Sex Workers

The economies of desire

Andrew Lam
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The economies of desire

THEATER Since 2010, This Is What I Want has hitched its program to the National Queer Arts Festival to explore the artistic and social ground between intimacy and performance. Privileging the immediate, even confused elaborations of desire over the canny or slickly theorized, TIWIW (produced by THEOFFCENTER in association with SOMArts, the Center for Sex and Culture, and the Queer Cultural Center) challenges adept, professional performance makers to risk forgoing the usual control or cohesion in the hope of finding new avenues for creation and participation.

TIWIW’s free-ranging curatorial approach, which includes artists operating outside queer or identity-based practices, gets a further boost this year with the inclusion of several Los Angeles–based artists and a symposium at the Center for Sex and Culture moderated by Carol Queen.

San Francisco–based performance artist and choreographer Tessa Wills took over as artistic director this year at the invitation of TIWIW’s founder, choreographer Jesse Hewit. Wills’s own piece caps the five-day program with a “participatory experience” at the Center for Sex and Culture, and in general she brings a particular stamp to this year’s festival, even as TIWIW stretches out within and beyond the Bay Area via a curatorial team that includes Hewit, Rachael Dichter, and Los Angeles–based artists Anna Martine Whitehead and Doran George.

Wills, a thirtysomething whose relaxed mien belies a probing stare, is an internationally produced performance maker who grew up studying music, ballet, and contemporary dance in England before relocating to the Bay Area. She’s one of those artists always worth going out of your way for. In fact, she was behind one of the more memorable contributions to last year’s TIWIW program (more on that below). Wearing a sleeveless T-shirt that nonchalantly compliments the shorn sides of her sandy brown bob, Wills sat down at a Mission café last week to discuss her directorial vision for TIWIW and the economies of desire.

San Francisco Bay Guardian Can you describe briefly the curatorial process this year?

Tessa Wills We asked people to apply, either people whose work we like or with a specific piece in mind, like Sara Kraft’s — Rachael [Dichter] knew exactly what the piece was. [Multimedia artist Sara Kraft’s The Truth employs a pair of dueling narratives in what the artist describes as a desperate search for objectivity, “fueled by the deeply subjective madness of desire, loss and the chaos of experience.” It premiered at Yerba Buena Center for the Arts in 2007.]

I had the curatorial statement underway, and the other curators added to it, enriched it or changed parts, and we invited people from there. About half of them are new commissions from people we are just excited by, like Dia [Dear] and Mica [Sigourney], and half of them are pieces that already exist. There are loads of people coming up from LA this time because two of the curators are down there.

SFBG One of those is British artist Doran George. How did he become involved?

TW I followed his work in England but never met him. Then he came to San Francisco, and we made very fast, intense connections around work and politics, and also a friendship. So we were looking for a way to work with each other.

When Jesse asked me to direct TIWIW and invite in curators, it seemed like that was really where Doran was at. A lot of his work is about somatics as it relates to gender. Because he was [in Los Angeles], it seemed sensible to think about other people that could support him and his choices down there. Anna Martine [Whitehead] is also down there working, and obviously she has this strong history with the festival, and her voice is clear, rich and powerful.

SFBG Can you explain the emphasis on desire and economy in your work and in your directorial approach overall?

TW Broadly, people in this festival [in the last two years] have looked at desire through the lens of sexuality — but they also have not. My artistic direction has put it very specifically; I really wanted to bring in that question of how money and desire weave together, and where the places of empowerment and disempowerment are around that. I’ve brought sex work to the fore in that. Doran also is interested in that. But we were very careful in the curating to broaden that out a lot. The pieces are not all about sex; but the pieces are all about desire. So there is breadth, but also that very specific thing that I’ve brought in.

In my piece, at Center for Sex and Culture on Saturday, there are nine people who are “charging,” they’re doing one-on-one performances with audiences. Basically, they’re facilitating you talking about your desire. But it’s not like straight sex work. It’s not like they’re going to meet your desire. They’re going to interrogate it with you and charge it up.

SFBG So “charge up” has a double entendre.

TW It’s got a double entendre, exactly. All of the chargers are sex workers. I identify as a sex-worker ally, and I identify in the space between performance and sex work. Those are my two communities. So this theme, the value of desire, somehow has those two together.

SFBG Where do you see subversive or radical points of departure in the intersections of desire and economy? 

TW People will take money and then use it for their subversive practices. So there’s that. Then there’s the fact that everybody is working for free to put this festival on. I think that adds a really interesting perspective to the conversation about how desire and money relate. Because the thing that’s really driven this festival is this passionate desire to put it on for its own sake. It defies any economic logic that any of us are working this hard. I mean, it’s ridiculous. I feel stupid how hard I’m working on this.

SFBG That’s the position of a lot of art-making in this society. But then, ridiculousness is a tried-and-true strategy of subversion too. I’m reminded of the argument in Judith Halberstam’s book, The Queer Art of Failure, where a willingness to “fail” — in the terms set by the dominant social and economic order — may offer a way out from under that order, and suggest alternatives beyond its reach or ken.

TW There are all these other economies that come to light when you look at that disconnect or failure [vis-à-vis the dominant economic model]—then it’s like, ok, that’s obviously not working, so what else can be motivating? There are just so many diverse economies at work. Like DavEnds piece, for example. She was really motivated by wanting to have close, intimate exchanges and make more friends. The people she’s brought into her piece, she’s very clear about it, are people that she wants to be friends with.

SFBG There’s a social impulse mixed in there. I also like the idea that desire could be tied to giving away or losing, as opposed to taking, receiving, gaining or possessing. Does that resonate with some of the pieces this year? 

TW Yes, I think that’s right. Mica Sigourney’s piece is one that I was very keen to curate. He’s the only one who’s been in all the iterations of the festival, and I think each time he’s done [TIWIW], it’s gotten a little closer to actually managing to stage desire, in motion, on the stage. His piece is kind of a secret, but there’s a way in which he is working directly with money. He’s trying to figure out his erotic value in the moment, with the audience. There’s a way in which his work always gets right to the heart of the theme for me.

SFBG Back to your piece: Does it build on previous work?

TW Yes. Last year, when I was at the festival, I did this piece with electric butt plugs. [Note: In this piece, Wills and co-performer Harold Burns were naked inside (what looked like) giant pink bath scrunchies (designed by Honey McMoney), wearing electric butt-plugs attached to a microphone set low before a pillow at the front of the stage. Individual audience members could come kneel and whisper their fantasies, their words registering solely in the physical responses and expressions of the performers.]

When they asked me to be in the festival, I identified that what I’m really excited about is the process of saying what you want, the somatic experience of saying what you want — especially if it feels transgressive inside of you. I don’t really care what the content of the thing is. And I don’t care whether society thinks it’s ok or not. I’m not really interested in any of that. I’m just interested in the physical, somatic experience of saying what you want. That seems like the most valuable thing for me.

So what I did in the butt-plug piece was to get the audience to come up and say things, to say what they wanted, and they couldn’t really be heard, and then we would just get the sensation — we would get the quality of how they were talking but we wouldn’t get the content. And we’d experience that in a very intimate, deep way. That’s what I wanted to try and develop a bit further this year. So after this week of people watching other people struggle and interrogate and stage their desire, [in this piece] they get to have all of that research land in their own body. They have their own process of saying what they desire, and they have their own somatic experience.

SFBG So it’s very individual and private, there’s no larger audience, there’s no documentation of the whole thing.

TW Exactly. It’s kind of rough for me as an artist, because I’ve put so much work into it, and it’s a very generous piece in terms of the amount — like we talked about the economic worth and the amount of one-on-one time with the audience. So it’s very sad for me to never get an audience response, actually.

SFBG No payoff?

TW Yeah, I’ll never get that.

 

THIS IS WHAT I WANT

Performances Wed/27-Fri/29, 8pm, $20

SOMArts Cultural Center

934 Brannan, SF

“Slow Sex Symposium” Sat/30, noon-4pm, free

“This Is What You Want — Experiential” Sat/30, 5-11pm, $15-$25

Center for Sex and Culture

1349 Mission, SF

thisiswhatiwant.eventbrite.com

Alerts

Jesse Hawthorne Ficks
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Wednesday 20

Pack the court for Kali, Hayward Hall of Justice, 24405 Amador #108, Hayward; www.occupyoakland.org. 8-11am, free. Of all the outrageous and unjust arrests that have gone down at Occupy Oakland, Kali’s may be the worst. Kali was turning his life around at the Occupy Oakland camp when he was arrested in December for his “unpermitted” blanket. He was denied medication for a mental health issue for days in jail before getting in a conflict with a guard- which got him charged with assaulting a police officer. It was his third strike, and he may face life in prison. From organizers: “Wear red in support of Kali’s favorite color! Since he was an active member of the Kitchen Committee, there will be Coffee not Cops as well as a potluck afterwards.”

“Notes from a revolution,” Booksmith, 1644 Haight, SF; www.booksmith.com. 6:30pm, free. In the Haight’s heyday, the Diggers were a cultural and political force to be reckoned with. The “community anarchist” collective served food in the Panhandle, ran free medical clinics, and generally cared for the large amount of people who flocked to the neighborhood in the 60s. They set up free stores and crash pads, and were known for absurd theater that makes you think. Now their broadsides have become a new book, Notes from a Revolution. Some of those involved in this recent San Francisco history will speak at the Booksmith for the books release, and there might even be some Diggers-style people-feeding afoot.

Thursday 21

Emiliano Donis benefit concert, Brava Theater, 2781 24th St., SF; www.brava.org. 7:30pm, $15-20. Emiliano Donis had only been 18 for a few weeks when he was arrested for dating his underage partner. According to his mother, Denhi Donis, they had been together at ages 15 and 17 before his birthday last fall. He was arrested in November, and has been locked up since. His moher organized this benefit concert, featuring a pretty great lineup of local bands, to help raise money for his legal fees.

Friday 22

The Black Power Mixtape room 304, Redstone building, 2940 16th St., SF; www.norcalsocialism.org. 7pm, $5-10 suggested donation. The Black Power Mixtape, 1967-1975, contains rare and powerful footage. There are scenes of Angela Davis being interviewed in prison, Stokely Carmicheal with his mother, and too many unnamed leaders spreading the revolution. The footage, shot by Swedish filmmakers who lacked a certain tendency to demonize those in the black liberation movement, is unique in its honesty. This screening is a fundraiser for local folks to get to the Socialism 2012 conference in Chicago next week.

Sunday 24

Queer prisoner letter-writing Station 40, 3030B 16th St., SF; www.tinyurl.com/station40. 4-6pm, free. It’s the monthly prisoner letter-writing campaign- the “post-pride (or hide from pride)” edition. From hate crime victims who fight back to sex workers to people who just don’t “look right,” LGBTQ people make up a disproportionate number of people in the criminal justice system. Come write letters to show them they’re not forgotten.

Monday 25

“The sky did not fall” Commonwealth Club, 595 Market, SF; www.commonwealthclub.org. 5:30pm, $7-20.  Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell was finally repealed last July. That hasn’t stopped people to argue for its reinstatement for reasons like“they’re in close quarters, they live with people, they obviously shower with people” (Rick Santorum in October.) Get the real story at this Commonwealth Club event, where soldiers will speak on the historic repeal’s effect on their lives. At least for these soldiers, the changes weren’t shower-related, but instead related to not fearing dishonorable discharge and hiding who they love while risking their lives in the military.

Female trouble

Andrew Lam
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Female trouble

arts@sfbg.com

THEATER We’ve come a long way, baby, but why does it feel like women’s equality is a legal concept that still troubles the status quo? This past year has proven that the erosion of women’s rights remains a powerful political agenda across the country, with state bans on certain forms of abortion, the redefinition of rape, and the blocking of the Paycheck Fairness Act.

Two very different shows opening this week in Berkeley (previews began last week for both) are poised to provide timely additions to the ever-evolving discourse on female power and its reverberations on society at large. Mark Jackson’s Salomania, at the Aurora Theatre, and Eve Ensler’s Emotional Creature, at the Berkeley Rep, take on themes of gender parity and its embattled vanguard with a historical drama set in the early 1900s based on the life of one notorious woman, and an ensemble work exploring the challenges of girlhood in the present day.

Salomania, commissioned by Aurora, has been percolating on Jackson’s burner since 2006, when he directed Oscar Wilde’s Salome, also at the Aurora. While researching the production history of the play, he discovered a mostly forgotten scandal involving Maud Allan, a San Francisco dancer who achieved stardom with a provocative interpretation of “The Dance of the Seven Veils.” But it wasn’t her dancing that cemented her notoriety, but rather a high-profile media controversy in which she sued British M.P. Noel Pemberton Billing for libel after he accused her of being a lesbian (she was), a sadist (she wasn’t), and a German sympathizer (she wasn’t that either) after starring in a private performance of Wilde’s then-banned play.

Like all the best media scandals, her 1918 trial had all the necessary elements for a juicy celebrity circus — the personal vs. the political, beauty vs. bigotry, a titillating flush of sexual impropriety — and temporarily displaced the more austere wartime headlines of the era.

There are several themes at work in Jackson’s biographical drama, gleaned in part from courtroom transcripts and letters from Allan to her family, but the one that seems to best tie Allan together with her biblical muse is the emergence of the “independent” woman in popular culture, and the fearfulness they’ve inspired in their detractors throughout history. And just as New Testament figure Salome has been almost unanimously vilified by both church and secular society for her coerced display of her physical sensuality (almost more so than for her adolescent act of brutal vengeance), so was Allan maligned for her empathic recreation of same.

Both Jackson and Allan’s attitudes towards Salome accentuate the positive lurking within her oft-maligned reputation. Jackson posits that she’s “the only honest person in the room,” the one with the greatest potential for breaking free of the venal, decadent atmosphere of Herod’s palace. Allan found in her a kindred beauty-seeker, whose attraction to John the Baptist was formed partially from a sense of wonder at his purity and capacity for selflessness.

“She was not an uncouth child,” she protested at her libel trial. “She was a woman who valued beauty.” Their mutual reverence for beauty aside, another tie that binds Salome and Allan is a shared reputation for willfulness.

“She was kind of a force of nature in her personality,” Jackson says of Allan. “[And] without apology said, ‘This is what I do, and this is who I am’.” This unyielding attitude contributed to Allan’s reputation as “difficult,” even “arrogant,” a complexity of character that attracted Jackson’s interest as a playwright as much as it repelled her critics.

“Any woman with a forward personality who has pushed her boundaries is going to be characterized that way by her culture,” he muses, a sentiment that could be applied equally to Salome as well as to Allan, as well as to almost any controversial female celebrity today: our Madonnas and our Hillary Clintons.

 

GIRLS, GIRLS, GIRLS

 

“Part of why I wanted to write this is to say there’s this amazing resilience here, and power, and resistance, and energy and vitality in girls that we haven’t even begun to unleash,” says Eve Ensler, who has also been compared to a force of nature (by Berkeley Rep artistic director Tony Taccone). Best-known for The Vagina Monologues, Ensler’s latest play, Emotional Creature, is having its world premiere at Berkeley Rep.

Global girlhood is its focus. Based on her book I Am an Emotional Creature: The Secret Life of Girls Around the World, the subject matter includes stories from Congolese rape victims, Eastern European sex workers, young factory workers, and Western anorexics, all struggling to move forward from their circumstances. Despite the often violent circumstances Ensler’s protagonists find themselves in, it’s their vitality that she hopes will come across, onstage and off.

Quick to emphasize that Creature is fictional, Ensler’s encounters with young women around the world — Democratic Republic of Congo, South Africa, Sarajevo, Haiti, Afghanistan — have nonetheless heavily informed the characters of her piece. And of course, she has her own experiences in girlhood to draw from. “When I was younger, I was constantly told I was being too alive or too intense or too dramatic, and I chose to learn how to mute myself,” she says. An outspoken and prolific anti-violence advocate, Ensler does seem to have overcome that mute button in adulthood, but she’s quick to point out that its existence can make girlhood a bewildering, disempowering time in life.

The creation of the piece began in Johannesburg, with a staged workshop at the Market Theatre in July 2011, and another in Paris in September. Director Jo Bonney likens the shape of the play to that of an event being put on by the girls themselves: a variety show of monologues, ensemble pieces, even song and dance numbers, with music written by South African composer Charl-Johan Lingenfelder. Navigating the stormy seas of modern-day adolescence and young adulthood, Ensler’s “girls” may still be facing a whole spectrum of obstacles while tapping into their personal power. But thanks to precedents set by strong women such as Maud Allan, and even Salome, the fact that they should want to at all no longer seems unusual or unfortunate — no matter how often American right-wingers might have us otherwise believe. *

 

EMOTIONAL CREATURE

Through July 15, $14.50-$73

Berkeley Repertory Theatre

Roda Theatre, 2025 Addison, Berk.

www.berkeleyrep.org

SALOMANIA

Through July 22, $30-$55

Aurora Theatre

2081 Addison, Berk. www.auroratheatre.org

Bringing the heat

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Bringing the heat

On June 13, more than 400 people, mainly from law enforcement and non-profits, gathered for a conference in downtown Oakland’s Marriott Hotel. Outside, a group of angry protesters gave impassioned speeches before trying to enter the hotel. The complex set of issues involved? The conference was organized to discuss tactics for arresting and charging child sex traffickers, but the protesters said that the conference would do nothing but further the state’s harmful impact on the lives of sex workers.

I wasn’t able to attend the conference itself; the Alameda County District Attorney’s office decided at the last minute that press would not be permitted inside. But from the conference’s description and a talk with Casey Bates, head of DA’s Human Exploitation and Trafficking Unit (HEAT), it seemed that the conference was mostly focused on improving efforts to by law enforcement to find people underage people who are having sex for money and prosecute their “traffickers,” a designation not much different than “pimps.”

According to Bates, the HEAT unit has focused on people selling sex on the street and online, and most are from California or nearby states, although he hopes the efforts can expand to people who are trafficked in from other countries.

Under the law, anyone selling sex under 18 years of age is classified as a CSEC- commercially sexually exploited child.

As DA Nancy O’Malley emphasizes on the HEAT unit website, “We have been fighting to shatter the perception of children as prostitutes and criminals undeserving of protection.  These young people are victims of child abuse.”

The sex workers rights movement, organized by people in the sex industry who see their work as legitimate, has largely called for decriminalization of prostitution and other forms of sex work since the movement off in the 1960s, with new concerns in the 21st century. Many groups have argued that police increase the violence in the lives of prostitutes, harassing and arresting them while not taking violence against sex workers seriously. The much older anti-trafficking movement, (or, as it was called at the beginning of the 20th century, anti- “white slavery,”) has many proponents who disagree, saying all prostitution involves some form of coercion. The two movements have a long history of conflict, and on June 13, this dynamic was thrust into the public eye.

Policing the problem

This conference was described as “comprehensive event designed to enhance the capacity of law enforcement and practitioners to combat commercial sex trafficking of children (CSEC).” 

“Of course we support refuges, housing, and other services for these children,” said Rachel West, an organizer with US Prostitutes Collective. “Why aren’t the police focused on that instead of spending hours on the net looking for women, or going out on the street doing street sweeps?”

But US Prostitutes Collective, part of the International Prostitutes Collective, which has been campaigning for decriminalization of prostitution since 1975, didn’t organize last week’s protest. This time it was Occupy Patriarchy, an Occupy Oakland affiliated group.

Occupy Oakland has not been shy about calling out police behaviors, from infamous incidents like the tear gas-heavy offensive on the Occupy Oakland camp last fall to shootings of local teenagers. The HEAT Conference, which was organized by the DA’s office and played host to law enforcement from across the country, was no exception.

“Whose inside this conference?” said one demonstrator who spoke during a 20-minute speak-out in front of the hotel that afternoon. “61 official speakers are law enforcement agents, DA workers, or politicians with anti-sex worker reputations. 39 speakers are individuals or representatives of non-profits. The vast majority of these work directly with law enforcement or politicians to criminalize sex workers. Where is the voice of the sex workers?” 

“What we find disturbing as anti-capitalists and anti-authoritarians is these police who, to sex workers, are oppressing us,” Clarissa McFaye, one of the demonstrators, told me in an interview. “We know that police are a very violent, fearsome presence in the lives of all sex workers, and we feel the only way that we can abolish child trafficking and exploitative forms of labor, which is all labor in actuality, is to abolish the police state.”

“They think working to enforce criminalization isn’t going to help child victims of sexual slavery. We know they exist, but we don’t feel this is a solution. We don’t think enhancing the ability to arrest people is a solution,” said McFaye.

“We really appreciate a lot of the effort that some of the non profits are doing,” McFaye continued, “We want to talk to them and form a sense of camaraderie with them and tell them that we don’t need the cops. We don’t want them. They’re bad for us.” 

Sex workers rights groups have long spoken out about police treatment of prostitutes. Stories of police harassing sex workers, going through with sexual acts while undercover before making prostitution arrests, and demanding sex in exchange for letting an arrest slide are fairly common. As McFaye told me, “they’re condoning child trafficking because they make deals with pimps.”

“Not to mention that hella cops are tricks,” she added.

Pimps and traffickers, children and minors

The HEAT Unit’s website lists 237 charges and 160 convictions made by the unit between 2006 and 2011. The statistics include trafficking as defined by California Penal Code Section 236.1, California’s Human Trafficking Statute. But they also include charges and convictions for pimping and pandering, sexual assault, kidnapping, and burglary, and the website specifies that “these statistics do not differentiate between child and adult victims, though the majority of HEAT victims are minors.”

The anti-trafficking statute defines a human trafficker as “Any person who deprives or violates the personal liberty of another with the intent to effect or maintain a felony violation of ” one of several anti-pimping, pandering, and solicitation Penal Code violations.

This includes Penal Code section 266 which defines a pimp as someone who, knowing another person has commercial sex, “lives or derives support or maintenance in whole or in part from the earnings or proceeds of the person’s prostitution.” 

But for Bates, “The way a pimp-prostitute relationship works is the pimp takes 100 percent of the cash.”

I brought up the pimp question with Cyd Nova, harm reduction services coordinator at San Francisco’s for sex workers-by sex workers health clinic, the St. James Infirmary.

“I know a lot of street-based sex workers who are totally independent,” said Nova. “Some do split their money with pimps or managers.”

Nova also said pimping’s legal definition can often have questionable consequences. “Legally that would be most peoples partners, children, friends.”

“I have met sex workers who have had their partners charged under pimping codes, which was not their relationship with that person,” Nova told me.

Many “pimping” relationships fall somewhere in between “peoples partners, children, and friends” and “the pimp takes 100 percent of the cash.” Sex workers, a criminalized class, often experience violence from both pimps and clients- but fear for their own consequenes if they report the crimes. I asked Bates his opinion on granting immunity from prostitution charges or a person who comes forward to report all too common violations committed against sex workers like rape, assault and theft.

“We do this all the time in the context of other types of crime that we work with. If it’s a murder, we may be willing to negotiate with our witness to determine whether or not is appropriate to give immunity for the person to testify against this other person, in exchange they won’t be prosecuted for the crime that they committed.”

But Nova said that striking that deal can be a major problem.

“One thing that is an issue for people forced into the industry is they are unable to receive services until they agree to testify against their trafficker. This doesn’t work for the majority of people, and it’s a major issue when you’re talking about services for trafficking victims,” he said.

At the St. James Infirmary, “We have people who have been in situations where they feel that they wanted to leave, but are not willing to bring criminal charges against the person,” he continued.

Nova also described a distinction between the terms “child” and “minor.”

“People have choices in how they use their bodies, and that includes youth. We are living in a world where sometimes people have to choose options that are not ideal,” he said. 

McFaye painted a similar picture, saying that “sex work is a form of work that all genders do sex work can make a lot more money than other options.”

“It allows me to do my political work as well as work a few times a week, instead of working at McDonalds. When I was 17 years old I tried to get a job, couldn’t find anything but shitty house cleaning jobs. Then some sex workers I knew showed me the ropes, and my life’s been a lot better ever since,” she said.

I described a similar situation, in which a minor chooses prostitution to make desperately needed money or escape an abusive situation, to Bates. “There are going to be people that make that claim,” he responded. “There’s no doubt about it. Part of the phenomenon is that a lot of people that are being abused, when they’re being abused, don’t even realize that they’re being abused. That’s a big issue,” said Bates. “People have made the claim, they did what they had to do in a difficult circumstance, and they don’t really see themselves as being a victim of crime. And what I’m suggesting is, that’s not uncommon, it’s part of the victimology actually.” 

He added, “I’m speaking specifically to people that are being trafficked. What you described doesn’t sound as much like a trafficking situation.”

But the law doesn’t allow for that kind of nuance. 

“That is a clear distinction that we want to draw. This is focused on commercial sexual exploitation of children,” Bates said. “When you become 18, you’re given a set of rights and you’re treated differently under the law.”

Solutions

The HEAT Unit’s model is unique, and if the conference has its intended consequences, it may be replicated throughout the country.

For minors that the HEAT unit identifies as CSEC, “The goal is to try to stabilize them, to figure out what services they need, what situation they came from and figure out how we can get that child back on track,” Bates told me.

“Sometimes, that requires that we detain them for a period of time so we can figure out what services are necessary. That’s somewhat controversial, because some people say that’s not appropriate. We believe that it’s in the interest of these girls initially, to figure out what’s necessary. That to turn them back on the street means to turn your back on them, period.”

Many sex workers’ rights groups, however, argue for antoher solution entirely- decriminalization of prostitution. Part of the argument for decriminalization is that sex workers would feel more comfortable coming to police with reports that they are their colleagues had been victims of crimes like rape, assault or theft. 

As Nova said, “California is currently using anti-trafficking federal funds to target all sex workers. They say, if we arrest a bunch of sex workers, some of them are going to be trafficked. This has not proven to be very effective, whereas decriminalization would result in people, who are in coercive work situations, feeling more comfortable coming forward and asking for help.

“They need an evaluation of what kind of practices are going on and what results they’re turning out,” Nova said. “A study where they have conversations with people who have been arrested and detained and talk about what their life was like, what was detrimental and what was beneficial.”

For some of the more anarchist-leaning protesters, however, the police should play no role in the solution.

“What we think would help is if we as sex workers come together is if we come together and combat this exploitation,” McFaye told me.

I asked if there was anything the police could do.

“No,” said McFaye. “They can turn in their badges. That’s what they could do.” 

When the sex workers’ rights movement took off in the ’60s, they joined the debate that had been going on surrounding prostitution and policing for a century. The movement continues- and on Wednesday, a distinctly anti-capitalist side of it made noise. These groups may be piping up more, as the Californians Against Sexual Exploitation (CASE) Act, which would increase funding and resources for policing sex traffickers, goes to the ballot this November.

Hot sexy events: April 13-19

Andrew Lam
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Hot sexy events: April 13-19

Kink.com is getting its star turn in the mainstream media – everyone’s favorite historic-building-cum-porn-palace served as the shooting locaiton for the movie that Stephen Elliott and Kink star Lorelei Lee penned, Cherry (trailer here). The flick, which makes its San Francisco debut at the SF International Film Festival (April 24, 27, 28) stars James Franco and Heather Graham, who plays a female director at a porn company.

It isn’t Kink in the movie, exactly — it’s not a BDSM company, for one. And I met up with Lee at Thieves Tavern this week and she told me that despite the vocation of Cherry‘s protagonist, she didn’t consider it a movie based in sex-positive activism.

“You can really destroy a movie by making it too political,” said the NYU student and star of multiple Kink sites, over a glass of red wine. Lee says she and co-writer Elliott wanted to write a story with a happy ending (er, spoiler alert.) “I think it’s a complicated story that doesn’t try to sell you on anything.” Of course, showing happy, functioning sex workers should be considered activism in and of itself these days.

Theirs isn’t the only project that uses the Armory as a backdrop for for an upcoming non-NSFW film. Filmmaker Simone Jude has been shooting a documentary on the lives of Kink’s women – Lee, Isis Love, and Princess Donna primarily — for the last four years. The trailer looks fucking awesome, and Jude needs your Kickstarting help funding the final editing process. 

The three women portrayed are total badasses, and it’d be great if this film could recieve the same kind of exposure that Cherry, which picked up IFC as its distributor and is being slated for a limited-city release, is enjoying. With all the sex-negative politicking going on these days, we could use some more high profile looks at women who refuse to let conservative social norms guide their views of fucking. People need to be exposed to that kind of stuff. Or at least, as Lee told me “I hope that they leave the theater feeling like they’ve watched a movie about real people.”

And now for your week in sex events.

“A Taste for Brown Sugar: The History of Black Women in American Pornography”

Rad lecture alert: University of California Santa Barbara professor Mireille Miller-Young will be giving a talk about her much-needed manuscript examining the history of black women in porn this afternoon. Miller-Young’s work tends to focus on race, gender, and sexuality as it appears in sex work and popular culture and she is also currently collaborating with sex-positive author Tristan Taormino and others on The Feminist Porn Book: The Politics of Producing Pleasure. 

Fri/13 4-7 p.m., free

California College of the Arts

1111 Eighth St., Room GC7, SF

(415) 703-9500

www.cca.edu

Writers With Drinks with Rachel Kramer Bussel and Curvy Girls

Rachel Kramer Bussel is the editor of Curvy Girls: Erotica For Women, which I recently had the pleasure of reading and is real hot. The stories are all about voluptuous women getting it on – in restaurant kitchens with the head chef, with the house sittee’s relative, with the guy that sold them those hot boots. The erotica follows curves like a racecar, and is a phenomenal piece of work for anyone who is looking for a re-up on body image – no matter what their measurements. Tonight, Bussel is reading at the much-loved Writers With Drinks event, so expect to get nicely liquored and hear her talk about sexy, body-positive couplings. 

Sat/14 7:30 p.m., $5-$10 sliding scale

The Make-Out Room

3225 22nd St., SF

www.writerswithdrinks.com

“A Taste of Rope”

The perfect opportunity to sample wines from around the globe while training your obedient submissive, this Femina Potens event has an value-added feature: different models from rope companies Maui Kink, Twisted Monk, Bind Me, Lover’s Knot, and Jugoya will be on hand, and wrist, and ankle, and ribs so that you can see the difference that quality and texture can make in your play. There’s limited space available here, so you should get on this quick-like.

Sat/14 9-10:30 p.m., $40-99 per couple

Location disclosed upon purchase

www.feminapotens.org

Bawdy Storytelling: Master and Servant

The pervy storytelling series goes on a power trip, with six kinky souls going on the record about their BDSM power play good-times. 

Thu/19 7-10:30 p.m., $12-$15

The Uptown 

1928 Telegraph, Oakl.

www.bawdystorytelling.com

New Penthouse Club opens, gets everybody drunk

Andrew Lam
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Last night’s opening of North Beach’s brand spanking new Penthouse Club and Steakhouse (formerly Show Girls, before that Boy Toys) was glittery enough and did have a two-story pole for the women to play on, but – and I will only say this once – ladies, when you are being introduced onstage in the first moments of a strip club officially being open and you are next to a two-story stripper’s pole, and you are a stripper, you better get up there and show the crowd what they’re going to be getting for its rumpled, sweaty single bills.

Like, wrap your calf around its and spin. Blow it air kisses. Something. 

Other than that, North Beach has another, very serviceable strip club. Gone is the cramped upper floor of Showgirls, annihilated in favor of a clear view to the main (there are four total) stage below and a round Lucite dais on which platform stilettos can twinkle about, their owners’ rear ends winking attractively for the up-gazers in the nightclub’s round tables on the first floor. 

The club is touting its seasonal, locally-sourced menu hard. Last night at the press preview (thanks to the open bar during this segment of the evening, my hangover from the stripper/porn star-themed cocktails made me want to stab myself with a seven inch glitter shoe this morning) there were roast beef sliders, spoonfuls of tuna tartare topped with “mango jelly,” and salmon on toast from executive chef Michael Ellis’ menu. Ellis has a Michelin star earned from his time at Dry Creek Kitchen in Healdsburg.

I hope to god the Michelin people come to dine at the Penthouse Club. Might I suggest the all-white circular booths, or perhaps the seats separated by shimmery silver fringe on the second floor? For more casual dining, take your slider over to the lap dance station, a circular seat providentially perched within swiping distance of the ATM. I’d be interested to see what the service was like for sit-down diners – the waitstaff was hotter than the strippers onstage. 

Dancers Samira and Ivy had found a quiet moment during the press preview portion of the evening to snack a slider and a martini at a table marked ‘reserved’ when I started harassing them about their thoughts on the big opening. 

“It looks a lot better than it did,” said Samira. Samira was wearing an ass crack-displaying tight blue dress. This is a style, I’ve noticed, that’s been spreading like wildfire among the more trend-forward sex workers (as evidenced by my onsite reporting from this year’s AVN Awards in Vegas). Other vivid entries on the sartorial stage included one young lady’s forest green velvet, off-shoulder frock, and a be-fringed number whose owner told me people were insulting for not being stripper-y enough. Some people have no taste. 

But I digress. Ivy, who has been working at the club for three years, told me that business continued as usual throughout the entire renovation process. “It used to be real crazy,” she reflected. Surely the tips will improve now that the dust has settled, I ventured. “I hope so!” said Samira. “But tonight it’s more about getting our name out.” Anything I can do to help ladies! The women were all carrying Clueless-style glitter cube purses available in pink, purple, and green. They use them to carry their cash and, I made up in my head, their lipstick for quick touch ups. One of them in a tight, translucent floor-length dress told me that I could purchase one for myself at Target. Also, that she used to work at an underground Asian coffeeshop in San Jose. 

And then the gladiator music started and it was time to stop pole dancing on the structurally unsound glitter tubes lining one of the strip platforms and sit pretty for the introduction of the club’s full lineup, who vamped one by one across the stage. Here we come to the disappointing part of the evening, wherein roughly two of the 1,000 strippers on stage worked the pole in a satisfactory manner.

When the actual performances began, the first few ladies to take their solo turns on the fresh new stage were a little lethargic, but then that thrilling moment came when the first one scaled the full height of the pole, and spun down to the floor with an accompanying shower of dollars and the full, back-breaking explosion that comes mid-break in “We Found Love.” Rihanna, you must make your songs for ladies to take their clothing off to them. 

And so: go to the Penthouse Club for Lucite, slutwear fashion, and if you like your lap dance with a side of $3 ATM fees. Also, the top floor bar has ice on it, so your drinks will stay cold if you are the kind of person who takes a long time to pick up your stripper-themed cocktail after you bartender makes it. 

Penthouse Club and Steakhouse

412 Broadway, SF

(415) 391-2800

www.penthousesf.com

Our Weekly Picks: February 22-27

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WEDNESDAY 22

Way Behind the Music

Famous rockers may have a way with riffs, but their grammar and syntax can often prove cringe-worthy. And yet, their inflated egos and turmoil-filled musings within literary efforts provide insight into worlds otherwise unknown. This, my friends, is the perfect set-up for an evening of music obsessed over-sharing. At the return of Litquake and Noise Pop’s collaborative event, Way Behind the Music, a collection of esteemed local musicians and writers will read from the autobiographies of Ozzy Osbourne, Sammy Hagar, Jewel, Slash, Ted Nugent, Marianne Faithfull, Angela Bowie, Jim Hutton (boyfriend of Freddie Mercury), and Christopher Ciccone (brother of Madonna). The group on stage — which includes Penelope Houston, Carletta Sue Kay, Jennifer Maerz, and more — will extract tales of Olympic-level drug use, epic bands fights, and rock star trials and tribulations, giving the audience just a taste of that wild ride to infamy. (Emily Savage)

7 p.m., $15

Make-Out Room

3225 22nd St., SF

(415) 647-2888

www.makeoutroom.com

 

THURSDAY 23

Big Black Delta

Big Black Delta is the solo project of Los Angeles maestro Jonathan Bates, lead singer of lo-fi rock band Mellowdrone. Legend has it Bates launched BBD after buying a used laptop off frequent Nine Inch Nails collaborator Alessandro Cortini and using it to create electronic soundscapes. Good thing too, because BBDLP1 is a crafty compilation made up of equal parts power and panache. “Huggin & Kissin” sounds so aggressive, it’s as if Depeche Mode’s synths decided to take steroids and beat up little kids. On the flip side, “Dreary Moon” with Morgan Kibby (the Romanovs, M83) has all the ethereal, vocal playfulness of an Air track. Bates brings in dueling drummers Mahsa Zargaran and Amy Wood for the live show. (Kevin Lee)

With New Diplomat, Aaron Axelsen & Nako 9 p.m., $10–<\d>$12 Rickshaw Stop 155 Fell, SF (415) 861-2011 www.rickshawstop.com

 

FRIDAY 24

“More Light”

If you’re up for a dose of reifying pessimism, check out “More Light” —a joint exhibition featuring new works by Francesco Deiana and Lafe Harley Eaves. In an effort to explore how society diverts humans from primordial joys, Deiana creates ballpoint pen drawings and images on photographic paper that juxtapose society’s adulterating tendencies with natural beauty (e.g. a drawing of an impenetrable brick wall flushed with a photograph of the ocean). Eaves, who’s said he views the world as “one dark joke after another,” makes line and pattern narratives that delve into the occult, religion, and the psychedelic. He also focuses on illustrating human duality and the uncertainty of relationships. (Mia Sullivan)

7 p.m. opening reception, free

Park Life

220 Clement, SF

(415) 386-7275

www.parklifestore.com

 

Image Comic Expo

With San Francisco’s WonderCon moving to Anaheim while Moscone Center South undergoes renovation, Image Comic Expo in Oakland is the primary destination for Bay Area comic book nerdery this season. Instead of focusing on Marvel and DC — the comics industry’s “Big Two” — the Expo bills itself as a “celebration of creator-owned comics.” Exhibitors include a number of independent publishers besides Berkeley-based Image Comics. Guests include Image luminaries Rob Liefeld, Todd McFarlane, and Robert Kirkman (The Walking Dead), plus fan favorites Jonathan Hickman (FF, Pax Romana), Joe Casey (Gødland), Brian K. Vaughan (Y: The Last Man, ABC’s Lost) and Blair Butler. (Sam Stander)

Fri/24, 3-8 p.m.; Sat/25, 10 a.m.-6 p.m.; Sun/26, 10 a.m.-5 p.m., $20–$150

Oakland Convention Center 550 10th St., Oakl.

www.imagecomicexpo.com

 

Dave Holland Overtone Quartet

English bassist Dave Holland came to the United States at the request of the legendary Miles Davis and became part of music lore as part of the quartet that birthed jazz fusion and its opus, Bitches Brew (Columbia). Holland has since worked with a number of jazz masters including Herbie Hancock, Stan Getz, Thelonious Monk and Chick Corea. When Holland was coming into his own as a musician in the 1970s, the rest of the Overtone Quartet were just entering into the world. But saxophonist Chris Potter (a frequent Holland collaborator), drummer Eric Harland (a SFJazz Collective performer) and pianist Jason Moran (a MacArthur Fellowship “Genius”) have established themselves as potent forces in their own right. (Lee)

8 p.m., $25–$65

Palace of Fine Arts

3301 Lyon, SF

(415) 567-6642

www.sfjazz.org

 

“Oracle and Enigma”

For a while, thanks to a series of festivals organized by producer Brechin Flournoy, San Francisco was the place in the country to see Butoh. The excitement and puzzlement surrounding the art has died down as it has simply become another form of international dance. So it should be good to again see one of its original practitioners, the Kyoto-born Katsura Kan who in 1997 moved to Thailand and has since become one of those peripatetic choreographer-dancers who takes inspiration from wherever he alights. As part of his winter residency at CounterPULSE, Kan and Shoshana Green will present “Oracle and Enigma” which they describe as “a journey towards the celestial horizon”. Sounds like Butoh . (Rita Felciano)

Fri/24-Sat/25, 8 p.m., $18–<\d>$20

CounterPULSE

1310 Mission, SF

(800) 350-8850

www.counterpulse.org

 

SATURDAY 25

Monster Jam

A stampede of horsepower comes thundering into the Bay Area today with the Monster Jam series of monster truck races and events, featuring 16 ground-shaking custom creations such as the long-running fan favorite “Grave Digger,” which is celebrating its 30th anniversary this year. Fans can get up close and personal with the burly behemoths during the afternoon “Party In The Pits” before the night’s main events, where the 10,000 pound muscle machines will fly through the air at distances up to 130 feet, reach heights up to 35 feet in the air, and of course, gloriously smash a series a puny regular cars. (Sean McCourt)

3-6 p.m. pit party, 7 p.m. main event; $12.50–<\d>$32, $125 for total access pass

O.co Coliseum

7000 Coliseum Way, Oakl.

(800) 745-3000

www.monsterjam.com

 

“Cum and Glitter: A Live Sex Show”

Perhaps you’re one of those people — that yes, do exist — left nonplussed by your standard strip club experience. Let’s face it, fried chicken buffets and atrocious choreography amplified by glitter platform heels don’t do it for us all. For you, then, queer pornographer Maxine Holloway’s new monthly sex show. Holloway, a vintage-loving local coquette, has bolstered her sex industry chops heading Madison Young’s women’s only POV website and used her connections to line up a crack cast for Cum and Glitter’s opening night: Kitty Stryker, Courtney Trouble, and Annika Amour among other superlative sex workers. Live cello music. Specialty cocktails named after the performers. Class. (Caitlin Donohue)

9 p.m., $30–$55 individuals, $50 couples

RSVP for location

www.cumandglitter.com

 

SUNDAY 26

“Up the Oscars!”

For a particular breed of movie fiend, the Academy Awards are more like a sporting event than a glamorous celebration of Hollywood. You know the type: catcalling the screen like they’re giving a blind ref the business (2006 flashback: “Crash? Are you fucking kidding me? Brokeback Mountain forever!”) This year’s ceremony will no doubt evoke its own array of passionate responses to awkward presenters and awkward gowns, omissions from the Tribute to the Dead, faux-surprised winners who unfurl pre-scripted lists of people to thank (“My agent! My masseuse!”), etc. The Roxie’s annual “Up the Oscars!” bash is aimed squarely at those who enjoy cheering and jeering the gold man in equal measure. D.I.Y. drinking games optional. (Cheryl Eddy)

3:45 p.m., $15

Roxie Theater

3117 16th St., SF

www.roxie.com

 

Stardust Sunday

Cover band? Try cover cult. The First Church of the Sacred Silversexual takes all the Christ allusions David Bowie made with The Rise and Fall of Ziggy Stardust and the Spiders from Mars and The Man Who Fell to Earth, exorcising one little bit — Jesus. The resulting mass is a blasphemous celebration of the 65-year-young rock God’s music. With as many members as Bowie has personas, all fully embracing their deity’s love of costume, the Church’s service has the campy theatricality of The Rocky Horror Picture Show and all the sparkle of a Ken Russell movie. (Ryan Prendiville)

With Space Cowboys DJs Mancub and 8Ball

8 p.m., $5

Public Works

161 Erie, SF

(415) 932-0955

www.publicsf.com

 

The Dodos

Listening to the Dodos kind of makes you feel like you’re part of a drum march that’s heading down a sunny country road via Brooklyn. Logan Kroeber, who’s been known to play a drum kit sans bass and to tape a tambourine to his foot, creates catchy rhythms that compel you to dance frenetically (really, it’s unavoidable), while lead vocalist Meric Long finger-picks an acoustic guitar and traverses the octaves with deep, introspective lyrics you can’t help Googling. This San Francisco-based indie folk duo most recently released fourth album, No Color (Frenchkiss) last year, and is closing out Noise Pop this year with what will likely be a memorable performance. (Sullivan)

With Au, Cannons and Clouds, Here Here

7 p.m., $20

Great American Music Hall

859 O’Farrell, SF

(415) 885-0750

www.gamh.com

 

MONDAY 27

Leslie and the LY’s

Long known for her 1980s-esque minimal dance-pop numbers encased in stretchy gold lame (referred to in “Gold Pants”), and even longer for her extensive bejeweled sweater collection (ahem, “Gem Sweater”), Leslie of Leslie and the LY’s boasts a newish additional talent to add to the mix: wedding officiant. The Ames, IA-based confetti-puke performance artist began officiating weddings when Iowa voted yes on gay marriage in 2009. The weddings she oversees are said to twinkle with her typical megawatt star quality — there’s even a documentary about one affair called Married in Spandex — and Mother Gem performs a personalized dance number for each lucky couple. While she may not be hosting any impromptu weddings during her appearance at Rickshaw this week, the world just feels more glamorous knowing that she could (for this, we listen to “Power Cuddle”). (Savage)

With Pennyhawk, Ramona & the Swimsuits

8 p.m., $13

Rickshaw Stop

(415) 861-2011

155 Fell, SF

www.rickshawstop.com

 

TUESDAY 28

Stephen Malkmus and the Jicks

Following 2010’s high profile Pavement reunion tour — which gave fans of the ’90s alternative rockers a chance to see the group live for the first or last time (as well as reportedly giving some of the members funds to pay off some financial debts) — leader Stephen Malkmus returned to the studio with his band the Jicks to record an album with Beck on board as producer. The result, Mirror Traffic, carries over the tour’s energy, and is the closest thing to a Terror Twilight follow-up to date. And as showcased by the Jicks’s all-too-short performance at the last Treasure Island Music Festival, Malkmus remains the slacker king of the nonchalant guitar solo. (Prendiville)

With Nurses

8 p.m., $20

Slim’s

333 11th St., SF

(415) 255-0333

www.slimspresents.com 

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The sex worker struggle

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The sex worker struggle

yael@sfbg.com

Google has come under fire in the past year for everything from privacy policies to censorship. But in December, some Bay Area residents were protesting the tech giant for a very different reason. The group that marched in front of the company’s San Francisco office was angry over the company’s donation to organizations fighting human trafficking.

The flyers declared, “Google: Please fund non-judgmental services for sex workers, NOT the morality crusaders that dehumanize us!”

Google had donated a whopping $11.5 million to organizations that “fight slavery” last December, including the anti-sex trafficking groups International Justice Mission, Polaris Project, and Not For Sale.

But the activists said that these are religious organizations that ignored the rights of consensual sex workers.

According to a press release from Sex Worker Activists, Allies, and You (SWAAY), “As frontline sex-worker support services struggle for funding to serve their communities, it is offensive to watch Google shower money upon a wealthy faith-based group like the International Justice Mission, which took in nearly $22 million in 2009 alone.”

“I appreciate what they’re trying to do, but I wish that they had done more research,” Kitty Stryker, a local performer, sex worker and activist, of Google’s choice to fund the organizations.

In a society where the term “sex worker” — coined to describe those who consensually engage in commercial sex and consider it legitimate labor — is still new to most people, this sex workers rights struggle can be an uphill battle. But it rages on, and San Francisco remains one of its most important front lines.

 

FREE SEX FOR HIRE

The heart of the struggle is, and or years has been, fighting the prohibition of prostitution, and the ultimate goal of the sex workers movement is the repeal of the laws that criminalize sex for hire. Decriminalization would be a vital safety measure for escorts, people working on the street, phone-sex operators, exotic dancers, porn actors, and other occupations that fall under the umbrella category of sex work.

Sex workers held worldwide conferences in the 1980s, meeting in Amsterdam and Brussels. Sex work was legalized and decriminalized in several countries around the world, including New Zealand, the Netherlands and Germany. The Sex Workers Outreach Project (SWOP) became one of the most important organizations fighting for the cause, with chapters around the world.

Here in San Francisco, the city remains a hub for sex-workers rights advocates, who raise awareness about issues ranging from STD prevention to consent in BDSM contexts. The Saint James Infirmary supports and treats sex workers when they need medical assistance, and the Center for Sex and Culture is a resource and community center that embraces all San Franciscan’s with their minds in the gutter, sex industry workers included.

San Francisco’s sex workers rights history includes two unions. Workers at the North Beach strip club the Lusty Lady formed the Exotic Dancers Union in 1997. The union became part of the Service Employees International Union, and the Lusty Lady remains the only collectively run, sex-worker-owned strip club in the United States.

Maxine Doogan founded the Erotic Service Providers Union (ESPU) in 2004 as an umbrella organization for sex workers in various industries. The ESPU has been active in opposing regulations of the massage industry and sponsoring Proposition K, a 2008 ballot measure that would have decriminalized sex work in San Francisco.

I spoke to a handful of Bay Area sex-workers rights activists to get a sense of the major issues and priorities for the next year.

NO VISAS

Activists are currently planning for the July, 2012 International AIDS Conference in Washington, D.C.

Many international sex workers rights advocates have been denied visas to get to the conference. The U.S. typically bars convicted felons — but there’s a special exception for people guilty of misdemeanor prostitution charges.

“SWOP has an idea of getting in touch with some of the people denied entrance and asking them what they were going to present on and to try and present their papers in their place, to make sure these organizers voices are heard,” said SWOP-Bay Area spokesperson Shannon Williams.

But that’s not where the government’s weird exclusion of sex workers from its efforts to fight AIDS ends.

The Presidents Emergency Plan for AIDS Relief (PEPFAR) fund allocates $48 billion to organizations around the world engaged in AIDS treatment and prevention. But thanks to the religious right, the law, approved in 2003, includes a stipulation that all recipient groups must make a pledge decrying prostitution. It’s known as the “anti-prostitution loyalty oath.”

A court ruling July 6, 2011 declared the oath a violation of the free-speech rights of organizations in the United States, but the U.S. still blocks PEPFAR funding for international organizations based on the “loyalty oath.”

“Sex worker activists are going to converge in D.C. for the AIDS conference and talk about the loyalty oath. The US is exporting its ideology through this funding requirement” said Carol Leigh, a longtime activist who curates the annual San Francisco Sex Worker Film and Art Festival.

 

EMPHASIZING CONSENT

Sex workers rights activists continue to be engaged in their complex, decades-long struggle with anti-sex trafficking organizations.

People who want safer working conditions say that decriminalization would make it easier for police to distinguish between coerced and consensual prostitution and encourage those with knowledge of crimes perpetuated against sex workers to come forward without risking prosecution for their own illegal work.

But many anti-trafficking advocates dismiss the distinction between forced and consensual prostitution in their efforts. According to a document called “Ten reasons for not legalizing prostitution,” on the website of the Coalition Against Trafficking in Women, “There is no doubt that a small number of women say they choose to be in prostitution, especially in public contexts orchestrated by the sex industry… In this situation, it is harm to the person, not the consent of the person that is the governing standard (emphasis theirs).”

It’s this refusal to acknowledge the importance of consent that really pisses off advocates —and has a powerful effect on the policy that governs them.

The federal definition of sex trafficking includes consensual prostitution, and defines coerced prostitution as “severe sex trafficking.” “Law enforcement agencies can use anti-trafficking funds to arrest sex workers in prostitution, on the grounds that the feds define all prostitution as trafficking, even though the government distinguishes between trafficking and severe trafficking,” said one sex workers rights activist.

According to Leigh, anti-trafficking organizations are not all bad; she named the Global Alliance Against Traffic in Women as an organization that “has been allied with sex workers rights movement and takes rights-based approach.”

But organizations that conflate consensual and coerced commercial sex are often big-time recipients of public and private funding.

Doogan is wary of any attempt to further regulate or criminalize sex work. She says that often, laws meant to deter prostitution trap people who may want to change occupations.  “Women have to continue working in the industry because no one else will take them for work when they have those convictions on their record,” said Doogan.

That may be the case with Lola, an occasional Erotic Service Providers Union volunteer who was arrested on prostitution-related charges outside California earlier this year. She moved to the Bay Area and is looking for a job, but after a promising interview last week, she’s nervous that a background check will reveal her arrest.

“I’m waiting to hear whether that’s going to be an issue or not. They could tell my landlord, and then I could lose my house too…all I’m trying to do is get a job,” Lola told the Guardian.

 

THE WORK GOES ON

For most sex-workers rights activists, the long-term goal remains decriminalization. For now education, creative projects, and protest in service of that goal continue.

Members of SWOP-Bay Area have a program called Whorespeak that does outreach at colleges, and “we’ve also been speaking in classes for therapists about how to work with current and former sex workers and not pathologize them,” said Williams.

According to Stryker, one of the most exciting projects happening now is Karma Pervs. The website, run by local queer porn star Jiz Lee, sells unique sex-positive porn and donates the proceeds to organizations like the Saint James Infirmary.

Then, of course, there’s the International Day to End Violence Against Sex Workers, when sex workers and allies gather to commemorate sex workers who have been assaulted and killed.

Sex workers often can’t go to police to report crimes for fear of being locked up themselves, society retains a huge stigma surrounding sex work, and there is an insidious cultural myth that “you can’t rape a prostitute.” These all add up to put sex workers at high risk for assault and murder; serial killers, such as the Green River Killer in Seattle and a murdered in Long Island-area this past summer, are disproportionately likely to target prostitutes.

That’s why, for Williams, “Our long-term goal is to decriminalize prostitution. But the real goal is to end violence against sex workers.”

On the Cheap Listings

Andrew Lam
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Submit items for the listings at listings@sfbg.com. For further information on how to submit items for the listings, see Picks.

WEDNESDAY 25

Bring Me Men: Military Masculinity and the Benign Facade of American Empire author presentation University Press Books, 2430 Bancroft Way, Berk. (510) 548-0585, www.universitypressbooks.com. 6-7:30 p.m., free. Author Aaron Belkin explores the hyper-masculine construction of our armed forces, and the glaring contradictions that lie therein.

Ryan Boudinot’s Blueprints of the Afterlife reading Booksmith, 1644 Haight, SF. (415) 863-8688, www.booksmith.com. 7:30 p.m., free. The apocalypse is undeniably white-like-fire hot these days, what with it being about to happen in 11 months and all. Author Ryan Boudinot is happy to get your cognitive juices flowing on the matter – his new book Blueprints of the Afterlife takes place during the days when glaciers are ravaging the United States’ landscape and human beings’ nervous systems can be hacked.

THURSDAY 26

Author reading: James Martel on Walter Benjamin’s anti-sovereignty theories University Press Books, 2430 Bancroft Way, Berk. (510) 548-0585, www.universitypressbooks.com. 6-7:30 p.m., free. SF State associate professor of political science Martel has written a pair of books that look to dismantle the false choice we are presented between anarchy and sovereignty. His solution to these limited options: the divine game-changing forces presented in the works of German-Jewish intellectual Walter Benjamin.

“Picturing the Contemporary Arts in Ms. Magazine: A Chronological Journey” art exhibit Yerba Buena Center for the Arts, 701 Mission, SF. (415) 978-2700, www.ybca.org. Through Sun/29. Thu-Sat, noon-8 p.m.; Sun, noon-6 p.m. Since founding editor Gloria Steinham’s talk at Stanford University today is sold out, get your 40 years of Ms. Magazine fix at this free art exhibit, for which YBCA has bedecked its lobby with iconic images from the last four decades of the seminal feminist publication.

“Sex Work and Consent” conversation Center for Sex and Culture, 1349 Mission, SF. www.sexandculture.org. 8 p.m., $10 suggested, no one turned away for lack of funds. Sex workers and community leaders will gather round to discuss consent-rape culture in our society – and there will be a Good Vibrations swag raffle to boot.

Lily Renée, Escape Artist: From Holocaust Survivor to Comic Book Pioneer author presentation Cartoon Art Museum, 655 Mission, SF. (415) CAR-TOON, www.cartoonart.org. 7-9 p.m., free. Trina Robbins wrote (and drew) the book on Renée, a 14-year-old Austrian Jewish girl who fled the Nazis, only to become a dynamic member of the 1960s underground comic scene.

SATURDAY 28

“The Wisdom of Compassion: Teachings with Patrick Gaffney” Rigpa San Francisco Center, 111 New Montgomery, SF. (866) 200-5876, www.rigpabayarea.org. 10 a.m.-5 p.m., free-$50 sliding scale. Sogyal Rinpoche’s most senior student (co-editor of Rinpoche’s The Tibetan Book of Living and Dying) teaches on how to get meditation and compassion into your life in a meaningful way.

“All You Can Dance For $5” Alonzo King LINES dance marathon Alonzo King LINES Dance Center, 26 Seventh St., SF. (415) 863-3040 x221, www.linesballet.org. 1-5 p.m., $5. Never mind lapsed New Year’s resolutions: this afternoon-long event will get you sweating without all that silly gym-angst (or sign-up fees). The well-loved dance company is offering a sampling of its classes – from hip-hop and ballet, to modern and jazz.

Treasure Island Flea Market One Avenue of the Palms, Treasure Island. www.treasureislandflea.com. Also Sun/29. 10 a.m.- 5 p.m., free. Though it’s moved indoors until March, Treasure Island’s oasis of all things old and unique continues to be your go-to monthly spot for quirky home furnishings, bike, clothes, and all kinds of more.

Golden Gate Kennel Club Dog Show Cow Palace, 2600 Geneva, Daly City. www.goldengatekc.com. Also Sun/29. 8:30 a.m.-5 p.m., $12. A plethora of historic events fill the Cow Palace each year — the Grand National Rodeo, weed expos galore, Cirque Du Soliel – but few feature arenas full of fluffy yappers. This dog show is over 100 years old, but still has new tricks. Among the breeds that will be featured for the first time in 2012 are the Swedish valihund and the cane corso.

Good Vibrations Lakeshore Avenue opening party Good Vibrations, 3219 Lakeshore, Oakl. www.goodvibes.com. 6-9 p.m., free. If the born-in-SF sex toy brand’s continued world domination — and new Oakland store — isn’t enough cause for celebration, know that Kani Burress of Real Housewives of Atlanta will be in attendance today, hyping her toy line Bedroom Kandi.

SUNDAY 29

Oakland Museum of California’s Lunar New Year celebration Oakland Museum of California, 1000 Oak, Oakl. (510) 238-2200, www.museumca.org. Noon-4:30 p.m., free with $12 museum admission. Learn to pound mochi, take in Korean drumming and storytelling performances, and get educated on the meaning of Fred Korematsu Day through a presentation by the daughter of the civil rights activist who fled when the US government ordered all Japanese-Americans placed in internment camps during WWII. It’s all here at this event to celebrate the entering of (the year of) the dragon.

MONDAY 30

[SSEX BBOX] sexuality documentary premiere Center For Sex and Culture, 1349 Mission, SF. www.sexandculture.org. 7:30-10 p.m., free. Witness the culmination of this international film project’s world travels, in which its team talked about living and loving outside the box with sex educators, writers, and just plain old hotties. You’ll have the opportunity to meet the director and crew after the film’s screening.

Review: Keep it couch-side for Courtney Trouble’s latest Live Sex Show

Andrew Lam
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3

The phrase “live sex show” invokes a history of glitzy spectacle designed for the viewer eager to escape the intimate, nuanced relationships of home. But a recently released film from director Courtney Trouble turns that idea on its head. Filmed at the Center for Sex and Culture’s annual Masturbate-A-Thon, every scene from Trouble’s Live Sex Show (Trouble Films) takes places on and around a grand green couch – and the live sex that takes place is as intimate and nuanced as it gets.

The sex in the film range from peeks that make the viewer feel voyeristic,  to fourth-wall breaking performative coupling, and actors seem to be having tons of fun playing with these varying approaches. 

Jolene Parton and Peter Devries fuck in a way that feels unaltered from if they had been on a couch in their living room. They switch between positions naturally, and do not strain to “open up” for the camera as mainstream porn actors are taught to do. Nonetheless, the scene delivers super-sexy shots of tits, ass, genitals, and sweaty orgasms – not to mention hot cuddling action after climax. 

Tina Horn and Roger Wood power-play their way through a spanking and strap-on scene, screaming and grunting with a gusto that straddles the line between “real sex” and “performance.”  In one nice moment, their movements end naturally and morph into a bow that is greeted with cheers from the audience. When the two realize they’re not being yanked with a cane, however, they shrug and keep fucking. 

This show’s indisputable main attraction is a scene with legendary porn star and sex positive crusader Nina Hartley and the young, wildly popular Jiz Lee. These two play to the audience, delivering a wonderful comedy routine-anatomy lesson-crash course in how tell your partner what you want during sex. 

Their scene does with joy and ease what the sex workers’ rights movement has been working on for years; it makes it clear that porn actors are workers who spend time having sex on camera, but who are also complete human beings with real lives and real desires. It’s sexy and exciting when, faced with Lee’s dripping pussy and smiling face Hartley exclaims, “I love my job!”

It’s also unashamedly political. Ditto Hartley’s expert dirty talk—“you’re so tight, so slick, so strong,” she moans to Lee during the fisting. Commenting on the strength of vaginal muscles is almost as unexpected as the scene’s end, with Hartley asking Lee about college majors. 

One of the ideas of queer porn is that it is made by and for people who have been oppressed and not considered part of the sexual “norm”—those with nonwhite, trans, queer, hairy, natural bodies, among others. 

People like this are often in mainstream porn, but framed as fetishes. Watching lesbians, strap-on, trans people, interracial sex is considered kinky. 

Like all good queer porn, Live Sex Show shows that when not “normal” people have sex, it’s about their own enjoyment; not who’s watching.  Wood fucks Horn with a strap on, and both parties are clearly having a blast. Lee can’t get enough of the fact that great sexcapade with icon Hartley, and brags about it to the audience. When the audience whoops and cheers, you can tell it’s because they’re just that pleased to see hot performers having such a great time.

In the immortal words of the Lady Gaga parody that went viral on YouTube, “Queer Porn this Way”: “Porn that humanizes is so hot, you’ll want that shit on DVD.” 

Yeah, you probably will.

Pick up your copy of Live Sex Show at www.courtneytrouble.com/films

The Bay Guardian respects all gender identities and preferred pronouns. This post was updated per Jiz Lee’s request to be referred to as ‘they.’

High whore holy day: A San Francisco tradition turns nine

Andrew Lam
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4

It was Saturday, December 17. A jazz funeral was being held for victims of violence against sex workers at the Center for Sex and Culture. Post-event, its message was still resonating in its attendees. “The holiday was beautiful,” sex activist and post-porn star Annie Sprinkle told the Guardian about the ninth year of the International Day to End Violence Against Sex Workers that she helped to found. 

The tradition goes back to 2003, when hundreds of sex workers and their allies came together on the steps of San Francisco’s City Hall. Gary Ridgeway, Seattle’s “Green River Killer,” had just been convicted, having confessed to murdering 90 women over 20 years before he was caught. Prostitutes, he said, “were easy to pick up without being noticed…I thought I could kill as many of them as I wanted without getting caught.”

Bay Area performance artist and long-time sex worker Sprinkle was incensed. She teamed up with Robyn Few of the Sex Workers Outreach Project (SWOP) to create an event that would raise awareness about the abuse experienced by workers in the sex industry. 

The event has now spread to the far corners of the earth. Last Saturday, vigils, marches, and educational events to commemorate the day took place from Chicago to Cape Town. 

Kitty Stryker, a local sex worker and performer who worked as stage manager for San Francisco’s event, said that the mood in 2011 was more celebratory this year. There were spoken word, humor and musical performances that “were celebratory and fierce and fighting back, and performances that were more introspective and hurt, understanding that these things come in balance,” she said.

“It wasn’t all angry activism or all sad crying,” continued Stryker. “We wanted the event to be a celebration of people who are still here with us, and support so we can continue to do this work.”

Sex workers rights groups decry coerced or forced prostitution, insisiting that many prostitutes have chosen their profession and deserve the same rights as other workers. This message conflicts with that of many anti-sex trafficking groups, who often conflate prostitution and sex trafficking, and depict all prostitutes as victims.

Sprinkle told the Guardian that the day is especially important because it is planned by and for sex workers and their allies. “It’s become a high holy day of whores. The one day that we all remember the real victims, not these made up situations. A lot of them are not victims, but people like to think we are.”

Sprinkle remembered the story of a friend who was raped and robbed while working as an escort in New York City. The friend reported the crime to the police, and the culprit was apprehended — along with the victim, who was arrested for being a prostitute. Many sex workers rights activists campaign for the decriminalization of sex work, arguing that if sex workers could report crimes against them to the police, it could help curb high rates of rape, robbery, assault and murder of sex workers. 

Sprinkle pointed out that sex work is not the only risky business out there. “Working in a convenience store or as a taxi driver is also very dangerous. Your risk being killed working at a 7/11.” 

The modern sex workers’ rights movement demanded the decrimalization of sex work, working to end the stigma against sex workers in the 1970s. San Francisco was the movement’s teeming center. Prostitutes marched on City Hall singing, “Everybody Needs a Hooker Once in Awhile.” Even Willie Brown attended the fabulous annual Hookers’ Ball.

And this year’s news stories provided a poignant reminder of the day’s importance. During last summer a serial killer targeting prostitutes in Long Island murdered eight women. He was the third Long Island-based serial killer in twenty years to target sex workers.

Sex workers may still be considered criminals. But if the now-decades-old sex workers rights movement has anything to say about it, that view will evolve in years to come. Hopefully someday we will all be able to walk the streets a little more safely.

It’s all in the angle

Jesse Hawthorne Ficks
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0
It’s all in the angle

caitlin@sfbg.com

SEX “It’s hard when you’re making out with a babe and it’s really hot and you realize you’ve been videotaping a wall for two minutes.”

No one ever said that making self-filmed feminist porn was easy. But for local self-proclaimed “slut kitten” Maxine Holloway, it’s an important — and incredibly arousing — process. Holloway is the newest webmistress on Femina Potens gallery founder and sex activist Madison Young’s Feminist Porn Network. Holloway’s sub-site Woman’s POV (www.thewomanspov.com) is perhaps the first to feature only shoots which are filmed by the actors themselves — the letters in the title standing in for “point of view,” of course.

Hence, her phone interview with the Guardian last week had turned to tricky camera angles. It can be incredibly difficult to film your own orgasm, Holloway says. But she’s learned a lot since her first POV scene (in case you were wondering, it involved a passel of “Italian babes” and a hotel room). The key, she says, lies in reconfiguring the way you look at having sex on camera — which inevitably involves spending a lot more time in your viewfinder.

Which is not necessarily a bad thing. “You see things that you wouldn’t normally have the time to focus on,” Holloway explains. “Twitching fingers, a hand on a thigh that looks amazing.”

And she’s hoping that fingers will walk to the site to check out its clothes-on segments, also. “We have these really sexy, amazing, vivacious women on our website, and I want people to lust and jerk off to them. But I also want them to hear what they have to say.” Woman’s POV has posted interviews with Kink.com fetish model Eden Alexander on what it’s like to work in the porn industry. Holloway has penned educational letters to the syphilis infection (Hitler, Van Gogh, Beethoven, and Lincoln, it says, were all rumored to be victims of the STI), and conducted an interview with erotic comedian and dandigrrl AfroDisiac.

“We’re showing the wholeness of what makes women attractive,” she says. “It’s not just their breasts or how they fuck, it’s what’s on their minds.” Bay Area women will have a chance to be featured on the site at Mission Control’s monthly queer sex-dance party Velvet on Fri/2 — Holloway and Young will be trucking out a dirty videobooth for self-filmed couplings (or singlings), not to mention conducting a workshop on the empowering and relationship-boosting aspects of filming your hook-ups with a partner. It will be a “fun and safe place for people to explore their exhibitionism on camera,” promises Holloway.

This kind of multi-lateral approach to sexuality is just what Young intended when she started her first website, Madison Bound, in 2005. Although she was already a successful sex performer who had been curating sex-art shows at Femina Potens for five years — having recently pulled together “White Picket Fences”, a multi-disciplinary look at what family and future mean to local queer artists and sex workers — she found the web to be a particularly useful tool when it came to advocating alternative sexualities.

“The Internet has the capacity to reach a lot more people,” she told the Guardian on a recent afternoon in the large, white Mission-Bernal Heights studio that is serving as the Femina Potens office space while the gallery is between brick and mortar locations. “I’m a girl from Southern Ohio and I’m always thinking about the girl from back there.” Despite her central role in a burgeoning alt sex community here in the Bay Area, she feels a responsibility to make images of queer sex available for Middle America. “You’re just not going to have this stuff happen in front of you in Iowa.” Other subsites on the Feminist Porn Network include Perversions of Lesbian Lust, a slutty take on lesbian pop novels, and Femifist, a site devoted to the much-maligned practice of fisting.

Young has known Holloway for years — Holloway has hosted many of Femina Potens’ “Other View” panel discussions on BDSM, consent, and the anti-rape movement — and over the past two has watched her develop a distinctive voice when it comes to directing porn. “I wanted Woman’s POV to be a place where she could explore that voice,” she says. “It’s super empowering for [the webmistresses and actors] because they’re able to find out what they think is hot. Women aren’t usually put in that position to be able to find what turns them on. People are like ‘oh my god that’s hot. Oh my god that’s me!'”

That kind of discovery, Holloway says, isn’t just sexy — it strikes back at the disempowering way that society treats sex workers. She mentions that she sees the site as an important step in the sex workers’ rights movement. When asked to elaborate, she says that the movement’s about “the ability to support yourself safely and creatively.” In other words, it’s not enough to have a safe working environment for adult film actors — although that’s important too. It’s important that sex workers have the opportunity to portray the kind of intimacy that turns them on. What better way to do that than hand them the camera? 

VELVET

Fri/2 8 p.m.-2 a.m., $20 free membership required

Mission Control

Private location, see website for details

www.missioncontrolsf.org

www.womanspov.com 

 

Period piece: The San Francisco prostitute march of 1917

Andrew Lam
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One morning in January 1917, 300 prostitutes marched into the church of their biggest detractor, Reverend Paul J. Smith. They were ready to show the anti-vice crusader what they were made of. The women were organizing in the face of what had become a decades-long dwindling of their rights, spearheaded by the reverend himself.

The world’s oldest profession flourished in brothels all over the city during the Gold Rush, thanks to all those lonely 49ers. But sex work has never been uncontroversial — and the local practice quickly accumulated its own critics.

Officials began cracking down on city brothels in the 1850s, slowly pushing them into tinier and tinier spaces. By 1909, sex work had been ghettoized in the Chinatown neighborhood and in 1911, to an even tinier strip of city known as the Barbary Coast. 

The 300 prostitutes had some community support, even a municipal clinic supposed to cater to their needs. But weekly checkups were mandatory. Anyone who refused could be arrested.

Reverend Smith took a hard line against what he saw as the heart of San Francisco’s vice. With friends, he gathered data on nightly wanderings through houses of ill repute (next time you find yourself in a gallivanting bachelor party, just use the “collecting evidence” excuse). Smith aggressively proposed a “state farm” – olden speak for rehab – for the sex workers, insisting he had their moral wellbeing at heart. 

The Reverend stepped on a few toes on the way, accusing police and politicians of having their hands in the pockets and up the skirts of brothels. An obviously annoyed Mayor James Rolph published an open letter in the San Francisco Chronicle lampooning Smith’s idea for a state farm. “I fail to see how it is proposed to reform the women by putting them on a farm. Is it your idea to make them milkmaids?”

But Smith’s most compelling challengers were the prostitutes themselves, who crowded into the reverend’s church the day of their march asking what, exactly, his intentions were for his campaign of persecution. 

“Are you trying to reform us or are you trying to reform social conditions?” asked one woman. Smith proposed that the sex workers turn to alternate professions where they would earn the minimum wage – $10 a week, half of what the prostitutes estimated they made through sex work. His suggestion was met with laughter.

“What ship are you going to send us away on?” challenged another. Smith brought up the possibility of doing housework, presumably while being financially dependent on a husband (numerous men, in fact, had written the reverend looking to be fixed up with a good-looking fallen woman). 

“What woman wants to work in a kitchen?” a member of the crowd shouted. 

Citing his “impassioned critics,” the reverend adjourned the meeting. By Valentine’s Day, the anti-vice movement forced a roundup of more than a thousand working women from city brothels and dance halls. 

But for a brief moment, sex workers native and foreign, young, old, and middle-aged, had made their voices heard in a city mostly hostile to their existence. At the time, the Chronicle characterized the march as “one of the strangest gatherings that ever took place in San Francisco.” 

Yeah right. In any case, “strange” isn’t the right word.

 

Get on the bus: St. James Infirmary’s new sex worker PSAs are

Andrew Lam
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3

St. James Infirmary has been providing free, non-judgmental medical and social services for sex workers since 1999. This week, it’ll take the next step. The clinic is putting ads up in Muni buses throughout the city this month meant to educate and inspire Muni riders throughout the city.  

But the campaign, entitled “Someone you know is a sex worker,” won’t be seen on a billboard near you. The ads, which feature actual sex workers, were rejected outright by both Clear Channel and CBS Outdoor before transit ad company Titan 360 agreed to the bus campaign.

You can preview the controversial images — as well as mingle with fabulous people who work for the health and safety of Bay Area sex workers every day — at an exhibit and launch party on Sun/16.

Artist Rachel Schreiber — who created the campaign with photographer Barbara DeGenevieve, and whom the Guardian reached by phone yesterday — thinks advertisers may be hesitant to seem aligned with sex workers rights.

“The anti-trafficking community has such a monopoly on the voice of the issue that I think people are afraid to speak out in another way. People are afraid of being perceived as not supporting that position. Anti-trafficking campaigns are really well funded, often overstated and under researched. Of course we are anti-trafficking and one of our big goals is to fight violence against sex workers”

“There are a lot of people who work in the industry by choice,” she continues. “And everyone deserves access to labor rights and health care and shouldn’t be stigmatized.”

The 27 individuals — sex workers as well as friends and family members of sex workers — who agreed to have their portraits and quotes displayed are taking a risk. It can be dangerous for sex workers to let their identities be known to the public. But Schreiber praised the participants for taking that risk for the good of the sex workers rights movement.

“There are a lot of activists in the community who are willing to go out on a limb…one impressive feature of this community is their support for one another, their willingness to go public to make the topic less secretive and stigmatized,” she says. 

Campaign slogans include “sex work is real work” and “sex workers rights are human rights.” Those are central tenets of the sex worker rights movement, which strives to gain respect and rights for everyone from legal workers like adult film performers and dancers to people who work illegally, including those who exchange sex for survival or sustenance. 

Most sex workers go to great lengths to separate their sex work from the rest of their lives. Schreiber notes a case where a high school teacher in Berkeley was outed, and lost her teaching job as a result. 

“We have a really intense social and cultural taboo against the notion that people trade sex for any kind of money,” says Schreiber. “It’s really deeply ingrained.” She says other, legal occupations, present similar challenges. 

“Agricultural workers, they’re using their bodies and their bodies are in harm’s way. Same with construction workers,” she goes on to say. “Sex work, yes it’s a form of labor that uses the body, but just because it involves sexuality its taboo is blown out of proportion.”

 

“Someone you know is a sex worker” campaign launch

Sun/16 5-8 p.m., $10 suggested donation

 Intersection for the Arts

925 Mission, SF

www.stjamesinfirmary.org

 

Hot sexy events: October 12-18

Andrew Lam
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What does the future look like for our alternative sexuality community? While the political system borders on redundancy and no one cares about it anymore, perhaps now’s the time to turn our focus inward. Two projects are in the works to look at the interior world of queers – and they both could use a hand from you.

First up, Madison Young and Femina Potens’ “Building Our Own Picket Fences,” a group art show that will turn FP’s new gallery space into a series of experiencial multimedia projects. Young, Midori, Monica Canilao, Mev Luna, Amelia Reiff Hill, and Harrison Bartlett have been selected to depict what their new family traditions look like. 

“As a child I knew I didn’t want to exist within that traditional construct of that white picket fence,” says Young in her Kickstarter video (yep, the project is looking for $5,000). “I want the white picket fence, but I want it my way.”

Wanting it your way is a prerequisite if you’re going to help out filmmaker Danielle Fernández.  Fernández is creating a documentary called In My Room for the Queer Women of Color Media Arts Project, and – shocking, San Francisco! – needs your help in tracking down queers of color to invite her and her crew into their bedroom. Got what it takes? She’s asking interested party to send her a photo of themselves, their room, and a list of three things they do in their bedroom on a regular basis. Find more info here.  

Now, sex events. 

 

“Bawdy Storytelling: Infomaniac”

Semantics? Maybe, but words have power, baby – the power to entertain and arouse, in this event’s case. This month’s Bawdy features a Good Vibrations strap-on fashion show, and cerebral stories from Carol Queen, transgender comedian Morgan, Mollena, and slutty blogger Fleur De Lis.

Wed/12 8 p.m., $15

The Blue Macaw

2565 Mission, SF

www.bawdystorytelling.com


Jack Davis’ Penis Show

Look at it – Jack Davis’ singular passion, the crocheted penis. Struck by the number of women creating vulva art in his college art classes, Davis has been building the pincushion phalli for decades. View whole walls of them at this art opening in Good Vibes’ back gallery space. 

Thu/13 6-8 p.m., free

Good Vibrations

1620 Polk, SF

www.goodvibes.com


“Exploring the Taboos of Intimate Fun” with Frank Moore

Rub one out at this presentation by shaman-performer Frank Moore. He’s seeking to unlock a state of erotic friction called Lila. Finally, an excuse to dry hump like you mean it. 

Sat/15 8 p.m., sliding scale $5-$25

Center for Sex and Culture

1349 Mission, SF

www.sexandculture.org


Beatpig one-year anniversary

Walter Gomez and Juanita More take their drag-BDSM slutfest into its second year of existence tonight. Break down to More’s beats and knock back $1 shot specials. Even better? Your five bucks of cover go to fund the Transgender Law Center. See, it feels good to feel good – or bad, as the case might be. 

Sat/15 9 p.m.-2 a.m., $5

Powerhouse

1347 Folsom, SF

Facebook: Beatpig One-Year Anniversary


St. James Infirmary ad campaign launch 

The peer-based sex worker clinic is taking a bold move in its quest for justice for those that trade sex for funds. They’ll be placing ads featuring real sex workers on Muni buses all over town – putting them in the public eye and boldly asserting “You know a sexworker” (that’s the campaign’s title). Come eat, drink, and be merry with those involved at this reception. 

Sun/16 5-8 p.m., $10 suggested donation

Intersection for the Arts

925 Mission, SF

www.stjamesinfirmary.org

 

 

Perverts give good poetry

Andrew Lam
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0
Perverts give good poetry

culture@sfbg.com

LUST FOR LIFE I work at the St. James Infirmary, an occupational health clinic for current and former sex workers. The clinic is a beneficiary of Dore Alley’s Up Your Alley Fair — a pride celebration for kinky people and little sister of the Folsom Street Fair — so every year I have to a work a shift at the festival. I haven’t been able to enjoy the actual street fair aspect of it for a while. But I always look forward to this week, and to Dore Alley Eve (as those of us in the kink and leather communities jokingly call it) because of Perverts Put Out (PPO), which this year takes the stage Saturday, July 30.

Now, it’s impossible for me to write about PPO without bias. I’m good friends with the producers and I’ve been on their rotating roster of performers since 2007. But I’ve also been coming to PPO as an audience member since 2004, right about the time I graduated from teen poetry slams and started performing my own works around the Bay Area.

Attending PPO for those first three years as an adult performer (in all senses of that term) and newly-minted sex writer trying to find her place in the SF spoken word scene, I received an amazing lesson in our sex and art communities. PPO is responsible for much of my education about both writing and performance. I sat back. I watched. I learned. I took a lot of notes.

So consistently well curated it borders on absurd, PPO is an impressive mix of genre and content — everything from poetry to performance art, diatribes to elegantly crafted erotic short stories. The unifying theme of PPO is of course sexuality, and most of the performers are queer in some way. But queerness and sexuality can cover a lot of ground.

Some of my favorite PPO memories from over the years: Kirk Read’s tragically beautiful piece about going duck hunting with a new lover. Daphne Gottlieb’s gorgeous poem “Carpe Nocturne” about (among other things) desire, lineage, death, and love. Lori Selke’s razor-sharp breakup letter to the racist and sexist mainstream BDSM scene. Meliza Banales’ riotously funny story about doing crystal healing sex work in Santa Cruz. Steven Schwartz’s “Bearlesque,” a smart and funny rumination on bear identity, complete with dancing and tassles. Jaime Cortez’s eerily beautiful short story “Excelsior,” about queer men cruising not in the Castro or SoMa, but in the Excelsior District. Fran Varian’s secret and brutal cop fantasy, told from the perspective of an anti-imperialist queer activist protagonist. Pretty much everything poet Horehound Stillpoint has ever done, ever. I could go on. But really, you should just come to the show.

PERVERTS PUT OUT: THE DORE ALLEY EDITION

Sat/30 7:30 p.m., $10–$15

Center for Sex and Culture

1349 Mission, SF

(415) 902-2071

www.sexandculture.org

 

Clean secrets revealed: the Lusty Ladies

Jesse Hawthorne Ficks
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0
Clean secrets revealed: the Lusty Ladies

Sex workers do all kinds of naughty (and very nice) things during work hours, but how these super-sexed individuals spend their down time seems like an alluring mystery. It’s fun to assume the sassy stripper wears high heels while vacuuming and doesn’t own sweatpants, but these are real people — and though they deal in dirty, it’s time for the Lusty Ladies to reveal their ‘clean’ secrets. 

The Lusty Lady is a unionized peep show establishment featuring a play pen packed with foxy bodies and a show that all sorts of loins love to watch from behind glass. The Lusties make it hard to think about anything other than sex, but for today, let’s leave the dancing, self-stroking, and teasing for the stage.

But these are well-rounded, independent women, replete with a full dancecard of squeaky-clean hobbies and pastimes. You want sexy? Try fresh brewed tea, or a cathartic yoga session. Rawr!

 

Bottoms’ up in the kitchen

sandy

Sandy Bottoms

Sandy Bottoms has been working at the Lusty for a year and a half and loves being surrounded by the cast of intelligent babes who prove that the sex industry can indeed provide legitimate work. She started off as the “surfer-California beach girl” but eventually found herself playing a younger role, complete with braces. 

SFBG: What’s your clean secret?

Sandy Bottoms: When I’m not dancing naked on stage I can usually be found in my apron baking. I’m so obsessed with cupcakes I’ve even wrangled a sweetie into making me a cupcake dress. 

 

SFBG: When do you most like to do it? 

SB: I like to make treats for my fellow Lusties, family, and friends whenever I can, really. Decadent boob-shaped cakes have made their way to birthday events, baby blue meringue cookies to transition parties, and indulgent vegan gluten-free cupcakes to Lusty PRIDE bake sales. 

 

SFBG: Where do like it? 

SB: My kitchen. 

 

SFBG: Why does it make you feel good? 

SB: I suppose in part baking fulfills a 1950s housewife fantasy that doesn’t integrate with or show through other parts of my character. I like to be productive when I’m relaxing and I never let the green grass grow under my high heels. 

 

Cinnamon’s late night creations

cinnamon

Cinnamon

It’s been nearly five years since Cinnamon debuted at the Lusty and she just completed her year-long term as Lead Madam in February. She likes stripping because it’s fun, different, and unionized — and her “pretty awesome juicy booty” demands attention. 

SFBG: What is your clean secret? 

C: I love to paint. I love to paint, sculpt, costume design (as seen above), sew, and get down and dirty with a good art project. Not that exciting, but it’s what I love. I even went to an art high school in Oakland.

 

SFBG: When do you most like to do it? 

C: In the morning, afternoon, evening. Sometimes even late at night, I wake up at 2 a.m. and want to paint or draw. 

 

SFBG: Why does it make you feel good?

C: Painting helps me sort my thoughts and I don’t feel so overwhelmed. I feel relaxed when I paint. I love getting really into a project and getting messy and covered in paint and other materials. I also don’t just stop with paint when I’m really into a project. I usually use anything I can get my hands on, from sand to coffee filters. 

 

SFBG: When do you feel most proud about it?

C: When I finally finish a project! Which is hardly ever. I also feel pretty happy when I start a really good new project with something I’ve never tried before. But more than anything I love it when someone comes over to visit and says “That picture is awesome, where’d you get it?”

 

Bijou shows off her flexibility

bijou

Bijou. Photo by craspadseries.com

A love of dancing and an appreciation of the Lusty community has kept Bijou on the stage for three years. She doesn’t pre-plan a routine per se, but she’s known to have cat moves, or at least a very feline-like presence. 

SFBG: What is your clean secret? 

B: I absolutely love and do A LOT of yoga.

 

SFBG: Why does it make you feel good? 

B: I can literally enter another space while I’m practicing, and my body always feels immediately energized after a class or home practice.

 

SFBG: Where did you learn such a thing? 

B: Studios all over the country and I informally trained every single day during a year in Bangkok, Thailand.

 

SFBG: When did you feel most proud of it? 

B: When I just let go and cry during my practice. It sounds funny but that usually means I’ve really, truly connected with my body.

 

Harlow Valentine brews it hot and wet

Harlow

Harlow Valentine

As a co-owner of the Lusty, Harlow Valentine loves exploring hot scenarios with lots of strangers and sharing the attention with intelligent and sexy women. She especially likes to show her “booty” to curious peepers. 

SFBG: What is your clean secret?

HV: I love to drink tea.

 

SFBG: Where do like it? 

HV: In the kitchen, at a cafe, in bed.

 

SFBG: Why does it make you feel good?

HV: It’s soothing, it’s warm, it’s delicious and sometimes has a fantastic color!

 

SFBG: When did you feel most proud of it?

HV: When I hear pleasing sighs escape from the lips of someone who’s just sipped my freshly brewed tea…though perhaps that’s because, in general, I enjoy hearing people sigh from pleasure!

Summer fairs and festivals

Maria Poblet
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Summer fairs and festivals

ONGOING

Young At Art Festival de Young Museum, Golden Gate Park, SF. (415) 695-2441, www.youngatartsf.com. Through May 22, free. The creative achievements of our city’s youth are celebrated in this eight day event curated and hosted by the de Young Museum.

* Oakland Asian Cultural Center Asian Pacific Heritage Festival Oakland Asian Cultural Center, 388 Ninth St., Oakl. (510) 637-0462, www.oacc.cc. Through May 26. Times and prices vary. Music, lectures, performances, family-friendly events in honor of Asian and Pacific American culture and traditions.

DIVAfest Exit Theatre, 156 Eddy, SF. (415) 931-2699, www.theexit.org. Through May 28. Times and prices vary. Bastion of the alternative, EXIT Theatre showcases its 10th annual buffet of fierce women writers, performers, and directors. This year features two plays, beat poetry, musical exploration, and more.

* Yerba Buena Gardens Festival Yerba Buena Gardens, Mission and Third St., SF. (415) 543-1718, www.ybgf.org. Through Oct. 31. Times vary, free. A series of cultural events, performances, activities, music, and children and family programs to highlight the green goodness of SoMa’s landscaped oasis.

 

May 18-June 5

San Francisco International Arts Festival Various venues. (415) 399-9554, www.sfiaf.org. Times and prices vary. Celebrate the arts through with this mish-mash of artistic collaborations dedicated to increasing human awareness. Artists included hail from around the world and right here in the Bay Area.

 

May 21

* A La Carte & Art Castro St. between Church and Evelyn, Mountain View. (650) 964-3395, www.miramarevents.com. 10am-6pm, free. With vendors selling handmade crafts, microbrewed beers, fresh foods, a farmers market, and even a fun zone for kids, there’s little you won’t find at this all-in-one fun fair.• Asian Heritage Street Celebration Larkin and McAllister, SF. www.asianfairsf.com. 11am-6pm, free. This year’s at the country’s largest gathering of APA’s promises a Muay Thai kickboxing ring, DJs, and the latest in Asian pop culture fanfare — as well as tasty bites to keep your strength up.

Freestone Fermentation Festival Salmon Creek School, 1935 Bohemian Hwy, Sonoma. (707) 479-3557, www.freestonefermentationfestival.com. Noon-5pm, $12. Learn about the magical wonders of fermentation with hands-on and mouth-on demonstrations, exhibits, and tasty live food nibbles.

Uncorked! San Francisco Wine Festival Ghirardelli Square, SF. (415) 775-5500, www.ghirardellisq.com. 1-6pm, $45-50 for tasting tickets, free for other activities. Uncorked! brings you the real California wine experience with tastings, cooking demonstrations, and even a wine 101 class for those who are feeling not quite wine-refined.

 

May 20-29

SF Sex Worker Film and Art Festival Various venues, SF. (415) 751-1659, www.sexworkerfest.com. Times and prices vary. Webcam workshops, empowering film screenings, shared dialogues on plant healing to sex work in the age of HIV: this fest has everything to offer sex workers and the people who love ’em.

 

May 22

Lagunitas Beer Circus Lagunitas Brewing Co., 1280 N McDowell, Petaluma. (303) 447-0816, www.craftbeer.com. Noon-6pm, $40. All the wonders of a live circus — snake charmers, plate spinners, and sword swallowers — doing their thing inside of a brewery!

 

May 21-22

* Maker Faire San Mateo County Event Center, 2495 South Delaware, San Mateo. www.makerfaire.com. Sat, 10am- 8pm; Sun, 10am-6pm, $5-25. Make Magazine’s annual showcase of all things DIY is a tribute to human craftiness. This is where the making minds meet.• Castroville Artichoke Festival Castroville, Calif. (831) 633-0485, www.artichokefestival.org. Sat., 10am- 6pm; Sun., 11 am- 4:30 p.m., free. Pay homage to the only vegetable with a heart: the artichoke. This fest does just that, with music, parades, and camping.

 

May 28-29 

San Francisco Carnaval Harrison between 16th and 22nd St., SF. 10am-6pm, free. The theme of this year’s showcase of Latin and Caribbean culture is “Live Your Fantasy” — bound to bring dreams alive on the streets of the Mission.

 

June 3-12

Healdsburg Jazz Festival Various venues, Healdsburg. (707) 433-463, www.healdsburgjazzfestival.org. Times and prices vary. Bask in the lounge-lit glow of all things jazz-related at this celebration in Sonoma’s wine county.

 

June 3-July 3 

SF Ethnic Dance Festival Zellerbach Hall, Berk. and Yerba Buena Center for the Arts, SF. www.worldartswest.org. Times and prices vary. A powerful display of world dance and music taking to the stage over the course of five weekends.

 

June 4

* Berkeley World Music Festival Telegraph, Berk. www.berkeleyworldmusicfestival.org. Noon-9pm, free. Fourteen world music artists serenade the streets and stores of Telegraph Avenue and al fresco admirers in People’s Park.

Huicha Music Festival Gundlach Bundschu Winery, 2000 Denmark St., Sonoma. (707) 938-5277, www.gunbun.com/hmfevent. 2-11pm, $55. Indie music in the fields of a wine country: Fruit Bats, J Mascis of Dinosaur Jr, Sonny and the Sunsets, and more.

 

June 4-5

Union Street Eco-Urban Festival Union from Gough to Steiner and parts of Octavia, SF. (800) 310-6563, www.unionstreetfestival.com. 10am-6pm, free. Festival goers will have traffic-free access to Cow Hollow merchants and restaurant booths. The eco-urban theme highlights progressive, green-minded advocates and products.

The Great San Francisco Crystal Fair Fort Mason Center, Building A., SF. (415) 383-7837, home.earthlink.net/~sfxtl/index.html. Sat., 10am-6pm; Sun., 10am-4pm, $6. Gems and all they have to offer: beauty, fashion, and mysterious healing powers.

 

June 5

* Israel in the Gardens Yerba Buena Gardens, SF. (415) 512-6420, www.sfjcf.org. 11am-5pm, free. One full day of food, music, film, family activities, and ceremonies celebrating the Bay Area’s Jewish community and Israel’s 63rd birthday.

 

June 10-12

Harmony Festival Sonoma County Fairgrounds, 1350 Bennett Valley, Santa Rosa. www.harmonyfestival.com. 10am-10pm, $45 one day, $120 for three day passes. This is where your love for tea, The Flaming Lips, goddess culture, techno, eco-living, spirituality, and getting drunk with your fellow hippies come together in one wild weekend.

Queer Women of Color Film Festival Brava Theater. 2789 24th St., SF. (415) 752-0868, www.qwocmap.org. Times vary, free. A panel discussion called “Thinkers and Trouble Makers,” bisects three days of screenings from up-and-coming filmmakers with stories all their own.

 

June 11-12

* Live Oak Park Fair 1301 Shattuck, Berk. (510) 227-7110, www.liveoakparkfair.com. 10am-6pm, free. This festival’s 41st year brings the latest handmade treasures from Berkeley’s vibrant arts and crafts community. With food, face-paint, and entertainment, this fair is perfect for a weekend activity with the family.

 

June 11-19 

San Mateo County Fair San Mateo County Fairgrounds. 2495 S. Delaware, San Mateo. www.sanmateocountyfair.com. June 11, 14, 18, and 19, 11am-10pm; all other days, noon-10pm, $10 for adults. It features competitive exhibits from farmers, foodies, and even technological developers — but let’s face it, we’re going to see the pig races.

 

June 12

* Haight Ashbury Street Fair Haight between Stanyan and Ashbury, SF. www.haightashburystreetfair.org. 11am-5:30pm, free. Make your way down to the grooviest corner in history and celebrate the long-standing diversity and color of the Haight Ashbury neighborhood, featuring the annual battle of the bands.

 

June 16-26

Frameline Film Festival Various venues, SF. www.frameline.org. Times and prices vary. This unique LGBT film festival comes back for its 35th year showcasing queer documentaries, shorts, and features.

 

June 17-19 Sierra Nevada World Music Festival Mendocino County Fairgrounds. 14400 CA-128, Boonville. (916) 777-5550, www.snwmf.com. Fri, 6pm-midnight; Sat, 11am-midnight; Sun, 11am-10pm, $60 for Friday and Sunday day pass; $70 for Saturday day pass, $150 three day pass. Featuring Rebulution, Toots and the Maytals, and Jah Love Sound System, this fest comes with a message of peace, unity, and love through music.

 

June 18 

Summer SAILstice Encinal Yacht Club, 1251 Pacific Marina, Alameda. (415) 412-6961, www.summersailstice.com. 8am-8pm, free. Boat building, sailboat rides, sailing seminars, informational booths, music, a kid zone, and of course, wind, sun, and water.

Pinot Days Festival Pavilion, Fort Mason Center, SF. (415) 382-8663, www.pinotdays.com. 1-5pm, $50. Break out your corkscrews and head over to this unique event. With 220 artisan winemakers pouring up tastes of their one-of-a-kind vino, you better make sure you’ve got a DD for the ride home.

 

June 18-19

North Beach Festival Washington Square Park, SF. (800) 310-6563, www.northbeachchamber.com. Sat, 10am-6pm; Sun, 10am-6pm, free. Make your way down to the spaghetti capital of SF and enjoy food, music, arts and crafts booths, and the traditional blessing of the animals.

Marin Art Festival Marin Civic Center, San Rafael. (415) 388-0151, www.marinartfestival.com. 10am-6pm, $10. A city center designed by Frank Lloyd Wright plays host to this idyllic art festival. Strolling through pavilions, sampling wines, eating grilled oysters, and viewing the work of hundreds of creative types.

 

June 20-Aug 21

Stern Grove Music Festival Stern Grove. Sloat and 19th Ave., SF. (415) 252-6252, www.sterngrove.org. Sundays 2pm, free. This free outdoor concert series is a must-do for San Francisco summers. This year’s lineup includes Neko Case, the SF Symphony, Sharon Jones, and much more.

 

June 25-26

San Francisco Pride Celebration Civic Center Plaza, SF; Parade starts at Market and Beale. (415) 864-FREE, www.sfpride.org. Parade starts at 10:30am, free. Gays, trannies, queers, and the rest of the rainbow waits all year for this grand-scale celebration of diversity, love, and being fabulous.• San Francisco Free Folk Festival Presidio Middle School. 450 30th Ave., SF. (415) 661-2217, www.sffolkfest.org. Noon-10pm, free. Folk-y times for the whole family — not just music but crafts, dance workshops, crafts, and food vendors too.

 

June 29-July 3

International Queer Tango Festival La Pista. 768 Brannan, SF. www.queertango.freehosting.net. Times vary, $10-35. Spice up your Pride (and Frameline film fest) week with some queer positive tango lessons in culturally diverse, welcoming groups of same sex couples.

 

June 30-July 3

High Sierra Music Festival Plumas-Sierra Fairgrounds, Quincy. www.highsierramusic.com. Gates open at 8am Thursday. $205 weekend pass, $90 parking fee. Yonder Mountain String Band, My Morning Jacket, and most importantly, Ween. Bring out your sleeping bags for this four day mountaintop grassroots festival.

 

July 2

Vans Warped Tour Shoreline Amphitheatre, Mountain View. www.vanswarpedtour.com. 11am, $46-72. Skating, pop punk, hardcore, screamo, and a whole lot of emo fun.

 

July 2-3

Fillmore Jazz Festival Fillmore between Jackson and Eddy, SF, 1-800-310-6563, www.fillmorejazzfestival.com. 10am-6pm, free. Thousands of people get jazzed-up every year for this musical feast in a historically soulful neighborhood.

 

July 4

City of San Francisco Fourth of July waterfront celebration Pier 39, Embarcadero and Beach, SF. (415) 709-5500, www.pier39.com. Noon-9:30pm, free. Ring in the USA’s birthday on the water, with a day full of music and end up at in the city’s front row when the fireworks take to the sky.

 

July 9-10

Renegade Craft Fair Fort Mason Festival Pavilion. Buchanan and Marina, SF. (312) 496-3215, www.renegadecraft.com. 11am-7pm, free. Put a bird on it at this craft fair for the particularly indie at heart.

 

July 14-24

Midsummer Mozart Festival Various Bay Area venues. (415) 627-9141, www.midsummermozart.org. Prices vary. You won’t be hearing any Beethoven or Schubert at this midsummer series — the name of the day is Mr. Mozart alone.

 

July 16-17

Connoisseur’s Marketplace Santa Cruz between Camino and Johnson, Menlo Park. (650) 325-2818, www.miramarevents.com. 10am-6pm, free. Let the artisans do what they do best — you’ll polish off the fruits of their labor at this outdoor expo of artisan food, wine, and craft.

 

July 21-Aug 8

SF Jewish Film Festival Various Bay Area venues. www.sfjff.org. Times and prices vary. A three week smorgasbord of world premiere Jewish films at theaters in SF, Berkeley, the Peninsula, and Marin County.

 

July 22-Aug 13

Music@Menlo Chamber Music Festival Menlo School, 50 Valparaiso, Atherton. (650) 330-2030, www.musicatmenlo.org. Classical chamber music at its best: this year’s theme “Through Brahms,” will take you on a journey through Johannes’ most notable works.

 

July 23-Sept 25

 SF Shakespeare Festival Various Bay Area venues. www.sfshakes.org. Various times, free. Picnic with Princess Innogen and her crew with dropping a dime at this year’s production of Cymbeline. It’s by that playwriter guy… what’s his name again?

 

July 30

Oakland A’s Beer Festival Eastside Club at the Oakland-Alameda Coliseum, 7000 Coliseum Way, Oakl. www.oakland.athletics.mlb.com. 4:05-6:05pm, free with game ticket. Booze your way through the Oakland A’s vs. Minnesota Twins game while the coliseum is filled with brewskies from over 30 microbreweries, there for the chugging in your souvenir A’s beer mug.

 

July 30-31

 Berkeley Kite Festival Cesar Chavez Park, 11 Spinnaker, Berk. www.highlinekites.com. 10am-5pm, free. A joyous selection of Berkeley’s coolest kites, all in one easy location.

 

July 31

Up Your Alley Dore between Folsom and Howard, SF. www.folsomstreetfair.com. 11am-6pm, $7-10 suggested donation. Whether you are into BDSM, leather, paddles, nipple clamps, hardcore — or don’t know what any of the above means, this Dore Alley stroll is surprisingly friendly and cute once you get past all the whips!

 

Aug 1-7

SF Chefs Various venues, SF. www.sfchefs2011.com. Times and prices vary. Those that love to taste test will rejoice during this foodie’s paradise of culinary stars sharing their latest bites. Best of all, the goal for 2011’s event is tons of taste with zero waste.

 

Aug 7

SF Theater Festival Fort Mason Center. Buchanan and Marina, SF. www.sftheaterfestival.org. 11am-5pm, free. Think you can face about 100 live theater acts in one day? Set a personal record at this indoor and outdoor celebration of thespians.

 

Aug 13

San Rafael Food and Wine Festival Falkirk Cultural Center, 1408 Mission, San Rafael. 1-800-310-6563, www.sresproductions.com. Noon-6pm, $25 food and wine tasting, $15 food tasting only. A sampler’s paradise, this festival features an array of tastes from the Bay’s best wineries and restaurants.

 

Aug 13-14

* Nihonmachi Street Fair Post and Webster, SF. www.nihonmachistreetfair.org. 11am-6pm, free. Founded by Asian Pacific American youths, this Japantown tradition is a yearly tribute to the difficult history and prevailing spirit of Asian American culture in this SF neighborhood.

 

Aug 20-21

Oakland Art and Soul Festival Entrances at 14th St. and Broadway, 16th St. and San Pablo, Oakl. (510) 444-CITY, www.artandsouloakland.com. $15. A musical entertainment tribute to downtown Oakland’s art and soul, this festival features nationally-known R&B, jazz, gospel, and rock artists.

 

Aug 20-22

* SF Street Food Festival Folsom St from Twenty Sixth to Twenty Second, SF. www.sfstreetfoodfest.com. 11am-7pm, free. All of the city’s best food, available without having to go indoors — or sit down. 2011 brings a bigger and better Street Food Fest, perfect for SF’s burgeoning addiction to pavement meals.

 

Aug 29-Sept 5

Burning Man Black Rock City, Nev. (415) TO-FLAME, www.burningman.com. $320. This year’s theme, “Rites of Passage,” is set to explore transitional spaces and feelings. Gather with the best of the burned-out at one of the world’s weirdest, most renowned parties.

 

Sep 10-11

* Autumn Moon Festival Street Fair Grant between California and Broadway, SF. (415) 982-6306, www.moonfestival.org. 11am-6pm, free. A time to celebrate the summer harvest and the end of summer full-moon, rejoice in bounty with the moon goddess.

 

Sept 17-18

SF International Dragon Boat Festival California and Avenue D, Treasure Island. www.sfdragonboat.com. 10am-5pm, free. The country’s largest dragon boat festival sees beautiful man-powered boats take to the water in 300 and 500 meter competitive races.

 

Sept 23-25

SF Greek Food Festival Annunciation Cathedral. 245 Valencia, SF. www.sfgreekfoodfestival.org. Fri.-Sat., 11am-10pm; Sun., noon-9pm, free with advance ticket. Get your baba ghanoush on during this late summer festival, complete with traditional Greek dancing, music, and wine.

 

Sept 25

Folsom Street Fair Folsom between 7th and 12th St., SF. www.folsomstreetfair.org. 11am-6pm, free. The urban Burning Man equivalent for leather enthusiasts, going to this expansive SoMa celebration of kink and fetish culture is the surest way to see a penis in public (you dirty dog!).

 

Sept 30-Oct 2

Hardly Strictly Bluegrass Speedway Meadows, Golden Gate Park, SF. www.strictlybluegrass.com. 11am-7pm, free. Pack some whiskey and shoulder your banjo: this free three day festival draws record-breaking crowds — and top names in a variety of twangy genres — each year.

 

Items with asterisks note family-fun activities.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 


 

Hooked in

Maria Poblet
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Hooked in

culture@sfbg.com

There is no water cooler. There are no memos. In most cases, sex workers aren’t walking into an office on Monday mornings — or even late Saturday nights — to punch in and gab with coworkers about the last shift. Sex work is a umbrella term pertaining to a multitude of professions, including but not limited to prostitution, porn, burlesque, modeling, and stripping. Most sex workers are independent contractors, freelancers, and individuals running their own businesses.

So in a way, the seventh San Francisco Sex Worker Film and Arts Festival (May 20-29) serves as the city’s whore company party, run with the intention of unifying a community in an ironically isolating line of work. Because whatever your profession, talking to a coworker about the daily grind is always extra-satisfying.

All but a select number of events during the festival are open to the public — we’re not talking about an exclusive trade show here. Organizers have packed nine days with musicals, cabarets, workshops, and parties, so whether you’re in the business, out of the business, curious, or supportive, this sex fest will do the trick.

The decision to base the festival around this kind of openness was intentional. Once the workday is done, where does a sex worker go to compare notes, swap secrets, laugh, or cry? The stigma around sex work can make talking to friends and family who don’t pole dance or film masturbation for pay awkward.

Chloe Camilla, a member of the festival’s planning committee, is still relatively new to the sex industry. She’s been doing a mix of porn and modeling for the past few years and remembers how intimidated she felt in the beginning.

“It’s strange — you’re shooting your first anal scene and you just want to ask somebody, ‘Uh, what do I do? Who do I talk to? Where’s the handbook?'” She and her friends have been talking about putting together a training manual with chapters on things like how to file your taxes, develop a marketing campaign, and learn screen tricks. “There should be a ‘Welcome to porn, here’s what to expect when you show up on set’ book.”

Camilla will be teaching “The Art of Webcamming”, a workshop she put together in response to peer requests. Webcams are a great introduction to the sex industry: cheap, easy, and gatekeeper-free — the Internet is an equal opportunity employer.

“Everyone can find their own market and niche. There’s room for all bodies and genders out there,” Camilla says, hoping her class will get people online and making money fast.

Festival founder Carol Leigh, a.k.a. longtime pro-sex activist, sex worker, and performance artist Scarlot Harlot, started the festival in 1999 to help foster supportive peer relationships while simultaneously urging hookers to use their collective voice to speak out on their own behalf and fight marginalization.

“I’m basically Grandma Scarlot Harlot now,” she smiles, her crimson lips matching the shiny paint on her fingernails. After years of marching up and down capitol steps, Leigh realized the creative potential of the people rallying around her.

It’s what she calls the “whore’s eye view:”

“As a group that’s oppressed with a stigma, there’s a kind of wisdom that grows from that stigmatization. Because we’re not accepted, we might not necessarily buy into mainstream values. Therefore, we do and see things differently,” Leigh says. Through art or film, sex workers can find their voice — even if they can’t be open about their profession because of child custody laws or a conservative day gig.

Now 60, with more than 30 years of advocating for sex workers’ rights behind her, Leigh says the festival’s relevance has expanded to respond to the community’s current needs. The back-to-back workshops at SomArts Cultural Center on May 27 most accurately reflects this year’s current list of hot topics: self-care and eco-sex, building bonds between male sex workers, and love advice for partners and pals of sex workers.

Although parts of the city’s sex worker community are tight-knit, festival organizer Erica Fabulous admits that closeness can depend on where you work and whom you work with. Getting politically active sex workers to attend is a snap, but festival organizers hope to reach past clubs and into the streets, pulling in workers from every corner of the industry.

“Sex work is raced and classed just like anything else — that’s why I’m so proud of the diversity of viewpoints that will be represented during the festival,” says Laure McElroy, the festival’s film curator.

Nearly 40 sex-worker-themed flicks will play at this year’s festival during a one-day marathon. Stories from Canada, Holland, Germany, Cambodia, and the U.S. will lay bare the work and lives of strippers, whores, masseuses, peep show gals, erotic performance artists, survival street workers, and escorts.

The diverse viewpoints echo another of the festival’s underlying missions: “These films are a glimpse of what’s happening out there — the people who are out there,” McElroy says. “I want people to walk away from this festival knowing that there isn’t just one way to think or talk about sex work.” 

 

Hot sexy events: March 16-22

Andrew Lam
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Hot sexy events: March 16-22

Although it’s not often that the Wall Street Journal alerts us to convincing arguments for the existence of prostitution, that seems to be the case today. The Journal published findings from a Duke University paper done on sex workers in Kenya that concluded that many prostitutes found relief in hard times from their clients. Illnesses in the family, unexpected handicaps, and staggering funeral bills were all cited as instances in which sex workers fell back on the largesse of their regular clients for financial support. 

Respectful relationships between sex workers and johns – yet another nail in the coffin for those that would ban the industry on the basis of worker exploitation.

 

The Art of 8 Limbs

Leave your bag of tools at home this time, kinky community. Disciple, local expert in kinky grappling and cell popping, will be teaching this class in utilizing one’s own body as an implement in body impact play and striking. And just to make sure you’re not inflicting pain on unsuspecting parties, part of the night will be devoted to stretching exercises you can perform before you put the techniques into play.

Thurs/17 8-10 p.m., $20

SF Citadel

1277 Mission, SF

(415) 626-2746

www.sfcitadel.org 


Exiles Mini Un-Conference

What’s an un-conference? Well, it’s unplanned, unpredictable, and undone when The Exiles, women’s BDSM group are running it. Come with something to teach and you can sign up on a schedule grid. Come with something to learn and you’ll do just that. After the impromptu workshops, the group is holding its officer elections, so a return to order is inevitable. Women-identifying folks only, please. 

Fri/18 7:30-10:30 p.m., free

Women’s Building 

3543 18th St., SF

www.theexiles.org


Kinky Salon Mardi Gras

This pansexual swinger’s party will probably be the easiest place in town to give away your beads. Get frisky while Bombshell Betty, Fromagique, Dangerous Delilah, and more take turns onstage to burlesque and brass band your inhibitions away.

Sat/19 10 p.m.-late, $25-35 members only

Mission Control

www.missioncontrolsf.org


Chaps Closing Party

You may have heard Chaps is closing. To send you leather lusties into the next few weeks without a cruise bar at 1225 Folsom, the bar is holding this sayonara party. Chuck Slaton and Ron Morrison, owners of the original Chaps, will be on hand, so take that shot, bend over, and wave – it’s been a heady three years. 

Sat/19 9 p.m.-late, free

Chaps 

1225 Folsom, SF

(415) 255-2427

www.chapsbarsanfrancisco.com


“Ask Me, I’ll Tell You: Men and Women Talk Out Loud About Sex and Aging”

How does down and dirty change when gravity comes to roost and you’re staring down retirement? Good question, one that even those approaching that age don’t rightly know how to answer. Joan Price gives this lecture on spicing up senior sex, lessons that you can also cull from her books,  Better Than I Ever Expected: Straight Talk about Sex After Sixty and Naked at Our Age: Talking Out Loud about Senior Sex.

Tues/22 6-8 p.m., $25-30

Good Vibrations

1620 Polk, SF

(415) 345-0500

www.goodvibes.com 


Sex Work Shop Talk

Take a load off those stilettos for a chat with your peers – that’s the mission of these semi (check the sexworkshoptalk.com website for the next date) weekly meet-ups for members of the sex trade just for industry types to connect on work-related topics. This week the get-together will also feature makeup tips for all genders, and a clothing/toy/makeup swap. Oh, and chocolate. There will be chocolate.

Tues/22 6:30 p.m., $3-10 suggested donation

Center for Sex and Culture

1349 Mission, SF

(415) 552-7399

www.sexandculture.org

 

Delhi 2 Dublin brings the St. Paddy’s bhangra

Andrew Lam
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It’s St. Patrick’s Day and everyone is Irish. Truly — the West coast brand of ethnic identity is a far cry from that of New England and New York, where families ran straight from the Potato Famine to set up shop in certain neighborhoods, maintaining their Celtic colors even now. Nope, by the time the gene pool wagon-wheels its way to California, most people are some amalgamation of several cultures. Which is to say that the Vancouver-based Celtic electro-bhangra of Delhi 2 Dublin should be seen as less of a new bastardization of world musics as much as a let’s-all-get-down reflection of who we are today.

But I’m waxing more sociological (per usual) than the band does itself. We caught the group’s DJ, Tarun Nayar, on a layover in an airport he was having trouble identifying (“Baltimore?” he guessed). The only concrete location we were able to get out of him is that the band is playing Mezzanine on St. Patrick’s itself, Thurs/17, after its show at the Aubergine in Sebastopol on Tues/15. Other sureities? Go to either and you’re gonna have a high-energy, border-blurring dance party on your Guinness-wielding hands.

San Francisco Bay Guardian: So you guys are playing your St. Patrick’s Day show here. In honor of the holiday, can you run down the group’s Celtic connection for me?

Tarun Nayar: Well the group was born on St. Patrick’s Day five years ago, so the Celtic connection is really important to us. The ex-director of the Vancouver Folk Festival called me to do an Irish-themed event. I was an electronica DJ and I was like, I don’t think we’re going to be able to put together enough material for you. He suggested that we blend together Indian and Celtic music. At the last minute we got together with a Punjabi singer. It’s always been easy to blend the two together since then. 

 

SFBG: Is there any actual Irish heritage in the group?

TN: There is – I’m half Irish-Scottish, and our fiddle player Sara Fitzpatrick is – ha, obviously.

 

SFBG: Why does that mix work so well, do you think?

TN: It’s the world’s two greatest drinking cultures! No, but really I think that two types of music – and we also play with North Indian influences – can be really happy, but have a real melancholy, introverted streak too. Plus, there’s all these historical theories that the Celts and the gypsies of North India have common ancestors. But we don’t really philosophize about it, we just play what sounds good. 

 

SFBG: Is there a single genre that describes Delhi 2 Dublin?

TN: We say “world fusion.” But that sounds so lame to me – it has these connotations to it. I just like to say good music.

 

SFBG: You’ve also got some interesting solo side projects…

TN: Yeah, I have a solo CD that came out March first in the States and Canada. It sums up my experience traveling around the world – it doesn’t really have anything to do with electronic music or Punjabi music. I sometimes do the scores of movies too, I just did work on a really gritty film about sex workers north of Bombay. 

 

SFBG: I hear a lot about Vancouver’s incredible cosmopolitan nature, and diversity. How did the city influence your music?

TN: Vancouver has one of North America’s strongest South Asian music scenes. Without the light of that community and the strength of its culture Delhi 2 Dublin definitely couldn’t have made it. Our singer and dhol player are out of that tribe. Without the open-mindedness of the people of Vancouver also, I don’t think we’d be around. We’ve always felt that San Francisco is a bigger version of Vancouver. San Francisco was one of the first cities on the West coast to embrace us. 

 

 

Delhi 2 Dublin 

With Señor Oz, Pleasuremaker, and DJ Dragonfly

Thurs/17 9 p.m., $18

Mezzanine 

444 Jessie, SF

www.mezzaninesf.com

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