Sex Work Memoirs

Activist Spotlight: Hawk Kinkaid on Negotiation and Shared Knowledge

by Dominick on April 17, 2013 · 1 comment

in Activism, Interviews

Hawk Kinkaid (photo of himself)

Hawk Kinkaid, a former escort, Internet porn performer and pro-dom, is the founder of HOOK, a grassroots non-profit organization that since 1997 has undertaken to share knowledge, reduce harm and build community among male sex workers. HOOK has published guides on best practices, negotiation, and legal issues, has collected stories and interviews, and runs the innovative educational program Rent U. He’s been a contributor to $pread magazine, performed at Sex Worker Literati, competed nationally in spoken word, and contributed to the upcoming omnibus anthology Johns, Marks, Tricks and Chickenhawks, edited by David Henry Sterry. We welcome new Tits and Sass contributor Dominick—a fellow contributor to Johns, Marks… and advice blogger for rentboy.com—who interviewed Hawk about the relaunch of  HOOK and his other projects.

So tell me about your piece that appears in David Henry Sterry’s new anthology. It’s called “Ice Cream”—when did you write it? Is it cold and sweet?

I wrote “Ice Cream” a year and a half ago. It is a true story, but it happened over a decade ago. Cold and sweet? I love ice cream. The story is not about ice cream, the dessert. It’s about a man who makes ice cream; it’s about going cold when it’s part of your business.

Does Ice Cream Man know you’ve written about him? I wrote about a client, a married elementary school principal exploring raunch/kink/humiliation on the rentboy blog, and he actually saw it! He left me a friendly comment.

Ice Cream Man has no idea. And I don’t think he would appreciate the story. It’s true, but I don’t think he would like it. He may not even be alive now. I have no idea, actually. Discretion with and about clients is part of the job, but after all this time, it’s a different world.

Well, I think a decade is plenty of time to hold a good story in. Has writing always been a part of your sex work practice?

HOOK along with other great programs like the now extinct $pread magazine have always been great outlets for me to share important stories or thoughts about working in the industry. Poetry is another significant part of my life, ranging from national spoken word slamming to my work’s inclusion in a number of literary journals. Writing has always been part of my life—I think it just made sense to also use words to shape the many experiences I had as an escort, pro-dom, etc.

HOOK definitely helped me when I was escorting. I kept that wallet card on me at all times, and wrote the number of a lawyer on it. I never had reason to use it, thankfully, but I felt better prepared.

That’s awesome! It’s what we work toward in being a resource for working men.
[READ MORE]

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Activist Spotlight: Audacia Ray, on Telling Stories and the Tricky Politics of Inclusion

by Caty Simon on March 20, 2013 · 1 comment

in Activism, Interviews

Audacia Ray, photo courtesy of the Red Umbrella Project

Audacia Ray, photo courtesy of the Red Umbrella Project

Audacia Ray is perhaps most renowned in the sex workers’ rights movement for her longtime editing of the now sadly defunct $pread magazine. But as a sex workers’ rights movement activist, Audacia has really been everywhere and done everything: blogging for years about her sex working experience as Waking Vixen; publishing her book, Naked on the Internet: Hookups, Downloads, and Cashing In on Internet Sexploration; and working as an adjunct professor of Human Sexuality at Rutgers University as well as for the communications consultant for the Global Network of Sex Work Projects. Amazingly enough, in 2010 she had time to found the Red Umbrella Project, a peer-led, community-based organization that “amplifies the voices of people who have done transactional sex, through media, storytelling, and advocacy programs.” RedUP is now where her creative, media, and advocacy energies lie. Tits and Sass asked her some questions about this project.

In the introduction to the Red Umbrella Project’s writing workshop’s literary journal, Pros(e), Melissa Petro theorizes that sex workers teaching each other the art of storytelling can increase agency because by writing our stories, we can better understand our choices. This kind of storytelling will also hopefully decrease stigma by increasing understanding (rather than bolstering whorephobia like the memoir pieces full of disdain for co-workers, like so many of the sex worker bios out there.)  How do you think telling our stories helps sex workers?

One of the Red Umbrella Project mantras is that we believe storytelling is the building block of social change. I think we need to be able to tell our stories and insist on making space for them in the world if we are ever going to make change for ourselves in the world. Our creative programs, especially the Red Umbrella Diaries events, are really the entry point for many people into the RedUP programs. It’s an easy thing to wander into, be curious about, and then hopefully we get sex workers into some of our programs, building their skills and community, while also getting potential allies to care and think more deeply about the many experiences in the sex trades. I think its important for creative expression to be individualized because there are just so many different kinds of experiences that people have doing sex work. It is also important to constantly look at the bigger picture – which sex workers’ stories are being represented and which are not? What experiences are being documented that indicate areas in which our rights are being denied and violated? And to me, the creative work cannot be an end point or a stand alone thing, it has to be linked to greater social change. I want to validate art for arts’ sake, but we’ve got a revolution to do here, and it’s important to link personal storytelling to cultural and policy change. That said, not everyone is an activist, and when sex workers show up at the Diaries or participate in one of our creative programs and feel awesome – that is enough. [READ MORE]

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In My Skin (2008)

by Caty Simon on February 19, 2013 · 7 comments

in Prostitution, Reviews

in-my-skin-kate-holden-paperback-cover-artIn My Skin by Australian Kate Holden is an example of the “my drug whore hell” memoirs to which I am both attracted and repelled. I’m an IV drug-using sex worker but do not subscribe to the NA model of addiction-as-disease and don’t define my life as hell. Most media doesn’t show anything true about my life at all, but instead falls back on depictions of drug-using sex workers as dead hooker jokes, grotesque caricatures of secondary characters with barely any lines. So I eat up all the tell-alls about them I can find, because even if their perspective on drugs and sex work isn’t mine, someone like me is the main character.

Holden’s pre-heroin self was the middle-class girl many of us once were: a scholarly teetotaler, a bohemian who looked up to Anaïs Nin. Her college friends began to experiment with heroin, and, feeling left out, she tried it. She developed a habit and fell into stereotypical behavior: Workplace theft (and a subsequent firing), breaking up with her recovering boyfriend and attempting to quit herself. When she was kicked out of her parents’ house, she became a street sex worker and then a brothel worker. After some time she enrolled herself in a methadone clinic, and eventually weaned herself off both heroin and methadone. While that sketch might sound like a sensationalist women’s magazine article, In My Skin manages enough powerful nuance to transcend genre.  READ MORE

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The Feminist Porn Book (2013)

by Caty Simon on February 15, 2013 · 3 comments

in Porn, Reviews

Feminist_Porn4I’ve seen the question “where is women’s porn, made for women” before, and I’ve seen it answered, but I’ve rarely seen the question “where is black porn, made for black women?” The Feminist Porn Book asks that question and answers it, as well as others: where is feminist porn made for trans women, for fat women, for women with disabilities? This is not tokenism, but rather an attack on heteronormativity from all angles.

The Feminist Porn Book is both refreshing and challenging right off the bat—it announces its title in big yellow letters on its bright pink cover, the proud opposite of discreet brown paper bag packaging. The volume, clocking in at 432 pages, allows enough room to create a delightful blend of the academic and the historical, the personal and the political, mouthy smut with lengthy footnotes. It situates feminist pornography in its rich history in its first section, from Betty Dodson crashing a Women Against Pornography meeting in her leathers to Susie Bright inventing the genre of porn movie review. Then it gets into the meat of the book, which branches off into many herstories and histories, into the many different politicized identities, theories, and sexualities that make up our porn today; bringing womanism, intersectionality, and labor analysis back to porn while not settling for the more facile simplifications of “sex positivity”. READ MORE

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An Excerpt From Pros(e), Issue #1 (2012)

by suzyhooker on February 12, 2013 · 0 comments

in Prostitution, Strippers

Prose1Pros(e) is the Red Umbrella Project’s literary journal, which collects and publishes the writings of participants in their writing workshops. The first Becoming Writers Workshop, which took place in Fall 2012, resulted in this first edition edited by Melissa Petro. You can buy the print and e-book versions of Pros(e) here. They will be running a spring session of the memoir workshop, in-person class in NYC and online. Applications will become available on Feb 19th.

The following is an excerpt from the piece “Notes from the Red Room”, by Kelley Kenney. Kelley Kenney is the nom de plume of a writer and off-and-on sex worker living in New York. This is her first publication, although she’s been keeping journals privately for over twenty years.

I had one session yesterday, at 5:30 . He was a Clark Kent, bespectacled banker dude to the outside world;  pocket Lothario in the Red Room. “Feel that big hard cock,” he instructed me. “Is this cock big enough for ya?” I looked at it. It was certainly medium-sized, and not skinny. I wasn’t sure if it had been a rhetorical question, like when people say “hot enough for ya?” or if he expected a thought-out response. I was momentarily confused, looking at his wielded appendage. “Yes,” I replied, with certainty. It was big enough for me. I dared myself to touch his wedding ring in a way he would notice, thinking of what I wrote yesterday. Doing so was like licking a frozen flagpole, or touching Boo Radley’s house. A dare. I hoped I didn’t smear lube on it. That silicone stuff can be such a bitch to clean off. READ MORE

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