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An Excerpt from Prose & Lore, Issue 4

By
suzyhooker
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(Image courtesy of Red Umbrella Project)
(Image courtesy of Red Umbrella Project)

Prose & Lore is a literary journal published by the New York sex workers’ rights organization Red Umbrella Project. Memoir stories about sex work are collected in two issues per year (Fall/Winter and Spring/Summer). We at Tits and Sass have been following Prose and Lore since the journal began, and the fourth issue is even more fantastic than those that preceded it. Prose & Lore Issue 4 features 20 original, true stories about experiences in the sex trades, written by sex workers who were supported in writing their stories through Red Umbrella Project’s peer-led writing workshops in NYC and by mentor editors who worked with folks from outside of NYC.  Contributors include new writers we have our eye on like Ava Talley and Leigh Alanna, our very own Tits and Sass co-editor Caty Simon and longtime Tits and Sass contributors Lori Adorable and Elle Stranger, Tits and Sass interview subject and harm reduction pioneer L. Synn Stern, and veteran Desiree Alliance activist Cris Sardina. Issue 4 came out  on July 15th – order ebook or print copies directly through RedUP or enter to win one of five free copies on Goodreads. Interested in writing for the next issue? Details will be posted on this page and RedUP’s tumblr.

Here we feature an excerpt of the journal, the piece “Got Milk?” by Janet, about her experience working as a pregnancy fetish and lactation fetish provider during and after her pregnancy. Janet’s wry humor and honesty about finding a way to make bank as a single mom student escort who was terrified that getting knocked up would leave her unemployed had us cracking up through just about every paragraph.  Janet was born and raised in New Jersey and has been a sex worker for 18 years, half her life. She started dancing at lock doors and strip clubs, but after getting tired of the dancing scene, she went on to work at various services as an escort in New York City and Northern New Jersey. She has traveled and worked escort services up and down the East Coast. She is currently working as an independent escort wherever it tickles her fancy.

How does one really decide to be a lactation fetish provider? I would love to say I calculated the short time I had the true potential of making bank, especially with my great fucking nipples and high milk production, which I made it my mission to keep up. I was a single mom and horny as hell. Working while breastfeeding was the only sexual outlet I had and it helped pay some bills. Well, only a small part of that one is true. I was a single mom and it helped pay some bills, but the rest is what I like to call a stereotypical situation avoidance strategy.

I certainly was not out to be the next unwed single mom college dropout. I wish I could have thrown teenage in there but I had done this dumb shit before and like they say, fool me once shame on you, fool me twice shame on me. I was working on baby number two and in my junior year in college, full-time status, I may add, and technically single. I was already relying strictly on sex work to pay all my living expenses, and living in Northern New Jersey was expensive even then, more than a decade ago. I never really thought it was but everyone that I met was surprised to hear I lived alone as a single mom. They would inevitably go straight to, “Oh, what do you do?” Answering with, “Full time college student” would not work. So I avoided socializing outside of work and the occasional recreational sexual escapade when working was not my cup of tea. This way everyone I spoke to already knew what I did and that I was a full time student. Once I was naked it was pretty obvious from the stretchmarks that I had kids.

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Nicholas Kristof’s Sweatshop Boner

By
Robin D
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(Image by Scott Long, courtesy of Scott Long)
(Image by Scott Long, courtesy of Scott Long)

The Cambodian garment industry’s factories often serve as the canonical example of sweatshops. Women toil away in them for long hours with low pay and awful, unsafe working conditions. There are regular mass faintings due to poor ventilation, chemicals such as insecticides and shoe glue, long hours, and lack of access to health care.

There are about 650,000 Cambodian garment workers, and 90% of them are women. The current Cambodian minimum wage is US$80 per month, though the lower end of a living wage in Cambodia is twice that, at US$160. Many Cambodian garment workers have organized themselves and are working to institute change through collective bargaining and by pressuring companies looking to improve their brands’ image. Local unions have even secured support from a number of international corporations, and these corporations and unions (as part of IndustriALL Global Union) were able to meet peaceably with government officials on May 26th. At issue were a new trade union law, mechanisms for setting wages, a demand for a US$160 per month minimum wage, and the fates of 23 garment workers who were arrested in January for protesting working conditions and pay. Unfortunately, a strike that was planned for the previous month failed. Still, protests continued.

The 23 workers were arrested as part of a violent government crackdown on January 3rd that left at least four dead and 80 wounded. There were similar protests and crackdowns the previous November, when police shot and killed one protester and wounded nine. There was another protest the previous September over mass dismissals of workers on strike and intimidation measures including the presence of military police during inspections.

New York Times columnist Nicholas Kristof, however, practically idolizes Cambodian sweatshops. Kristof has recently come under fire for disseminating false stories about sex trafficking that were fed to him by the Somaly Mam Foundation and Mam’s “rehabilitation center” AFESIP in his columns, in the forward to her memoir, and in his 2012 “documentary” Half the Sky. Information about Mam’s fraud, however, had been published in the Cambodia Daily since 2010, and it is highly unlikely that Kristof was unaware of this fact. Her fraud and its horrific consequences for local sex workers were hardly a secret among sex worker rights activists in the Asia Pacific Network of Sex Work Projects.

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The Week In Links—July 11

By
Red
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Petite Jasmine (Photo via her Facebook page, courtesy of Rose Alliance)
Petite Jasmine (Photo via her Facebook page, courtesy of Rose Alliance)

Today marks on year since the murder of Petite Jasmine. Reading about her life and death is the most powerful argument we know against the Nordic Model.

Cool, some tourist filmmakers are fundraising to shoot a documentary in Dallas strip clubs. “The project ‘was started because the strip club and stripper industry was one of the few areas I felt created clear camps — men and women,'” OK!

Bitch Flicks writes about Shae on Game of Thrones, picking up on some of the same themes you saw covered here.

An interesting twist to opposition to Canada’s bill C-36: “A Saskatoon man whose money was stolen by people posing as licensed adult services workers says the federal government’s proposed prostitution bill will give ‘free reign’ to such thieves, or even human traffickers, by preventing people from going to the police.”

Looks like thanks to researchers in Brazil, after this World Cup we can finally put to rest the idea that big sporting events are a boon to sex workers. According to one sex worker,

the World Cup has hardly been the boom she hoped for, and that many tourists have come from Latin American countries with weak currencies and haggle over prices lower than what a Brazilian would pay. “The tourists have even less money than we have,” she said dryly.

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You Could Touch Him in 50 Places: An Interview with Colby Keller

By
Matthew Lawrence
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Poloroid by Meneline Puryear.
Poloroid by Meneline Puryear

The name Colby Keller might be unfamiliar to you if you don’t follow mainstream gay media (or don’t watch gay porn, I guess). But if that’s your thing then you have surely heard by now that Keller, a ten-year veteran porn performer, has decided to buy a van and cross the country (and maybe Canada) in order to make porn in all 50 states. There’s an Indiegogo campaign to help him do it, and right now he’s actually surpassed his goal.

Colby Keller is tall—especially for someone in the porn industry—and scruffy, which is a thing now in gay porn but which wasn’t, really, when he started. He has a pretty massive fan base that likes him for his kooky sense of humor as much as for his porn work. He also visits more museums than anyone I’ve ever met who wasn’t directly employed by one, which he frequently documents on his blog, Big Shoe Diaries.

I’ve met Colby a handful of times. We have mutual friends, and a couple of years ago we saw each other at The Hookies, the international gay escort awards. (Those exist.) He was presenting one of the trophies and kindly snuck me his wristband to get into the VIP area, where a small group of us awkwardly marveled at everything that was happening around us.

He’s in LA right now on something of a media blitz—Vice declared him “the Marina Abramovic of gay porn” just a few days ago — but he was nice enough to answer some questions about Colby Does America over the phone.

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So, What’s Your Real Take-Home?

By
story
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IMG_0318“What’s your real name?” is the question most commonly asked of strippers. The second? “How much money do you make?” There have been quite a few articles written on the subject of stripper income, and the most recent ones all seem to cite one University of Leeds study, a stripper named Menagerii’s Reddit pic of her best haul ever, and several months of income tracking that I posted on my blog which generated a bit of conversation.* Pretty scant resources. There’s also the occasional boomtown news article that suggests there’s a pot of gold up for grabs by women willing to undress in whatever city is most recently the site of oil drilling or a large sporting event.

Recently, ABC News ran a segment on college students who dance to pay tuition. In that segment, this well-spoken and good looking gal named Maggie claimed to make $180,000 a year dancing on the weekends. Because I once shared my monthly income with the internet, Huffington Post writer Arin Greenwood e-mailed me while she was working on this story to ask if Maggie’s figure seemed reasonable. I told her anything was possible, although that number was high. But more importantly, I wanted to know why everyone was so interested in how much strippers make.

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