HOOKERS AND SEX WORKERS are known for their artifice in the world of pleasure, but the title of a new book written by those who play for pay is 100 percent perfunctory: Hos, Hookers, Call Girls, and Rent Boys: Professionals Writing on Life, Love, Money and Sex.This isn’t a sexy title—it sounds about as exciting as The Encyclopedia Britannica. But that’s just the title.The essays, articles, stories and poems aren’t at all the ho-hum, politically correct compendium of prostitution writings by whiny, anal-retentive social workers that feel sorry for the poor misguided hos. The prose in this volume is fresh and the tales are both heart-rending and hilarious, sometimes simultaneously.
What’s most striking about the volume is how relevant these intimate and detailed chronicles are for any reader, whether they’ve sold their bodies or just their souls. It’s not just about sex. Rather than ghettoizing prostitutes, strippers and porn actors, editors David Henry Sterry and R.J. Martin have brought together essays from a broad sampling of sex workers, keeping it balanced.There are gripping accounts of writers who struggle to pay bills and get their lives together, who have families, who are human beings. How this crew differs from the straights is they all opted for sex work rather than a drone job.
I recently attended the inaugural Sex Worker Literati reading hosted by Audacia Ray and David Sterry at Happy Ending, where some of the authors were there in the flesh. Ray is a sexuality rights advocate who has a chapter in the book about the days when she was a naked girl for hire. It’s a new series that’ll be held the first Thursday of the month; the reading is free but some portion of the booze goes toward sex worker rights groups. I felt lots better downing a Bombay and Tonic, knowing that I was helping a rent boy get better medical care.
Sterry is the author of 10 books, including the best-seller Chicken, about his experiences as a young hustler in Los Angeles during the 1970s. Fellow editor Martin was a barker in a variety of North Beach sex clubs, where, according to his bio, he worked as a “panderer, thief, con artist and business manager for a few independent businesswomen.” He quit heroin after a 20-year addiction and went on to direct SAGE for four years and is now finishing an MA in Creative Writing at San Francisco State.
At a packed house at Happy Ending, former stripper and prostitute Jodi Sh. Doff, reminds us that she worked during an era when the term “sex worker” hadn’t yet been invented. Her writing is hardboiled; Diamond Lil’s on Canal Street “stinks of stale beer, cheap whisky, smoke and cunt.” Doff recounts the tragedy of the brutal murder of Lele, a beautiful young stripper she worked with at a topless bar in “the Deuce,” as 42nd Street used to be known pre-Disney. It was an abandoned, litter-choked lot, full of “dog shit, broken bottles, neon, used condoms, freaks, vermin, predators.” Ah, the good old days.
The book is full of quirky details and the habits of both hos and the tricks that love them. There’s Melissa, a blonde freshman on a co-op program from Antioch who goes to Mexico to volunteer at a preschool. When her job falls through, she instead works as a stripper at La Trampa. She’s now an elementary school teacher. Then there’s “Helping Daddy Pay the Rent,” the anonymously written story of a girl who was raped by her father at two and began hooking at the age of 12. Zoe Hansen pens a tale of her heroin addiction and kidnapping on the Lower East Side. Lorelei Lee speculates about why she started in the business—mainly to pay her tuition for college after squandering her poetry fellowship.
Perhaps the most entertaining writing comes from Xaviera Hollander, the legendary madam who wrote the best-selling Happy Hooker during the 1960s, who writes about what she learned from her business. Men’s main sexual problems can be boiled down to: “My cock is too big; my cock is too small; I am cumming too quickly; I can’t cum at all.” She says it’s much harder to be a writer than a hooker because men are pickier about what they read than what they fuck, since they’d sooner fuck trash than read it. She said it, not me.
> Hos, Hookers,Call Girls, and Rent Boys: Professionals Writing on Life, Love, Money and Sex
Michael
