Whore Culture Rising: a review of the sex worker's art show

The prospective client on the other end of the line is in Mississippi - somewhere ill-fit for submission. I am stretched on my bed, as is the cliché, but no, no cigarette, and no cosmo, either. I really am resting on my pillows, nursing a cough, but now late to the start of the Sex Worker Film and Arts Festival that is kicking off just as the phone rings.

Carol Leigh (aka Scarlot Harlot), the Festival’s founder and producer, has already tipped me off, so through some underground connections I now have a clip from The Tonight Show. Leno is tweaking at the class war, his quips aimed at none other than Whore College, which opens this week as part of the 2005 Sex Worker Film and Arts Festival. “What do you fall back on when you flunk out of Whore College? Your typing skills?” Nervous laughs burble & recede, as Red and Blue State audience members pause for perhaps the first time and ponder how it is that all the whores got that way.

Errant receptionists or no, how many of us are truly “executive assistants” of another sort?

At City Hall, that celebrated site of America’s most well-known socio-erotic protest so far this century, on the same steps where Rosie wed and Newsom posed, I pause for some phone-cam snaps. Unsurprisingly, they end up girl-on-girl style when, descending the steps, I’m caught by another lady of leisure — a provider (that’s the most au courant euphemism) — one of our lightly unruly, politically savvy, radically engaged sex worker contingent of prostitutes (criminalized, legalized, decriminalized), strippers & dancers, fetish and BDSM pros, phone and web-cam hos. Among us also are lobbyists, labor organizers, educators, counselors, filmmakers, students, writers, and, by lack of virtue of the law alone, illegal workers - political criminals.

We may perform vastly different sorts of erotic labor, at our what-would-be-day (to most) but-are-often-night jobs, but we consider ourselves to be part of a unified community. Today finds a diverse cross-section of the global sex worker movement in dialogue with representatives from San Francisco’s law enforcement - a vice cop, a public defender, a sexual assault team coordinator - as well as supportive leaders in the labor movement. Participants in the Sex Workers’ Festival hail from as far as Taiwan and Australia, and from all over the US. This week in San Francisco, we work together and we make our case to be seen and heard as workers.

Like most other laboring-class Americans, we hold jobs that we don’t always love, but it’s not the work that hurts us: it’s the management, corporate owners and doing erotic service work in a society so deeply disjointed around anything sex.

We face the same shifting career paths and indefinite exit plans as most of our sister citizens do, only ours get chalked up to something special and sinister — it’s public work, it’s domestic work, it’s therapeutic work, it’s not “real” work.

Do we not labor within the same chauvinist system all workers struggle under to make a buck, to save it, to get off the wheel? In the sex trades we feel that wheel bearing down harder than in most any other we’ve occupied. We feel the corruption and violence that keeps it spinning, and still somehow believe in this dream called “making an honest living.”

Kimberlee Cline, a local activist and sex worker, calls on Lieutenant Mary Petri to relay to her peers in Vice, “Look to the example of our Mayor; if he can commit civil disobedience in the name of equality and justice, I invite you to do the same: stop arresting us.”

Jeanette Maier, The Canal Street Madam, whose phones were being tapped at the same minute in 2001 as the World Trade Towers smoldered, whose consequent arrest became an embarrassment to the FBI, who got her probation overturned just to be here, goes straight for the sugar when addressing the cops and lawyers present: “Honey, we are not going away.”

In her featured performance, “Peep Show,” on Friday at the Roxie Theatre, Carol Queen (Ph.D.) describes the 7 a.m. customers, neckties flipped over their shoulders, popping one off before capitalism calls them. “It’s not very sex-positive of me to suggest it, but...” she wonders, what would happen if these “Captains of Industry” went directly to that 8 a.m. meeting instead of stopping by the (now unionized, worker-owned-and-operated) Lusty Lady? Could it all come crumbling down, and if it did -- here, I wonder -- would the more honorable business prevail?

You know it’s a successful conference when the bathroom discourse is as significant as the work going down behind more formal doors. Tonight’s the last evening of films at the Roxie Theatre, and the ladies’ toilette is host to as much political sass and savvy as any other forum this week. I give away my spot in line three times to make sure I’ve got the exact nuances of Australian brothel law down, to get feedback from the attendees of our City Hall roundtable. In this perfect think tank, where we can trade business cards and fix eyeliner, all under the protective gaze of a silver screen diva photo next to the sink, we are working up nothing less than international sex worker uprising.

The submissive still on the line — self-employed, single, business traveler — begs to call again. He requests permission to send a brief note in the meantime, detailing his innate need to serve me.

“Serve me.” I’ve got a few things in mind — not all marabou and martini, either. A paid vacation would be nice. Matching my deposits to a 401K would be even better.

At this, satisfied myself, I turn back to my laptop, order a bank transfer direct to my account, and get on to the waiting press calls and writing. All, as they say, in a day’s good work.

Melissa Gira is a writer, a sex worker rights activist, and the founding editor of boa: a journal of new whore culture (boazine.com). This article is reprinted with permission from boazine.com.