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.

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…

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

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!

So we make $1400 to do what we do best – make a big porny show of moaning with a just a bit of effort on our part. I find myself between Juliet’s legs, with him behind me. I flick out my tongue and lick her bad porn style, my tongue outstretched not to please her but to make the whole performance something special for the guy our client. It works. He plunges into my pussy and cums pretty fast. As we all lay on the bed afterwards, I whisper in Juliet’s ear. “You know I don’t really lick pussy like that, right?” She laughs.

We hadn’t fucked each other for a long while, Juliet and I. We always had other lovers, interests, passions. Sex was just never the most interesting thing we had to learn about each other. That was funny to us both, since we both held a deep interest in sex and sexuality. But we had no shortage of intimacy, of course. “I adore you,” she always says, when she wakes beside me. To show my true colours, I prefer smothering her with kisses all over her face and tracing her lips with my fingers. We have escaped the plague of jealousy, I think because we have such a deep desire to see each other succeed, to grow, to be happy. Our desire is an investment in the ever-changing nature of intimacy, in the belief that it can’t be held tightly, nor measured or owned. Nor is it only sexual. Our intimacy has always been unruly, free and expansive. We witness each other. We accept each other, without shame for who we are or what we do. We adore each other just because we are.

Our working cunts just much prefer spending time together cuddling in the bed,laughing, pinching, kissing, talking…all things that don’t involve thrusting. Thrusting has become boring and commonplace. And I revel in the intimacy of knowing what does turn Juliet on. It’s not fucking. This is knowledge that no client has, or could possibly guess. I could tell you all about it – if you paid me.

We were a couple of queers playing straights playing bi-curious for cash. It was so thrilling to see the pile of bills on the bedside table, all for our performance. A hooker I once worked with told me that when clients ask her what turns her on, she says “money”. She gets great tips. And I see how it’s true. Our lesbian double show isn’t all faked…we are genuinely into performing and getting paid for a show well done.

Another night, she comes to me, cunt aching from her period. She had been working the night before, and her menstrual sponge is stuck inside. These little sponges stop blood from pouring onto a client, but they often get pounded deep beyond reach. She asks me to slip my hand inside her and remove it. This time, it lays tucked under her cervix, out of the awkward reach of her own hand. I don’t know how anyone gets them out alone, really.

We are camping on a beach and it is dark. We have no flashlight, no mattress, and no stove to make dinner. But we have heels, lingerie, and latex gloves.

I snap a glove on. We laugh at the sound, associating it more with sex than with doctor visits. “Are you ready?” I ask her. “Do you want some lube?” I know she is a bit nervous, because she is often stone. There is almost no occasion (ON) in which she would ask someone to slip their hand in. But if it was going to be anyone, it would probably be me. She trusts me. I can tell.

“Yeah, get some lube,” she agrees.

First we try in the campground bathroom. It’s ablaze with green fluorescent buzzing lights and resident moths. I insist Juliet sit on the toilet. She leans back. She stabilizes herself by bracing her arms against the stall walls. She blushes at the exposure, shushing me when ladies arrive for their nightly shower. But still we revel in filling the toilets with our slutty mania.

“Shit, wait, almost touching it, fuck, is that your cervix or the sponge?” I crane my wrist to a new angle. Juliet’s face swells with a held laugh, shaking her head. “I don’t know,” she squeaks out. She almost falls off the toilet, giggling. “This isn’t going to work, I can’t even feel it,” I say. We move to the tent, where she can lay flat on her back.

There, I reach inside her with my palm facing up, two fingers sliding in and then my thumb following. She tightens, but she is trusting. I’m surprised to now feel the sponge resting right there, not far from the mouth of her cunt. It’s a wet creature sitting on a golden seamway. Waiting for me. So easy for me to grab, so out of her reach. This pleases me, reminds me that we need each other so intimately. I pinch the pink treasure with the tips of my fingers and pull it out. It is dark veined with blood and it smells like earth. I snap the glove up from my wrist and stretch it around the still-warm creature. I tie a knot in the end and bat the stretchy filled glove against my knuckles like a toy. We screech and laugh. I am reminded of some old joke about wanting to be someone’s tampon. I would love to curl inside Juliet, and feel her open herself to clients, to her work, to feel her power. I suddenly wonder why there is no such a thing as peer-administered pap smears and STI tests. We could all reach up into each other’s cunts, keeping them going, keeping them working. It would breed familiarity and intimacy with the source of our cultural alienation. The familiarity would remind us again and again that there is nothing subterranean or dangerous about our busy cunts. What feels more mysterious is how Juliet and I have found each other, and figured out to use our cunts, market them in ways that deepen our love for each other. We are comrades in this mystery, practicing a revolution without a map. We support each other’s autonomy. We love without borders.

That night on the Sunshine Coast, as the stream of client calls slows, I ask Juliet if we can consummate our money-sharing approach with a bit of a ritual. She agrees. We collected palm fronds and all the cash we’d made. Holding hands, we step together into a small circle I’d fashioned from the palms. There is just enough room for us both to sit cross-legged inside it.

I take the money and lay the bills all in the same direction. Juliet then takes them from me, and starts counting out the money in hundred dollar piles, fanning them out around our thighs. The counting is the best part. On some mornings when I arrive home from the brothel around 8am, Juliet wakes up from our bed just to watch me count. I now have a sense of what is going on in the gangster and drug dealer films – our common relatives in the cash only economy. It feels powerful. We count the piles together, and screech when we reach the grand total.

Then we hold hands, close eyes.

“I invoke the whores of history, our foremothers and forefathers,” Juliet chants. “All the brave, smart hustlers.”
“All the fat and young whores.” I add.
“The bold. The beautiful.” Ha.
“The tranny hos.”
“The working girls of colour, the stories not passed on.”
“The ones who will come after us.”

We sit in silence, savouring. Lightly touching fingers, knees bumping up against each other, surrounded by light.

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.

But I’m still nervous. I can’t pace my steps right, I want to walk faster, but Juliet has stopped to examine a pile of abandoned clothes and things in the gutter. “Look!” she exclaims. “I love this shade!” She has found a half-used tube of Ruby Rose lipstick. Before tossing it into the blue milk crate strapped to her bike, she satisfactorily rolls the shiny tube closed. She tries on some shoes too. She is always picking things out of the gutter. Hardly someone you’d think was a pimp. But she is. Juliet is my pimp. Or, should I say, she got me in the biz. Isn’t that what a pimp is?
We are almost at the brothel. I want to get there and start working already! But I also want Juliet to slow down. I want her to look at me, tell me all over again how I will be admired and paid well by men. I want her to admire me, adore me. I want her to be a million things to me – and she is. She takes me in the buzzing front door, introduces me to the receptionist, and checks in on me via text message all night. And I’m fine. She knew I would be. I knew I would be. But that’s not the point. The point is to feel my apprehension is acknowledged, that no matter if I have a lucrative night or a bad one, I am not judged on my whoring skills. Basically, that I am loved no matter what happens.

Way back when, Juliet introduced me to the outcall biz back in Toronto, Canada. It started one day when I was visiting her at her day job. She worked at a sex shop. As usual, I was rushing home from the university to have dinner, wondering all the time if the degree was worth the poverty it created.

Juliet was answering emails as I came in the door. She gestured for me to close the small office door behind me. “I need to tell you something,” she said quietly. Juliet almost never hushed her voice. “I started doing sex work.” Her glance burned with excitement.

“Humph.” I said in response. I wasn’t much shocked. I’d seen her host dildo races, organize feminist porn awards, and convince art crowds to sharpen their pencils with a toothy vagina. In fact, when she said it, it felt strange that this conversation hadn’t already happened. “Are you enjoying it?” I asked.

“Damn straight,” she said. “And I think you could do it too. Why be poor?”

Why indeed? For Juliet, poverty had never been noble. She knew it well – it clawed at her, choking her in all she did growing up.

Juliet thought I’d be good at it. She said I had the right attitude towards sex: I practised sexual connection outside of love, I enjoyed sexual exploration, and was motivated to learn about others through their sexuality. Basically, she saw that I was an entrepreneurial slut capable of looking after myself.

So we made a plan to talk shop. In Queen’s Park a few days later, we scrounged for a clean park bench. There was no place to sit that wasn’t smothered by the sound of city workers’ chainsaws. I was grateful for the cover. Sex working is mostly criminal in Canada. I didn’t want anyone to overhear us.

Juliet gave me my legal education on two glossy sheets of reused paper from the sex shop. One side was plastered with images of Buck Angel’s transman pussy. I was sure no one had yet printed Sections 210–213 of the Criminal Code of Canada on the other side of such precious porno.

“So here’s a quick rundown,” she explained. “You can’t have a workplace, that’s violating the bawdy house law. You can’t work for anyone, or they get charged with procuring. Don’t employ anyone like a driver or a security person, or they get charged with living off the avails of prostitution. You can’t negotiate price in public, that’s against the communication law…” she began to rattle off.

“So you can’t do anything legally?” I interrupted. “Not really,” she answered. “But you can get smart about not getting caught.”

I looked around the park, feeling suddenly exposed, and liking it. Again, glad for the sound of fallen tree limbs getting fed into the wood shredder. This was survival knowledge. I felt honored to receive. And glad that Juliet had no shame about thriving and sharing the spoils.

At that time, we were friends, lovers, and allies. We were about to become hustlers, partners, and comrades.

Ask me how I got into the industry, and I’ll tell you: “Juliet made me do it!” Not only did she pimp me, she also trafficked me across international borders for her own nefarious purposes – ie she wanted a travel buddy, a confidante, a close friend from home to share in. Really, she could go to jail for this camaraderie. If we weren’t both white women, that is. Because the world only sees victims in sex work, and those victims are usually imagined to be Thai women workers, not ever women who choose this life, and are fulfilled by it. The truth is, most internationally traveling whores choose this work, no matter their race – the world just can’t imagine it that way.

“My only regret about sex work,” Juliet confesses to me one night, “is that I didn’t know how to start doing this ten years ago when I was 24.”

“Fuck that, I wish I’d known at 14!” I answer. For once I shock her. I already knew at 14 that I had something valuable to boys. But the exchange was never profitable enough for me. I always wanted more out of it. Now I see what I want, and how to get it, without shame.

“Yes, can you imagine? I could have sold my virginity for $1000!” she fantasizes.

“Are you kidding? That’s worth way more. Dream bigger,” I dare her. We are whores, we are whores who dare to want more. Greedy cunts!

To be continued…

Call for Submissions: WhoreLover (working title)

Please submit via email attachment (pdf or doc file) to: partnersanthology@gmail.com

Deadline: November 23rd 2009

Compiled/Edited by Sadie Lune

Whore Lover: Lovers and Partners of Sex Workers Speak

An anthology of non-fiction essays written by the non-paying partners (queer-trans-straight) of sex workers about their experiences and feelings regarding their unique position in the marketplace of love.

From casual dates, to great long term relationships, to going down in flames, ‘Whore Lover’ will explore the personal narratives of people attracted, intimate and in love with those who work in the sex industry. Present and former lovers and partners of sex workers are encouraged to submit. Whore Lover is looking to represent the stories of a multiplicity of people: people of color, trans, queer, gay, straight, of all ages. Partners of workers in all areas of the sex industry will be featured.

Topics of interest include but are not limited to:

*Day to day negotiations
*My partner and I turned each other out
* I was a trick and then became a lover
*Loving a Sex Work Celebrity
*My partner’s job turns me on
* My partner’s work inspired me to be a sex work client
* I’m a sex worker and I only date other sex workers
*How I deal with family and friends around my partner’s work
*How I’ve dealt (or not) with my own ego around my partner’s sex work
*My partner switched jobs within the industry and how that worked for us
* My partner’s sex work is a secret from everyone (including me?)
*I broke up with my partner because of sex work

People who have dated/loved/married all variety of sex workers, such as: porn actors, strippers, FBSM/sensual massage providers, street-based workers, tantra providers, erotic body workers, sexual surrogates, escorts, fetish workers, phone-sex workers, pro-Dominants and pro-submissives, are welcome to submit.

A limited number of interviews are possible to those who are interested in having their voices heard but feel more comfortable talking than writing. No poetry, please.

Pseudonyms or anonymous submissions are fine and will be honored.

Pieces should be between 1000-7000 words.