Sex Worker Literati is moving uptown – and by uptown we mean the Bowery – for a lust-drenched 1 year anniversary cavalcade extravaganza. After packing them in downtown every month for year, on Sept. 15, Sex Worker Literati sheds its skin and reinvents itself at the great East Village landmark that has come to represent the finest in words: Bowery Poetry Club. Besides our usual collection of stranger than fiction tales from the seething underbelly of America’s sex trenches, we’re adding ultra-live music and brazen, bawdy burlesque. It hardly seems a year since the groundbreaking anthology Hos, Hookers, Call Girls and Rent Boys shocked America by rocketing onto the front page of the Sunday New York Times Book Review. Giving voice to an under represented population that is glorified and reviled, fetishized and stigmatized, worshiped and spat upon, from $5000 a night call girls to $10 crack hos to hard-working rent boys, Sex Worker Literati is the living breathing embodiment of this internationally acclaimed anthology. In the flesh. David Henry Sterry and Zoe Hansen will be riding herd over an all-star lineup of the finest ho writer/performers money can buy. & IT’S ALL STILL FREE!!!
In the exchange of sex for money, a window opens into the human soul. Take a peak. Cum laugh. Cum cry. Just cum.
The monthly Sex Worker Literati reading series was co-hosted at Happy Ending by David Henry Sterry and Audacia Ray from August 2009 to June 2010.
Starting in July 2010, Audacia will be solo hosting a storytelling series, The Red Umbrella Diaries, at Happy Ending (302 Broome Street) on the first Thursday of every month. Check out http://redumbrellaproject.com for information on live events, the podcast, and a monthly blog carnival.
David will resume Sex Worker Literati events in September at the Bowery Poetry Club.
Get in touch:
Email Audacia Ray: dacia [at] wakingvixen.com
Email David Henry Sterry: sterryhead [at] gmail.com
The purpose of the series is to give voice to people who exchange, or have exchanged, sex for money. To show this population for who they truly are, in all their beautiful diversity, in their own words, in their own images- gay, straight, and all kinds of others. College educated, high school dropout, and everything in between. From glitzy upscale penthouses, to back alley cracked hangouts, and everywhere in between. Too many times, in the it’s-a-small-world-after all community of sex workers, we focus on what separates and divides us, rather than our common cause, which is safety, prosperity, and happiness for all those concerned. There will be a steady stream of movies, pictures, social commentary, short memoirs, nightmares, war stories, poetry, announcements for events, advice for and from sex workers on life, love, money, sex, and so much more. But we also want to make this a place where sex workers and their friends from all over the world can contribute. Where they can be heard. And seen. We welcome submissions of all kinds.
This website came about as the result of a book that David Henry Sterry and RJ Martin put together, and which Audacia Ray contributed to. It is being published by Soft Skull Press. It’s called, Hos, Hookers, Callgirls, and Rentboys: Professionals Writing on Life, Love, Money and Sex. It has contributions from sex worker All-Stars like sex art goddess Dr. Annie Sprinkle, gay icon Perry Brass, sexual revolutionary Dr. Carol Queen, the Happy Hooker herself, Xavier Hollander, porn star and sex educator Nina Hartley, acclaimed memoirists and gay activist Matilda Bernstein Sycamore, Devil in Miss Jones icon Georgina Spelvin, and best-selling memoirists Kirk Read. But it also has contributions from people right off the streets, who are literally never heard from in our society. The only saying that all of the writers in that anthology have in common is that they exchanged some kind of sex of some kind for money.
