Working Sex (25 page)

 

Although AIDEN SHAW first became familiar to many people as a porn star, he has also directed music videos, designed websites, and worked as a photographer, model, actor, singer/ songwriter, and interior designer. Shaw is the author of three novels,
Brutal
(1996),
Boundaries
(1999), and
Wasted
(2001), all of which received widespread attention in British and U.S. gay media. In 1991 he collaborated with fine artist Mark Beard to produce a handmade, limited edition book that is now housed in the Metropolitan Museum of Modern Art. Shaw is also the author of a 1997 volume of poetry,
If Language at the Same Time Shapes and Distorts our Ideas and Emotions, How do we Communicate Love?
His autobiography,
My Undoing,
was released to wide acclaim in 2007. Read more about him on his website,
www.aidenshaw.com
.

 

SISTER GRIMM is a writer, performer, polyglot, traveler and teacher. She is currently teaching in the land of modern windmills and northern lights, and working on a full-length poetry manuscript.

 

MIRHA- SOLEIL ROSS is a transsexual performer, video maker, sex worker, and activist who grew up amongst mountains of scrap, sewer rats, and bottles of gin in Notre-Dame du Sacre Coeur, a poor district situated on the South Shore of Montreal, Quebec. She has been working and living in Toronto since 1992. Since 1993, she has created over a dozen videos (including
Tremblement de Chair, G-SPrOuT!, Allo Performance
), which have been screened at film festivals across Canada, the U.S., and Europe. She is the founder of MEAL-TRANS, the first ever publicly funded multiservices, peer-run program for low-income and street-active transsexual and transgendered people in Toronto. Ross’s show
Yapping Out Loud: Contagious Thoughts from an Unrepentant Whore
premiered as part of the MAYWORKS Festival of Working People and the Arts. She is interviewed under the name of Jeanne B. in Shannon Bell’s book
Whore Carnival
(New York, NY: Autonomedia, 1995), and as Mirha-Soleil Ross in Viviane Namaste’s
Sex Change, Social Change: Reflections on Identities, Institutions, and Nations
(Toronto: Women’s Press, 2005). She appears in
Bent on Writing: Contemporary Queer Tales
(Toronto:
Women’s Press, 2002), and in
My Breasts, My Choice: Journeys Through Surgery
(Toronto: Sumach Press, 2003).

 

ANNA JOY SPRINGER has little fangs and barks like a deer when excited. Teenage fans call her “The Bird Lady,” because she writes, almost exclusively, about birds. Before moving to San Diego to teach at Eileen Myles’s School for Wayward Writers, she did lots of femme jobs, made neon sculptures, sang in legendary punk bands Blatz, The Gr’ups, and Cypher in the Snow, and read her purple prose with Sister Spit. She currently tongue-lashes misogynists, writes weird and lengthy cross-genre messes, and ponders the many species of love, radical performative pedagogy, and the gyre of ethics in konsumer kapitalism.

 

MATTILDA, A.K.A. MATT BERNSTEIN SYCAMORE, is the editor of
Nobody Passes: Rejecting the Rules of Gender and Conformity
(Emeryville, CA: Seal Press, 2006) and an expanded second edition of
That’s Revolting! Queer Strategies for Resisting Assimilation
(Brooklyn, NY: Soft Skull Press, 2004).
The Night That Plays like Ping-Pong in My Head
is excerpted from Mattilda’s first novel,
Pulling Taffy
(San Francisco, CA: Suspect Thoughts Press, 2003). Her second novel,
So Many Ways to Sleep Badly,
will be published by City Lights in fall/winter 2008, and Mattilda hopes that it will destroy literature.
Her first anthology,
Tricks and Treats: Sex Workers Write About Their Clients
(New York, NY: Harrington Park Press, 2000), was recently translated into Italian. Mattilda loves feedback. Her blog is
nobodypasses.blogspot.com
and her homepage is
www.mattbernsteinsycamore.com
.

 

Writer, performer, and literary-event wrangler MICHELLE TEA is cofounder of the original Sister Spit experience, the legendary all-girl spoken-word road show. She is the author of four memoirs, including
The Chelsea Whistle
(New York, NY: Seal Press, 2002), the award-winning
Valencia
(Seattle, WA: Seal Press, 2000), and the illustrated
Rent Girl
(San Francisco, CA: Last Gasp, 2004), as well as her first novel,
Rose of No Man’s Land
(San Francisco, CA: MacAdam/Cage Press, 2006). She is currently at work on the graphic novel
Carrier,
illustrated by Laurenn McCubbin and set to be published in 2007 by MacAdam/Cage Press. Michelle has edited three anthologies, most recently
Baby, Remember My Name: New Queer Girl Writings
(New York, NY: Carroll and Graf, 2006).

 

TRE VASQUEZ, two spirit, former ho, down for reclaiming our histories and spiritual wellness through hip-hop. He uses performance and other mediums of art as an offering to an indigenous movement of young warriors/soldiers in order to take back our land, communities, hearts, minds,
and bodies. He has performed in many events such as The Sex Worker Art Festival Tucson, Intercourse: A Sex and Gender Recipe for Revolution, a tour with the band Tricrotic, and a whole lot of shows that are none of your business. Keeping it spiritual, keeping it political, keeping it gangsta by any and all means necessary.

 

SHOSHANA VON BLANCKENSEE is a native San Franciscan, a veteran of the Sister Spit Ramblin’ Road Show, who has been featured at The Coco Club, The Chameleon (remember those ole places), The Paradise Lounge, and K’vetch (at Sadie’s Flying Elephant). She also coran a reading series at The Bearded Lady Cafe (yet another place that doesn’t exist anymore). She is the author of a play,
Show Me Your Arms,
which went up in March 2000 in a little theater called Bindlestiff, and the star of the lesbo mommy movie
Playdate,
which came out in last year’s Frameline festival. She has been published in
On Our Backs
(Los Angeles, CA: Alyson Books, 2004) and the anthology
Bottoms Up!
(Brooklyn, NY: Soft Skull Press, 2004).

 

ANA VOOG is an omnisexual Minneapolis-based multimedia performance artist. At this time she is most known for her 24/7 in-home webcam, which is now the longest-running homecam on the net. Thee modern grrl is infotainment value:
Ana Voog becomes sexual stereotypes and then blows them up from the inside out—knowledge through nonsense. By doing and being what sexual stereotypes are not supposed to she hopes these roles will be abandoned and new ideas will spring forth. Now, as she nears age 40, she has been through many incarnations as an artist. First as painter and musician on her eleven-year journey as singer/songwriter of the allfemale band The Blue Up, which brought forth five records on two major labels. Second as “camgirl,” photographer/ pornographer and writer/documentarian, which brought her worldwide recognition from the Museum of Modern Art in New York City,
The New York Times, A&E, Playboy, Hard Copy,
etc. Thirdly, she’s become almost a recluse in North America, crocheting avant-garde hats and spinning yarn from exotic animals and futuristic textiles. Say wha? Fourthly, after all this she says, Jedi-style, “I emerge still a cocoon” now at the end of her beginning, she starts . . . just like the paradox she is. She can be found at
www.anacam.com
.

A
nnie Oakley is an activist, artist, and curator, as well as a ten-year sex industry veteran. Oakley created and continues to organize the Sex Workers Art Show Tour, a nationally acclaimed cabaret-style show featuring visual and performance art by sex workers. She has lectured and performed at colleges and theatres across the country, and is a firm believer in cultural production as activism. For more information, please visit
www.sexworkersartshow.com
.

For more than thirty years, Seal Press has published groundbreaking books. By women. For women. Visit our website at
www.sealpress.com

 

INDECENT: HOW I MAKE IT AND FAKE IT AS A GIRL FOR HIRE by Sarah Katherine Lewis. $14.95, 1-58005-169-3. An insider reveals the gritty reality behind the alluring façade of the sex industry.

 

NOBODY PASSES: REJECTING THE RULES OF GENDER AND CONFORMITY edited by Mattilda, a.k.a Matt Bernstein Sycamore. $15.95, 1-58005-184-7. A timely and thought-provoking collection of essays that confronts and challenges the notion of belonging by examining the perilous intersections of identity, categorization, and community.

 

BARE: THE NAKED TRUTH ABOUT STRIPPING by Elisabeth Eaves. $14.95, 1-58005-121-9. A closer look at the way sexuality is viewed in our culture: what, if anything, constitutes “normal” desire; the ethics of swapping money—or anything else—for sex.

 

GETTING OFF: A WOMAN’S GUIDE TO MASTURBATION by Jamye Waxman, illustrations by Molly Crabapple. $14.94, 1-58005-219-3. Empowering and femalepositive, this is a comprehensive guide for women on the history and mechanics of the oldest and most common sexual practice.

 

CUNT: A DECLARATION OF INDEPENDENCE by Inga Muscio. $14.95, 1-58005-075-1. “An insightful, sisterly, and entertaining exploration of the word and the part of the body it so bluntly defines. Ms. Muscio muses, reminisces, pokes into history and emerges with suggestions for the understanding of—and reconciliation with—what it means to have a cunt.”—Roberta Gregory, author of
Naughty Bitch

 

NAKED ON THE INTERNET by Audacia Ray. $15.95, 1-58005-209-2. Sex rights advocate reveals that many young women use the Internet to explore their desire and develop their sexual identities.

Working Sex

Sex Workers Write About a Changing Industry

Copyright © 2007 Annie Oakley

 

Published by
Seal Press
A Member of Perseus Books Group
1400 65th Street, Suite 250
Emeryville, CA 94608

 

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form without written permission from the publisher, except by reviewers who may quote brief excerpts in connection with a review.

 

 

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

 

Working sex : sex workers write about a changing industry / edited by Annie Oakley.

p. cm.

eISBN : 978-0-786-75087-0

1. Prostitutes—Biography. 2. Prostitutes—Social conditions.

3. Prostitution—History—21st century. I. Oakley, Ann.

 

HQ118.W67 2008
306.7409’045—dc22
2007039519