It did all feel a bit weird, though, to have everyone in my community mobilizing to send complaints to Facebook. Usually I am getting angry messages about the way that Facebook is censoring breast feeding photos, or gender pronoun options, or sex positive groups, or queer performances, etc. I guess that’s the old chestnut of freedom of speech. How do we want that right served up? Well, the learning and work I have been doing recently about advocating for decriminalization over legalization and regulation, as well as the reading and thinking I have been doing about the Prison Industrial Complex, including the inefficacy of police and state responses to violence in my community is directing me to question, more and more, the amount of time and energy I spend convincing the capitalist and governmental powers that be to hear me, or represent me, or provide services to me. All those things are important, no doubt. But I’m dreaming about other responses that build the sex worker community, that fortify us and that speak to our differences across race, class, gender, and ability, that make it possible for us to confront and transform violence in our lives.

So on that note, I want to make a little list here (I adore making lists of ten) that takes note of some of the ways that people I know, including myself, are building our community in rad ways, and that go beyond Facebook-type stuff:

1. Sharing biz skills and organizing at the upcoming Desiree Alliance conference in July 2010! I’m working on a proposal for a workshop, and I hope to be part of a network of white anti-racist whores who will gather there. It’s in VEGAS people! They have scholarships, too!

2. Mentoring people who are new to the business. I was in Melbourne a few weeks back and hung around with a few friends who are new to the industry. It was amazing to hear their excitement and stories about all they were learning, and in particular, how they were processing and healing from sexual violence by engaging in sex work. I can’t really emphasize enough how just having coffee with another whore feels like organizing, feels like community building. I would never be doing what I’m doing today if generous sex workers didn’t share their knowledge and expertise with me. Thanks, lovelies. I’ll never forget my first ho-down on the Criminal Code of Canada’s bullshit…

3. Remembering Missing and Murdered Women, especially from Vancouver’s Downtown East Side, but also from the Highway of Tears and the deaths especially of Aboriginal women and/or sex workers, on February 14 in Canada. We are building steam and power to demand accountability for this tragedy. We are thousands strong!

4. Supporting sex workers’ rights to work during the Olympics in Vancouver and also the upcoming FIFA World Cup in South Africa. Big sporting events are a time when many workers are really busy working and they likely need an extra hug or cooked meals while working their bodies so much. Also, they are under increased surveillance by anti-traffickers and media (always to ensure our “safety”, yeah right, have a look at this group Buying Sex is Not A Sport to see what I mean), so love your hooker an extra bit during these times!

5. Marching in the Mardi Gras parade this coming weekend in Sydney, Australia. A whole bunch of hos I know are busy making costumes, their creativity endlessly inspires me. I’m sure that so much glitter has been spilled for the theme “Transsexual Empire Strikes Back” in connection with the group A Gender Agenda. I’m not able to march this year, but I’m giving the group a donation – not surprising to see sex workers and transpeople working together! Last year I marched with Touching Base, another sex worker organization that works with clients with disabilities. Yay for coalition building!

6. Working on my zine Whorelicious, the Classy Issue. As a middle-class person and increasingly financially successful hooker, I am working on understanding my class privilege right now and moving past the guilt and shame of it. I do think that guilt and shame are fairly unproductive emotions, and their relationship to my identity issues sometimes really immobilize me in thinking through the structural conditions of poverty. But I am also seeing how they form a part of my learning about oppression; I can see how I moved through those feelings when I worked to become an anti-racist ally and also as an ally of transpeople. I have been reading this book Without a Net: The Female Experience of Growing Up Working Class edited by Michelle Tea (but don’t buy it from Amazon.com, get it from the Toronto Women’s Bookstore if you want to buy it) and also this website Class Matters. Please send me more suggestions of resources if you have them. I am particularly looking for class-privileged people who want to talk about their experiences. I am also interested in creating “community banks” of funds pooled by sex workers for group members to draw on in times of emergency and for professional and creative development. If we have money, let’s use it well!

7. I have a little sex-worker self-care kit of essential oils, sexual health resources, emergency contraception, and sacred items that is always evolving and growing with me. I hope to share its contents with you all soon – so powerful to have my care in hand.

8. Speaking of self-care, I am also excited about the ways that sex workers are protecting our health! Some sex worker health clinics here in Sydney are working with us to provide self-administered PAP tests and vaginal and anal and throat swabs, isn’t that amazing! Although I recently had an experience with a doctor that was judgemental and less than empowering, I also see instances of peer-to-peer health approaches that are really inspiring. I can tell you that when I get my feet up in those damn stirrups I feel so much less empowering and more vulnerable allowing a doctor into my cunt than any client. I feel the weight of the power of the medical establishment to determine the health and risks of my body, to medicalize my mental health, to judge my self-care and harm-reduction approaches, and also to withhold options to my gender transgressive friends. That’s how I feel about doctors. The more we mobilize to understand and share information between us, the more powerful we are.

9. I’ve been learning to walk in heels that are a full inch higher than my last highest pair. Legs! legs! legs! Femmes, I forever and ever salute you for your kick-ass femininity. Preferably, this salute happens from a kneeling position. Also recently expanded my deep throat skills an extra inch. Skills development, oh yeah! I am thinking I would like to learn pole-dancing next.

10. Being mega impressed lately by the way a trans hooker friend of mine uses humour and sarcasm as survival. I sometimes get a bit deep into the earnestness and honesty, spilling my guts out and being all emo, but shit damn, this friend knows how to perform her way out of a messy and potentially violent situation. I used to think that all the high glam and dragesque was a bit of a mask because of my nerdy judgements about how to “be real” (in recovery from bad feminism, I still seem to be), but wow, this friend is totally brave, skilled, and having fun too. (I guess it’s a mad crush, too. I love playing out crushes on other hookers by suggesting we “work together”! Desire = community-building too, you know!)

I am glad to see that sex workers are alive and well and mobilizing using Facebook and other social media sites, making them safer and more useful to us in our work and community organizing. I hope the outcome will be increased mobilization and networking beyond the domain of Facebook. I have to say that every time someone shared the nasty item with me, especially someone who wasn’t a sex worker but an ally, I felt really validated to see that they took this expression of violence against us quite seriously. Just the week before I had been visiting a friend in Melbourne and his housemate had a friend over who made a joke about killing a hooker totally out of the blue. My friend was cooking us some lamb steaks and he asked how I wanted it cooked – I said the bloodier the better and then out of nowhere this guy says “Well I’ve got a prostitute for you to deal with then!” He didn’t know I was a sex worker. I was so stunned, I couldn’t even speak. Then he starts spouting off that he needs some serious coin and he should do a few tricks but we had to promise “not to tell anyone” if he tried it. Damn. I am seeing more and more how important it is to be out as a sex worker, I am trying to do that with more and more people, not only so people can see and know my humanity as a sex worker, but so that more hos can choose this work without shame or fear, including that little dickhead. And I was really happy to see that the friend that I was visiting that day ended up being one of the people who shared his outrage with his online community – thanks for hearing me that day, friend, when I couldn’t speak up right away.

Whew, that felt really good to talk about my community’s survival and resistance and to remember that we aren’t just all Facebooking our way to freedom. Onwards and upwards, hos!

Dear advertisers,

I’ve edited my text from “lips” to “L1PS”, suggested explosions and release instead of orgasms, and implied I offer “erotic services” instead of plain ol’ sex. I have done all this, and more, to meet your needs, the needs of online websites and newspaper companies who gladly take my money to run my sex work advertisements (and who often charge me heaps more than any other category of advertisement) but who don’t respond to my needs for responsible and accurate representation of what I offer and what I don’t offer to prospective clients. Partly this is about following the law, but partly it is about you making a buck. “This is not large commercial brothels, this is individual sex workers being charged several times more than other advertisers. There seems to be no reason for this difference.” says Janelle Fawkes, CEO, Scarlet Alliance, Australian Sex Workers Association. It is discrimination because we are sex workers. Plain and simple.

This is about my safety, people. And that has me hopping mad today. You will hear from me again.

Love,
Lusty Day

Does any other businessperson have the difficulty in reaching appropriate clients that sex workers do? I spend a great deal of time crafting my advertisments, researching escort websites, taking accurate photos and ensuring that my business takes place in a discreet manner to protect my clients, minors, and my business (i.e. in areas of the Internet safeguarded by parental controls, and with appropriate adult content warnings, and accessible via iPhones and other mobile devices so clients can access my photos more discreetly). And yet! All forces seem against me when I attempt to reach clients responsibly.

My newest obstacle are the advertising restrictions in the state of Victoria, Australia. On most of the sites I have considered advertising, like Australian Babe and Sensual Down Under, sex workers deliberately obscure their faces to protect their identity. (There is a larger conversation there about the merits and dangers of being out and proud, politically and emotionally speaking, which I will save for another post.) Many sex workers do not want to be identified so easily by their friends, family and community, and for good reason. Whether sex work is illegal, decriminalized or legalized, sex workers still deal with whore stigma. From a business perspective, anyone who has posted images on the world wide web knows that the images can only proliferate. Many internet cruisers are “pic collectors” and simply grab photos for their own personal hard drive or mobile phone collection, and the sex worker never sees a penny for all the getting off that gets done to their photos. I’m sure many more sex workers exchange face pics once a rapport is established with a client, but I guess I’m saying that sex workers have good reason to obscure their faces if that option is open to them. (For many street workers, trans workers, porn actors, or in small communities, anonymity is a inaccessible privilege.)

So you can imagine my surprise when planning a working tour to the state of Victoria where you can only advertise sex work with pictures of your FACE. Imagine that. They use images of women in bikinis and underwear to sell cars, beach resort holidays, nightclubs, and, of course, bikinis and underwear, but nope! You can’t use an image of your whole body to sell sex in Victoria, Australia. WTF!?! Scarlet Alliance has made a submission to review this law and others here. I just can’t get over the fact that you can post alluring photos of yourself all over the www place but not for a business transaction where your clients need to see what you look like to decide if they want to buy your services. Basically it means that I have to spend extra time communicating with clients by sending them additional photos privately or describing myself on the phone. I wouldn’t care so much if the very same style of photos weren’t immediately accessible to every other businessperson trying to sell their product on billboards, or bus shelters, in newspapers… and yet I am actually SELLING SEX and I can’t get access to these advertising methods.

For a hard and painful laugh, try to place an ad in any newspaper and get their list of prohibited words. In the state of Queensland, here is a list of things you can’t say in your ad according to the Prostitution Licensing Authority:

• Be published through radio or television or by film or video recording
• Describe the services offered. Words that do not directly describe the services offered are permissible
• Describe or refer to body fluids or waste
• Describe genitals, except for whether or not a penis has been circumcised
• Refer to drugs or drug use
• Imply that sex workers are under the age of 18 years
• Imply that unsafe sex is available
• Intend or induce a person to seek employment as a prostitute
• State directly, or indirectly, that a licensed brothel or sex worker is connected with or provides massage service
• In respect of brothels, state directly or indirectly that the brothel is associated with escort services
• In respect of sole operator advertisements, imply that more than one sex worker is available
• Contain an image of the sexual organs or anus of a person or frontal nudity of the genital region and mons veneris/mons pubis region

So in Queensland I can’t say directly what I offer, I can’t mention whether or not my pussy is clean shaven (but I can talk about circumcision?), I can’t suggest that I love my work and that it is a good way to make some money and meet cool people, I can’t offer a lesbian double experience, etc etc. Again, from Scarlett Alliance: “In many cases whether a word is allowed or disallowed has very little to do with logic. From State to State the conditions vary dramatically and in many cases the same words are used blatantly in other advertisements within the same paper.”

The newly formed group Nothing About Us Without Us in New South Wales has been organizing around advertising discrimination in recent months. Their campaigns focus on the lack of consultation with sex workers by all levels of governments in Australia. I want to close with their words:

Sex workers must be consulted and be included at EVERY meeting, panel, taskforce or roundtable that is formed to discuss the sex industry. No implementation of policy, procedure, legal reform or directives should occur without detailed and in depth consultation with sex workers at all stages.

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.

One of my favourite scenes was when Gigi negotiates full service with a client and then goes off to use the toilet, and young Lola comes by and undersells the man the same service because of her youth and ignorance about the work. It’s a real-life moment of how and why sex workers need unions, need ways of working together to demand a base wage/rate from clients, and also to normalize safer sex practices. When Gigi discovers that Lola has gotten only half the gas for the same service, her anger spills over as frustration at the difficulty of teaching a very young girl how to sell sex. Lola is really just a child, playing with pleasure, friendship, and companionship. As Lola is played by an adult actor, I didn’t even realize how young the character is supposed to be until a scene when she gets her period for the first time. I have to say that the heartbreak of this situation for me isn’t that Lola is being forced to sell sex at such a young age, but really that she has to work so much and so young, instead of having time for play and exploration. The scenes where Gigi and Lola dance together and play clapping games drive this home, as these are the moments when you see both women enjoying a break from the drudgery and pain of poverty. I think it’s a tricky thing to explore sex for the first time while at the same time standing your ground around payment for that play. It demands a maturity that is learned, of course, but not usually without some heartbreak and violence and shame. (I want to think more on this, especially about how youth can come to sexual maturity and experimentation in safe and consensual ways that might even include getting paid for it. Obviously the issue of juvenile sex workers is a touchy and divisive one.)

Another powerful moment is when Gigi and Chicken are reaching for solace and intimacy from each other in hard times, but Chicken rejects Gigi sexually because of his suspicion that she is “sick” and damaged goods. The moment is truly heartbreaking as Gigi hurts so bad from the stigma of HIV for sex workers. Gigi is wanting something different than what she lives, of course; but Chickn, her only ticket out, is not exactly living high off her labour like your stereotypical pimp. Chickn could so easily have been portrayed as unfalteringly cruel, but instead he is likewise struggling against poverty and circumstance.

Nothing is simple in this play, and there is nothing like portraying the small intracacies of human relationships to show the humanity of sex workers and their “pimps”/managers.

All this said, the play itself was amazing but the program notes didn’t show the same depth. In fact, they really bugged me because of their patronizing tone. Exhibit A:

“We have all whored ourselves, our art, our skills to the highest bidder at some point in time. We may even have thought we were at rock-bottom. But that’s still no comparison to the lives of the gas girls.” from Outwards From a Still Centre, Isaac Thomas, a short piece in the program

I am so irked by the assumption in this phrase that whoring is “selling out.” Selling sex isn’t rock-bottom for many sex workers. In fact, often it is an easier and better-paying option than working in toxic factories, or the humiliations in being a clerk or cashier, or back breaking agricultural labour. Of course there are labour risks and health risks in sex work, but the real pain and difficulty comes from the stigma that prevents you from telling your family what you do, or the violence you face because by virtue of being a sex worker you are assumed to have forfeited your right to safety and respect just because of the work you do. The criminalization of sex work is what really messes with our lives, not the “selling out” to capitalism. This “selling out” language is easy shorthand which assumes that sex work is a betrayal and is a last-ditch choice. Guess what? Whoring isn’t the worst thing you can stoop to. For many, it is a choice, sometimes among many bad options (hello capitalism), but it is still a choice about what sex workers choose to do with their bodies. Please take your pity elsewhere.

No, we haven’t all whored ourselves. I don’t think selling our art or skills to the highest bidder is an appropriate metaphor. I don’t think these transactions really compare with the stigma and assumptions that accompany actual whoring. Working for McDonald’s, selling your song to Telus, selling coffee to yuppies, cleaning rooms in a hotel, or picking fruit, etc, etc, are NOT whoring yourself. They are instances of exploited labour, yes. There is a similarity. But all these types of work are easily “heroized” by the left and by worker movements as instances of worker tenacity, worker skills, or at the very least, as opportunities for small resistances against the beast of capitalism. Aren’t sex workers entitled to a place in the pantheon of hard-working labourers? This is sometimes hinted at in that old phrase “the world’s oldest profession.” But it never materializes in honour, respect, and decriminalization of the skills that sex workers have, or in any worker movement taking an interest in the liberation of whores as defined by sex workers. So until you do your homework by listening to actual sex workers, everyone, stop making the “whoring ourselves” metaphor. The similarities don’t exist where and how you think they do.

All my ranting being said, I do think we do have places of comparison with the lives of the gas girls. This is what makes their stories important to us, because we should be able to see and articulate where our liberation and theirs are tied together. This does not mean having them in some untouchable category of pity. The gas girls are struggling to survive and find happiness, and this play shows that they have love for each other, a means of survival however precarious, music, song, and life life life. When we can imagine the gas girls in Zizbabwe, or those ”on Sherbourne, in Vancouver, Chennai or Bratislava” (as the program notes) as our sisters, mothers, friends, and maybe even as ourselves – and find opportunities to hear their stories and support their struggles for justice, we will find our instances of solidarity and common humanity. I just wish that the program notes might have suggested that there were gas girls in the audience of Passe Muraille, too.

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.

On gingham

Hi, I’m Lusty Day and I’m a whore about town in Toronto, Ontario, Canada. Today one of my clients sent me an email top ten list of all the things he loves about getting down with me, following by a list of five things he feels too shy or unable to initiate when we are together. It was so tender and beautiful, I got myself off reading it. I do love my work – most of the time. I did receive that email hot on the heels of three days of idiots calling me and cancelling, prank calling me, and just generally wasting my time and the time of the other sex workers I work with. Speaking of heels, these red square-toed heels made me $20,000. They have only been licked once. Welcome to my blog. Welcome to the best kept secret of the world. More on that in posts to come.

Whorelicious hugs,

Lusty Day