Annie Oakley is an on again/off
again stripper, prostitute and activist. Reared in the working-class apocalypse
of Detroit, she moved to Olympia, Washington, where she continued the town's
tradition
of staging large-scale, DIY art festivals such as Ladyfest and Homo-A-Go-Go.
Her contribution: founding the annual Sex Workers Art Show, a cabaret-style performance
event
featuring
current and former members of the
sex trade.
After five great festivals, Annie lost her mind and decided to take several of the participants on tour. I was one of them. She borrowed a friend's credit card and lied to the car-rental agency, insisting that their vans would spend the month in a tranquil Washington State wilderness preserve. Then she loaded the ill-gotten vehicles with some of the most outrageous, flamboyant, tough-talking sex workers creating art in America today.
Carol Leigh, a.k.a. Scarlet Harlot, is perhaps the mother of the movement. She edited an anthology called Sex Work — hell, she actually coined the phrase "sex work" — which was my personal introduction to the world of prostitutes as workers. Mistress Carmen is a professional dominatrix with all the big, shiny boots the job requires; on our tour, she'll play screechy, experimental cello and swallow fire.
We start out in Los Angeles, where there aren't enough feminists to fill a theatre. |
Leslie Bull is a poet who worked as one of the industry's least-protected workers, a streetwalker, strolling San Francisco's notorious Capp Street. I've done a few stints as an "escort," and I prattle on about that on stage. Gina Gold, a former phone sex operator and lapdancing queen, shows her video Do You Want Me To Stay?, which hilariously skewers lapdance customers. Carol Queen is our bona fide sexologist, with a Ph.D. and a peep-show history. She started the Good Vibrations sex toy cooperative and wrote bunches of books, all of them smutty. Jayson Marston is our only boy, weary from time spent in an industry that overlooks the struggles of men. A pro dom in Hollywood, his stories are funny and real, documenting encounters with cracked-out television celebrities on one page, exposing the industry's dark side on another. Emi Koyama's intersex and whore identities dovetail in her writings.
For the next thirty days, thirteen of us will cruise
through every region of America, waking at dawn, performing nightly in scary
dive bars and even-scarier college lecture halls. In between we are crammed together
in the vans, sometimes as long as twelve hours, rubbing up against each other,
chafing and irritated. You won't find tidy euphemisms like "escort" and "call
girl" in this group — we're mostly straight-up whores. We find raw strength
in adopting words that are often used against us; it's an effort toward solidarity.
As Emi says on stage each night, "When sluts are safe, everyone is safe."
We start out with a kerplunk in Ladyfest Los Angeles, a city where there aren't enough feminists to fill a theatre. Our show the next night is at the Brown Derby. Like everything in L.A., it "used to be famous" and "was in a movie." That show blows only slightly less hard than our Ladyfest gig. Los Angeles is where people go to make movies about strippers, not to hear them complain about the reality of not being Demi Moore. The venue didn't bother promoting our show, and they shoved us in a back, stageless room with icy air conditioning and a bitchy bartender. Treated badly and lacking a real audience, we all performed horribly. My personal pain was compounded by having to watch a video of Candye Cane fucking herself with a high-heeled shoe — while I was sitting next to my little sister. "It seems like she'd get an infection," Sis said timidly.
Our
audience in seventy-five percent johns. We're unsure what to think
about this. |
That night in the van, as we cross the Nevada border, everything kicks in. We're landlocked now, and the strange new desert landscape confirms that we've hit the road. An excitement bubbles in the air-conditioned vans. We all talk our heads off, getting to know each other. I'm shaking with a caffeine-like giddiness — we're touring the land, a bunch of hookers and poets and hooker-poets, my favorite people!
Our show in Vegas is at a strip bar, and we're all thrilled. I've always wanted to perform on a mirrored stage. But because I couldn't ever will myself to strip — Jesus, it was exhausting enough to just lie there and get fucked, you want me to dance? — reading a story in front of the pole seemed like my big shot.
Around this time, I have developed a strong, platonic crush on Gina Gold. She had introduced me to the concept of "inside voice." It's the one that says whatever is on your mind, scandal be damned, the opposite of the more tactful, civilized "outside voice." Gina has no outside voice. A nice, middle-class girl, she has safely escaped the damages of the sex trade, yet upon finding herself once again among the whores, she starts pushing her boundaries, engaging in wild acts to impress and entertain us. By the end of the tour she will have lost her anal virginity and, with the aid of another performer, kidnapped our tranny-boy roadie and entertained him with a live sex show.
When the audience finally files into the strip bar, I am surprised to see that they are mostly men. Middle-aged straight men. Johns. Our audience in seventy-five percent johns. We're unsure what to think about this. In her signature poem, "Prostitution is Just Life," Leslie says that a few tricks are dangerous, and a few others are really dangerous, but they aren't all bad: without them, we wouldn't have a business at all. I am solidly in the bitter and resentful camp. I bristle at their presence.
As our show rolls on, I think it's important that these guys are here. How many hundreds of sessions did they pay for, without ever really learning what was going on inside the mind of the body they bought? Gina's monologue — about a kinky peep-show visitor who liked to illuminate his anus — is wickedly funny, and Carol Queen performs a generous story about an extremely religious man who finds sexual healing. Having bit my tongue 'til it bled countless times, it felt good to read my little riot act to this docile audience, uttering the sentences I would swallow during phony exchanges. "Martin was pathetic," I read, revisiting my very first trick. "I couldn't believe I was having sex with this man. On a rocking chair that faced the bed was a stuffed animal, a teddy bear named Fatso, and as Martin took my hand and wrapped it around his nasty little dick, he said, "Oh, that's Fatso, I hope you're not shy — Fatso likes to watch!"
The upright and uptight of Tucson discovered that the festival got a tiny grant from a city arts commission, and they are flipping out. |
The crowd titters nervously. They're allowing a radical idea to sink in: the
women they rent may be faking, might not even like them as people.
It's
a good show for everyone, and afterward we linger in the adult bookstore next
door, getting to know each other better. Leslie tells me that she's an ex-hooker;
snagged by the anti-prostitution squads that get women off the streets but fill
their heads with victim propaganda, she is now shaking off others' interpretations
of her life, calling it as she saw it with her gritty, gripping poetry. She reads
each night with a tough confidence, drawling her verse like the audience is one
big john she's putting the hustle on. It works — she holds the audience
rapt with often-brutal takes of street survival. I tell her I thought she was
great, and she bursts into girlish giggles. "Really? Thank you!"
Proof that the sex worker movement is a movement, and a growing one, waits for us in Tucson, Arizona, where we're scheduled to perform on the opening night of the town's second annual Sex Worker Film Festival. When we pull up to the hotel late at night, news cameras are blazing at the curb.
The upright and uptight of Tucson discovered that the festival got a tiny grant from a city arts commission, and they are flipping out. One of the festival's sponsors has already been on The O'Reilly Factor, defending her organization's decision to pass some cash to the working girls. "What it really is," she said, "Is an art festival that allows people who are not heard in mainstream media to tell their story about the industry."
Having such eloquent people on our side is great, but
it provides no comfort when I hear that a Republican senator called us "trash" in
the daily newspaper. How quickly I've adapted to the safe and supportive bubble
of
our vans! I've forgotten that, in the eyes of many, we're not a traveling guild
of talented superheroes but the scum of the earth.
Four days into the tour, we're lodged in the southwest. Personality clashes begin to emerge with vigor. A conversation about racism turns argumentative, One performer bursts into angry tears. People begin to complain about another performer's chronic lateness. Some have problems with the seat-of-the-pants organization of the tour. Many gripes are heaped upon Annie, who handles it with grumpy grace.
Soon, the similarities to Lord of the Flies-style
reality shows were striking. |
Heading for Austin, we pause to sleep in the dusty, rundown town of Las Cruces, New Mexico, and one of our girls starts tweaking. No doubt she's got her reasons, but it's jarring. She jumps out of the van at a stoplight and begins wandering off into the great unknown, in full view of the police car behind us. Later, she freaks out on the staff of an IHOP, which is bizarrely decorated with pro-Vietnam War banners and tapestries. Back at our crappy hotel, she begins to cut her arms bloody and fling her suitcase around, unnerving her roommate, who flees to my room in tears. Annie, our leader, is bewildered. She hadn't asked any of us if we were mentally ill. We sleep poorly, upset and unsure how to deal with this new disaster both compassionately and capably.
I think you have to be a little crazy to hop into sex work. If you're not crazy when you start, you'll be crazy when you finish. Back in the golden age of my own whoredom, the constant fear of arrest — when coupled with the reality of fucking losers I'd rather knee in the groin — kept me in a state of compromised anxiety and introduced me to panic attacks. Other women I worked with had their own problems, ranging from serious paranoia to nose-ripping cocaine addictions.
Penny Arcade liked to say, "You can't take shortcuts
through people's personalities," and this became the mantra of my tour. There
were many fights. The tour seemed to cleave in half, with unhappy performers
in one van and determined optimists in the other. An argument broke out in Boston
and
was psychotically documented by the three or four performers who had brought
along videocameras. When it was their turn to holler a grievance, they turned
their cameras on their own faces. Soon Annie became overwhelmed by all of the
compulsive self-documentation and ordered everything turned off.
Soon, the similarities to Lord of the Flies-style
reality shows were striking. I found myself rolling through New Orleans at
two o'clock
in the morning, voting our most difficult comrade off our dysfunctional island.
We all cast a vote, right in front of the performer whose immediate future hung
in the balance. She sat there, profoundly quiet. The votes were cast in favor
of her staying, and she performed with us until a second cousin of gangrene called
her back home for medical treatment. I shit you not.
We rolled on. We got a lot of applause; we performed
for
sold-out crowds. As someone who's done several cabaret tours, I was astounded
by the
turnout.
Sex really does sell, and even if some of our audience felt like they got the
bail-and-switch, most left happy, considering new perspectives.
Our sharpest
critics were the sex workers in the audience. There was no pleasing them. Some
thought we were too celebratory of work that is so often fucked up.
Others thought we dwelled too heavily on the negative, subtly encouraging the
tedious notion that sex workers are victims. Personally, I think we ran the gamut.
On one end was Mistress Carmen's triumphant poetry crescendo, "Whores! I declare
war!" On the other was Spider's matter-of-fact poem about making money off her mother's boyfriends who molested her.
"I'm
sitting
here in a sleazy hotel with a bunch of sex workers!" he said into
his phone. |
In
San Francisco,
where I live, it's easy to feel like the revolution has already been won.
Strippers successfully unionized the Lusty Lady; spoken-word performances
address many educational descents
into the sex industry. Most of the people I know have done some
sex-trade work, even if it's a bit of nude web modeling or porn-mag writing.
But outside my sex-positive utopia is the real world.
At our New York City show, Gina made the brave
decision to perform her best and most graphic work in front of her mother. Before
she started the monologue, she gave an impromptu speech for all of us. She told the audience
how hard
it
was to create work about such controversial material, yet be forced
to
hide
it from our parents and support systems. "My mom just thinks I sleep and watch
TV all day," Gina
said sadly. Annie's mom visited us at our Detroit stop, but she didn't show up
at
the show that night. My own family has no idea how much I've published; they
think I'm an ambitionless wage slave.
As we made our way back toward the East Coast, our group
had completely fractured. I found the infighting to be a major
drag. Here we were, a gang of real fighters: we fight the power, we fight the
system; in many instances, we've fought for our lives. Fighting
has become part of our personality and identity; it's not just who we are,
it's who we think we are, who we have to be. Placed
among each other, we just keep fighting. We don't know how to stop.
During
our discussions in the van, interesting questions would come up, like
who is left out of the sex-worker revolution, who gets the most attention,
why is there a social hierarchy of whoredom, with streetwalkers
at the bottom, and strippers at the top? These were rarely discussed calmly. Often, conversations devolved into a pissing contest,
where the most put-upon-by-the world won.
Then there was that early-morning radio interview in
Minneapolis. At eight a.m., we stumbled into the Best Western breakfast
room in our pajamas. We met a weasely little man who would conduct a live
interview with us, via cellphone, on the city's No. 1 boring-ass radio station.
"I'm
sitting
here in a sleazy hotel with a bunch of sex workers!" he said into
his phone. He said "sex workers" in the way one might say "purple monkeys." And sleazy?
There was nothing sleazy about the Best Western, with its Froot Loops dispensers
and heated indoor pool full of retirees.
He was setting us up.
"Where do sex workers go on their days off?" he asked.
Again, substitute "purple monkeys" for "sex workers." The little bitch
knew we were going to the Mall of America, but we wouldn't say that on-air. It was our day off;
we didn't want
10,000 yahoos to know where we going. He spent
most of the five minutes talking about us in the purple-monkey voice
instead
of interviewing us about sex work.
When he hung up, we started screaming
at him.
"What are people at the mall going to think of you?" he
asked with a chuckle.
You are exactly why we are doing this tour,
I fumed. To counter shock jocks and video games that give you extra points
for killing a hooker. To keep telling the truth in the face of stereotypes
and scapegoating and endless underestimating of our worth and power.
This
little guy was a failed journalist, self-loathing. He used to write for The Wall Street Journal,
and now he was being paid to pander to the morning-radio listeners of Minneapolis. And we should
be ashamed of our jobs?
"We totally made him cry!" Annie chirped happily as we shut the door behind us. We walked back to our rooms, triumphant. And then we went to the mall.
n°
©
2003 Michelle Tea & Nerve.com
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