Working Sex
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STEPHEN ELLIOTT is a former stripper and the author of six books, including Happy Baby (San Francisco, CA: McSweeney’s Books, 2004), a finalist for the New York Public Library’s Young Lion Award, as well as a best book of 2004 in salon.com, Newsday, Chicago New City, the Journal News, and The Village Voice. His most recent book is an almost all true sexual memoir called My Girlfriend Comes to the City and Beats Me Up (San Francisco, CA: Cleis Press, 2006). His work has been featured in Esquire, The New York Times, GQ, Best American Non-Required Reading, Best American Erotica, and Best Sex Writing 2006. He is the founder of the Progressive Reading Series and the executive director of LitPAC, a literary political action committee.
JANELLE GALAZIA is a stripper and hooker and daydreamer. She loves to write and think and make money. She has no special credits to her name, but is constantly trying to live up to the image she had of her adult self when she was a child.
Born and raised in Chicago, former hair-metal fanatic ANA J started verbalizing her inner demons in 1995. After a few years of self-publishing her stories in zines and corunning an independent zine distro, she moved to Olympia, Washington where she continued to self-publish. She collaborated through the years with many other artists and performers she didn’t really keep track of. Upon returning to Chicago, she joined forces with Ms. Nomy Lamm to create and cohost The Finger, a highly successful, all-inclusive monthly queer variety show. She has in the past performed with Sister Spit, cohosted countless drag shows, and toured with the Sex Workers Art Show in 2004. Ana J has been involved in the seedy underbelly of the adult carnival for the past nine years, the past six as a professional dominatrix. She currently resides in Tucson, Arizona where she is employed as a baker and is working on a comic/ cookbook/book. She spends most of her time collecting owlrelated bric-a-brac and browsing the aisles of grocery stores aimlessly for hours without making a single purchase.
JUBA KALAMKA is a producer, curator, essayist, and consensus H.N.I.C. of the western hemisphere. He is the creator of the microlabel and distro Sugartruck Recordings, is a founding member of the award-winning homohop crew Deep Dickollective (D/DC). Kalamka is the director of the PeaceOUT World Homohop Festival in Oakland, California, which celebrates its seventh year in 2007 and has spawned sister events in New York City, Atlanta, and London, England. Kalamka is featured in the homohop documentary Pick Up The Mic and recently completed an MFA in Poetics at New College of California in San Francisco. He lives in Oakland with his primary partner, their daughter, and a love-mongering cat. He practices polyamory both locally and globally.
EMI KOYAMA puts the emi back in feminism at http://eminism.org.
CHRIS KRAUS is the author of the novels Torpor (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2006), Aliens & Anorexia (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2000), and a collection of essays about the Los Angeles art world, Video Green: Los Angeles Art and the Triumph of Nothingness (New York, NY: Semiotext(e), 2004). She is the coeditor of Hatred of Capitalism. She has written on art, poetics, and theory for academic anthologies and art magazines. Kraus is the founding editor of Semiotext(e)’s Native Agents imprint.
BRUCE LABRUCE is a writer, filmmaker, and photographer stuck in the gulag otherwise known as Toronto, Canada. He started out as a child, then quickly moved on to the production of homo punk fanzines (J.D.s [with G.B. Jones], Dumb Bitch Deserves To Die [with Candy Parker]) and Super-8 mm movies. These products helped to launch the so-called homo-core or queer-core movement, which corrupted a whole new generation of homosexuals. LaBruce’s early films, No Skin Off My Ass and Super 8 1/2 went on to become cult hits and film festival circuit favorites, earning slots in such highprofile fests as Sundance, London, Berlin, Dublin, Thessaloniki, Toronto, Vancouver, San Francisco, and Tokyo. LaBruce’s Hustler White, made in collaboration with Rick Castro, premiered at Sundance and similarly went on to become a film festival and cult favorite, winning the grand prize at the International Trash Film Festival. Hustler was followed by his first legitimate porn film, Skin Flick. LaBruce’s photography and writing has appeared in a wide range of publications including Honcho, Inches, Index Magazine, Eye Magazine, The National Post, The UK Guardian, Dutch, Butt, Strut, Dazed and Confused, Loyal, The Breeder, Bon, and K48. He has also produced two books, The Reluctant Pornographer (1997), his premature memoirs, from Gutter Press, and Ride, Queer, Ride (1997), a survey of his work from Plug-In Books.
NOMY LAMM is a writer, singer, and self-taught accordion player. She began writing zines at age seventeen, focusing on body-hatred and the systems that enforce it. In the fourteen years since then she has written, performed, and organized around queerness, body image, trauma and disability, feminism, trans inclusion, radical Jewish identity, antiracist ally work, and more. Her writing has been published in numerous feminist anthologies including Listen Up: Voices from the Next Feminist Generation (Barbara Findlen, ed., Seattle, WA: Seal Press, 2001) and Body Outlaws: Writings on Body Image and Identity (Ophira Edut, ed., Seattle, WA: Seal Press, 2000). She writes an advice column for the feminist magazine make/ shift, and is currently working on her first novel.
ARIEL SMITH is an award-winning filmmaker and video artist who has been creating her own independent works since 2001, many of which have screened at festivals internationally. Her most recent works include 1, 2, 3 KnockUP (2006, DV) and Savior Complex (2007, 16mm) She currently resides in Ottawa by way of Vancouver and Montreal.
GLORIA LOCKETT is the former codirector of the prostitutes rights organization COYOTE (Call Off Your Old Tired Ethics) and Executive Director of the California Prostitute Education Project (CAL-PEP), an Oakland-based, nonprofit AIDS and HIV prevention organization that works with street prostitutes. Lockett served on San Francisco District Attorney Terence Hallinan’s Task Force on Prostitution and as a member of former Governor George Deukmejian’s California AIDS Leadership Task Force. She has been published in several anthologies, including The Black Women’s Health Book: Speaking for Ourselves, edited by Evelyn C. White (Seattle, WA: Seal Press, 1990), Sex Work: Writings by Women in the Sex Industry, edited by Frederique Delacoste and Priscilla Alexander (San Francisco, CA: Cleis Press, 1984), and Lessons from the Damned: Queers, Whores and Junkies Respond to AIDS, by Nancy Stoller (New York: Routledge, 1998). She was also, for eighteen years, a prostitute.
NAIMA LOWE creates films, performances, and writings that consistently defy genre and explore the complex relationships between racial identity, collective memory, the body, and queer sexuality. Naima’s work has been featured in the Sex Workers Art Show, The Philadelphia Fringe Festival, and at Rites and Reason Theatre in Providence, Rhode Island. Her recent film, Birthmarks, a thirty-minute experimental documentary about her father witnessing the 1967 Newark Riots, has been selected to travel the country and the world as part of NextFrame, an international touring festival of student films. Naima graduated from Brown University with a BA in Africana Studies in 2002, and is completing her MFA in Film and Media Arts from Temple University. Naima has two cats and misses the ocean.
JESSICA MELUSINE is a writer, model, and bon vivant featured in Paying for It, Shameless, Zaftig Glamour Girls: Femme/ Femme Erotica, and a performer at Perverts Put Out! and assorted Ladyfests. Her story Avatar in Pink appears in Red Light: Superheroes, Saints, and Sluts (Vancouver: Arsenal Pulp Press, 2004); the book has been nominated for both a Lambda Award and an IPPY.
VERONICA MONET offers workshops, lectures, and professional advice on sex and relationships. Veronica Monet’s Sex Secrets of Escorts: Tips from a Pro (New York, NY: Alpha Books, 2005) is available in most major bookstores. Her extensive media credits include CNN, A&E, ABC’s 20/20, FOX News, Bill Maher’s Politically Incorrect and The New York Times. Monet was educated at Oregon State University, graduating with honors as a psychology major. Monet is also published in six books including a textbook, Human Sexuality: Opposing Viewpoints (St. Paul, MN: Greenhaven Press, 1995), Whores and Other Feminists (New York, NY: Routledge, 1997), Breaking Ritual Silence (Gardnerville, TN: Trout and Sons, 1998), Porn 1
01 (Amherst, NY: Prometheus Books, 1999), Dangerous Families: Queer Writing on Surviving (New York, NY: Harrington Park Press, 2004) and Paying for It (Oakland, CA: Greenery Press, 2004). Monet has over a decade of experience with the practical and political aspects of sex work, having worked as an erotic model, porn actress, prostitute, escort, and courtesan. Her political activism includes volunteer work for Bay Area Bisexual Network, COYOTE San Francisco, and Sex Worker Outreach Project. Ms. Monet is a Certified Sex Educator (SFSI), a founding member of the Association of Sexual Energy Professionals (ASEP), a trained volunteer for the Center Against Rape and Domestic Violence (CARDV) and an Ordained Minister (ULC). Her next book promises a departure from the sex-manual genre while maintaining her uncompromising passion for exploring sensible alternatives to society’s sacred cows. Please visit www.flossophy.net. for clues.
EILEEN MYLES has written thousands of poems since she gave her first reading at CBGB’s in 1974. BUST magazine calls her “the rock star of modern poetry” and The New York Times says she’s “a cult figure to a generation of post-punk females forming their own literary avant-garde.” Eileen headed to New York after college (University of Massachusetts, Boston), quickly gaining the friendship of Allen Ginsberg, working for poet James Schuyler, becoming a habitué of the household of Ted Berrigan and Alice Notley, and generally being a notable part of the turbulent punk and art scene that animated Manhattan’s East Village. From 1977-1979, she edited the poetry magazine, dodgems. From 1984-1986, she was artistic director of St. Mark’s Poetry Project. She also wrote, acted in, and directed plays at St. Mark’s and PS 122. Always, she has been a virtuoso performer of her own work—she’s read to audiences at colleges, performance spaces, and bookstores across America as well as in Europe, Iceland, and Russia. In 1992, she conducted an openly female write-in campaign for president of the United States. In 1997, Eileen toured with Sister Spit Ramblin’ Road Show. Her books include Sorry, Tree (Seattle, WA: Wave Books, 2007), Skies (Santa Rosa, CA: Black Sparrow Press, 2001), on my way (Newton, MA: Faux Press, 2001), Cool for You (New York, NY: Soft Skull Press, 2000), School of Fish (Santa Rosa, CA: Black Sparrow Press, 1997), Maxfield Parrish (Santa Rosa, CA: Black Sparrow Press, 1995), Not Me (New York, NY: Semiotext(e), 1991), and Chelsea Girls (Santa Rosa, CA: Black Sparrow Press, 1994). In 1995, with Liz Kotz, she edited The New Fuck You/Adventures in Lesbian Reading (New York, NY: Semiotext(e), 1995). She’s a frequent contributor to Book Forum, Art in America, The Village Voice, The Nation, The Stranger, Index, and Nest.
BLAKE NEMEC is a media activist, phlebotomist, and sound engineer. His writing has been published in San Francisco Bay Times, slingshot, Lip Magazine, as well as in two anthologies, From the Inside Out (San Francisco, CA: Manic D Press, 2004) and That’s Revolting! (Brooklyn, NY: Soft Skull Press, 2004). He is a sound technician with five years’ dedication to national microradio and independent media groups. He has worked as a boom operator and sound engineer in various independent films including Dear Doctors: Born Queer.
KIRK READ is the author of How I Learned to Snap (Athens, GA: Hill Street Press, 2001), a memoir about being openly gay in a small Virginia high school. Snap was named an Honor Book by the American Library Association. Read spent two years touring to 120 cities and towns to spread the gospel of sexed-up heavy metal queer teenagers. He is working on a novel and a memoir about sex work called This is the Thing. He frequently performs at colleges around the country and hosts spoken-word events around San Francisco, including the open mics Smack Dab and K’vetch. He is a longtime counselor and phlebotomist at St. James Infirmary, San Francisco’s free health clinic for current and former sex workers. At the infirmary, he started a support group for male sex workers in 1999 and was volunteer coordinator. This semester, he finishes his MFA in Creative Writing at San Francisco State University and is the apprentice of a gourmet organic chef. He’s a southern gentleman and a witch.
Although AIDEN SHAW first became familiar to many people as a porn star, he has also directed music videos, designed websites, and worked as a photographer, model, actor, singer/ songwriter, and interior designer. Shaw is the author of three novels, Brutal (1996), Boundaries (1999), and Wasted (2001), all of which received widespread attention in British and U.S. gay media. In 1991 he collaborated with fine artist Mark Beard to produce a handmade, limited edition book that is now housed in the Metropolitan Museum of Modern Art. Shaw is also the author of a 1997 volume of poetry, If Language at the Same Time Shapes and Distorts our Ideas and Emotions, How do we Communicate Love? His autobiography, My Undoing, was released to wide acclaim in 2007. Read more about him on his website, www.aidenshaw.com.
SISTER GRIMM is a writer, performer, polyglot, traveler and teacher. She is currently teaching in the land of modern windmills and northern lights, and working on a full-length poetry manuscript.
MIRHA- SOLEIL ROSS is a transsexual performer, video maker, sex worker, and activist who grew up amongst mountains of scrap, sewer rats, and bottles of gin in Notre-Dame du Sacre Coeur, a poor district situated on the South Shore of Montreal, Quebec. She has been working and living in Toronto since 1992. Since 1993, she has created over a dozen videos (including Tremblement de Chair, G-SPrOuT!, Allo Performance), which have been screened at film festivals across Canada, the U.S., and Europe. She is the founder of MEAL-TRANS, the first ever publicly funded multiservices, peer-run program for low-income and street-active transsexual and transgendered people in Toronto. Ross’s show Yapping Out Loud: Contagious Thoughts from an Unrepentant Whore premiered as part of the MAYWORKS Festival of Working People and the Arts. She is interviewed under the name of Jeanne B. in Shannon Bell’s book Whore Carnival (New York, NY: Autonomedia, 1995), and as Mirha-Soleil Ross in Viviane Namaste’s Sex Change, Social Change: Reflections on Identities, Institutions, and Nations (Toronto: Women’s Press, 2005). She appears in Bent on Writing: Contemporary Queer Tales (Toronto: Women’s Press, 2002), and in My Breasts, My Choice: Journeys Through Surgery (Toronto: Sumach Press, 2003).
ANNA JOY SPRINGER has little fangs and barks like a deer when excited. Teenage fans call her “The Bird Lady,” because she writes, almost exclusively, about birds. Before moving to San Diego to teach at Eileen Myles’s School for Wayward Writers, she did lots of femme jobs, made neon sculptures, sang in legendary punk bands Blatz, The Gr’ups, and Cypher in the Snow, and read her purple prose with Sister Spit. She currently tongue-lashes misogynists, writes weird and lengthy cross-genre messes, and ponders the many species of love, radical performative pedagogy, and the gyre of ethics in konsumer kapitalism.
MATTILDA, A.K.A. MATT BERNSTEIN SYCAMORE, is the editor of Nobody Passes: Rejecting the Rules of Gender and Conformity (Emeryville, CA: Seal Press, 2006) and an expanded second edition of That’s Revolting! Queer Strategies for Resisting Assimilation (Brooklyn, NY: Soft Skull Press, 2004). The Night That Plays like Ping-Pong in My Head is excerpted from Mattilda’s first novel, Pulling Taffy (San Francisco, CA: Suspect Thoughts Press, 2003). Her second novel, So Many Ways to Sleep Badly, will be published by City Lights in fall/winter 2008, and Mattilda hopes that it will destroy literature. Her first anthology, Tricks and Treats: Sex Workers Write About Their Clients (New York, NY: Harrington Park Press, 2000), was recently translated into Italian. Mattilda loves feedback. Her blog is nobodypasses.blogspot.com and her homepage is www.mattbernsteinsycamore.com.
Writer, performer, and literary-event wrangler MICHELLE TEA is cofounder of the original Sister Spit experience, the legendary all-girl spoken-word road show. She is the author of four memoirs, including The Chelsea Whistle (New York, NY: Seal Press, 2002), the award-winning Valencia (Seattle, WA: Seal Press, 2000), and the illustrated Rent Girl (San Francisco, CA: Last Gasp, 2004), as well as her first novel, Rose of No Man’s Land (San Francisco, CA: MacAdam/Cage Press, 2006). She is currently at work on the graphic novel Carrier, illustrated by Laurenn McCubbin and set to be published in 2007 by MacAdam/Cage Press. Michelle has edited three anthologies, most recently Baby, Remember My Nam
e: New Queer Girl Writings (New York, NY: Carroll and Graf, 2006).
TRE VASQUEZ, two spirit, former ho, down for reclaiming our histories and spiritual wellness through hip-hop. He uses performance and other mediums of art as an offering to an indigenous movement of young warriors/soldiers in order to take back our land, communities, hearts, minds, and bodies. He has performed in many events such as The Sex Worker Art Festival Tucson, Intercourse: A Sex and Gender Recipe for Revolution, a tour with the band Tricrotic, and a whole lot of shows that are none of your business. Keeping it spiritual, keeping it political, keeping it gangsta by any and all means necessary.