic bow tie clipped at his neck. He smiled through viscous vampire fangs and pressed white makeup. His slicked back hair would have made Bram Stoker proud. His dad called out from the sidewalk “Say trick-or-treat!” The boy said it like a quiet hiss. He was a remnant of the Halloween that I cherished: neither plastic nor disposable.  The boy happily offered his empty sac to me. I poured an entire bag of Snickers bars inside and said “You are the best Dracula I have ever seen.” We were both uncomfortable in our costumes, but we both felt great. I followed the miniature Dracula down my steps. Halloween was waiting for me.

***

Rumpus original art by Jason Novak.

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I was hiking up a mountain near Occidental College, deciding whether or not to hire this girl.

“I’m not comfortable dancing topless,” she’d said. I tried to remember which girl I was talking to and hoped it was the brunette with big lips laying on the beach, not the one who’d sent me a video clip of her slithering to techno music on top of a lime green Pontiac GTO, whose meth drip I could taste through my computer monitor. I couldn’t ask which one are you?  So I asked “Can you dance in a bikini top?” I was casting for a background role that involved stripping for pretend customers for fourteen hours in tight Lycra g-strings and precarious shoes. “I can dance, but not on a stripper pole,” she said. I heard shuffling as she dug for her cigarettes, Prozac, a handgun or ancient jaguar beads found on the floor of a 13^th century Mayan temple. I felt queasy. “It’s just that, I hate myself when I do these hundred-dollar jobs—especially the nudity ones,” she said.

“What is your name?” I asked.

“Monique.”

“There are lots of clothed, better roles out there, Monique.” I said. I knew if I hired her, she’d complain about her costume showing too much of her ass, whine about having to eat granola bars and warm apples from craft services while the regular crew nibbled tri tip. I wanted to tell her she would make it out of here alive.

But, she won’t.

Monique was already losing her backbone. It was evaporating disc by disc in the face of pressure: her no-matter-whats were sliding into so-whats and I wasn’t about to shove her down that slippery slope. Go away, Monique, I thought. The late afternoon sun melted as I climbed further over the ridge, dodging gopher holes and jagged rocks. Discarded green beer bottles poked out of the dirt, free of their labels. I kicked one.

Then she told me she could dance. She offered to show me.

I was at the top of the hill now, looking down at a pile of cigarette butts near a wood bench with graffiti carved into it with a pocketknife. I saw distant flames gobbling the San Gabriel Mountains and imagined Monique dancing for me on the ledge where I stood, twisting into a pretzel of compromise. Smoke swirled in the distance.

Fuck. What a fire. Helicopters circled above the 134 Freeway and airborne water would soon spill from above, leaving blackened branches and steam.

“No. That’s okay,” I said. She sighed the miffed sigh of a girl used to being picked.

“How long do I have to be topless?” she asked. I flashed back to the time I made the decision to do more than I wanted and how hard it was to go back. I remembered being frantic to be picked and, years earlier, kicking meth only to watch strippers snort lines off the yellow dressing room counter with dollar bills they collected from stage. My mouth watered.

Exactly one year ago, I quit my job at the massage parlor where I worked. Ever since then, I see my handjob name in blue sparkles whizzing past on white water delivery trucks, at bus stops and on billboards. My handjob name is a ringtone I can’t escape. Now my monitor is filled with pictures of naked girls with similar names. It’s tempting like a dare to jump across the river—just this once.

Here comes the girl with glorious brown skin wrapped in a leopard print silks made by a tiny barefoot woman from a dusty remote sub-Saharan village, the land of her grandmother whom she only met once. Here comes the girl gyrating on a beach in a turquoise bikini right before the Atlantic waves reach her ribcage off the shore near Sao Palo. In the picture her smile is a shriek and she has her father’s pointy nose. Here come the full frontal vag shots cluttering my inbox.

“I have my Aunt’s nose,” she said.

“You deserve better,” I said.

Monique and all the ones after her said they were twenty-seven, the age I was when I started giving handjobs in the strip club where I worked back in San Francisco; the same club where a stripper allegedly lit herself on fire upstairs in the studio apartments where some of the girls turned tricks. I heard about her from strippers who wore a little too much black eyeliner to be a hundred percent credible. I wondered if she left claw marks on the dressing room walls to warn us; if her claw marks glowed under black light like dandruff. I wondered if she had shiny, black ringlet hair and gray teeth; if she danced to Massive Attack in a fishnet shirt. I wondered how many of us would burn and how many would rise from the ash, rebuild ourselves from the chalky bits and cross over onto land.

The week before the strip club where I danced became a handjob factory, I snubbed girls who cranked the shank while they snickered at me for being a “clean girl” and paid their $180 stage fees in less than fifteen minutes. Every night, I left the club at 11:15pm with my wad of come-free bills that I extracted song after song.

During my shift, I leaned against a wall right underneath suspended TVs that played porn on a continuous loop and studied the backs of necks and tassel loafers flopped over knees. My heels stuck to gum on the floor. I glanced around and realized every single stripper in the club was in the back doing the rub and tug with my regular clients. I was the smug, empty-handed sucker. Naked dances happened in tiny rooms that were more like Motel Six shower stalls with beige plastic antibacterial gel containers fastened to the wall instead of showerheads. A man gestured to me with his fingers and the gesture meant come here.

“Do you do more in the back?” He said. I nodded and hurried him down the snaky black hallway into one of the dinky stalls and unzipped his pants and made one-sixty for a three-minute song. 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. The system won the night I offered handjobs. Of course, I had choices. I could touch dick or walk out, find another club to work at and be told:

Get Naked.

Let me see your body.

You’re on stage in two songs.

I’m not suggesting doling out handjobs like Altoids was morally wrong, or that receiving money for that service was offensive. It’s just that as a young woman, I didn’t want to have be a handjobber. In that club at that time, I kind of did have to be a handjobber. If a woman had given me some maternal bullshit about “deserving better,” I would have told her to go fuck herself and found the next pole to climb, the next John with a comb-over to nuzzle up to.

Desensitization its own kind of death; the absence of feeling a very distinct feeling. My skin twitched like I was watching a movie that was making me fall asleep. I jerked awake with crumpled Kleenex in one hand and sweaty twenty-dollar bills in the other. Hundreds of faces were a blur but my body knows things I don’t know:

The sting of bleach.

Walgreen’s Peach body spray.

Black Suede Cologne.

I recall the surge of power I felt with money in my fist and the horniness I felt when I got aroused by the porn playing on a continuous loop. The hours dead and dark then gone for good, mornings became extinct. I remember the day when giving handjobs didn’t make me ache anymore. That was the day my feelings were burned in the fire, impossible to excavate.

We were the girls who crossed our own lines and were altered slightly, but fatefully. We were the girls from dairy farms and foggy dusks that have our mothers’ chocolate chip bar recipes stuffed in drawers and our fathers’ tennis calves. We wore animal beads from temples in Gujarat and hoped they’d bring us luck.

We were the girls. We are the girls.

We like to think that work is this other thing that we do to pay bills. I wanted to believe that my job was not the real me; the real me existed outside the club. I had a body double doing handjobs while the other counseled homeless teenagers and wrote stories. I hiked back down the mountain and slipped on loose dirt. I grabbed a branch and pulled myself up. It was getting dark and I still hadn’t booked all of my stripper extras. As I write this, I feel the pull of stripping tugging at me like the leper kids in Bombay who once hung on my shirt until I poured all of my coins into their open palms. I heard about a club about an hour away. Girls I know say it’s pretty good right now. I’m thinking about my car payment. And I’m thinking about my health insurance, wondering how I’ll come up with it all. I need money and am holding a buzzing ball of power in my hands — Me, in charge of hiring these vulnerable young women who will have to decide for themselves whether or not to burn.

***

Photos by Romy Suskin.

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At one point, Mike asked me if I considered myself a sex addict. I don’t, but I have addictive tendencies that leak out in every area of my life, including sex work. I asked him if he would be interviewed. At first, he declined because he didn’t want to revisit that dark time. But we kept corresponding. As he delved more deeply into his recovery, he decided that by telling his story, other people could possibly benefit. We had both read bell hooks’s The Will to Change: Men, Masculinity and Love, and decided to use it to inform our discussion, with a focus on patriarchy, feminism, and intimacy.

***

The Rumpus: I’m so glad you agreed to have this conversation.

Mike: To be honest, I am scared about doing this. I have a mountain of shame about how I have acted in relation to my interactions with sex workers.

Rumpus: My hope is our conversation will open a new door—one of forgiveness, emotional awareness, mutual growth, and well-being. As Janna Malamud Smith wrote in the most recent issue of The Sun, maybe the retelling of your story will “tame the unmanageable anguish” lurking within.

Mike: Since I consider myself a sex addict, my story is best understood as a progression from compulsive masturbation to interacting with sex workers, which is why I describe it as a series of forbidden doors being opened. In my addiction, I totally acted against my convictions. My stiff cock led me through the gutters of a city draped in hedonistic venues, with my mind fixed on gratifying my selfish desires. But as bell hooks makes clear in her book The Will to Change, men are socialized to compartmentalize their lives and I have done that. I’ve been a hypocrite and justified my actions. Also, I can dissociate in a heartbeat.

Rumpus: bell hooks also talks about shifting consciousness and self-love. She really opened my eyes about what men learn about masculinity in this culture: domination and destruction. I don’t think only men compartmentalize, though. Women do that, too, especially as a result of being knotted up with shame and grief or trauma. I think many readers will relate to your experience of addictive behavior and disassociation. I’ve brought all of my wounds into the sex industry looking for salvation, and behaved compulsively both in my personal and professional life. I remember at times, that feeling of soaring above myself as if I were in a movie because I was anxious or afraid. After a while, I began to look forward to the movie feeling and then was disappointed. That was a sad moment—the moment I couldn’t feel. So I dug my nails into my thighs as a reminder I was still there. I remember feeling surprised that my feelings could shut off like a faucet. Other times, they’d flare up, like during a spinning class at the gym.

As a young boy, what did you observe about sex in your household?

Mike: My dad was a verbally abusive alcoholic. My mother was a narcissist who said she didn’t like children. So I experienced lots of neglect and I learned at an early age to seek refuge under the sheets. Both parents lacked boundaries. My father had many affairs that my mother tolerated because my dad was from the wrong side of the tracks. When I was a preteen, my dad’s mistress came to stay with us at our summer home, which was isolated so we all swam naked. So there I was swimming naked with my father’s mistress, while my father lounged naked beside the pool.

Rumpus: What was your first introduction to sex? What was your first experience with sex workers?

Mike: My first introduction to sex and workers was looking at pictures of naked women in “dirty” magazines. When I was a kid— not sure how old I was, but certainly I was in elementary school—a friend of mine found his father’s stash of Playboy magazines. I thought this was wrong and something we shouldn’t be doing. But they were fantastically gorgeous with their beautiful breasts and submissive poses. I was very excited about seeing those pictures and even though it felt forbidden, my mind took note of this experience for sure. And I can even remember the smell of those pages—the magazines had a certain sweet aroma.

My first sexual experience with another person was with my high school girlfriend, who was a loving, caring, beautiful person. We were two lonely people who became intertwined, in love, and then eventually had sex. I wish I had better understood why my relationship with her seemed like it was not enough.

Rumpus:  How were sex workers viewed by your father, friends, and neighborhood or in your culture?

Romy Suskin

Mike: In high school and college, talk about strippers was rare. Perhaps the closest I came to thinking about this was listening to Dylan singing about a woman who worked in a topless place, who shared a book of poems with him written by an Italian poet from the thirteenth century—intriguing and romantic. But probably if you had asked us at the time about strippers, we would have paraded out the usual ideas about these women having difficult lives either because of poverty or abuse and leading them to use their bodies to make money, because they didn’t have any other way to get by. However, even in the counter-culture that I ascribed to, the message of patriarchy in our society remained strong. And that message was: men can use their power to dominate women and they are entitled to having sex with them. Intellectually, I was trying to rebel against that message, but a part of me wanted to be that powerful man having any sexy woman available to him. And we were busy doing the hippie thing at the time.

Rumpus: The “Make Love Not War” hippie thing? I wonder if—aside from fighting for our civil rights—hippies were interested in working towards partnerships that nurtured integrity, wholeness, and humanness, or were they just getting baked and screwing to Jimi Hendrix?

Mike: Yeah, Intellectually, I was trying to rebel against that “free love” message, but a part of me wanted to be that powerful man having any sexy woman available to him. When I looked at explicit images of naked women at that time, there was no thinking of about who these women really were. There was no thinking that other men saw these same images. There was no thinking there was a photographer, or somebody taking advantage of these women to make millions of dollars. That would contaminate the fantasy. It was complete sexual objectification. And it seemed harmless. Cybersex provided access to women who would chat with me and masturbate for money. I fell deep into this world again with no regard for what this arena might really be like. There were times when I would get very depressed thinking of the women in Eastern Europe who frequented the rooms of cybersex. In my clearer moments, I knew sex slavery could have been a component of this, and in those moments I would clear my accounts, cancel my e-mail addresses, vow to never go back. But like any addiction, I would rationalize and justify until I was back spending money and pretending I was special to Ilithya or Evana or Nadia.

Rumpus: I know that routine. Not only with drugs (in the ’90s) but that spin cycle of quitting and starting behaviors. I would swear off meeting johns in my apartment and clutch my last $3, and get a call and agree to meet a manic attorney or sad comedian at my place. I read recently that Backpage alone counts for an estimated 20,000 sex ads nationwide, daily. And although there are thousands of consenting adults participating in prostitution, there are also minors being trafficked. [For more information about this topic and how to stop it, check out FAIR Girls, a small nonprofit that helps underage girls escape prostitution.] Exploitation and abuse happen in illegal enterprises, but also legal ones like schools, institutions, corporations and homes.

What impression did you have of the other men that you saw in the strip clubs?

Mike: For many of the men I know who have interacted with sex workers, this was very much part of their secret life. We hid this part of our lives because we didn’t want other people to know. One of my skills was to filter out the men and only see the women. But when I did see the other men in clubs, I often thought they looked pathetic. Somehow I deluded myself into thinking I was different. There were the few handsome young men, and it was clear they were appreciated. For example, I saw one woman in the strip club take a particularly charming-looking guy into the women’s bathroom with her after a very flirty interaction. But then there would be the drunken guys who would weave their way back to one more lap dance.

Rumpus: Describe how you felt when you finally had direct contact with strippers. What was your impression of the women you met there?

Mike: If at that time when I first started going to strip clubs, you had asked me about strippers, when I had a cup of coffee in my hand, I might intellectualize about the state of their lives and what drove them to be strippers. But I know as I roamed the streets and then entered into the darkly lit spaces seeing beautiful breasts, sexy asses, gyrating moves, and having drinks to help bolster my courage to be as sexual as I could be with these women, notions of their well-being were not on my mind.

Certain strip clubs felt very much like a new level of sexual activity. There was an energy that things could go much further. There was a sense that these women were more vulnerable and willing to do whatever. It gave me a sense of power, and I know this fed my addiction. At that time, my drinking escalated. My first nude strip club was a forbidden zone. I continued to be nervous and embarrassed, but my heart would race with excitement. I was hooked on this experience and wanted to go back and try to become more comfortable each time. I was very much objectifying these women and considered it a show I could watch, but there was a certain barrier I would not cross.

Then I crossed the barrier. Soon, I was trying to get as close to having sex with these women as I could. I would spend lots of money, lap dance after lap dance. The bubble busted when my money was gone. I realized these women were not interested in me at all. I felt their cold rejection. I was not at all special—just a creepy old guy in a strip club, and our relationship was about me giving them money for feigned sex. Part of me thought I was a big man going there, but another part of me could sense my low self-esteem—that I was shocked when a sexy, young woman offered me a lap dance. I figured they wouldn’t want to interact with me. So my ego got a lift. And then after they got off my lap and it was clear I meant nothing to them, I felt a sinking feeling reinforcing my worthlessness. But like any addiction, I kept going back.

Rumpus:  There are theories that suggest it’s human nature to hotly desire the thing just out of reach. I think you beat yourself up too much. Help me understand how this was a bona fide addiction. Was there a point of irrevocability where there was no going back to who you were before?

Romy Suskin

Mike: A turning point was when I started to search the dark alleys and go off the beaten path. It was there that I met Pattie. I remember entering her club and she was standing by herself with another dancer passed out on an ugly couch. She had a whiskey voice and I did not find her attractive at first. She asked me what I was doing. “I was just curious,” I said, and turned to leave. She said, with an aggressive confidence, “You will be back.” It was truer than I could have imagined.

I returned to her club, and sought her out on a night with a lot of activity in the club. It was hard for me to get her attention. She asked me outright for money—no hesitation—and she said I could stick it in her panties. This was a new experience, and the flash of what I saw gave me a huge rush. I wanted more from her and went back again. I had my first lap dance with her, and I could sense she would be willing to take things much further. I was nervous and scared, but wanted her very badly.

Then she gave me her phone number. To me, this was amazing: a stripper giving me her phone number. I felt like I must be someone special to her. I didn’t think once that this was usual for her. But this certainly became a big, special secret for me. I had Pattie’s phone number. I called her a lot and would find her in these murky situations. I found out she lived in a hotel. It all seemed so shady and dark. I was drawn to this.

Rumpus: Drawn to darkness? What was going on in your life that compelled you to seek out murky darkness?

Mike: Pattie was what my inner addict wanted. A woman whose life was chaotic, who was dark—she was part of a tough world, a sexual one; this was obvious, and she was vulnerable—she was always talking about being broke and needing my help. In fact, many of her phone calls would start out with “I need,” so I felt needed.

Rumpus: You got locked in with the one who made you feel special, even invaluable.  Maybe it’s because you were lonesome, not a bad person.

Mike: I would go to her club, and the other girls would be miffed because I was always going to see Pattie. One of them got angry and said I should know she was a heroin addict. That was a strange moment, but I was in denial. I never saw Pattie’s bare arms, even during her lap dances. And she had scars on her neck and ankles. But I ignored the signs of drug addiction to think of her in an idyllic way. In other words, I kept up my delusional thinking to keep my fantasy of who she was and who we were, romantic and alive.

Rumpus:  What did you enjoy about Pattie?

Mike: Even through her heroin fog, Pattie had a brilliant mind for details. She remembered and noticed things about me that really were surprising. And sometimes we would not be in contact for close to a year, and when we got back together it would be as if we were together the day before. That is probably her gift for being successful in her trade as a sex worker. She is a very smart and also very clever. There was one time with Pattie that did seem special. She was about to start treatment at a clinic for heroin addiction— to finally give it up—and I held her in my arms as she cried about being scared. I think that was the only real time when I was trying to be there for her, and that I meant something to her.

Rumpus: Who were you to Pattie?

Mike: Looking back, it is hard for me to understand who I was to Pattie.

She said I was her only true friend. We talked about our lives, and I said that if things changed with my wife, I would like to have a future with Pattie. I feel very ashamed now when I think of those empty promises. I also know she was quick to shut down, most likely to protect herself from men who had used her. I told her I loved her a lot, and a couple of times she said she loved me. But whether I was just another client, it is hard for me to say. However, when I stopped and really thought about Pattie’s week, I realized she had a long list of men’s numbers in her phone and I’m sure she was playing lots of guys simultaneously. When I saw her, she would sometimes leave me hanging for hours. Now I realize I was probably just another guy on hold, like a plane waiting to land. Also, I’m older than Pattie by a decade. I never stopped to think that that might matter. I never stopped to think, what kind of man does Pattie really want? She certainly never tried to seduce me outright. So when the denial fades away, I was just an older guy that she could manipulate for money. So in the moment, I was a vulnerable, lonely man she could use.

Rumpus: Do you think Pattie and the strippers you encountered ever felt degraded or exploited? How do you think Pattie felt about being a sex worker?

Mike: When I watched the sexy strippers on the stage moving as if they were getting fucked, it seemed degrading to me. But then again, that did not stop me from staring at them and fantasizing about me being the one fucking them. I also would sometimes look around at the men drooling at them, and realize, like me, these beauties would have nothing to do with us outside the club. I know there were probably as many attitudes among the women stripping, as there were women. I can’t assume they all shared the same point of view of their work.

There is one moment that stands out. Pattie sent me a message before she went to work, saying, “Back I go again to be molested to pay my bills, so sad, so true.”

Rumpus: Do you think Pattie and her friends considered themselves victims? Do you think the strippers you paid considered themselves feminists?

Mike: You also ask me to make generalizations about feminism and sex workers and I hesitate to do so, but we can turn to bell hooks where she provides a very insightful discussion of men and their attitude of, I want to get it when I want it. So it seems to me the participants on both sides of the equation are not usually likely to be working under feminist principles. But you, as a sex worker, might know differently. One of the hallmarks of sex addiction is that we abandon our principles, and for me, as I now try to fully embrace feminism, read about it, talk to women about it, start conversations about smashing patriarchy, and most important, act differently.

I am horrified by my past and how I treated women when I was acting out. Similar to the earlier discussions on this page about Max’s experience, we ignore what we know is right to feed our need for sex.

We also know what Rachel Lloyd courageously points out in her Rumpus Interview with Julie Greicius: that crime and horrible conditions often underlie the experiences we are having. I knew it was there, but became blind as I sought sexual interactions pulled by my insatiable drive for sex.

So, to me, most of the sex industry—from porn, to strip clubs, and then including prostitutes—feeds into patriarchy. I’m ashamed of the fact that I strode out into the night to seek sexual interactions with a feeling of entitlement. It was pure selfishness. It was fake, too, because the power was really obtained by the cash I was willing to throw away. To have some sexy, delicious-looking stripper even consider to ask if I wanted a lap dance felt powerful. I felt entitled to have her grind against me so I would experience arousal.

It was not a mutual relationship based on a love and respect. Even with Pattie, the stripper I had a relationship with, I felt entitled and powerful. She held the promise of hot sex. She would allow me to feel manly and powerful, but really I was putty in her hands, and she pulled a lot of money out of my pockets with her beguiling ways. In fact, looking back, it’s clear she always had the upper hand and she knew it.

Rumpus: I think one way to smash patriarchy is to shirk control over women, and to align yourself with feminist concerns like pro-choice. Many women in the adult industry consider themselves feminist. Steve Bearman, in his essay “Why Men Are So Obsessed with Sex,” describes sex as “the one place sensuality seems to be permissible, where we can be gentle with our own bodies and allow ourselves overflowing passion.” I bring that up because it seems that people don’t allow themselves to enjoy their sexual bodies normally, and so they pay for it. This is a consumer epidemic, not the fault of the adult entertainment industry. I have had many joyful and wondrous experiences with men and women in the context of sex work, and just because I was being paid didn’t make that experience inherently degrading. I guess what I’m saying is that it’s not sex or the sex industry, but patriarchy and consumerism that are dehumanizing, as well as a culture that devalues intimacy.

Was it an intimate experience to be with sex workers?

Romy Suskin

Mike: I would ask myself, how can I have some kind of sexual interaction with an attractive woman tonight? The fact was—and is—I am married. But if we set that aside for a moment, the thing about going to a strip club is that if you have money in your pocket, you will not get rejected. But it’s so much about objectifying women and treating them like sex objects. Money is power in this relationship, and for the women, sex is power. You asked about our culture condemning men who hire women for entertainment, which really is a euphemism for sex or some kind of sexual interaction. I guess a lap dance is a dry hump, but whatever. I guess one could say men need the service, women are willing to provide the service, but for me sex is more than that.

Rumpus: Needing intimacy is different than needing sex. And there is a wide range of sexual experiences that are meaningful in some way but not entirely intimate. I don’t think it’s black and white. Which reminds me of bell hooks speaking to the loneliness and isolation in our culture. She called intimacy “mutual giving,” not “mutual taking.”

Mike: Sex is a very intimate act, but if it’s not really accompanied with emotional intimacy, it feels empty to me and hollow. Cooking a nice meal for someone and sharing that meal with good conversation can mean so much more than an hour of paid sex. And the people I know would think there is often much more going on in the interaction between men hiring a woman for sex. I can share from my own experience that when I was in this dance with Pattie and other sex workers, it was more complicated than just an hour of paid time.

Rumpus: More complicated how?

Mike: Pattie would sometimes contact me during her break at work at 4am and ask me to pick her up after work. And I would think about the number of men she was with that night and then that week. I then I would get this revolting feeling and feel very sad. So when I think of the women having sex with hundreds of men night after night, it conjures up a difficult feeling, even though as a sex addict I’m naturally drawn to prostitutes.

Rumpus:  Maybe you were just drawn to her, the idea of her in contrast to the other parts of your life. Living a double life has its appeal. How did you stop seeing Pattie?

Mike: I was more than drunk—it was a blurry evening. We finally made it to the V.I.P. room. Again, I was very nervous and awkward, but also feeling strange. I had given her a large tip; so three condoms were laid out on the table. She disappeared for a while somewhere in that confused time. When she came back I started to give her a back rub and she abruptly stood up and said we needed more money. I followed her to try to get more money, but I couldn’t get any more, so she simply turned away from me and started talking to another man in the club. I felt humiliated and in a state of despair. I walked out into the street. Dawn was approaching. I felt horrible and wanted to kill myself. I somehow made it home. I disclosed everything to my wife, like vomiting on her with all I had done. It was an ugly, selfish way to give her all that painful information and certainly was not done in a caring compassionate manner. Out of anger, she told my kids what was going on. It was a disaster. I hurt a lot of people. However, I found a great therapist. And the next day I found an AA meeting and started my road to recovery. I kept going to meetings. It also was made clear I was a sex addict, and so I went to meetings for that group also.

Rumpus: What have you learned from your experience with Pattie? What have you lost or gained?

Mike: I am trying to rebuild my life, especially with my wife and family. An important part of that is not having contact with Pattie ever again. I do think about her and wonder what she is doing and how she is doing. But I also know it is selfish to think contacting her would not matter to my life partner. Some people say sex addiction is not real and I am just a pervert or creep. Others may judge me harshly. And the news is filled with condemnation. I am hoping that, as sex addiction becomes more widely accepted as a nasty addiction, treatment for sex addiction will become more widely accepted and recovery will be more tolerated. Younger people are coming to SLA meetings because their acting out it has caused them to lose their jobs, their marriages, or become estranged from their families. And I am not alone in suspecting its reaching epidemic proportions.

I have learned that my disease of sex addiction is an intimacy disorder. Even when I am with my family, who are all very loving and affectionate people, I have trouble being “part of.”  I still hang a bit in the shadows, as I was taught for many, many years. But now I am trying to make my way “Out of the Shadows” (the title of a helpful book on sex addiction by Patrick Carnes). Even when things are going well, it’s hard for me to simply enjoy the good things in life because I feel a pull to sabotage my own well-being—throw a wrench into my life. Something as simple as playing a game with my son can help me to better make a connection and build my self-esteem. I am in no way saying that everyone who goes to a strip club or interacts with a sex worker in some way is a sex addict, in the same way that everyone who has a beer is not an alcoholic. But I want to fight against patriarchy and I long to heal. What if all the money that has been spent on empty sex was instead spent supporting community gardens? Think of all the people who could be impacted in a positive, life-affirming way.

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I guess I was supposed to disappear in a puff of stripper-smoke. I guess they were put off by my confrontational, searing inquiries. It was one thing to tell me stories about their cancer-stricken wives and college-bound daughters while I listened in a fishnet bra by the paid hour. It was another to type their story in print. I was told my questions were too “hard.” The irony is not lost on me. I’d nearly given up when Max finally responded. He agreed to do the interview if it were 100% anonymous. I thought of the NY broker wearing my dress in my living room, red-faced and trembling with terror at the thought of giving up control. I remembered telling him “Stand up.” I held his damp chin in my gloved hand and said to him, “You’re safe here.” This was one of those moments. Max’s gentle courage was by turns surprising and tender as he flipped from sex worker to client. I was inspired by his vulnerability. I hope you are too.

***

The Rumpus: Growing up, what messages did you receive from your family about sex workers?

Max: Even though my home town is known for vices of various kinds, I can’t say I was ever aware of sex work going on in the 70’s, other than seeing strip clubs from the outside. I certainly never saw any prostitutes, or if I did, I didn’t know that’s what they were doing. My father was a sailor and spent long periods of time stationed overseas, and in recent years I’ve learned that he used to have relationships with women when he was stationed there, some of which involved financial arrangements. Some day I hope to get up the nerve to ask him more about it.

Rumpus: What impression did you have of strippers? What impression did you have about John’s? What about the messages you received about sex workers from your peers, neighborhood and your culture?

Max: There was a famous club in the red light district where I grew up which was owned by an old burlesque performer, and you could see old black and white pictures of her on the marquee outside. I guess I didn’t really find it sexy at all, the elaborate costumes, the big hair, the exaggerated physiques and mannerisms. Mind you, I was a teenage boy and it was the 70′s and so my tastes reflected my age and the era…I was hotter for Tatum O’Neal than some buxom older woman with a big hairdo.

Rumpus: I was more of a Kristy McNichol fan: her mole, her butch-y baseball shirts and her effortless toughness slayed me in Little Darlings.

Max: OH MY GOD KRISTY MCNICHOL! And Jodie Foster and Linda Blair.

Rumpus: What were your early sexual experiences? Did porn have a starring role? What were your first experiences like with sex workers?

Max: My dad started letting me read porno mags when I was 12. Mostly stuff like Hustler. That’s when my inner sex life took off. In the 70′s and early 80′s, video porn wasn’t really available. Phone sex lines hadn’t been invented yet, so magazines were the primary wank- material. My early sex life was pretty typical for a teenage boy, involving tons of masturbation and trying to (and eventually succeeding in) sleeping with lots and lots of women.

My first experience with sex work, I was the one who got paid. I was working summers when I was 19 and 20 at a sign-makers shop. It was a family-owned business, and the most senior employee was a very overweight, very effeminate guy named Ralph who was known for trying to instigate inappropriate relationships with all the young guys in the shop, most of whom just laughed at him. Ralph was my direct supervisor, and one summer he wrote me a pretty pornographic letter about all the things he wanted to do to me. It was the early 80′s, I was very young, I wasn’t a homophobe but gay sex seemed pretty icky to me, and my first reaction was anger. To my shame, I reported him to the owner.

And then the following summer, I wanted some money to buy something (some really cool mod boots that I would never be able to afford on my own) and I thought I could use his lust against him. He came to work way earlier than everybody else, so I showed up early too and told him I could do some of those things for money. I suggested that we swap blowjobs for $70, and he thought that was crazy expensive. I told him to “Take it or leave it.” I thought that by making him blow me that it somehow made me less gay, because I wasn’t only servicing him. I was getting something out of it. So I sucked him off, tried to mostly use my hand instead of my mouth, didn’t let him come in my mouth, tried to do as little as possible, and then we ran out of time before I could get him to reciprocate.

Rumpus: With any other job, it would be “working an extra shift” the doing more in order to buy shoes or pay for a vacation, but you’re also talking about another aspect of sex work: The part where one crosses lines drawn in the sand. At several points, I had disdain for certain acts, but when I felt trapped or needed rent or wanted those shoes, I crossed those self-imposed boundaries. The result was unexpected: It made me feel a stubborn and unspoken alliance with women I’d previously judged.  But it also felt like a relapse of sorts.

Max: Yeah, you go into this with a list of things you’ll never do. Lines you’ll never cross. You’ll never get a blowjob without a condom (until you find out how uncommon covered blowjobs are, and well, that’s an easy temptation to give in to.) You’ll never see a girl who’s being coerced by a pimp, and then you find out that, well, you’ve been doing it, and now what? Try harder to screen people? You’ll never see a girl who’s got a bad drug habit, but then you run into one, and now what? That list of things you’d never do becomes the list of things you’ve done.

Rumpus: I found that the acts get easier to do, never harder. It gets harder to stop doing them. Like when dancing in New Orleans, it was never “necessary” or expected to do hand jobs in the clubs where I stripped. During that same time, in LA, I worked at a hand job parlor.

Max: That’s very true. But it’s true about sex acts in general, not just pay-for-play ones.

Rumpus: You’re leading me into deep waters where there was something thrilling and frightening about sleeping with someone I swore I wouldn’t ever fuck. Then, while working, there was something freeing and incredibly lonesome about being desired by someone who wasn’t invested in me at all.

Max: There were years I spent in an unsatisfying marriage that I felt crushingly lonely. My self-esteem took a lot of blows and the way I dealt with it was I drank too much, gained weight, and I pretty much felt like I was an enormous sweaty unlovable loser who was doomed to a life of no compassionate skin contact. I watched a ton of porn. My sex life and my love life were Porn and Astroglide. At that time, I’d never been to a strip club. I didn’t know how they worked. I didn’t know that sex went on in clubs; I thought it was kind of like going to a restaurant where you were allowed to look at the food but not eat it. And I was too hungry for that kind of torment.

I tried meeting women on the Internet, but fat, drunk and married does not exactly make for a compelling personals ad. And then one day, about ten years ago, I ran across a personals posting that was clearly an ad from an escort. And I was like, “Escorts? On the Internet? You can do that?” I searched around a lot, researching, eventually finding the web discussion forums where escorts and customers interact, where escorts advertise, where customers post reviews of women and warnings about rip-offs or dangerous situations, and after about a year of getting my nerve up, I made an appointment with a woman named Amy. The session (I hate the word “session.” It sounds so clinical, but I don’t know what else you call them, they’re not “dates”) was weird. She smoked, which I didn’t like. She was really sweet, very friendly and she knew it was my first time. And it’s hard to judge from pictures on an Internet ad, but she wasn’t the type of woman I would date. We didn’t have a lot in common to talk about, music or books or movies or whatever. It was like Patton Oswalt on a date with Suzanne Somers or something. At some point, there’s not really a whole lot to say, so you’re not left with anything but the sex. And the sex was not great.

Still, there’s something thrilling to going from feeling utterly alone and unlovable to realizing that all these women with all these pictures in all these ads, you can be with any one of them, at least for one hour, and pretend. And all you need is money. It’s not a replacement for love— it pales in comparison to a real loving relationship with somebody who you are sexually compatible with, but it sure as fuck beats being alone and feeling untouchable.

Rumpus: What do you think Amy’s experience of you was in that moment? Or any of the women you hired?

Max: The positive experiences (and the vast majority were positive), I want to think that they enjoyed my company. That maybe I was more fun than the typical customer. I want to think this. Maybe sometimes it was true. Maybe sometimes they were just good at convincing me it was true.

Rumpus: Tell me about your most positive and negative experiences you had with hiring women for sex acts/entertainment/ lap dances.

Max: The most positive experiences were always ones where there was a real emotional connection, where the sex part of the relationship took a back seat to just talking.

I remember one night going to a strip club. It was late on a Friday night, and I hate Fridays in clubs. It’s always really crowded and loud, everybody’s drunk, there are frat boys and bachelor parties, the girls are all making tons of money and you can’t really talk to anybody. But I was bored, and lonely, so I went, and this dancer that I had not seen in a year or two recognized me across the room and ran up and practically jumped in my lap. We were both sober by this point in our lives, and we just talked. For four hours. She was sick of the business— didn’t feel like working, I didn’t really want a lap dance anyway, and we just sat and talked until the club closed at 4am (about marriage and boyfriends and school and careers and music and life). It was just nice. Especially when you’re a socially awkward guy who has trouble talking to people and meeting people, you don’t drink any more so your old social life is dead, being able to sit and have an intense conversation with a really pretty girl all night is a precious thing. And there was really no other way I could see that ever happening. I couldn’t talk that way with my wife any more. I didn’t have any friends. I couldn’t meet a “civilian” girl somewhere, because I was married and unavailable. This was what I had, this was a rare moment, and I took it.

Rumpus: That reminds me of good nights I’ve had in clubs on Bourbon Street. During the Occupy movement, I remember sitting at a table with a group of guys discussing politics and education—just having a brilliant conversation for hours and enjoying that I was sober and sane and speaking to smart, engaging guys from various states with letters after their names. They paid me for some dances but it was secondary to the fun discourse at the table.

Max: The negative experiences were usually when I found myself in a situation where I felt I was doing something wrong, dangerous or exploitative. I think my situation is not uncommon, and I think most of us do not want to hurt anybody. Not wanting to participate in anything that’s harmful, that’s wrong, that’s cruel. But like a lot of other industries, both black-market ones like drugs or gambling and legit industries like food processing or farming, there are abuses. And so you go into it navigating through the abuses.

You’re in this for a connection. Physical—but also emotional. And a shadow of the dark side of sex work kind of hovers around in the background.

It’s like with drug use. You just smoke pot once in a while, and then one day you find yourself buying a little more weight, from a guy who’s got a gun in his car, and you realize there is this whole other big scary reality behind the little bit that you can see.

Rumpus: Yeah, both can be hiding places and places of refuge. I often met professional gamblers and people who led subversive lives who preferred the company of sex workers because it was familiar and safe for them. And there is danger lurking due to the fact we aren’t protected by law enforcement but criminalized and scorned. I often found myself with people where something could easily go array.

Max: And so the bad experiences were ones where I saw someone based on an ad and some email conversations, and then when I met her, she clearly had a drug problem. Or there was evidence she was being “managed” (pimp). I had met one woman a couple of times at her apartment, she was funny and we got along well, and then I saw her a year later and she had a black eye and was pleading for an extra $40, offering things like sex without a condom for a little extra money. And it’s a difficult situation to know how to handle. You can’t just take your money and walk out, because if there really is a pimp you think he’s either going to meet you at your car to extract the cash, or he’s going to take it out on her in ways that make you sick to imagine. And so you maybe go through with it, get it over-with, leave the money and go and never come back.

Rumpus: What is the thing you are most ashamed of? Afraid to tell me?

Max: I think the thing I am most ashamed of is that I’ve been to Asian massage parlors. These are places with women who are very recent immigrants from China and Southeast Asia, and for a fixed door fee you can get a massage, and for a fixed “tip” you can have sex. On the one hand, it’s convenient; it’s cheaper than a typical escort and you don’t have to make an appointment in advance or have your references screened by the woman. You just show up. On the other hand, the sex is often not that great.

And call me naive, but what I discovered after a couple of trips to these places is that many of these women are victims of sex trafficking. They’re imported into the country under the ruse of getting a good American job, and then their handlers make them work off their exorbitant “travel fees” in the sex spas before they are cut loose. And even after they work off their debt, often they just return to the sex industry, because they lack skills, they lack a verifiable work history, they don’t speak very good English, and the sex work is what they know and it becomes, in a way, easy money.

Thing is, they are not glassy-eyed robot slaves sobbing under their oppressor like you see in movies about this kind of thing. They’re funny, they’re charming, they’re nice to you. And they’re very much in control as far as the sex goes: they set fierce limits about what is and is not allowed, and are usually much stricter about condom use for every act than regular escorts.

Rumpus: But it’s not consensual. It’s coercion. It’s sex slavery.

Max: And I felt very remorseful when I learned this.

And then I did it again.

I want to tell you about one of one of the best escort relationships I had which was also the most heart wrenching. It was with a woman who I clicked with right away. What I mean is: Our interests, our sense of humor, our musical tastes. We became friends. But she was a recently sober addict and was still having some trouble getting her life back together. Some things happened that resulted in her getting a 24-hour eviction notice from her landlord, and we texted about it that night, and then…I stepped back a little. I was afraid I was getting into something over my head. I sometimes have a problem with compulsively wanting to save broken people, and this compulsion gets me into trouble, and I recognized I was starting to do it again. A few hours after we texted, she killed herself.

She was a secret. Nobody knew that I knew her. I didn’t know her family or friends. I didn’t know if they knew what she did. My family and friends and girlfriend certainly didn’t know she existed. So I had to grieve for a dead friend secretly and I had to question in private, without anybody to talk to, whether I had failed her as a friend in her hour of need. It was around the time that all those dead sex workers were turning up in New York and the police had not really been investigating, because they’re just hookers, they’re just disposable women, who cares, right? And I wondered if I was doing the same to her in a way.

I looked up her address in the local police department’s crime website, just to see the police report. “Deceased person” is all there was. I found her obituary online and sent a contribution to her funeral fund, through PayPal, and a few days later I saw somebody from her hometown finding my blog by Googling my name, so I guess they wondered whom the fuck I was. She was very beautiful and very sweet and I’m still sad.

Rumpus: Do you think that any of the women you hired felt degraded or exploited? Did you? Do you think the women you hired considered themselves feminists? Do you think they considered themselves victims?

Max: Other than the women in the massage parlors I visited, I honestly don’t believe that most of the women doing this felt degraded. The ones that were escorts who didn’t have pimps, didn’t have drug problems, and weren’t trafficked, I honestly believe that they chose their profession about as much as any of us choose our profession. I don’t think they feel any more exploited than all of us workers feel exploited. We all have to work to live, and most of us would rather be doing something else.

Many years after my first blowjob-for-money experience, I went through a bi-curious phase and I guess I have to say now that I’m really a bisexual who leans hetero. Speaking only for myself, if my only two choices were becoming a warehouse picker for Amazon for $10 an hour, or sucking dicks ten times a day for $50 bucks a pop, I’d buy me some kneepads. Somebody can point to, say, a fellatio porn scene where the guy is rough on the girl and calls her names, and say that it’s inherently degrading, and my argument would be that it’s only inherently degrading if the girl doesn’t want to do it. I mean, I’ve had it done to me. I thought it was a blast. And I didn’t even get paid.

I really don’t know whether they considered themselves feminists. Do people even talk that way, outside of literary and political forums? We didn’t talk about it, specifically, although I imagine many of them did, and some of them didn’t, for the same reasons that non-sex workers do or do not.

Rumpus: What did you get out of your experiences with sex workers? How did you feel afterwards?

Max: Seeing women for money, made me a little less sad. It was a brief respite from loneliness, from my skin being hungry for human touch the way a drowning person is starving for oxygen.

Rumpus: Beautifully said. You basically summarized the book I’ve been writing for three years.

Max: Afterwards, it was a really nice feeling. Sometimes there was guilt. Sometimes there was fear of disease, especially if I slipped and did something that was not 100% safe. I got a sore throat, or a zit in a weird place, and there was a voice in the back of my mind saying, “See? You’re a diseased sex maniac and now you’re getting what you deserve.”

After I got sober and lost weight and got some of my self-esteem back, the attraction of these relationships was the implicit agreement about non-commitment. I was unavailable for a long-term relationship. When I got involved with a non-professional, feelings would develop, things would go too far, and eventually somebody, usually both of us, would get hurt.

The money changing hands is a way of saying, “This money symbolizes our agreement that this is temporary, a fantasy, it’s just pretend, and at the end of the hour we go our separate ways. Now c’mere and let’s pretend!”

There’s a saying, which I think is kind of crass-sounding, that “You aren’t paying for the sex, you’re paying for her to go away afterwards.” But it’s true in a way, and the agreement goes both ways. By paying, you are agreeing that the hour is all you get, is all you are entitled to. In some ways, this is preferable to one-nighters and hookups and short-term affairs, when even if there is agreement to not get attached, inevitably somebody might anyways, and then there may be resentments and long-lasting emotional consequences to deal with.

Rumpus: If you think sex work is humiliating, how is sex work more humiliating than, say, working at Wal-Mart?

Max: I don’t think sex work is humiliating in and of itself, I think society makes it humiliating. You want humiliating? Try cleaning vomit-filled toilets in a frat bar on a Friday night. Try mopping floors for a person who spent more on their car than you will earn all year. Try being lectured in public by a man ten years younger than you because you poured his wine wrong.

Next time you’re in a fast food drive-thru at 2am on the way home from some bar, look through the window at the people in the kitchen, see how they are spending their Friday nights for minimum wage, and think about humiliation. Read about chicken-processing plants, Amazon warehouses. There are a million humiliating ways to make a living in this capitalist world we live in. At least escorting takes place in private.

Rumpus: Why do you think people react so strongly against sex work?

Max: It’s a combination of things.

First is the conflating of the worst abuses of sex work with all of sex work. A drug addicted single mom being pimped and beaten and coerced to walk the streets is a horrific and inhumane thing, but it’s the extreme end of the scale. It’s not inherent to sex work that it be done that way, any more than it’s inherent to casual drug use that drug cartels have to leave dozens of beheaded bodies by the side of the road every week. Otherwise everybody who laughed about smoking up on 4/20 has an awful lot of blood on their hands.

Also, people react very strongly against sex— or at least against sex done in a way that they disapprove of. People are going to say that sex work was created by the patriarchy, to serve the patriarchy, that it commodities women, treats them as objects to be bought and sold. I don’t agree. To believe that, you have to believe that all of these women lack agency, lack any will at all. That’s not been my experience. I’ve never “bought” a woman, any more than I’ve “bought” a guy to mow my lawn or “bought” a barista to make coffee.

Rumpus: Why do you think our culture is so invested in seeing sex workers as broken and hopeless? Why do you think our culture condemns men who hire women for entertainment?

Max: Well, I mean, half the culture condemns all of us for even having any sex at all outside a marriage between a man and a woman. It’s easier, when confronted with behaviors or social issues that you don’t approve of, to extend your opinion about the act to a judgment about the person. Sex workers are broken women the way drug addicts lack willpower, the poor don’t have a work ethic, the homeless are bipolar drunks, women who want birth control and abortions are sluts, students studying the liberal arts are spoiled hipster narcissists, and men who hire sex workers or go to strip clubs are losers who can’t get a date or misogynists with a straight white male sense of entitlement.

Rumpus: What in our past provokes us to feel shame about sex, to recoil from these conversations and to be honest with ourselves about what type of intimacy we seek?

Max: I go through life with an intense fear of being judged, found wanting, rejected, and left to die alone. Not just about sex work, or sex, but about everything. I know I’m not alone in this. And so when society condemns a thing, it’s natural to want to keep it a secret, or to seek out communities of like-minded people so you can feel normal. It’s why drunks hang with other drunks, and why recovering alcoholics hang with other recovering alcoholics. Nobody wants to feel like an outcast.

One thing I’ve noticed is that there is growing acceptance in some areas, like The Rumpus, like in the Bay Area, for sex workers. There seems to be solidarity and a reclaiming of this identity, to try to turn it into something noble and strong and creative— to drag it out of the shadows. There is less of an effort to do so with the customers. The Johns. Whatever advances for acceptance are gained by sex workers, I feel like the customers will always be seen as losers. Despite the fact that there are probably more sex worker customers than there are sex workers, we live in more of a closet than they do.

***

Photographs by Marc McAndrews.

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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. Tranny hookers checked their weaves in the windows as they sashayed by and winos waved their lotto tickets in my face as they brushed against its elegant modern angles. Everyone was holding.

Clients at the Polk Inn participate in street economy, meaning, most of them turned tricks, hustled drugs or smoked dope with the ghetto blaster guy who bounced up and down the sidewalk, nodding his head to the rhythm of Coolio’s “Gangsta’s Paradise” and singing the lyrics, “The ones we hurt are you and me.” Polk Street was their terrain. My job as a residential assistant was to enforce the house rules.

For instance, clients weren’t allowed to bring their swag into the Polk Inn.

We reserved the right to rifle through their backpacks and purses, but I never did. We buzzed clients into the front door and they willingly held out their hands to show the things they carried: a wrinkled brown paper sack from the liquor store full of cigarettes, candy and beer. My manager said their world was small and that they stayed within a four-block radius of the Polk Inn. But I don’t know. Some clients wandered, like Charlie, a gorgeous blonde, crack-smoking tranny. They had rules and they had chores, like they had to keep their rooms clean and show up for their meetings with their case managers in order to live there.

I became a residential assistant because of a guy who looked like a young hippie version of Robin Williams. He was a case manager who liked to jabber on about how he thought everyone was attracted to him—his boss, his co-workers and his clients. To my surprise, he hired me, regardless of my protracted career as a nude lap dancer in the tenderloin. RA was a counseling position that required no actual counseling, but my duties ran the gamut. At times I was a nurse, babysitter, DJ, watchdog, secretary and cook.  I distributed meds and dinners for a half-dozen 17-24 year-old HIV positive, mentally unstable, drug addicted clients. Then I encouraged them to dispose their hypodermic needles into the bright orange Sharps containers attached to the walls. During my shift, I recorded the clients’ notable behavior in a big black plastic binder that was kept in a drawer upstairs.

In the reception area, clients met with their case managers for counseling and to determine if they were progressing or declining—if the drugs were working. The phones rang non-stop while I sat at a computer and helped Jim with his cover letter. He was a dashing, gay, high-functioning client with an actual job in an office somewhere. His blazer, shoes and sunglasses were worth more than my Mission District apartment.

The case managers’ offices were dinky and crammed with file cabinets and folders.  I didn’t envy their job one bit, even though that’s the only way for an RA to progress. So, after I finished Jim’s cover letter, I hung around the office and handed out sack lunches to clients. I made sure they included a turkey sandwich, one Capri Sun, chocolate chip cookies and a cloudy red apple. When the clients were really good, I got to give them a movie pass.

At five, the case managers went home, the fog wiped away the sun, and we RA’s took over the Polk Inn.

 ***

Armando was short and thin, five feet tall and Latino, with loose khaki shorts and a studded black belt. He smeared grease on his slick black curls and wore a chunky silver rope chain that seemed uncharacteristically butch around his fragile neck. Armando had been a resident for a few months. He was twenty-two, and a cutter. Phil, the other RA, warned me. One afternoon, Armando sat in a chair in the courtyard, slumped over a black journal with a set of skinny pens, drawing. Once in a while he wiped a shiny ringlet aside with his right hand. Picked up another pen and shaded.

“Want a snack?” I asked him. He shook his head and tore another piece of coarse white paper from his journal and drew in loopy, magnificent detail. I looked over his shoulder at his drawing of a giant menacing orchid overtaking an angel wielding a sword.

“That is so good,” I said.

“I’m going to the Academy of Art.” He stood up. Looked at his work from another angle. Sat back down. His forehead was creased.

“Can you play some music? Phil always plays music.”

“Sure.” I saw CDs by Radiohead and Jill Scott that another RA left behind and popped in the Jill Scott.

“Thanks,” he said.

I looked forward to my shift on Sundays because I’d cook dinner early and make it a movie night. My usual dish was chicken smothered in olive oil and wild rice with almond slivers. I wore a red key attached to my wrist dangled by an elastic cord. It opened every door in the building and jangled against the refrigerator and pantry with a loud, tinny clank. I found garlic salt, butter and carrots in the fridge. Chopped an onion. I rifled through the dishwasher for cooking pans. Tossed the chicken and vegetables in the oven. While it cooked, it killed the antiseptic institution smell of frozen French fries and stale fish sticks. The kitchen had sliding glass doors that opened out into a patio where clients sat on aluminum chairs in the chilly, afternoon sun, smoking over silver tables. White plastic ashtrays were filled with rainwater. Butts afloat in the soot.

“Miss Congeniality,” played loudly on the big flat-screened TV in the community room. It was the movie they all voted for unanimously. Clients settled onto new, sturdy couches with fluffy cushions, a far cry from the ratty couches I lugged home from St. Vinny’s— more like scratching posts with springs that tickled your tailbone when you leaned back.  Allesandra, a Native American tranny and Revo, the junkie skateboarder, played Gin Rummy on one couch. I buzzed Jessa in. She waddled frantically up to her room, over eight months pregnant. I registered her jerky movements. They meant another fight with her boyfriend outside. Donald, the autistic happy redhead shuffled by in white pajamas and slippers. “Can I have a snack?” is all I’ve ever heard him say. I showed him cookies or an apple. He took the cookies. Shuffled to the couch for the movie.

A woman I didn’t recognize from the security camera in the front office rang the bell. She held hundreds of white lilies wrapped in Saran Wrap. Said they’re from a wedding. Could she donate them? Armando put down his pen and smiled huge.

“Lilies! My favorite! Can we decorate?” We spent the next thirty minutes cutting the tops off of water bottles with scissors and filling them with water from the kitchen sink. I unlocked the case managers’ offices. Armando pranced into the room, cleared a space on top the desks, placed the lilies in the center, and sauntered off with jerky dance moves. He threw his hands in the air as if to say, “Ta Da!”

“Can I have some in my room?” He asked, knowing I would allow it, that I was a pushover. He didn’t wait for my permission. I watched him carry two bottles of flowers up to his room, which was on the second floor, right next to the RA office. I didn’t see him for the rest of my shift, until I knocked on his door to give him meds.

When I did, he showed me two small, framed pictures of his mother and sister. Their faces were round and hazy like from an 80’s after-school special. He told me they don’t talk to him anymore because he’s a gay hooker. When he said it his eyes flashed wildly—practically flirtatious. He didn’t smile. My entry for him read: Armando was social, helpful and productive. He worked on his beautiful drawings and helped me decorate.

After filling out my time sheet, I rode my motorcycle a couple blocks up to O’Farrell in the wet cold night where I still stripped at The Century Theatre till 4a.m. I wasn’t allowed to tell my coworkers or the clients at Polk Inn that I stripped, or to divulge any personal information, especially my handful of years in AA. Self-disclosure was considered unprofessional. Besides, Polk Inn was a harm reduction gig. They didn’t want abstinence talk to scare off clients.

While on the floor of the club, I met a client who asked me to fuck him at a hotel for $800 the next night and I agreed. Over dinner, he drugged me with GHB and I knew something was wrong, so I guzzled water and shoveled food down my face as quickly as possible. No one knew where I was that night. I tucked the secret in my gut and hoped my shame didn’t spill out onto my clients. I was supposed to be stronger than that. I was supposed to be helping them. I was supposed to be a role model. I didn’t want to be shitty to them.

 ***

When I showed up for my next shift at the Polk Inn, all hell had broken loose. Allesandra died in a knife fight on the street and Revo disappeared for a couple days. Jessa was in the hospital in labor so she’d moved out of our facility and into the one that housed single mothers. I was reprimanded for allowing Armando to get anywhere near the scissors. “They could also cut themselves on the edges of those water bottles,” my manager said. He was right, but I didn’t feel remorse. I thought it was good for Armando to do something thoughtful and we shared a love of lilies—our favorite flower.

I walked into the kitchen, which is the first thing I do in any place to reset. I stood in the chilly glow of the fridge and considered my options. I swiped a Capri Sun and sucked the wet sugar from the spindly straw. It was eerily quiet under the florescent kitchen lights. Charlie rushed out the front door in a denim miniskirt and spike heels with a little wave. I was ordering Dominoes pizza in case some clients showed up for dinner when heard loud music blaring from upstairs. It was coming from Armando’s room. I grabbed his meds from the office and knocked on his door.

“Can you turn that down?” He opened his door a couple inches.

“Why? No one’s here.”

“I’m trying to order us pizza.” His eyes were two black holes.

“I’m not hungry.” I handed him his meds. He shook his head. Shut his door in my face. I ducked into the RA office and wrote in the binder:

Armando was asked to turn his music down. Refused his HIV and psych meds.

Downstairs, I gorged on three pieces of drippy pepperoni pizza and replayed the night with the client who drugged me with GHB. He’d offered me the water while we waited for our table in the restaurant. It tasted like soda water. Then I felt foggy and dizzy and almost peed my pants. I was shocked at how easily I’d crossed the line from dancer to hooker. Had the street economy invaded my skin and normalized it? I wrestled with excuses and found only bewilderment and shame.

I used my red key to open an empty client room and locked myself in the bathroom. Turned the light on. Stuck my finger down my throat. Threw up in the toilet. I hadn’t told anyone about the $800 GHB client. I wanted to sit in the dark and blast music, rock back and forth in my own emptiness. Rock my emptiness to sleep.

Disgusted with myself, I washed my face and hands and dried them.

Armando’s music played louder and louder.

“God damn it,” I mumbled. I walked down the hall and banged on his door. He didn’t open it.

“Armando!” I kept knocking. Louder.

“I’m coming in, Armando.” I unlocked his door and noticed my key chain still had some puke on it. I wiped it on my jeans. The door was heavy because he’d used a bookshelf to blockade it. I pushed my whole body against it, sliding the bookshelf towards the wall. Armando stood holding a wooden bat in his arms. His head was cut and blood dripped down into his perfectly tweezed black eyebrows. Blood was splattered on his hands and shirt. His eyes were fierce— lacked any of the softness from the other day. His gaze was ecstatic and free, like an angel floating in cool moonlight.

“I’m okay,” he said.

He let the bloody bat drop and it landed with a thunk. Both of us froze together, standing in the dark room with his blood under our feet. White lilies drooped pitifully on a wooden bedside table. My manager must’ve confiscated the water bottle, so they collapsed there, dying.

“I’m okay,” he said again in a raspy whisper. We glowed in the dark. I backed away, stepped into the hall and called my manager. Armando’s door slammed shut.

“Call 9-11,” my manager said. I didn’t want to. I didn’t want Armando to go anywhere. I wanted to throw a blanket over him and pat him on the head and hand him a sack lunch and a movie pass. Within a few moments that could’ve been thirty seconds or a half-hour, the door buzzed.

Outside, the ghetto blaster guy was still swaying to rap music. Behind him were six men in black helmets and kneepads. I’d never seen them before: the SWAT team. They wrapped Armando up and carried him away on a stretcher. His expression seemed to ask me. Why?

***

Photographs by Romy Suskin

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