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

By

-

February 12, 2013

Pros(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.

Continue

American Courtesans (2012)

By

Jessie Nicole

-

November 27, 2012

The tagline for American Courtesans describes it as a “documentary that takes you into the lives of American Sex Workers” and telling “a different kind of American story…” The film is (thankfully) less ambitious in scope, focusing on high-end escorts instead of the entirety of the sex trades. What American Courtesans does, and does powerfully, is offer an intimate perspective into the lives of its subjects, giving them a space to talk about their lives and work. The women share stories of both triumph and trauma, showing that there is no single or simple story about work in the sex industries. With exceptional production quality and sincere, candid interviews, American Courtesans moves us further towards changing the popular conceptions of sex work.

The film weaves the stories of eleven current and former sex workers together through interviews and casual conversations with Kristen DiAngelo, the driving force behind the project. Though all of the women ended their careers as independent escorts charging high rates, their backgrounds up to that point are extremely varied. The majority of the women are still working, and quite a few illustrate the fluidity of the sex industries as they describe their experiences in pro-BDSM work, porn, stripping, and other fields of sex work than escorting. The women in the film give the audience a diverse set of experiences in the sex industries. From Juliet Capulet in San Francisco, who talks about escorting as a way to explore her identity as a sexual being, to Gina DePalma in New York City, who was working on the streets as a thirteen-year-old runaway, the audience is reminded that sex workers belong to and come from all communities.

Continue

A Tidal Wave, Not A Fire Hose: Access To Condoms In New York And Why It Is Important To Decriminalization Struggles

By

Emma Caterine

-

June 20, 2014

(Image from the film: Advocating in Albany, (No Condoms as Evidence), Red Umbrella Project)

I’m a community organizer for Red Umbrella Project, and for the past year and a half I’ve been one of the leaders in the struggle to ban the use of condoms as evidence of all prostitution-related offenses in New York. We recently had a great victory in this campaign with a NYPD directive issued that bans the use of condoms for three misdemeanor offenses: prostitution, loitering for the purposes of prostitution, and prostitution in a school zone. Unfortunately that still excludes most prostitution-related offenses which, while targeted at clients, managers of the sex trades, and human sex traffickers, all too often are an initial charge filed against those doing sex work, especially transgender women of color. So our battle continues. But I feel it is important to clarify for people in the sex trades around the world why it is that we as a peer-led group by and for people in the sex trades place such great importance in this issue. While some may say that advocacy of any goal short of the decriminalization of all prostitution laws is selling out, the decriminalization of condoms opens the door for greater possibilities in organizing around other decrim efforts both in New York and elsewhere.

Handcuffs empower no one. Red Umbrella Project knows, from the arrests and incarcerations of our comrades, family, and friends, that the criminal justice system is toxic to the lives of people in the sex trades, especially those most marginalized within it. All too often sex work criminalization goes hand-in-hand with the criminalization of trans women and queer youth of color, undocumented people, and low-income women of color. Believing strongly that a peer-led model personally empowers the lives of people in ways that even the most progressive justice system cannot, we oppose the tearing apart of our communities by arrest and incarceration.

Continue

It Happened To Me: I’m An Escort Who Thought She Had Gonorrhea

By

Nell Gwyn

-

November 6, 2013

World War II military propaganda poster, circa 1940 (Image courtesy of the National Library of Medicine) — 1940 World War II military propaganda poster (Image courtesy of the National Library of Medicine)

I was in the midst of a pretty good day when I received a phone call from one of my non-client lovers. The poor boy had come down with a case of throat gonorrhea, which I didn’t even know was a thing. He was just calling to let me know I had been exposed the last time we had sex, since we had made out with great vigor and he had also gone downtown, like the sweetheart he is. I thanked him for letting me know, told him to feel better, hung up and began to evaluate the situation in the calm and rational fashion that any sex-positive, non-monogamous person might try to evaluate a situation such as this.

Gonorrhea. No big deal, right? I have always expected to contract an STI at some point in my life, and as far as STIs go that’s not such a bad one. I was feeling a little funny in the junk, which I figured was probably due to a yeast infection. It seemed likely to me that I might, in fact, have gonorrhea, and I should probably get tested ASAP either way.

Then I remembered what I do for a living. I remembered that there weren’t just lovers whom I may have exposed, albeit unwittingly, but possibly about three clients as well. Even worse, I remembered that I desperately needed to make the money I was planning on making over the coming weekend— or else I wasn’t going to be able to pay my rent.

Mother. Fucker.

In my work as a full-service escort, STIs had always been a sort of intellectual, if abstract, concern. It is something I knew could be a really detrimental thing to have happen to my business, but it hadn’t happened yet, so I wasn’t too worried about it. Now here I was, in the exact situation I had only considered in the abstract. The one where I need to make money but can’t really figure out an ethical way to do so without exposing myself as every client’s worst nightmare: the poxy whore.

Continue

An Excerpt from Prose and Lore, Issue #2 (2013)

Prostitution

By

suzyhooker

-

July 11, 2013

(Image courtesy of the Red Umbrella Project)

Prose & Lore is the Red Umbrella Project’s literary journal, which collects memoir stories about sex work in two issues per year (Fall/Winter and Spring/Summer). The stories are original to Prose & Lore, and about 75% of the authors in each issue are previously unpublished. Many of the contributors participate in RedUP’s memoir workshops and drop-in writing sessions. You can buy the new issue here, or pony up for a Prose and Lore subscription here. On Tuesday, July 23rd at 7 pm at the Bureau of General Services, Queer Division (27 Orchard Street in Manhattan) contributors to Prose and Lore will be giving a free reading.

This is an excerpt from contributor Mandy Tz’s piece, “My Almost First Time”, describing her first experience attempting full service sex work after working as a webcam girl. Mandy is a white trans woman who enjoys nothing more than telling a heavily tattooed man begging to worship her that she can’t hear him cause she has “Ace of Spades” blasting from her speakers. She may seem sensitive from her piece but she’s actually an evil, merciless slut devoted to instituting female supremacy. You can contact her for plans of future co-femme world domination at hornyliltz69@gmail.com.

…I open the attachment on the email. It’s a picture he took of himself by using the mirrored ceiling of an elevator. Oh, wannabe artsy types. But he was cute for a pasty white guy as old as my dad. So I thought, yeah sure why not. I told him I’d love to meet up. He said he could meet on Thursday night and I said I was free too. I didn’t realize until Thursday morning that it was Valentine’s Day. Hmmm, I wondered, should I be suspicious of that?

I hit up one of my girls who had been doing this sorta stuff for a while. “I wouldn’t be worried,” she told me in that tone of confident knowing that she spoke with even when she was clueless, “I’ve had lots of Valentine’s bookings. They feel lonely. Hell, sometimes it means they will pay you more.” Though I do ask for it, I am often wary of taking advice, especially on doing sex work, from cis girls. It is a completely different dynamic and though generally we are expected to be very similar things and to meet certain standards, trans women who detract in any wayfrom those standards are judged much more harshly. My outfit, makeup, legs, hair all have to be flawless, ‘cause if and when my top comes off, my clients aren’t happy to see the tiny little nibs. And this particular girl had, amongst other things, told me she had worked without makeup and had worked in flats, things I didn’t and still don’t think I could get away with. But for some reason I believed her this time. I was desperate to believe this would go smoothly: I had little money, my exgirlfriend was kicking me out of our apartment, and I really wanted to get laid, even if the sex was shitty. I didn’t want sex, I wanted affirmation that I would be okay.

Continue