CALLOUT for SEX WORKER PARTICIPATION: Every Ho I Know Says So

Hello sex workers, we are looking for your participation in a video project:
EVERY HO I KNOW SAYS SO: A VIDEO FOR LOVERS AND PARTNERS OF SEX WORKERS

What is this project?
EVERY HO I KNOW SAYS SO is a video project documenting the advice that we sex workers want to give to our lovers, partners and dates on how to be supportive to us. This video will be a resource for partners/lovers of sex workers who struggle to understand and accept sex work.

Who is making this video?
This video is being made by two sex workers, Jackson and Lusty Day. Lusty Day is a white, middle-class genderqueer kinky independent escort hailing from Toronto, where whorephobia was a major reason for her breakup of a four-year relationship. Jackson is an australian, white, class privileged queer trans boy who works it as a lady hooker and dancer with a rainbow of experiences including dating fellow sex workers, dating workers while not a worker, and also dating non-sex workers. We are making this video with no budget, just our own labour. And we will distribute it at no cost to the viewer.

How can I participate?
Contact us! We will do a super short interview with you where you speak as if you were speaking to your lover from your own experience. An example:

“I want you to understand that my work is sometimes sexually fulfilling but that that doesn’t threaten our relationship, it’s just a positive aspect of my work.”

We realize that many sex workers are not out about their work to lovers, family, friends, immigration officials, police, etc because of criminalization and reasons of personal safety. If you don’t want to be identified, we can video you without showing your face (ie focus on your hands) and also change your voice. We can also accept written statements. We are open and willing to negotiate the best way for you to participate. AND you can change your mind about being in the video at any point. Talk to us!

While you might want to vent (and we’ve all got a crappy story of a lover who just didn’t get it), this video is trying to build a gently challenging space. Anger is powerful to express, but please also remember our goal of creating a resource for partners and lovers that helps them listen and grow.

Why are we making this video?
EVERY HO I KNOW SAYS SO is a response to the lack of resources for people looking for advice on how to be a good support person to a sex worker. In turn, we want to support our lovers to fight stigma against sex workers, especially in intimate relationships. Sex workers themselves have valuable advice and direction to give our partners. With this video, we are saying “We support you in becoming a sex worker-positive and supportive lover and person in the community!!! By continuing to work on your attitudes about our work and educating yourself, you are showing us that you care. We love you!”

This video is a platform for sex workers to share their voices, including at the forefront sex workers of colour, Aboriginal sex workers, trans* sex workers, queer sex workers, disAbled sex workers, sex workers of all ages, working class sex workers, and migrant sex workers, too. As two relatively privileged sex workers, we are committed to using strategies that centre the people most affected by whore stigma and oppression.

How will the video be distributed?
We intend to distribute the video on YouTube and we hope you will blog and distribute it online for us, too. We hope to complete the video by October 2010.

Can I pass this callout to a friend who is a sex worker?
Yes, absolutely. Please share it as we are hoping to connect with many different sex workers.

To participate or to answer your questions, please email jacksonisforcutting@gmail.com and lustyday@gmail.com.

Edited: July 25th, 2010

New zine available! FANG IT: My Melbourne Sexcapade

Freshly baked, my new queer sex zine Fang It: My Melbourne Sexcapade. Contact me at lustyday@gmail.com with your address if you want one. $2 to pay for the printing, blood, sweat and tears!

The lovely Sarah Pinder has already published a review on her blog bits of string press.

Here’s an excerpt from the story “Being The Best I Can Be” to entice you:

What are you training for? a guy at this squat in Brunswick asks me. I fumble and bullshit some answer. If pressed again, maybe I’ll say I’m training for the revolution. That may be true. But mostly I’m training because I’m a submissive masochist and a hott butchy curly-haired meanie told me she already bought me a whistle. Let’s call her Coach. She knocked my shoulder gently at the spanking workshop last week as she left and said you have my number.

So effortless. I’m hooked.

Over text we make plans to meet at the track at the uni, 4pm Sunday. On the day of I keep wanting to chicken out, my stomach twisting, I’ve never played with her before nor have I ever done more than joke about having a fitness top. I have been building her up as a big meanie in my mind all week. I go over all possible excuses. None are solid. Hell. Shape up, pussy-ass. It’s time to represent. I pull on some little nylon running shorts and a pale blue cotton shirt with some sporty-looking numbers on the front. I jump on the Family Star, and pedal hard down Rathdowne, repeating to myself: I can take it. I can do it.

By the time I reach the uni it’s raining. I half-hope we’ll call it off. I start a text and blam, she appears behind me out of nowhere. Damn, she is riding her bike too, and she’s got the best green old-skool track pants and a hoodie on, its strings swinging in the wind. All dressed up! Some guy asked me when I left my house if I was a personal trainer, she tells me. We laugh. I’m loving that we are dressed up for a scene wearing sportwear. I feel so nerdy-good in this bike helmet, too.

We decide to do it indoors and I follow her up Lygon Street. We race the clouds, and I can’t hardly keep up to her because the back wheel on the Family Star is slipping on some rain. We settle into my friend’s empty bedroom, I tell her some of my likes and limits and she does the same. We’re all awkward until we discover this skipping rope hanging on the back of the door. Start with that, Coach says, sitting on the bed.

I wind the rope around each of my wrists once and jump. Sweat pours off me after only a minute and my calves are already seizing up. This might be the shortest scene ever. After a bit she says I can stop and I get right down on the floor in front of her, putting my head on her lap, playing up my heaving breath to get xxx-tra attention. She falls for it, stroking my head. What a good job you did, she says. I beam. Now push-ups…

Edited: July 12th, 2010

Mourning a client and a dear friend Aaron

Dear friends of the sweet and sexy Aaron,

I wish I could be there with all of you today to celebrate the life and wildness of the best client a hooker could ever have: Aaron S, and of course, his constant companion, little Aaron. Together, they were VERY badly behaved – just the way I liked it!

My name is Lusty Day and for the past two years I had the great privilege of sharing intimacy, friendship, and hot sex with Aaron. I was really nervous when we first met about learning about how to communicate with and please Aaron, but he was the most gentle, patient, appreciative and dirty-minded lover and client I could ask for. I first started working for him when I was still quite new to being a sex worker. At the time, I was really struggling with telling my friends, my family and my community about the work I was doing. Aaron taught me that there was nothing shameful or wrong about buying and selling sexual services. Plus, that guy was so persuasive he was paying me half the rate I charge other clients and we were having twice the fun! We had some great times together rocking his wheel chair around the living room. He taught me so very much about the power of eye contact and a great laugh – both instrumental to having great sex.

More than client and sex worker, Aaron and I also became great friends and allies. He always offered me a place to sleep if I was feeling down, and even though I suspected that he had an ulterior motive in asking me to sleep over, Aaron likewise cared deeply about me and all his friends and was always looking out for us. He was a fierce fighter for people’s freedom. Despite numerous difficulties that the ableist world threw at him, Aaron was always out attending and leading community events and rallies. His legacy will live on in the struggle for rights and respect for people with disabilities, for queer people, and for sex workers, to name but a few.

In honour of Aaron today, I’m wearing the purple lovely g-string panties he once gave me and telling everyone his most important advice: have sex! It meant so much to him and little Aaron that people felt pleasure and happiness. I am sad to miss the gathering but I’m sure that all the love and light you raise will shine for Aaron all the way over to Indonesia where I am sitting here loving him still.

Big love and whorelicious hugs to all of you,

Lusty Day

Edited: April 8th, 2010

Whore Lover Part 2

This is a continuation of Whore Lover Part I. Happy reading!

In Oz, it wasn’t enough for us to work for someone else in the Sydney brothels. So we decide to head north to a tourist town on the Sunshine Coast, place ads in the local newspaper, and run our own gig from a secluded rental townhouse on the beach. The place is more luxurious than the tents, squats and couches we are used to. Here we have mirrored closet doors, our own washer and dryer. We have our own brothel. We can do it. Fuck brothels where management takes half our fee. We can reel clients in ourselves. It’s easy with a bit of hustle, a sweet talk on the phone.

Our ads are side-by-side in the community classifieds. Soon we realize that all the clients are calling us both, checking out rates and services. We try a scam. Between us, we rotate offering a cut rate $20 less than each other. The guy always books the cheaper rate. We are bleeding the same market. After a few bookings, I have an idea.

“Do you want to pool our earnings?” I ask Juliet. “We are splitting the ad, lodging and food costs. Why not collectivise the incoming?” We have long shared our spoils through common stories, laments and rage against the whore-phobic world.

She thinks about it for a millisecond, and agrees. “Why not?” We fish out a bigger envelope. It feels radical to share the proceeds, each acknowledging that we have common interests and skills and that we support each other’s work.

I think our mutual desire for cash wafted out on the ocean breeze because before long a fellow arrived. He is a crack dealer, ready to flash his cash, and didn’t even ask the rate. Juliet hustles the guy to pay us both, at the same time. It’s what is colloquially known as the “lesbian double.” Show time! (more…)

Edited: December 11th, 2009

Whore Lover Part I

This is a longer piece that appeared in the first issue of my zine Whorelicious. I wrote it for the upcoming book Whore Lover, which is still seeking submissions. I will post the call for submissions in a few days. The story is quite long so I’ve decided to serialize it…hope you like it!

xxx
LustyDay

Whore Lover

Juliet and I are walking down Illawarra Road in Sydney, Australia. I am lagging slightly behind her. She is wearing her red striped dress and white flats. She is going out on a date after she drops me off at the brothel. I see a red thread trailing from the hem of her dress. I don’t stoop to grab it and fix it for her. The whole hem could unravel. And I don’t think she would really care about the thread anyways. Her clothes are always well-chosen, but not necessarily well-made.

We are walking towards Amore after the sun has set, it’s 9pm and I’m about to start my career as a brothel whore. She knows the way because she has already worked there. She is taking me there because she wants me to know the way, too.

“So one more time, what should I say to the clients in the intro?” I ask her. I am nervous. I have hooked before, but never in a brothel. Competing with other women, especially straight women, is terrifyingly about to become reality. I don’t think of myself as competitive. Or straight.

“Just remind yourself that the only thing you want to do in the world is fuck them,” she repeats. “Touch them at any moment you can – on the leg, on the shoulder, whatever. Call them handsome.”

Juliet has already lent me her knockout pink baby doll negligee from the Sally Ann. She thought it would go well with my sky-high red patent leather heels. I wouldn’t really know. I don’t know much about femme fashion other than fresh-faced admiration. My style is more clean-faced boyish gurl-nerd with sensible walking shoes. We have gone over the intro scenario before, the moment when I emerge from the girls’ room and lay my charm on the client for 30 seconds to convince him to book me. But I need reassurance, I need a wise whore to tell me I will be successful. (I haven’t learned yet that for every kind of ho, there is a client who will readily see her sex appeal.) I have barely arrived in Australia. But Juliet has already been working for nine months in brothels all over Sydney. She has encouraged me to come from Canada to have an adventure and pay off my school debts. After three grinding years in graduate school, I am ready for it. (more…)

Edited: November 10th, 2009