Click here to read “Admit You’ve Paid For It: The Savage Honesty of David Henry Sterry,” in which Rumpus sex columnist Antonia Crane flips the script and interviews Sterry.

***

I am so stealing Sam Benjamin’s pet name: ‘The Ivy League Pornographer.” Sam attended Brown University. Shortly upon graduating, he found a home in the LA porn industry. His memoir “American Gangbang: A Love Story” was released in 2011. “Sex, Drugs, Ratt and Roll,” co-authored with Stephen Pearcy of the glam metal band Ratt, comes out in May. When he gives readings, he usually has bizarre 70’s porn music playing in the background on an ancient ghetto blaster. He is also unapologetically adorable.

***

The Rumpus: How did you get started in the sex business?

Sam Benjamin: I’d love to say I got started shooting porn as a total lark but in fact, I was deadly serious about it. It was probably the most intentional thing I’d ever done. At 22 years old, I imagined I’d make revolutionary sex films: spectacular, feminist, clever, ornate, Brechtian fuck flicks. Porn with a heart, basically. I fell far short of my goal, of course, but for a time there I really believed.

Rumpus: Best experiences being a sex worker?

Benjamin: Getting to push the boundaries of my self-conception.

Rumpus: Some things you learned about the sex industry?

Benjamin: I learned how to mix up a convincing fake-cum mixture that looks good on camera. Equal parts 30 SPF suntan lotion and pina colada mix. Bam.

Rumpus: Did you tell your friends and family you were a sex worker?

Benjamin: I told my folks that I was shooting porn, yes. I used to tell girls in bars, too, not only because once entrenched in the sex industry, I fell victim to a sort of snow-blindness, wherein I believed that my dirty lifestyle had a kind of validity and richness that your average 9-to-5′er would find deliciously interesting, but because I was philosophically opposed to lying. I alienated the hell out of people for a couple of years there with my potent blend of narcissism, over-sharing, and reverse snobbery. It’s like I was a character on Girls. Ahead of my time, I suppose.

Rumpus: Other jobs?

Benjamin: Transition from porn to respectable work was the absolute worst. I was used to making a grand a week, working negligible hours. My first job back was working in the customer care department at Wells Fargo in Portland, Oregon, answering handwritten letters from irate customers. Not that many people write letters to banks anymore. Most call. Turned out most of my new “pen pals” were incarcerated. Earning slave wages myself, trapped in a life I didn’t understand, I felt a certain kinship.

Rumpus: Do you think sex work should be illegal?

Benjamin: My sex work was actually always legal. Confusingly legal, in fact. Many of the actresses I shot escorted on the side, and they had to approach that side of their professional life with some discretion. Porn, on the other hand, kosher in the eyes of the LAPD by dint of having a running camera on the premises, allowed for all the salacious chest-thumping and idiotic, out-loud braggadoccio the world could bear. It made zero sense.

Rumpus: Did you ever have a crush on a client?

Benjamin: I had a crush on several of the porn actresses I shot, but none more than Belladonna. It wasn’t even that she was remarkably pretty—which of course she was. Bella had a wonderful, kind personality and possessed the sort of charisma that actually allowed me to believe that the stuff I was engaged in making might be worthwhile; might be valuable.

Rumpus: Would you recommend the sex business as a way to make money?

Benjamin: The adult film industry was a great way to make money in my heyday, which was 2000-2005. You had to be a complete, desperate drooling fool to avoid making at least a middle-class income for yourself. But the bottom’s since dropped out, and I certainly wouldn’t recommend this path to any graduating college seniors, unless they could approach it from an extremely inventive and resourceful marketing angle.

Rumpus: Good things about working in the sex industry?

Benjamin: The best thing about working in the sex industry was that it made me—a child of Hebrew School carpools and shinguarded soccer teams—feel unique and somewhat daring, even if that sense of “authenticity” proved increasingly difficult to hold onto as the years progressed.

The worst part was that the sex I managed to cadge was usually disappointingly bad. It was the raison d’etre, ya know? That was probably the main reason I had gotten into directing porn, if you want to get right down to it, and, to my surprise, it was horrid, cold, weird, unsympathetic sludgy coupling. I’ve had far, far better sex since I left the sex industry. That was my big lesson.

Rumpus: Are you still in the business?

Benjamin: I left porn about eight years ago. I still live in LA, and I’m tied to the adult film industry by a few friends, but that’s about it. I simply don’t have the heart for it. Porn was always stronger than me, and it still is.

Related Posts:

• Johns, Marks, Tricks and Chickenhawks: The Rumpus Interview with Annie M. Sprinkle
• Donna
• Facing Sex Addiction: A John Comes Clean
• Who’s having a good time?
• The Rumpus Interview with Jennifer Lyon Bell

So when I heard that the terminology around acts that our culture considers to be “sexually deviant” was being changed in the May update to the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM-5), I was curious. The DSM-5 is a field guide for the mental health community and it was being updated this month for the first time in thirteen years. There was considerable noise in the press over how the DSM-5 might newly characterize healthy sex versus deviant sex.

I looked around to understand what appeared to be a very confusing run-up to the May update, and found the activist and author Susan Wright to be the most eloquent commentator on the topic. Susan founded the National Coalition for Sexual Freedom (NCSF), a national advocacy organization for the BDSM, swing, and polyamory communities, in 1997. I asked if we could talk for an assignment I’d gotten for Details on the subject. But what I was chiefly interested in was writing a book that looked at women and sex in a way that might be counterintuitive.

We spoke on the phone at length one night in April, after my son went to sleep. Our conversation left me humbled. In 1991, when Susan got into the kink community, she got a lucky break to get her first book published. But when her editor discovered she was in a kinky triad with a married couple, he told her that if she wanted to get her book published, she would have to sleep with him, too. “I stood up and walked out,” she said. “It was one of the defining moments of my life, and it sparked the activist inside of me.”

I wanted to get her voice out in the world to color the hard-facts reporting that didn’t dig into the issues deeply enough. Susan had smart things to say about consent versus rape not just in “fringe” communities, but in the sexual lives of people of every persuasion. Her sharply-worded thoughts of media influence on the persecution of alternative sexuality gave me a serious education. But what hit me most was how much we yielded to contemporary notions about sexuality. Sexual deviance is a subjective thing. What was considered deviant decades ago (homosexuality) is no longer so. What’s still unacceptable in some countries and communities (pre-marital sex) is a given in the West.

What is our cultural moment, I wonder. Whatever it is, Susan makes it clear that talking about sex yields a different kind of intimacy than most of us have come to expect.

 ***

The Rumpus: Since the third edition of the DSM, the manual defined “non-normative” sexual behavior as “paraphilias,” or sexual deviation. Back then, a “sexual disorder” included homosexuality—and that was removed in 1973. So there are different opinions about what’s considered “deviant” at each cultural moment. The American Psychiatric Association (APA) said they may add “paraphiliac disorder” to the manual to differentiate between healthy people who enjoy kinky sex and those who are mentally ill. How does that sit with you?

Susan Wright: The DSM’s rationale section for each diagnosis includes the APA’s thinking and possible language on paraphilia: clear non-normative sexual behavior that’s practiced by healthy people.” Paraphilia in general has been defined as “non-normative sexual behavior that is not solely focused on the genitals or breasts.” By itself, it doesn’t require psychiatric intervention. That’s different from what they call “paraphiliac disorder,” which is when someone is causing severe distress or inflicting harm upon themselves or others.

Rumpus: The language is cloaked in secrecy until May. What is the main issue?

Wright: How they’re going to define “distress” is the issue. There’s a lot of societal pressure because of the stigma around kinky sex.

Rumpus: How would you define distress or harm, say, if you’re in a dominant/submissive relationship? Is it distress or harm, say, if you’re a sub and your partner spanks and bruises you consensually? What is distress?

Wright: Distress is about the person who’s actually doing it. This is how the APA would like to diagnose mental illnesses: “Is this person suffering distress over the fact that this is happening?” Some people don’t at all, and some may overlap with sexual sadism, such as psychopaths who don’t suffer any sort of distress over what they’re doing. Those people also suffer “impairment” to themselves in that they can’t have real relationships with people and don’t have the social skills to form bonds.

The other important part concerns harm to others. I’m not sure if that should fall under mental illness, but that’s what sexual sadism as a paraphiliac disorder would be: someone who harms other people. And either they do it non-consensually or in a way that’s so extreme, that it actually causes damage to the other person.

Rumpus: So the language in the DSM-IV (TR), the 2000 update to the 1994 fourth edition, was vague?

Wright: The line wasn’t drawn before regarding what is mental illness. They had a vague criteria, four out of five, that could have applied to anyone who was suffering some kind of distress because they weren’t out. Or distress because they hadn’t found the kink community yet. Or because they felt alone, ashamed, or confused about what they were doing. That kind of shame is not mental illness.

Unfortunately such diagnoses were used not only by psychiatrists but by people in the legal field who used the DSM without the qualifications to interpret what it really said. We need that hard, bright line and that’s what the APA said they were going to give us. A lot of persecution comes because people think that kinky people might be mentally ill. If we can disprove that, it gives them no reason to have a problem with us.

Rumpus: What did you wean from your conversations with the APA?

Wright: On behalf of NCSF, I was able to talk to the paraphilias sub-working group and educate them about the discrimination and persecution that’s going on because of the DSM. Frankly, they were quite surprised, and they didn’t want the DSM to engender that sort of discrimination. So I think the information that the APA released to the public—the distinction between paraphilia and paraphiliac disorders was a response to that. It was a way of saying: “Hey, listen, we’re not talking about healthy kinky people. They shouldn’t be discriminated against because they’re not mentally ill.” I’m really hoping they follow through.

Rumpus: Are there legal repercussions around the language they include in the manual? You mentioned that laws around “bodily harm” vary from state to state.

Wright: A good example is family court, when you’re trying to get child custody. The judge evaluates the parents and if an accusation is made that one of the parents is kinky and that they’re not a fit parent, the judge will turn to the DSM. Then he might say, wow, you won’t give up your sex partner who happens to be kinky, so therefore you require this and you are mentally ill.

The language included in this new edition will have repercussions across the board—in psychiatry, in legal settings, and also in our understanding of what kinky sex is. It already has an impact. One out of three people in NCSF’s surveys say they have been persecuted. Some were attacked, some discriminated against. That’s a huge number.

Rumpus: What about accusations that kink can go too far? Since highly emotional events often take place around kink, what happens when someone goes over the edge? How do people differentiate within these gray areas?

Wright: If we can take away some of the stigma of this, it’s easier for someone to report something inappropriate. Say you meet someone and decide to have kinky sex and you get assaulted. Right now it’s difficult for the person to report that to the police because of the stigma around kink. They’re also afraid they’re not going to be believed. Removing the stigma will give us more access to the judicial and legal framework that’s in place so we can protect ourselves and get the education we need around this.

Of course there are limits. And there will always be legal limits in terms of what you can do to another person. If you enter somebody, and you damage them in way that injures an organ or you impair a limb, that’s absolutely harm. Even if it’s consensual, it’s harm. If you tie someone up and cause nerve damage in somebody’s arm, you harm them. And there are questions about the liability involved—and there have been cases about things like this. I’m sure in the future, as the stigma’s removed, we’ll be able to deal with these in the right setting and really grapple with these questions.

Rumpus: You’d prefer states follow the American Law Institute’s Model Penal Code.

Wright: When people go to court over things like this, it varies from state to state. Some states already follow the Model Penal Code. Then you’ve got a legal interpretation regarding what is “serious bodily injury.” In appellate court cases, which set precedent, things like using a riding crop or dripping candle wax on somebody have, in the past, been considered serious bodily injury. But those are very old cases and I don’t believe that a judge or jury today would rule that a crop or candle wax used consensually is assault.

There are gray areas in all of this regarding consent. None of these court cases are clear-cut. That’s the problem when they create precedent—we’re left not knowing where those lines are. But the Model Penal Code lays out a very good framework for looking at these issues in terms of actual physical injury.

That said, most people who are kinky are not even into the extreme, intense things that people who do body piercing like to do with their bodies. Most want to be kinky in a power exchange kind of way, or they want to cross-dress or engage in some sort of role play. Others are kinky in a BDSM or S&M kind of way. Those people like really intense sensations. They are not harming each other—they’re giving each other intense pleasure through intense sensation. That’s the goal of BDSM. The people who do it non-consensually, they should be arrested. And the people who go over the edge, well, there are going to be penalties because they’ve harmed somebody and they, too, should be arrested.

Rumpus: An earlier piece in Salon addressed rape and sexual assault at “play spaces” in San Francisco’s kink and bondage community. It quoted Carol Queen, the co-founder of the Center for Sex and Culture, saying she doesn’t go to commercial dungeons anymore because of this issue.

Wright: These kinds of stories are why NCSF has Consent Counts, an activism program we’re doing to decriminalize consensual BDSM that doesn’t result in serious bodily injury. We did surveys on consent in BDSM because we believe that’s the most important thing for the kink community to be talking about right now. We need to understand consent: what is it? What is it in a legal sense, in an ethical sense, and where do you cross that line?

For example, we put out a guide, which we call a “fact,” called “Is This Assault?” “Was I assaulted” is a fact—people really have this question—that explains questions such as, “Was it assault if I said yes right up until I said no?”

These are basic questions that are not being explained to people—kinky or vanilla. Unfortunately there’s a gap in the sexual education of adults in America. The kink community is trying to fill that gap. There’s a lot of date rape out there. It’s often someone you know who crosses the line in a small way or in a major way. We need to do a lot more education to teach people this is the line you can’t cross. And we need to do more than teach people how to protect themselves. We need to draw the line ourselves.

At NCSF, we also have a Guide for Groups with a consent policy we’d love to see BDSM groups and clubs use—it says you don’t touch anyone or anything without the other person’s permission, you respect it when somebody says “no,” and you don’t renegotiate in the middle of a scene when someone’s all happy and will say yes to anything. We’re hoping that if we create hardcore lines, it will help form boundaries for people and give us all the education we need.

Rumpus: Besides the DSM-5 update, is there a larger cultural issue that needs to be addressed?

Wright: There’s not a single person out there whose life hasn’t been touched by the issue of consent. When do you consent, when are you coerced, pressured, or manipulated into doing things you don’t want to do sexually? We all need sex education about consent, and safe sex is what it comes down to. Perhaps the kink community is ahead of the curve because we do such complicated, interested games, that we have to understand each other and need to have a way to follow the rules in order to do this—because millions of people are doing this millions of times. That is important for everyone to hear because we aren’t hearing it from anyone else.

Rumpus: Has the Fifty Shades of Gray phenomenon helped make these issues more prominent? The book sold seventy-million copies worldwide.

Wright: You know why Fifty Shades of Gray is so popular? Because it’s barely kinky. It’s popular because they talked the entire time about what they wanted sexually. They negotiated, they compromised. It was a real lesson. Most people don’t even talk about it before they have sex. They don’t know what’s really turning on the other person. To be able to communicate in that way creates an intimacy like no other. And that’s what we have to teach other people. This is something that needed to be said and shown—here’s how you have a great sex life. And you get to confess your deepest, darkest secrets.

Related Posts:

• The Sunday Rumpus Interview: T Cooper
• Self Evident Truths
• The Trouble With Prince Charming or He Who Trespassed Against Us
• The Rumpus Interview with Madison Young
• What About Men?

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.

Related Posts:

• Death of A Bad Girl – A Life in Letters: The Rumpus Interview with Daphne Gottlieb
• The “Most Beautiful Thing That Ever Fucked”: The Rumpus Interview with Oriana Small
• Here Comes the Girl
• Facing Sex Addiction: A John Comes Clean
• Paying to Play: Interview with a John

***

Annie M. Sprinkle spent her “wonder years” age 18-40 in Manhattan, then returned to California where she has been based for the past twelve years. Sprinkle earned a BA at School of Visual Arts then became the first porn star to earn a Ph.D. (IASHS). She has been an activist in sex worker rights for forty years, founded Occupy Bernal, and is currently a passionate environmental activist pioneering the ecosex movement. A former prostitute and “porn legend,” she has proudly had sex with over 3500 people. She has also written and done photography for most every ‘80s-‘90s sex magazine as well as many non-sex publications like Newsweek and the New York Times, and has published five books with Tarcher/Penguin, Continuum, and Cleis Press. Annie Sprinkle’s guiltiest pleasure is reading the National Enquirer every week. For the past ten years she has collaborated with her life partner, artist Elizabeth Stephens. Visit Anniesprinkle.org, loveartlab.org, and her new site, sexecology.org.

***

The Rumpus: Are there any correlations between your career in sex and your career as an artist?

Annie M. Sprinkle: Being a whore was great preparation for being an artist. Beth Stephens, my partner and collaborator, and I just did a live art piece in a Brooklyn gallery—Grace Exhibition Space. Our work is exploring the earth as lover, instead of earth as mother. So we built a bed frame and poured fifty-five big bags of fresh dirt into it. We took off our clothes and got into the bed of dirt. Then we invited our audience to take off their clothes and join us. On one hand, it’s very different than been a prostitute. But then again it’s not. We were paid to get in bed with total strangers, naked. In a sense we are turning art patrons into johns and jills. It’s fun to play in these realms. I think that in some ways, we are all whores, johns and jills.

Rumpus: Why do you think there’s such a stigma about buying and selling sex?

Sprinkle: It’s a pity that there’s such a negative connotation about paying for sex. There are very few out johns in the world. I really respect those few. Fred Cherry, who passed away, Hugh Loebner, and Charlie Sheen are the only out johns I can think of, after all these years. They are very brave. No one wants to admit they pay for sex. Yet millions of people do, one way or another. Being a john is actually far more stigmatized than being a sex worker.

Rumpus: Do you think being a sex worker would make it easier to pay for sex?

Sprinkle: I heard about a recent study where some researcher did a survey and discovered that people who have been prostitutes are ten times more willing to be johns than the average person. So, if you’ve been paid for sex you understand the value of that experience on some level.

Rumpus: Were your johns generally respectful of you?

Sprinkle: My johns adored and worshipped me, therefore they empowered me. When I was 18, 19, and 20, I had a poor self-image and needed attention. It’s hard for people who haven’t been prostitutes to imagine, but I think it’s often true. There can be a very symbiotic relationship happening.

Rumpus: Did you ever have orgasms with clients?

Sprinkle: Sure, I had orgasms with clients, even though it was kind of a taboo at that time to admit it. Women weren’t supposed to enjoy sex that much! Today whores are much more open about enjoying the sex. I usually kissed my clients if they wanted to kiss. I thought it was just way too weird to say “no kissing allowed,” That to me was uncomfortable. Blow jobs are okay, but kissing clients is still a taboo. I liked having orgasms with clients and that was kind of a taboo at that time, but I never paid attention to that. A lot of women I worked with didn’t respect their clients. I had some clients who didn’t respect me, but still you somehow made it work. One guy, he had a lot of money and he was pretty disrespectful, he kept trying to have anal sex with me and I didn’t want to have anal sex with him and he just seemed to really want to provoke me and make me angry and manipulative. And then I felt like ugh this guy really needs love. Gee, I’ll model love for him, I thought. I’ll kill him with kindness. I don’t know if my strategy had any effect or not. Perhaps it was simply my way of coping with a challenging situation, and I needed to pay my bills. Other women might have kicked him in the balls and thrown him out. But then whores have the ability to put up with behaviors other women would never manage to put up with. That’s why we deserve to be generously compensated. Some men can be very rude. On the other hand, some clients are absolute angels. One john always brought me a gift every time he came to see me. He brought me a pearl necklace, a ring, a bra or something. But eventually, as much as I really loved all the gifts, he fell in love with me, and he tried to weasel his way into my life. It was too much and I sort of had to ‘break up with him.” Yes, whores do sometimes break up with their johns. He was pretty devastated. He was in love and that was not okay. That was uncomfortable for me. I’m sure he soon found another whore to buy gifts for. A lot of women I worked with really didn’t respect their clients. I respected my clients, as I tend to see the intrinsic, unique worth of every person. I was raised Unitarian by humanist parents. I think the whore-client relationship is very influenced by our childhoods, our parents, what we bring to the table as it were. I had many clients who didn’t respect me, probably because of how they were raised. We’re all the walking wounded. But still, magically, somehow you made it all work. It was still a win-win situation even when it was all screwy and convoluted. We are all complex creatures.

Rumpus: Who was your favorite john?

Sprinkle: I didn’t call them “johns” but clients. So I had this client I’ll call Samuel. Not his real name. I saw him steadily for twenty years, usually twice a month. Over twenty years you really get to know someone. When I met him originally, he had three little kids, then they started growing up, getting married, then they’d have their drugs and alcohol problems, then they got divorced. . . Whenever we would get together I’d ask him, “How are things? How are the kids?” He was someone that I wouldn’t have been having sex with had he not been paying me. But I cared about him deeply and genuinely wanted to know about how his life was going. When his business took a turn for the worse, I lowered my price for him. Looking back I’d have to say it was definitely a type of long-term relationship. The only reason it ended was because I moved out of New York. He was a great guy. He owned camera stores. I met him when I was 18. We split up when I was 38. He saw me grow up too. He was a client, and also a friend. Such things are more common than people might think. This arrangement was not so different than many American relationships. That’s why the laws against prostitution have got to go. They are totally unfair and mean.

Rumpus: Have you ever paid for sex?

Sprinkle: There have been times where I have definitely felt like I was a john. As a pin-up photographer for ten years, when I was photographing men and women, to be honest, sometimes I felt like I was a john, especially when I was shooting guys because they—you know—they had to have big erections in the photos. So they would jerk off for me for hours sometimes, and then I’d pay them. I sometimes felt like a “dirty old man” and a “voyeur.” Because they were younger than I was, and I’d pay them, and they were working it. But that was okay. I didn’t mind being a john!

Rumpus: So, how has this experience changed your idea of the john/jill-providor relationship?

Sprinkle: I’m interested in the idea of expanding the idea of what a john is, or a jill. I also did a masturbation ritual which is called “The Legend of the Ancient Secret Prostitute” in a theater piece called: “Post Porn Modernist.” I was just fresh out of prostitution, so it was just an extension of that. Now that work is studied in many universities. In my theater pieces, I would do “Tits on the Head”—Polaroid photos for $10 on the stage. There would be a line of folks paying me $10 for their turn. It was public prostitution. I turned my whole audience into johns. But because it was in a theater context, an art context, it was socially acceptable.

***

First photograph © by Annie Sprinkle.

Second photograph © by Julian Cash.

***

This interview appears in prose form in Johns, Marks, Tricks and Chickenhawks: Professionals and Clients Writing About Each Other (Soft Skull Press).

Related Posts:

• Donna
• Johns, Marks, Tricks and Chickenhawks: The Rumpus Interview with Sam Benjamin
• Facing Sex Addiction: A John Comes Clean
• Who’s having a good time?
• The Rumpus Interview with Jennifer Lyon Bell

I’m pretty sure Stephen died on September 11th. He worked at Cantor Fitzgerald, a company located on floors 101–105 of Tower 1. Most of the 658 employees in those offices that morning died in the attacks. I was seeing Stephen two to three times a month through the outcall escort agency I worked for in New York City, and after August of 2001, I never saw him again.

I met Stephen at a bachelor party. I hated bachelor parties. I hated them because the elements that made them such a good time for the men in attendance—the randy women, the booze, the feeling of brotherhood—conspired to bring out something ugly in them: bravado.

This particular bachelor party immediately got off to a bad start. A friend of the groom called the woman I was doing the party with—a voluptuous Latina in a platinum blonde wig who went by the name Moet—“hefty,” and she freaked out, storming off to find the friend of the groom who had set up the party, demanding an apology before she would perform. The party was held inside some kind of shipping/receiving warehouse in Manhattan, and I didn’t know Moet at all. I had met her just minutes before outside the warehouse, and when she stormed off, I assumed she had left me. Standing there all by myself in a transparent slip dress and heels, I felt like carrion for a pack of hungry wolves.

“How much for a blowjob?” one man barked.

“Will you let me snort coke off your ass?” asked another.

“You and the fat one—you eat her pussy?” inquired a third.

To make matters worse, I wasn’t much of a dancer. I had tried stripping once, and hated it; I found I fit into sex work because it was much more one-on-one, much less all-eyes-on-me. Though most of the other escorts at the agency liked doing bachelor parties because of the tips and party atmosphere, I avoided them, viewing them as frat parties for grown men. The only reason I agreed to do this one was the soothing words of the phone girl: it was only a few guys, she swore. It was hastily organized, not even a real bachelor party, more of a last-minute cap on the night’s festivities. From their voices on the phone, they sounded so drunk, she doubted they would be standing up. And Moet—bachelor parties were her forte. She was a pro.

But now I was Moet-less, flanked by a group of at least ten men and counting, all of whom stood upright and alert, except for the guys sitting in the circle of foldout chairs in the center of the room. The phone girl’s assurances had obviously been a con job, tailored to placate my insecurities. The men had probably requested a white girl for the party, and I was the only one available. Though confident I could handle the situation, I felt vulnerable and extremely uncomfortable, the primary reasons I chose to avoid bachelor parties in the first place.

“Hey, I got an idea!” a man called out from behind a large desk in a corner of the room. “Let’s all play strip poker!”

“Shut up, Steve!” said a sweaty man in a suit jacket. Most of the men where clad in subtle variations of the same ensemble: pants and suit jackets that had probably appeared much nattier earlier in the evening. “Come sit on my lap, baby, and rub those titties all over me. I know you’ve got some great titties under that dress.” The sweaty man beckoned, crooking his finger in a come-hither motion in my direction.

“That’s not fair, Ray!” the man behind the desk scolded, standing up. He looked to be about fifty, with a paunchy stomach and khaki pants worn high on his waist. He took off his suit jacket and draped it on the back of his chair dramatically, a la Demi Moore in Striptease. “Why should she be the only one who takes her clothes off?” he said, jiggling his big belly and unbuttoning his shirt to an imaginary beat.

“I don’t know, Steve, maybe because she’s a stripper?” a voice in the group growled.

The man with the large belly opened a drawer of the desk and gestured towards me. “We have our company poker night here,” he said. He reached into the desk drawer and pulled out a basket filled with unopened card decks. “You know how to play?” he asked.

I shook my head no.

“I’ll show ya,” he answered with a wink, handing me an unopened deck. He lowered his voice, and I leaned in closer to hear him. “It’s been a looooong night, hon. We’re just getting back from the casino, and I’m pretty sure the groom’s puking in another room. Everyone here’s nice, just wasted. Just do your thing, hon. These,” he indicted towards the cards, “should keep the heat off of you a little bit.”

“Let’s play STRIP POKER!” he yelled out, rolling his belly and wiggling his hips as he threw the card decks to the men in all directions. “I can’t wait to see what you’re working with, Hector!”

In light of Moet’s MIA status, the man’s gesture made me feel like I had an ally, though one could never be sure in this business. As the men grumbled to themselves and dodged the flying card decks, I moved to the center of the circle of chairs, ready to start my slow, drawn-out removal of garments. There was no music, so the men’s obnoxious inquiries and demands would have to serve as my soundtrack. Suddenly, Moet burst back into the room, the groom, supported by the best man, following behind her.

“Come on now, Kenny,” the best man slurred. “You have to apologize to this lovely lady! Look at those lips! She could suck the chrome off a bumper!” He had lipstick on both sides of his face and wobbled on his feet. His fly was partially unzipped, and I could make out the tartan plaid of his boxer shorts through the opening.

“I never said anything to her, Mike, I swear,” Kenny stammered. “It was all a misunderstanding. I was asking for a Hefty bag, for the beer cans…”

“Well, she’s ready to show us all a good time, but only if you say those two magic words. Otherwise, she’s out of here, and it’s going to be all your fault. Right, Moet?”

Moet appeared to be in much better spirits upon reentering the room, and was wearing a man’s tie around her neck, its knot perfectly aligned with the ample swell of her cleavage. Her spandex minidress looked to be at least three sizes too small and barely touched the tops of her meaty thighs. She marched over to Kenny, a slight man with feminine features and large glasses that threatened to overwhelm his face, and straddled his lap.

“Do I feel heavy to you, baby?” she purred, her large posterior extending far past his knees.

“No, baby, no! You feel just right!” Kenny said, his voice going up a few octaves as his small frame was engulfed by so much Moet.

The best man looked at me. “You gonna show us a good time, too, Courtney?”

I opened my mouth to speak with my best feigned enthusiasm, but the man with the large belly cut me off.

“I was kind of hoping Courtney and I could be alone, Mike.”

Moet gyrated deeper into the lap of the man who had insulted her. The best man surveyed the room, his eyes stopping to linger on Moet. Based on her performance, he must have decided mine wouldn’t be necessary.

“Alright Steve-o, she’s yours, but you owe me. You can take her into that room in the back.”

Another thing I didn’t particularly enjoy about bachelor parties were these public negotiations of my services that didn’t involve me.

I picked up my bag from a chair and waited for the man to lead me towards the backroom, but he just stood there, looking at me impatiently.

“What’s the matter?” I asked.

“You’re forgetting your cards, hon. You want to learn, right?”

I looked over at Moet, in an attempt to communicate to her where I was going, but I couldn’t get her attention. She was bent over Kenny’s chair as if doing a backbend, her arms on both sides of his lap, and her breasts upside down in his face.

It was the one thing about the bachelor party the phone girl hadn’t lied about.

Moet was a pro.

Stephen and I sat in the backroom for the next hour and half playing strip poker for prudes. He didn’t want me to take off anything beyond my bra and panties. All that left me to remove was my dress and shoes. He stayed in his boxer shorts.

“Thanks,” I said, acknowledging the diversion he’d created in the other room. “But you didn’t have to do that. I’ve done plenty of bachelor parties.”

“I saw your eyes,” he said. “You looked like a deer in the headlights of life. Moet doesn’t have that look.” He ashed his cigarette into a plastic cup of beer. “I wouldn’t have been able to live with myself. I can’t get off on that. My name’s Stephen, but I also have a superhero alter ego. They call me Captain Save-a-Ho.”

I laughed, even though he was calling me a ho.

All of the men at the bachelor party that night, except for the groom’s best man, whom it was mentioned he had known since childhood, worked at Cantor Fitzgerald, in Tower 1 of the World Trade Center.

***

The phone girl told me that Stephen had called every night since the party to see if I was working. A few nights later, I was, and I was driven to his Brooklyn Heights Brownstone. Five years before, he told me, he had split up with his wife who was living on Long Island with their teenage daughter. We went into his bedroom, and he reached into a dresser drawer and took out a small bag of white powder.

“I got this the other night at the casino,” he said. “Bought it in the parking lot. I’m not really sure why. It’s not my thing.”

I cut a line of it on top of the table next to his bed. Its consistency was both soft and crunchy, like some kind of salt mixed with soap. I blew it behind the bed when he wasn’t looking. I didn’t have the heart to tell him it was fake.

We had sex and his sweat rained down on me in salty droplets. His breathing quickly became labored.

“I wish you could have seen me in my prime, Courtney,” he said. “Wait.” He ran into another room and came back with a photo album. There were pictures of him from high school playing football, pictures from what looked to be a college frat party; it made me think of the bachelor party at the warehouse. “After your forties, hon, it’s all downhill,” he said. “But it was a great ride.”

As I was leaving, he tipped me a hundred dollars, then made an all too familiar request.

“Give me your phone number, hon,” he said. We can cut the agency right out of it.”

I’d been down that road a million times before and had learned the hard way that unless you had some kind of special line just for them, it never paid to give a client your phone number. It ended up abused, treated like a free phone-sex line or a drunken confessional. So I compromised and gave Stephen my new email address.

My mother had just bought two computers she’d seen advertised on television and gave me one as a gift. It wasn’t exactly a real computer—it was called an i-Opener, and it was similar to WebTV in that it was just the Internet, a keyboard, and a screen. Because my i-Opener had been a present from my mom, it was registered through her account, and my email address had one very small difference from hers: the number 1.

As I wrote down my email address for Stephen, I stressed the importance of remembering this digit.

“Don’t forget the 1,” I said.

“No worries, hon,” he replied.

He forgot the 1 and emailed my mom.

***

As a sex worker, there are three questions you are asked constantly by clients. The first one is “What’s your real name?” Clients are obsessed with this question. If they can get you to tell them your real name, it makes them feel special, elevated. The relationship is still a paid one, but now they know you just as anyone who is important to you does in your other life. Disclosing your name also negates what may be the most important veneer a sex worker has: anonymity. It’s a revelation that can be interpreted as either “She trusts me enough for me to call out to her if I see her on the street” or “She actually wants me to come up to her and say hello.” The second question clients always ask is “What were the circumstances that led you to sex work?” or, as they see it, the circumstances that led you astray, from good girl to bad. The third question is “What gets you off sexually?” This is usually phrased as “Now tell me what you like.”

I never told Stephen my real name. It was nothing against him. I had told other clients my name in the past, but because “Fiona” came across as more exotic-sounding than “Courtney,” before the movie Shrek at least, to them it sounded like even more of a stripper name, and they never believed me. So I told Stephen that Courtney was my real name, that in spite of what he may have believed as Captain Save-A-Ho, there was nothing to save me from—my private life and public life blurred together. So when Stephen emailed my mother, he addressed the email in part to Courtney.

My mother had gotten other emails meant for me after buying me the i-Opener, but nothing related to sex work. Thankfully, Stephen hadn’t written anything too revealing, just that he would like to see me again soon and had enjoyed our time together. My mother probably wouldn’t have even thought the email was meant for me if Stephen hadn’t addressed it not just to “Courtney” but to ”Courtney Love.” He was being funny, but I was a big fan of hers, and my mother knew this.

In January of 2002, I was living with my mom and using her i-Opener when I came across Stephen’s email, then six months old. My exit from New York City had happened hastily the previous December when I had lost my apartment in a perfect storm of Xanax addiction and unpaid rent. Clients come and go from your life—your life and theirs mix in hour-long intervals and dollar allotments, and it occurred to me as I read Stephen’s email that I couldn’t recall seeing him after August of the previous summer.

I wrote down his email address, logged into my newly created Yahoo email account and wrote:

Stephen—

It’s Courtney. Sorry I didn’t get in touch sooner, but everything’s just been so crazy the last few months. I can’t imagine what it’s been like for you. The loss of life is staggering. I don’t want to say too much now, I’d rather wait for you to respond first, but I’m no longer in New York. Hopefully I’ll be back soon. Just wanted to make sure you’re okay and let you know I’m thinking about you.

Just as I was about to hit send, it occurred to me that my new email address might cause some confusion. It contained my real name, Fiona, followed by some numbers that were relevant to my life. I’d been so adamant to Stephen about Courtney being my real name that I figured it warranted some kind of passing explanation.

This is my new email address, I added. Fiona’s my real name. I was just trying to keep some distance, you know?

***

I did make it back to New York, and in the summer of 2002, I found myself working for the same outcall escort agency I’d been working for when I met Stephen. One night, my driver for the evening took me to meet a friend of his, another driver for the agency, between calls. I recognized the girl his friend was driving for the night immediately: the big breasts, the wide, shapely hips. The only thing different about her was the sable color of her wig. It was Moet.

“I remember you,” she said, getting out of the car to smoke a cigarette and empty the sand from her shoes. Her driver had just picked her up from a call she had done at the beach. “We did that bachelor party together, and you ditched me.”

“I didn’t ditch you!” I said defensively. I had experienced the brunt end of other girls’ reactions to imagined crimes in the past.

“Relax, mami,” she said. “You remembered where those guys worked, didn’t you? That company, in the Towers? What’s your name again, mami?”

“Courtney.”

“People can say whatever they want about us and what we do, Courtney, but those men that night, they didn’t have much time left. And maybe I’m crazy for even thinking like this, but that night I know I showed them a good time, and they went home happy. Do you know what I mean, mami? I gave them my all that night, and I feel good about that. ”

***

Rumpus original art by Devon Kelley-Yurdin.

Related Posts:

• Here Comes the Girl
• RECESSION SEX WORKERS #8: The Sex and Politics of Antonia Crane
• A Survey of the Stripper Memoir
• Admit You’ve Paid For It: The Savage Honesty of David Henry Sterry
• Johns, Marks, Tricks and Chickenhawks: The Rumpus Interview with Annie M. Sprinkle

There is a gun manufactured during World War II with Nazi insignia carved into the hammer. A gun with a ceramic grip, cream-painted with delicate roses. A majestic double barrel, a combination of polished steel and lustrous wood. And ten others, all of them shiny, cold, and heavy in the palm of my hand. Each one of them I have to pick up and acknowledge. Turn them over in the evening light. Listen while he tells me each individual history—their makes, values, and how they came into his life.

When we initially met, years earlier, Bob told me about his collection of firearms. We were in bed together, our bodies stretched out post-sex. He told me how he bought his first one in response to the threat of ’80s AIDS paranoia. He and his boyfriend started amassing weaponry together when a proposition calling for an AIDS quarantine was put on the ballot. His boyfriend was HIV-positive. They lived together in this house for a decade. Bob didn’t seroconvert until the early 2000s, though, long after that boyfriend died of an opportunistic infection.

In ’86, even though Bob was mostly closeted, he planned a revenge-killing spree. He wanted to walk up to Jesse Helms in a dark alley and leave his body full of smoking holes. He dreamed of drugging Lyndon LaRouche and leaving him facedown in a blood-splattered hotel room. Of waiting on a rooftop for days to pick out Ronald Reagan’s tiny head from a mass of bodyguards, pull the trigger, and watch the body gently fall to the ground.

Bob came of age with the backdrop of Stonewall and Harvey Milk. He deserves these revenges. His stories fill up the room between us, settling the distance between our bodies. I never ask him what happened or why, instead of going vigilante, he stayed in his job as a scrap-metal executive, flying from country to country to negotiate against unions. It is best practice to not ask clients embarrassing questions. That is part of the role of a sex worker: to let clients remember only the good stories about themselves.

That day was the first time we met, but I decided immediately to do what it took to make Bob my regular, even though doing so would break down the boundary between sex-work life and real life. Bob would be my primary romantic relationship for a couple years, the real reason I couldn’t really commit to dating anyone else.

Bob fucks me like I’m the drink of water he’s needed for a long, long time. In bed, when I lower myself onto his cock, he growls into my ear, “Your body is made just perfect for my dick.” I kneel next to him in the kitchen and drink his piss while he deep fries me breaded eggplant. It isn’t all about the sex though. He is caring and kind of lonely. I am caring and kind of lonely as well.

In the span of our relationship, guns become a focal point of tension. Every visit, we discuss plans to go to the shooting range together. Once a month, he goes with a group called the Pink Pistols. Part of me wants to go with him, but we both shy from commitments that would solidify our relationship in that way. Our ability to be as free as we are with each other runs parallel with the transient nature of our relationship.

After two years, we’ve stopped having sex every time we hang out. A year into our bimonthly overnights, he started to get erectile dysfunction and now has to inject Viagra into the slit of his cock to get it hard. I feel disappointed when we don’t fuck, even though this should be the ideal hooker situation: getting paid to lie around naked, eating and watching TV, while Bob gives me history lessons.

Tonight, though, I am being pushy about him fucking me. Cupping my hand around his cock softly bobbing in saggy underwear. He keeps trying to talk to me about the tactics of Occupy, but instead of letting him play earnest daddy I take off my clothes and climb onto his lap. I suggest we pack a bowl; maybe if we get high, tonight will be like it was before.

The reality is that he’s not into fucking me any longer. He’s started dating a forty year-old goth to whom he doesn’t have to hand a wad of twenties in the morning. The date’s name is Billy. Bob tells me about what it’s like when they hang out: he picks Billy and his laundry up and orders him dinner. Then they get undressed, and Bob puts his fist in Billy’s ass. Billy never asks him about emotions and never wants to hear stories.

Back on the couch, his hand lies idle on my thigh. We start talking about the guns. And then we’re walking upstairs, and I find myself limply obeying instructions to press my finger against a trigger.

Even though the gun is unloaded, I feel nervous. In bed, listening to his stories of desire and revenge was romantic, but here, the connection of death-lust to the solidness of dull grey steel scares me. He wants me to practice holding and aiming. He stares at me, my hips out, and I’m trying to keep my shoulders straight and hands steady. He tells me to practice pulling the trigger. Russian roulette: What if there was one forgotten bullet in the barrel? How many of these plaster walls would it pass through?

I can’t do this with him looking at me. I feel my body absorbing the physical memories imprinted by his hands when he grasped these guns with anger. The desire for his own or others’ deaths. These guns have been held by other men in his life. What right do I have to be here?

I start panting, asking for the barrel against my temple while I suck his cock. I want to feel the muzzle pressed against my ass. Please threaten and fuck me with these weapons. I whine for him to pin me down with them. He says no. These guns are too precious to be clogged up with my spit and cum. It would create something too messy between us. He walks me into the bedroom and jams his meaty fingers into my hole. I pretend to cum but instead I feel empty and untouchable. This is the last time we ever fuck.

***

In New Mexico, where I grew up, everyone owned a gun. It was a ritual to give boys BB guns on their twelfth birthdays. After their parties, I’d sit watching them shoot at balloons tied to hay bales.

Driving down the windy highway, I’d see trucks full of hunters, racks of shotguns covering their back windows. My dad had a gun in the front barn. He said he kept it only for emergencies, but once I saw him shooting at the coyotes that slunk around our apple trees every morning, eating rotting fruit.

Along with gun culture comes a routine engagement with killing, with guts and blood and bullets piercing flesh.

The first boy I played footsie with was named Alistair. He was a tall redhead with a plain face. He was one of the few other gringos in our class. In the grade below us was his snotty-nosed sister Abigail, who had to go to the nurse’s office every day to take her ADD medication. Altogether, there were five siblings in the school. They lived outside Taos in one of the houses made from car tires and dried mud, with no electricity.

The third Friday of the month, our classes were driven together from school to the public pool in Española. Alistair was the only other kid who could swim, who needed to swim to avoid getting dunked underwater or standing lonely amongst the clumps of sullen teens smoking in the shallow end, the girls with their immaculate chola bangs and the boys with slick shells of hair under hairnets. It was at the 9” mark he started touching me, rubbing his feet against my ankles underwater, brushing his fingers against my waist lightly.

It was six months later when he shot himself in the face. His parents said it was a gun-cleaning accident. The wound was not fatal. Gossip at school was that, with his finger already pressing down on the trigger, Alistair decided he didn’t want to die. He succeeded in not shooting out his brains, but blasted a hole in his face where his nose once lay. We were given a half-day off to think about it. (When there were drunk-driving accidents and real suicides, we got the whole day off.)

I think about New Mexico constantly. It’s where I always end up in dreams, retracing childhood footsteps. Deep in the stillness of the mountains was the steady promise of adventure. The summers I spent walking barefoot down trails into dense ponderosa forest, taking paths over sharp rocks to a waterfall, a sparkling, clear stream that spilled through boulders the size of my body. I would lie naked on the rock, sunshine shadowed by the ghostly aspens bordering the creek, long skinny trees with arms branching into bright yellow leaves. The winters were full of soft falling snow. I’d walk through the dead pasture, the cold numbing my toes till I couldn’t feel my feet. I’d climb over fences, and the dogs and I would slide across a frozen river, picking up driftwood to break a hole through the glassy surface to the water still flowing underneath.

Life and death in New Mexico is more visceral than survival in San Francisco. Death was not news. It was walking to the school bus every day, past the body of a cow that first bloated up with gas and then deflated into a pile of strewn skin and clean-stripped bones. Bound to these memories of sweet, simple earth are recollections of the fragility of bodies and the constant threat of extinction.

***

Bob wants to take me to the gun range, and I can’t think of a reason to say no.

Everyone tells me that I need to know how to shoot a gun. For when the apocalypse comes. For when the bombs hit and the smoke starts rising and the earth is quaking. When the war starts or when the war ends. All queers need to be prepared so one of us can hotwire a car and we’ll hightail it to a ghost town to live in a commune, away from the storm. We’ll need guns for that. Or if all the rich people shut us in the city so they can be the ones to move out to clean air and open spaces—we’ll need guns for that too.

Bob drives into the parking lot. It’s strip-mall dirty. There’s a river next to it, but it’s less of a river of water and more like a river of mud, churning its sludge slowly.

Inside, everyone looks hard: tight-lipped faces, weathered cheeks. At the counter is a bored-looking woman. Her ponytail is as perfect as a gymnast’s, pulled back so tight it makes her eyebrows arch, every curl slick with hairspray. She hands us liability forms. I’m only allowed in as Bob’s guest. It is against their rules to let any random person off of the streets rent a gun, so as to avoid the suicidal.

Behind the counter are thick, plastic shotguns that look like toys for GI figurines. There are shelves lined with items for cleaning and customizing your gun, there are pepper spray canisters, including pink ones for girls. On the walls are rows of targets to choose from: zombies, black diagrams of bodies, and a picture of a mustached man grasping a skinny blond girl, pressing a gun against her temple. I’m grateful the figure in the cartoon isn’t a black man. In Miami, after the murder of Trayvon Martin, a gun shop started selling targets of a figure in a hooded sweatshirt, Skittles and iced tea in hand. They sold out in two days.

Above it all, a line drawing of Angelina Jolie looks upon us like the Virgin Mary. Her benevolent gaze falls on the altars’ offerings of hunting knives, NRA bumper stickers, and shirts that proudly proclaim, “Extreme Right Wing.”

Before walking into the shooting range, I must put on earmuffs and eye protection. Then I walk through one metal door, which must be completely shut before I can open the second. It feels like entering into a spaceship.

Inside, the range looks like a concrete bowling alley. But instead of bowling balls, every lane is filled with a steady stream of fire and explosion. Every time a shot is fired, I jump reflexively. I’m trying to keep my eyes on everyone, to be ready to duck at any second. I cannot let go of the idea that this is dangerous. I am the only faggot in this room, the only one wearing a purple shirt and nail polish. All the men around me are the type I’ve encountered on Friday nights waiting for the bus, the drunk and surly ones who follow me around street corners demanding a cigarette or an answer as to why I’m dressed so funny. Men I play chicken with, staying cool and impenetrable on the outside while keeping my eyes on their fists. Here, they all have guns in their hands, and even though nobody so much as glances my way, there’s a loop in my brain warning me I could die in seconds.

Even here, with the formality and cartoon targets and lists of rules about proper use, I don’t forget that guns are instruments of death. In the shopfront are hunting magazines covered with pictures of elk vibrantly alive, looking at the reader with poise and innocence against a background of vivid green. None show the felled creature, a limp corpse with blank eyes, the thunderous dance of electrical synapses in its brain dulling into a final, dead silence.

Although I get swept up in the romance of preparing for revolution, the kind of violence that guns bring feels too final, too cold. I’m scared to learn how they work, because I’m scared to tap into the mindset of how they are used.

And now it is my turn to shoot. Stay calm and pleasant. Pick up the firearm, press thumb against thumb, pulling the trigger, and stay steady for the combustion. The bullets, depending on their size, will squeeze out quiet and civil, or screaming, cursing the world for their expulsion into open air.

The anticipation is more than the action, after many rounds of tension popping my arms out of aim, I learn how to pop off shot after shot. Bob takes a picture of me: it looks like a still from a video game. The roof is crumbling, sheetrock hanging loose from the low plywood ceiling. The figure in the image is trapped on both sides by aluminum walls; above him, a light in a cage almost touches the top of his head. His shoulders are arched back, neck tanned, arms stretched out in front holding the magnum steady. A ball of flames explodes from the muzzle; its destination is the cowboy zombie target, which has its own gun drawn and which is illustrated to have a chunk of flesh already missing from its torso. Spent shells litter the ground.

I lay the gun down and walk outside to smoke a cigarette, staring into the seething brown of the river.

***

Rumpus original art by Jason Novak.

Related Posts:

• In Praise of Not Knowing
• Johns, Marks, Tricks and Chickenhawks: The Rumpus Interview with Sam Benjamin
• Johns, Marks, Tricks and Chickenhawks: The Rumpus Interview with Annie M. Sprinkle
• Heidelberg
• About That Whole “Men Are Sex Fiends” Thing…

“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.

Related Posts:

• Admit You’ve Paid For It: The Savage Honesty of David Henry Sterry
• Weekend Rumpus Roundup
• Holy Orange
• Death of A Bad Girl – A Life in Letters: The Rumpus Interview with Daphne Gottlieb
• Legs That Just Won’t Quit

Related Posts:

• No related posts…

My class partner is Sharma, a quiet Punjabi girl with a thick mustache and no neck. We are both social outcasts, her for being brown and from a comp school, me for being Welsh and from a comp school. We are academically behind everyone else. I know what onomatopoeia is but cannot identify a conceit. We gained entrance to Cambridge by pretending we knew everything, so I feel it inappropriate to ask. Or more likely we gained entrance to Cambridge because they needed more brown people and more Northerners from comp schools to fill the quotas. But let’s get back to the tutorial. We are talking about theories of literature. Feminist theory is mentioned.

“I mean, I get feminism. It’s pretty simple. You can’t argue with political, social, and economic equality for women, can you? But when it comes to literature, it seems a bit ridiculous—”

Eyes darken, a flash of something. Emma leans forward onto the edge of her seat.

“What do you mean ‘ridiculous’?” 

Emma eyes me warily, and her voice is sharp, a knife edge trailing against my skin. But she smiles a little, a smile that is encouraging.

“I read that woman, Rebecca West, her reading of Ophelia as this slut that needed to be punished and shamed. It seemed a little extreme. I think Ophelia was just upset Hamlet didn’t like her. I mean, if that’s feminist theory, reading shit which isn’t there, it seems a bit odd…”

It has not yet occurred to me that my entire degree rests on reading shit which isn’t there, and theory is just the way you choose to read that shit. Emma doesn’t challenge me, nor does she enlighten me. She smiles the same smile, but there is a cold, dead smolder in her brown eyes, and she snaps at Sharma and me, and we leave early. It’s hot in the room, and the windows are steamed up, and I feel sweaty and uncomfortable and hungry, but I can’t afford to buy lunch. I’ll have to eat cereal again, and outside, the fen wind that bites through bone rattles the windows.

At the end of term, the Director of Studies calls me in for an assessment and asks me how I get along with Emma. I shrug.

“She’s cool. I like her.”

The DOS looks at me directly. It’s unusual for her to look you in the eye when she talks. Usually, she is thinking about The Brontës, and eye contact is fleeting and irritable, because your presence is distracting her from thinking about The Brontës. But this time, she is interested in me, and she is looking into my eyes because she wants to see something in me. When she finds what she is looking for, she seems sad. “I think you should read this,” she says.

She hands me a piece of paper. It is not so much a report or a dissection as an evisceration of my character. I am young, conservative, reductive, stubborn, arrogant, and prejudiced. She thinks I have a problem with women. I am a liar. It mentions a book I failed to return to the library. I forgot I had it, and had argued with the library for months, telling them to leave me alone, I didn’t have the damn book. Then I found it, embarrassingly, under my bed, and I couldn’t afford the twenty-pound fee they wanted to charge me, so I sneaked it back into the library and kept insisting I didn’t have it. The book was found yesterday, Emma has written on my report; it was obvious I had sneaked it back into the library. It was exactly the type of lying, antisocial behavior I would participate in.

I really can’t argue with that.

The DOS is still looking at me. “Well?” she says eventually, not angry but curious.

“Why would she write this? I mean, does she really care about the book that much?”

“I think she doesn’t like you,” says the DOS quietly.

“But—why? What did I do to her?”

The DOS looks at the paper and looks back at me. “I have no idea, but you obviously offended her.”

It is announced a day later that Emma will be leaving Cambridge and going back to Oxford. She never really enjoyed it here. Is more of an Oxford woman. The other girls in my class—all posh, all from the South, all went to private school, all white, all privileged—refuse to go to Emma’s leaving dinner in solidarity with me. It is touching. It is our fleeting moment of sisterhood. It is women bonding against injustice perpetrated by another woman. Or is it my fault for lying about the book and hating Rebecca West’s reading of Hamlet?

Emma leaves. Life goes on. A small incident, an insignificant one, but it is my first adult experience of political anger and its charged power, of being aware that I let someone or something down, and whether it was Emma or my gender, I cannot quite figure out. I wonder, often, if it was because I don’t understand feminist theory in literature and don’t like Rebecca West’s reading of Ophelia. I suppose it is now that I stop ever using the word “feminist,” because it is a word which—if used in the wrong context, if negated, if crossed, if misunderstood—is dangerous, and dangerous even to the tenuous solidarity of the sisterhood. It pit Clever Emma against me, and then it pit us girls against Emma. I suppose I see Emma as the gatekeeper to feminism, the guardian of its secrets, the woman who saw something rotten in the state of me and so rejected me from its folds. I might be entirely wrong. Maybe she just thought I was an obnoxious little cunt, regardless of my views on Rebecca West.

***

I think it is a fatal flaw to conflate fallible human beings with the lofty principles we espouse to make living in this fucked-up world a little easier, to give us all a little more hope, but I suppose I did that after my experience with Emma. If someone asked me if I was a feminist, I would pause a little, and say, “I suppose.” I suppose I did not want to be associated with an ideology which was so very judgmental, which could dismiss me because I disagreed with one way of reading a character in a goddamn Shakespearean tragedy. Of course I agreed with equality for women, but it seemed that feminism was far more complex and multifaceted than this. And because I could not claim the ideals of the feminist simply because someone far cleverer than I thought I was not one, I felt rejected.

A year or so later, I discovered the massive contradictions and schisms within different feminist schools of thought, and I felt better about not being able to say, “I am a feminist.” I found out that feminism, as a construct of white, educated, Western women—women like Emma—often alienates women of color by either failing to acknowledge their experience or by speaking for them in a spectacular feat of paternalistic irony. I found out that despite this, women of color—women such as those who wear the hijab and have been told by white, educated, Western women that they need to be emancipated from it—still call themselves feminists, because they believe in political, social, and economic equality for women. And yet, even knowing that these women have the strength and determination to overlook the problems in practicing feminism, knowing that they embrace its ideals and proudly say, “I am a feminist,” I still faltered when people asked me if I was a feminist. Something still stuck in my throat; something didn’t sound quite right.

Of course I believe in social, political, and economic equality for women, but as a woman of privilege, is it my main battle? Is it MY main battle? Do I see the world in terms of identity politics? My main battle has been with capitalism, which enables inequalities of all kinds—it is built on racism and misogyny and homophobia and the gulf between the rich and the poor. If you oppose capitalism, it goes without saying that you oppose sexism and that you want political, social, and economic equality for all people, and ergo that you are a feminist. Doesn’t it? Can I choose one without the other? Sarah Palin can. She claims to be a feminist while still espousing neoliberalism. The 26-year-old Christian woman I am Facebook friends with—a woman who has never had a job in her life, who purchased an Ethiopian child from an expensive Christian adoption agency and is married to a cop (a COP!)—says she is a feminist. The girl who called me a “happy hooker” in an online feminist magazine, who is meant to be “the most important female voice on the radical left,” says she is a feminist. So is my issue with feminism, or with political, social, and economic equality for women?

It has to be the former.

I avoided identifying as a feminist or not, but somehow, when my work became sex, it became something that people wanted me to take a stance on. They wanted me to “come out” as a strong, proud feminist, or to admit, like Katy Perry, “I am not a feminist.” But I did not. I never mentioned it. I did not because I knew that there would be white, educated, Western women who would disagree with me whatever I said, and I felt that feminism was theirs, not mine. I can only think about my alienation as an intersection between sex and class, because to me, intellectual feminism is dominated by white, educated, Western women who are of a different class from me. They are above me. They have a right to feminism, and they are the ones who call the shots on who is one or isn’t one, and you can argue with them, you can let them tell you who and what you are, or you can ignore them and go on your merry way attempting to deconstruct all forms of oppression, gender disparity included.

For a long time, as a sex worker, I went on my merry way and puzzled over whether feminism supported women in hijabs or denounced them as reinforcing sexism and patriarchy, whether feminism liked sex workers or hated them. It seemed, in about 2005, that feminists erred on the side of denouncing sex workers with agency, pitying those without agency, supporting the LGBTQ community, and saving women in Africa and the Middle East both from men and from themselves.

When I left sex work after my book came out, I abruptly stopped writing about it. I completely disengaged with the complexities and contradictions of that world. Partly it was that I’d written enough and that I simply wanted to write about something else. Partly it was that I knew if I didn’t just shut up, I would be painfully ossified into the role of “The Stripper” (capital T, capital S) forever. But I was also aware that staying in that world would require me to adopt a stance about something—about being female, about being a female sex worker, about feminism and sex work. It was a definitive stance that I felt unable to take because I was being told over and over by women who identified as feminists that working as a sex worker was not feminist, that my words and my experiences were not feminist—that I was not a feminist.

I was tired of endlessly explaining that sex work could be empowering and could be exploitative, but that most things in life could be either of these things as well. I was exhausted of being told that I had somehow “let the side down” by writing about the dark, sordid, empty, alcoholic hole that I had crawled into, steeped in loneliness and misery, pickling slowly into a preserved shrew. I was fed up with being held up by one set of feminists as a traitor to the cause, accused of personally contributing to the millions of sex-trafficked children across the world, of disrespecting women who did sex work through dire economic necessity, as if my own was somehow delusional. Then there were others who wanted me to say that sex work was positive, empowering, that it was feminism in its purest form. And of course, there were people all along this spectrum, who found my writing offensive or simply shit, or who thought I spoke to them, but very few could seem to understand that what I was writing about was my personal experience. I was writing about my personal experience and my subjective opinions as a white, educated, privileged female who worked in the sex industry, at first by choice and then by economic necessity.

I used to take my clothes off for money. I gave the occasional hand job to pay my rent in the sticky, hot Champagne Rooms of strip clubs in midtown Manhattan. A few times, I guided a man’s hand under the bedazzled blue nylon G-string to encounter my well-pruned, hairless muff, which, when parted, was hot and wet and worth an extra fifty. I sold a couple of blow jobs. I took my clothes off for drugs. My experience wasn’t empowering, but it didn’t fuck me up (I did that just fine on my own), and it was sure as hell something to write about. It didn’t involve well-thought-out safe practices, and it was more ad hoc and alcoholic than calm, more instinctual and messy than measured. It was not an example anyone should ever follow. It was much more than an episode in my life which somehow embroiled me in an argument that I didn’t know how to participate in about women and rights and feminism. It was so much more.

I wrote a piece in the Guardian on feminism which ended like this:

I’ve read the books, studied feminism’s history, seen the glossy pics of mutilated vaginas in Marie Claire magazine. The problem is, it just doesn’t affect me. Like most women my age, I’ll tell you I’m a feminist, but really, I don’t know what that means anymore, despite the all-girls college, despite the paper on gender theorists in my third year, despite the lesbian tutor, despite the years working in the sex industry, despite the fact I’ve been held up as its paragon or derided as its destructor.

I don’t know what feminism means in Britain in the 21st century aside from finding things that aren’t there, like liberation in a strip club and prejudice against a 1958 interpretation of Hamlet. And so I’m tempted to say that nowadays it doesn’t mean very much at all.

This was the wrong thing to say. The fight for political, social, and economic equality is, of course, not over, but the disparities are felt most cruelly by low-income women of color. Feminism is, for the most part, steered by Western women who are not low-income women of color and who espouse liberalism: the appropriation, domestication, and commodification of radical ideas. They are educated and white and privileged, like me, and they do not discernibly suffer from income inequality, unlike me. Most of them—yes, let me be glib here, let me make the sweeping generalization I have observed of the Feminist Gatekeepers—most of them went to private schools. They have friends and family in major cities who can put them up rent-free post-graduation. They don’t ever have to worry about childcare, because they have grandparents who can help them or a sufficient salary to pay for it or a husband with money. They dabble with burlesque because it is risqué, they decide Botox is antifeminist before they ever have any need for it, and they have no problem claiming to be feminists, not like I did.

What does feminism mean? I’m tempted to say it doesn’t mean very much at all. This was the wrong response, but it is what I felt. It is what I feel. For white, educated women of privilege, what does feminism mean? Does it mean the ability to speak for and on behalf of women of color and sex workers, refusing to engage with our own privilege? Does it mean very much at all if it can’t agree on what, exactly, political, social, and economic equality looks like? Does it mean anything if it can provide a smug platform from which one can judge another woman for being a sex worker or practicing Islam, if it can espouse neoliberal ideas which are complicit in other people’s oppression?

I said earlier that trading intimacies for hard cash did not make me more qualified to speak than you, but I lied. I lied, because now I think that because I was a sex worker, you should listen to me. I think that feminists should be prioritizing the voices of the very women it has elided for so many years: low-income women of color experiencing political, social, and economic inequality, those who are sex workers, those who are not white, Western, and educated. I think you should pay attention instead of dismissing us, glossing over us for that other educated white woman, the one who is in charge of feminism and its entrance exam. You need to pay attention, because if you don’t, we will lose this battle, you and I, despite being “sisters.” Are we sisters? I thought so. I thought we could say anything to each other, but it appears we cannot.

***

I whisper to men in the basement of a Manhattan club, and the conversation never turns to feminism.

Sometimes it is about their wives, how their sex life is unsatisfying, how since the children came, things have changed, and they are lonely. They are lonely, and they seek my clean, soft, perfumed, hairless, white flesh for solace. They seem to implicitly understand a simple fabricated contradiction: I enjoy my job, but at the same time I need “saving” by a man. I do not enjoy my job, and I do not need saving. I do not enjoy my job because I am saturated in human misery, in loneliness. It comes off their skin in waves, not pheromones but desperation, a need for something, a need to fill this hole, cram something into it, sex, women, something, usually just sympathy and a touch, my sorrow, my sympathy, given in a fake gasp, a caress, a sigh, longing, and the release.

I stop writing about sex work. I stop writing about feminism. I don’t think about it that much until Katy Perry declares she’s not a feminist, and everyone either condemns her for not understanding what feminism is—politicalsocialandeconomicequalityforwomen—or declares that feminism has failed to “brand” itself in order to sufficiently appeal to young women, as if it is a marketable commodity that can and should be packaged up, shoved in a colorful outfit, and thrown onstage to sing racy number-one hits about last Friday night in order to attract today’s Girls-watching audience. Perhaps feminism should have a blog and a Twitter account, definitively decide the rules for entry, and set out their manifesto. Pornography: for or against? MTF trans women: friends or foes? Anorexic women: disgusting, pitiful, shallow victims of the media’s obsession with perfection? Obese women: empowered riot grrrls? Malala Yousafzai: the acceptable face of female Islam, but anyone else in a hijab (and especially those in purdah) are supporting patriarchy and inequality…

Is it a failure of feminism and its “branding” that I still cannot self-identify as a feminist? Am I merely a casualty of the feminist sex wars of the ’80s, or is it a failure in me, as a radical political woman, to look past the constant bullshit of feminists and strive towards its noble ideals: equality for all women?

***

I am active in the radical left scene, and when Violet, a fellow activist, finds out I used to be a sex worker, she befriends me and reveals that she is polyamorous, a stripper, and a prostitute. Violet is a big proponent of “sex-positive feminism,” and she wants my book to be light, breezy, unproblematic. She wants it to gloss over the dark side of our industry, being sex workers in the age of capitalism, because she believes we have a responsibility to break the stereotype of a sex worker. She wants to find in my writing, as a white, educated, Western woman, some kind of universal experience that can be held up as the holy grail of nonexploitative sex work with agency.

I fail again. I keep failing. Whenever it comes to women, I fail. I fail, and Violet is disappointed, because my book is not sex-positive and she can find no redemption for me. Redemption. Everyone wants us sex workers to repent and find redemption, even the sex-positive feminists. I should have been born with redemption; then I wouldn’t need to find it. I am so tired. I don’t argue. Violet is a feminist, you see. She is a white, educated, Western female sex worker who sees the world through the narrow prism of her identity politics. And me? I am so tired. I am so lonely. I am so miserable. I would like to walk into a bar, pick a man that I like the look of, call him over, and curl up, intimate, in his lap. Have his breath quicken, feel the hard press of his erection as my body brushes his, realize that it is not just a financial transaction for him, but that it is about sex, the longing for it, the forbidden nature of it, the elusive, bitter tinge, the throb, the ache, hollow and empty, a hole that can never be filled. I want him to want me, and I want to pay him to want me. I want to be on that stage, feel cold steel between warm thighs, watch flesh mist mirrored glass I am tempted to say that nowadays it doesn’t mean very much at all I want to press against a stranger’s body and feel myself lost in an embrace I paid for nowadays it doesn’t mean very much at all I can’t call myself a feminist very much at all because this is simpler. This is simpler. This has meaning for me. This tells me what I need to know.

It doesn’t mean very much at all.

***

Rumpus original art by Annie Daly.

Related Posts:

• The Sunday Rumpus Interview: Anne Elizabeth Moore
• Facing Sex Addiction: A John Comes Clean
• Admit You’ve Paid For It: The Savage Honesty of David Henry Sterry
• Johns, Marks, Tricks and Chickenhawks: The Rumpus Interview with Annie M. Sprinkle
• Women are Bitches

2. Because human beings are never more alive to their own hope and shame and fear than when they are naked and aroused, and because the same must therefore be true of our characters, who are nothing more than poorly disguised versions of ourselves.

3. Because I’m really tired of seeing sex used to sell SUVs and underarm deodorant and crappy light beer, rather than being portrayed as a natural and sometimes even holy human endeavor.

4. Because I have accumulated over the years such a tremendous surplus of sexual humiliation that it seems stingy of me not to re-gift some it to my readers.

5. Because I happen to agree with Freud’s naughtiest disciple, Wilhelm Reich, who argued that a true political revolution would only be possible once sexual repression was overthrown, which pretty much rules out the Tea Party as a true political revolution because, boy, is that a movement that needs to get laid.

6. Because I am now married with two small children and thus writing about sex often constitutes the closest I get to having sex.

7. Because President Bill Clinton and Monica Lewinsky did have sexual relations, and while I could care less about the big phony scandal that story became, I am interested in the sweet and deranged version of love that passed between them. Aren’t you?

8. Because I’m really tired of having to listen to well-meaning religious folk misquoting God about how the rest of us should use our genitals.

9. Because both my parents are psychoanalysts – and despite what you are all now thinking, which is basically, Wow, you must be a really crazy person, which is a very interesting thought for you to have, by the way, and something we might want to talk about a bit later in the session – the one lesson my parents managed to impart, as I lay those many afternoons on the analytic couch that was, in fact, the only piece of furniture in our living room, is that our libidinal drives are not some bright new user option, but an essential part of our beings, an inborn riot of wants and counter wants that we can never control entirely. And because, as a writer, I’m interested in the loss of control, in the danger of forbidden thought and feeling, it strikes me as utterly foolish – just from a practical perspective – not to write about sex. Why skip over the part almost guaranteed to teach you something new about yourself?

10. Because I’m tired of living in a culture that allows children to fire make-believe glocks but freaks out at the first sign of a naked boob.

11. I just really love being able to write off lube as a business expense.

12. Because our best writing resides in the senses, and sex invokes all five of our senses—at least if you’re doing it right.

13. Because, though I watch pornography, and am terrifically involved with it for about two and a half minutes, I am most often made sad by pornography. Not simply because it involves the self-exploitation of people who probably have suffered a good deal of misfortune, and not simply because porn stars can perform in manners that often seem like physiological, geometrical, and even gravitational impossibilities (and thus make me feel like the abject sexual nebbish I surely am) but because porn stars are actors being paid, most often, to simulate pleasure. They drain sex of its single most intimate aspect: the vulnerabilities that bring us to the act in the first place, the drama of our imperfect bodies as we seek to make a communion of our desires.

14. Because I believe literature’s central purpose is not to pretend we don’t have bodies and their consequent needs, but to make us feel less alone with these needs.

15. Because the Puritans themselves were—don’t kid yourselves—total horndogs who wanted nothing more than to tear off those black robes and suffer a spiritual crisis. And because when I write about sex I am writing, ultimately, about a dream that begins with the Puritans: that we the people of this violent and troubled kingdom will at last forgive ourselves the lust and loneliness the reddens our blood, and will seek a final remedy in the warm temple of one another’s bodies. Who’s with me?

***

This Manifesto is part of a set of six tiny books called Writs of Passion. They are adult material, stories and essays that have appeared in Tin House, The Normal School, Playboy, Best American Erotica, etc., but are too dirty for prime-time. The covers fit together like a puzzle to form a gorgeous image, created by my DIY partner in crime Brian Stauffer. Limited edition, available until Valentine’s Day.

To order, send $25 per set via Paypal (sbalmond AT earthlink.net) or send an email to stevealmondjoy AT gmail.com.

***

“Why I Write Smut: A Manifesto” originally appeared in The Normal School, Spring 2012.

Art by Brian Stauffer.

Related Posts:

• “Attention Is the First and Final Act of Love”
• Writs of Passion
• Johns, Marks, Tricks and Chickenhawks: The Rumpus Interview with Sam Benjamin
• Johns, Marks, Tricks and Chickenhawks: The Rumpus Interview with Annie M. Sprinkle
• Boston Marathon Roundup