I couldn’t resist this item which just came rolling through my google alerts. A copy of Zak Smith’s (aka porn performer Zak Sabbath) book Pictures of Girls is up on ebay - and here’s what the description says about what makes this particular copy a collectible:
A “must-have” title for Zak Smith collectors. This copy is very prominently, wittily, and beautifully signed and inscribed in black marker on the title page by the artist: “I am writing this while talking to Audacia Fucking Ray! ZZS”. There is no recipient named, but Zak Smith was evidently multi-tasking and slightly overwhelmed in the presence of Audacia Ray. A writer, photographer, publisher, producer, and filmmaker, Audacia Ray is the author of “Naked on the Internet: Hookups, Downloads and Cashing In On Internet Sexploration” and the writer/director of the film, “Bi Apple”. She is a cult figure among savvy Internet addicts, especially devotees of pornographic films, through her role as editor of Spread Magazine, which takes the genre seriously as a legitimate medium of expression. This title has been out-of-print for some time and is now highly collectible. This is the only such signed and inscribed copy available online, the best by Zak Smith we have seen so far, and has no flaws, a pristine beauty. A rare, one-of-a-kind association copy thus. 88 plates. One of the most brilliant living American artists. A flawless collectible copy.
The funny thing is that I actually remember Zak signing several books this way - when his book Pictures Showing What Happens on Each Page of Thomas Pynchon’s Novel Gravity’s Rainbow was released, he did a talk and signing at Barnes and Noble on 22nd and 6th, and I went to say hi because he was only in town for a few days. After the attendees of the signing were gone, B & N asked him to sign his way through a stack of books so they could sell signed copies. I sat and chatted with him as he did it, and he came up with a variety of clever things to write in the books.
I can’t really make sense of 2008, but that’s okay really.
The year started off with a trip to the Adult Entertainment Expo, where I had a conversation that would turn into my stint blogging for the Village Voice at for just shy of five months. While in Vegas, I went to my first AVN Awards Ceremony, where I got to see Jenna Jameson talk smack on the industry. I also got news that my film, The Bi Apple, had been nominated for a GayVN Award for Best Bisexual Video. While in Vegas I started shooting with my HV20 video camera, which I got a serious amount of use in 2008.
During the month of January I decided that I was going to leave my post as executive editor at $pread Magazine - a really heartwrenching decision. But, after three years of blood, sweat, and tears over the project, it was definitely time to move on. I didn’t immediately know what I’d be moving on to - but that got sorted out.
I went to San Francisco twice in a month: once in late January for the Sex::Tech conference sponsored by ISIS, and again in mid-February for the GayVN Awards. I hosted a small get together at the Center for Sex and Culture before the awards show - a bunch of really excellent people came out and made me feel like The Bi Apple was worth making. I didn’t win the award, but the name of the winning film was garbled, so no one was really sure who won, and in fact a bunch of blogs reported that The Bi Apple had won. Anti-climatic AND confusing - oh the strange strange world of porn.
In February, I curated a solo show for Molly Crabapple at Arena Studios - it would turn out to be the only art show I curated in the year. The show did well, got a lot of press, and we sold more than half the pieces.
In March I had planned to do a lot of public speaking: in panels on women and porn at Cinekink, sex work at the Left Forum, and indie porn at Babeland, plus I did a talk on sex workers and the media at Women, Action and the Media. However, public speaking took on a new frenzy after the Eliot Spitzer scandal broke on March 10, and I was suddenly inundated with phone calls from press. On March 13th, I was on CNN Prime News and then took a cab from the CNN studios directly to the first fundraiser and launch party for Sex Work Awareness, the non-profit I’ve co-founded. March was also the month that I got rolling with merchandise, with my sex nerd tee shirts.
The beginning of April saw the launch of Naked City, the blog I edited for the Village Voice for almost five months. While running the blog, I wrote a couple hundred posts and produced 19 episodes of Naked City TV. In April I was the keynote speaker at Sex 2.0 in Atlanta, where I got to meet lots of fabulous internet sex nerds. At the end of April, after a week of shut in fun, I finished a rough cut of Dacia’s Love Machine, the comedic short that debuted this fall.
May kicked off with some solid pain when I fell and smashed my two front teeth plus badly sprained my ankle, and I spent a lot of the month getting things fixed and stressing about how to pay for them. I landed my first college level teaching job at Rutgers University, where I co-taught a Human Sexuality lecture course over the summer semester. It was exhausting and the pay was bad, but the experience really kicked my ass in good and important ways.
In June I traveled to Amsterdam for the Pinched festival, where I was a keynote speaker. It was a whole lot of fun, and not just because of the sleepover and breakfast fun Eliyanna and I had with Annie Sprinkle and Beth Stephens at Xaviera Hollander’s house (though that was certainly a highlight).
In July I went to Chicago for the Desiree Alliance sex workers conference, which brought up a lot of personal shit for me and made me realize that I was getting really burnt out on activism and solitary work.
August saw the abrupt and sad end of Naked City, but I wasn’t alone in job loss - a bunch of other bloggers and sex writers lost their gigs too. In August I started to see very clearly that I needed to get more organized and make some more solid career-type decisions, and for the first time I started to very seriously consider leaving New York.
In September I did the official online release of Dacia’s Love Machine, but had the immediate set back of being ditched by Google Checkout and scrambling to get real credit card processing. My longterm relationship unraveled in September, and I’m still feeling the aftershocks of that. I also went shopping for suits and started the job interviewing process at a small handful of non-profits, while at the same time I launched into my first semester of solo teaching at Rutgers.
October was a painful, stressful month that ended way better than it started. My life changed when I landed my job at the International Women’s Health Coalition. As a kind of farewell to the jizz biz I made a trip to Berlin for the official premiere of Dacia’s Love Machine at the Berlin Porn Film Festival.
In November the Sex Blogger Calendar was launched to much fanfare at our party in the middle of the month, and we raised a decent amount of cash for Sex Work Awareness to do its work. I’m looking forward to making good on our various projects in 2009.
December was a bit of a blur - I’m still settling in to the 9 to 5 lifestyle but finding that I’m taking to it quite well. I’ve decided to officially end my video podcast Live Girl Review, but it will get new life in 2009 because I’m passing the torch to Jamye Waxman.
I am single. I have a full time job. I have been an adjunct professor for two semesters. On Monday I commence living by myself. If a year ago someone had told me that all of those four things would be true today, I definitely would not have believed them. But there it is. And hopefully in coming months, things will start to make a bit more sense.
In general I’m not one for resolutions, but in 2009 I hope to learn more about balancing work and life. That is to say, I hope to build up more of a life that isn’t about work. That’s been one of the jarring things about working full time - realizing that I don’t really have any hobbies and I’m not sure what I like to do other than work. I also want to make some goals for my personal work - writing, activism and video projects - for this upcoming year, but I want to give myself a bit of a break too.
This list just scratches the surface of this big ole wrap up we’ve been working on at the International Women’s Health Coalition. For all the details, including info about the next steps for all of these wins (because any gain in sexual health and reproductive rights shouldn’t be taken for granted) - click here. If you want to read away from your computer screen, you have the option of downloading a word or PDF doc too.
1. New U.S. Administration offers hope for women and girls
The election of Barack Obama as the 44th President of the United States provides an opportunity to uphold human rights, promote health for all, and change the future of millions. Women’s health and rights advocates in every corner of the world expressed excitement and hopefulness.
2. A new “Mexico City policy” leads the way on comprehensive sexuality education
Prior to the XVII International AIDS Conference in Mexico City in August, health and education ministers from throughout Latin America and the Caribbean pledged to invest in comprehensive sexuality education and increase access to health services to strengthen the region’s HIV/AIDS response. The resulting Mexico City Declaration on Sex Education in Latin America and the Caribbean was unanimously endorsed.
3. U.S. citizens turn back attempts to restrict abortion access
In November, U.S. voters overwhelmingly rejected ballot measures to restrict access to safe abortion in South Dakota, Colorado, and California. In April, the Council of Europe called for all 47 member countries to make abortion safe and legal.
4. Indian government puts the power of prevention in women’s hands
This year, India’s National AIDS Control Organization (NACO) will provide sex workers in four states with about 1.5 million female condoms, which is the only woman-initiated HIV prevention technology currently available.
5. Clinton Global Initiative prioritizes adolescent girls
At the Clinton Global Initiative (CGI) annual meeting in September, longtime IWHC partner Bene Madunagu, head of the Girl’s Power Initiative (GPI) in Nigeria, spoke to the need for comprehensive sexuality education programs for the 1.5 billion people in the world today between the ages of 10 and 25.
6. Women’s advocates secure advances in Ecuadorian Constitution
After a year of negotiations, Ecuador’s Constitution now says that young people must receive sexuality education and that the State has an obligation to provide sexual and reproductive health services to its people.
7. Colombia’s high court rules on the side of science - and women’s rights
In June, the highest administrative court in Colombia ruled that the sexual and reproductive health services provider Profamilia can continue to import and distribute emergency contraception (EC)—in accordance with women’s right to access a full range of safe and effective contraceptive methods.
8. Connecticut, Colombia, and others stand strong for sexual rights
This year, Connecticut joined Massachusetts in legally recognizing same-sex marriages. Internationally, a Colombian court extended pension benefits to same-sex partners, acknowledging that to exclude them would violate the principles of non-discrimination and human dignity.
9. U.S. states prioritize youth health over ideology
In 2008, the number of U.S. states refusing to participate in the federal government’s abstinence-only-until marriage education program (Title V) reached 25, as state governments recognize what research and evaluations have repeatedly shown: abstinence-only programs are ineffective.
10. Muslim women in the United Kingdom granted equal rights in marriage
Muslim leaders in the United Kingdom succeeded in creating a new marriage contract under Sharia’h law that gives husbands and wives equal rights, after four years of negotiations. The new contract no longer permits men to practice polygamy and grants women the right to initiate divorce.
Last Wednesday, I set up my International Day to End Violence Against Sex Workers speech to auto-post about the time I would be giving it in Washington Square Park. I handed my Flip camera to Tess and asked her to shoot (plus she’s been curious about the Flip - no better way to learn it than using it).
I got a little past half way into the first sentence of the speech, and I just broke. I meant to deliver the speech with a force and enthusiasm that would inspire people, but I could barely get the words out. I think it ended up being inspiring in a way that was a little different than I intended. As a general rule, I’m not one for public tears, and I’ve certainly never cried in front of a large group like that.
Wednesday night I just felt gutted. I went out afterwards, which was probably good, but I just wanted - well, things I can’t have, things that don’t exist anymore. I know I am strong, and I did feel supported that night, but sometimes there just isn’t anything reasonable that can fix hurt. Thinking about murdered sex workers and the long long way there is to go to secure basic human rights for people who work in the sex industry - that’s a heavy hurt that is hard to mend.
I wasn’t sure I’d be able to put this video online, mostly because I wasn’t sure I’d be able to sit and edit it. Truth be told, I haven’t watched it all the way through. I snipped the beginning and the end, and I know there’s a bit of a blip in the middle. I just can’t sit and watch video of myself breaking like that. My speech was about strength and vulnerability, and I know there’s strength in exposing my vulnerability, so that’s why I’ve posted the video. I hope it strikes a chord.
I’m starting to put together some wrap up posts for 2008, so I figured I’d start it off with one that was pretty easy to put together: my favorite photos of 2008. Many many more pictures that I’ve taken are available on my Flickr account - you have to have a username to have a look, since my stuff is tagged as unsafe.
October 2008 - me in the projection room at Eiszeit Kino after the premiere of Dacia’s Love Machine at the Berlin Porn Film Festival
June 2008 - L to R: Eliyanna Kaiser, Xaviera Hollander (and her boobs), Annie Sprinkle, Beth Stephens, and me after breakfast at Xaviera Hollander’s in Amsterdam
April 2008 - Joy Rumore, my tattoo artist and friend, in the sex nerds tee-shirt she designed for me. (psst, tee shirts are available in my store)
March 2008 - My arm-length photo of myself at CNN, right after taping an interview about the Eliot Spitzer madness.
February 2008 - Me the night of the GAYVN awards, in the dress that Bella Vendetta made for me. The Bi Apple didn’t win, but going to the GAYVNs was very amusing.
January 2008 - Crowded on a bed with a bunch of sex nerds, taking pics in the mirror on the ceiling, the night before the Adult Entertainment Expo.
At the International Women’s Health Coalition (where I’m now the program officer for online communications and campaigns, in case you missed that post), we’re starting to roll out new webby goodness, starting with a redesigned website and a video series. In the new year we’ll also be adding a blog, an audio podcast, and we’ll be posting videos on a regular basis. I cannot tell you how excited and proud I am of these developments, and how psyched I am to move forward with all these new projects. My mission in general is to get more people online talking about and engaged with issues of sexual and reproductive rights and health. That word sexual is key - this work isn’t just about reproduction. Lots of sex acts are non-reproductive, and when they are consensual they should be under the umbrella of human rights.
Here’s a snippet from our website launch note:
Filled with interactive resources and up-to-the-minute information, you’ll find even more ways to stay informed, take action and connect with others dedicated to securing every woman’s right to a just and healthy life. Visit www.iwhc.org and find out:
• Two things you can do right now to make a difference for girls and women
• How much you and others know about women’s rights and health through our new poll
• How an IWHC-supported organization, Adolescent Health and Information Project in northern Nigeria, is reaching thousands of young people with vital information about their bodies and rights
• What IWHC’s new tag line, a Just and Healthy Life: Every Woman’s Right, means to people around the world. Our new video series is available on our site and YouTube channel
The video below is one of the just and health life videos - the woman featured is Susana Chavez, the director of Centro de Promoción y Defensa de los Derechos Sexuales y Reproductivos (PROMSEX) in Peru. They are a feminist organization that promotes and protects sexual and reproductive rights and health in Peru through policy reform, particularly on access to safe abortion.
This is the speech I gave at the International Day to End Violence Against Sex Workers vigil in Washington Square at 7 pm on December 17, 2008.
Every year I come to this event, and every year, in the hour before the vigil, I seriously consider not showing up, because it’s hard to be here, hard to stay present and be witness to the sadness and struggles of this community. Sex workers and our allies are strong – no doubt – but we are also vulnerable. And those two words -strength and vulnerability- are exactly why the International Day to End Violence Against Sex Workers exists.
Today, on the 6th annual International Day to End Violence Against Sex Workers, there are gatherings in 20 cities around the world, including places like Tucson, San Francisco, Hong Kong, Vancouver, Copenhagen, and Sydney. There’s a National March that happened earlier today in Washington DC, culminating in a rally in front of the Department of Justice. And here we are, a little chilly but resilient. Our movement is growing, and though we have many obstacles, we are moving forward toward a world in which sex workers’ rights are recognized as human rights, where we are free to choose what we do with our bodies and how we make our livings - whether that means working in the sex industry or keeping far away from it because we have viable economic alternatives.
In a minute we’ll read the SWOP demands for ensuring justice and safety for sex workers, but I also wanted to add in my very own demand – and it’s not directed to policy makers, health care providers, law enforcement, or any other official organization. It’s directed to the people standing right here today. My demand is this: take care of yourselves, ask for help when you need it, and offer support to others when you can. And by support, I mean the purest and most human form of support – listen to sex workers and allies about their experiences, their struggles, their doubts. It’s true that we have a lot of work to do, and sex workers are dying while we’re trying to do that work. But it’s also true that we can’t be of service, we can’t fight the good fight, if we don’t take care of ourselves and each other. When we’re done with the program today – after we read the SWOP demands and the list of names of sex workers who were murdered this year, I want to encourage you to hang out a while, decompress, and just talk to each other and offer support.
This day is a hard one to face, a hard one to be present for, but the purpose of any memorial service is to create a space for the living to show respect for those who have lost their lives and to be there for one another. So let’s do that – not just today but throughout the year.
This weekend I took a much needed road trip with my most excellent of travel pals, Eliyanna (who used to be my co-executive editor at $pread). We’ve also had fun traveling together on my 2007 summer East Coast book tour, and this past summer we went to Amsterdam together. We’ve also done a variety of $pread-related adventures together (including Vegas in summer 2006). We have three objectives on our trips: 1. get lost on purpose, 2. eat awesome food, 3. learn about weird stuff.
This weekend, I had the bright idea to go north and explore Salem, Massachusetts. It had all the right elements, and we had a totally awesome weekend. We drove up Friday night (drives both ways involved talking, consuming sugar, and listening to Pseudopod and Radiolab) and pretty much just crashed at the Salem Inn, a lovely B&B with a variety of staircases and hallways that made us confused, but whatever. In the morning we discovered that they have a bunch of zebra finches, in addition to several fire places. We didn’t get a room with a fire place, but we did score a room with a whirlpool bath, which was totally awesome.
On Saturday we got right to the witch tourism. There are a few layers of cheesiness to the witch experience in Salem - mostly there are a lot of dioramas that light up and have some quantity of dust on them, but the storytelling was pretty damn good. And though I know this stuff from reading The Devil in the Shape of a Woman, it’s always disturbing to be reminded about the price that non-conforming women have paid throughout history. Eliyanna and I had good talks about feminism, forms of hysteria, and witchery all throughout the weekend.
There are a bunch of cemeteries in and around Salem, but this one we’re bundled up in is Old Burying Point, which was established in 1637. John Hathorne, who was the judge at the Salem witch trials, is buried there. Though others involved in the trials later admitted they’d lied and made stuff up and said that the accused weren’t really witches, Judge Hathorne publicly stood by his role in the trials (and the death of 19 condemned men and women). He’s an ancestor of Salem resident Nathaniel Hawthorne, who altered the spelling of his name to distance himself from the shame he felt about the Judge’s role.
We were impressed by the headstones and the stories they do and do not tell. This guy died in 1790 at age 97 - impressive, as most other folks in this cemetery were dying in their 50s and 60s.
After several hours of history goodness and me torturing Eliyanna with my jokes about it being colder than a witch’s tit, we defrosted with a wine tasting and some quality time at the Derby Square Bookstore - Eliyanna is pictured trying not to disturb the carefully stacked books. The store’s two keepers kept popping out from behind the piles to urge us to ask for help instead of trying to retrieve books ourselves. Every book in the store, all used but in good shape, was 50% off. Most excellent, and most dangerous for book hoarders like us.
Before dinner we headed to the House of Seven Gables. The only way to see the historic house was to take a guided tour - which actually was a series of performances of Christmas scenes from famous works of literature including A Child’s Christmas in Wales, Little Women, A Christmas Carol, ‘Twas the Night Before Christmas and -uh- The Diary of Anne Frank (the last of which was traumatizing enough when Eliyanna and I went to the Anne Frank House in Amsterdam, a little too much for the holidays). I whined a little about attending something called A Classic Christmas, but overall it was really awesome. And wholesome. But we counter-balanced the wholesomeness on day two.
Sunday morning we did the continental breakfast at the inn and then set out for the Salem Wax Museum. I’m not generally an enthusiast of wax museums because I find them kind of tacky, but Eliyanna convinced me with promises of death masks. It was satisfyingly creepy. For example:
After the witch trials of 1692, the hanged witches (all 19 of them) weren’t given Christian burials on account of them being agents of the devil and all. Instead, they were dropped into shallow graves in the woods surrounding Salem - no one knows exactly where. Note the placid looks on the gravedigger’s faces. But wait, the best part is yet to come!
Also in this massively creepy diorama is an illustration of the fact that shallow graves and rains meant that body parts would poke out of the soil. It’s hard to see in this picture, but there is a rat snacking on the blue, bloated foot. I don’t think the limbs would be so well preserved and bleeding though. But still - awesome.
At the end, we got to make wax casts of our hands. I got excited about being able to make a red right hand a la Nick Cave, plus an added flourish. So, this is now in my home office right next to my Feminist Porn Award:
We lunched, and then on our way out of the cafe, we saw a striking postcard, for a burlesque performance called The Slutcracker (beware auto-playing sound file and pop ups for all menu items). It was on our way home, and we had an hour to make our way to the Somerville Theater for the matinee performance.
The show was awesome. A burlesque, fully choreographed satire of the Nutcracker, with a giant dancing pink vibrator instead of the nutcracker figurine, plus lovely burlesque ladies of all shapes and sizes. This pic from my iPhone shows a moment in the first act that involved a 10 foot tall cock and balls painted like a candy cane and spurting fake snow. Amazing.
And to top it all off, the basement of the Somerville theater houses the Museum of Bad Art, which I’ve wanted to go to for years. They spent a while without a public exhibition space, but have found a home. And, whoa. Most of the art is not bad on purpose, and it’s been curated from yard sales, thrift stores, and trash piles. They are getting more and more intentionally bad submissions however. The descriptions and titles for the pieces really make everything extra-awesome (for example, there was a painting of a vase-less bouquet of flowers standing on a table called “No Apparent Means of Support.”) This particular piece is from the “Pointlessism” school of painting:
The International Day To End Violence Against Sex Workers is an annual event that occurs on December 17th. This year the national Sex Workers Outreach Project has organized a march in Washington DC. Check out their informative web page for more information. There are also smaller vigils happening in other cities for those who can’t make the trip. Here in NYC, there will be a candlelight vigil from 7 to 8 pm on Wednesday, December 17th in Washington Square Park. The event is co-sponsored by the Sex Workers Outreach Project, Sex Work Awareness, $pread Magazine, and Sex Workers Action New York.
I’m MCing the event and giving a short speech, and there will be a reading of the names of sex workers murdered in the past year.
It’s always a pretty somber and kind of difficult event to be present at, but I do think it’s worth our time and energy to bring attention to the volume of sex workers murdered every year, while also looking forward to a future where less of that happens.
Producing a calendar for a fundraising project is not a new idea - it’s tried and true, and it conveniently means that there’s an actual product so there’s a tangible answer to “what do I get?,” a question that people getting friendly with a new organization are justified in asking (also, the end of the year is prime giving time). Another justifiable question is, “what will my money be used for?”
The organization that benefits from calendar sales - and at this point in the game is receiving all of the money from each sale through my store, since our costs are covered - is Sex Work Awareness (SWA). Sex Work Awareness is an organization that I co-founded with Eliyanna Kaiser, Kevicha Echols, and Susan Rohwer, and was created around the core belief that all sex workers have a right to self-determination; to choose how they make a living and what they do with their bodies.
SWA plans to use funds from the calendar sales to do our media skills training workshops Speak Up! for sex workers in New York and another city on the east coast. We will use the money to pay the workshop presenters, rent space and provide snacks, as well as provide a small stipend for workshop participants who might not otherwise be able to afford to take time out to take the day long seminar.
SWA will also allocate some funds to the development of a new media project, an alternative audioguide to the Metropolitan Museum of Art’s 19th and 20th century European paintings. The audioguide, Red Light Met, will be available as a podcast on iTunes and will be chock full of information about prostitution and the arts.
So far, the calendar sales and outreach efforts have not been focused on the community of activists who work on sex worker issues. This is not because we don’t think that groups like the Sex Work Outreach Project and their many chapters, or SWANK, or PONY or the Desiree Alliance (or… or…) are important. It’s because so far the work of Sex Work Awareness, as exemplified by our project Sex Work 101, has been very focused on public education on issues that affect sex workers. The vast majority of the people who posed for the calendar and are buying the calendar are not sex workers, but they are expressing solidarity with sex workers and putting their faces, names, and dollars on the lines to support the efforts of a sex worker advocacy organization. And this is a great thing.
One of the calendar’s two producers, Diva, is a lovely example of what Sex Work Awareness hopes to see more of in the world. Over the summer, she made a few comments on her blog about sex workers (though she used other words) that I found offensive and misguided. I could have left a nasty comment or lashed out at her in some other way, but I gave her the benefit of the doubt and assumed that she just had never grappled with the issues that sex workers face, nor had she ever been aware of meeting someone who works in the sex industry. So I emailed her about it and started a conversation and sex workers that she was open to (though possibly a bit bewildered by at first). Sometimes people are straight-up evil towards sex workers - other times they say hurtful things because they haven’t ever had the chance to meet (and humanize!) a sex worker. This fall, Diva has been hustling like nobody’s business, along with Tess Danesi (who is also not at all a sex worker), to raise money for Sex Work Awareness and sell these gorgeous calendars.
I know that a conversation or an email thread with one person seems like a tiny thing. And throwing in $20 towards a calendar seems tiny too - but the sex worker activist movement is small, and every little bit counts. There are also a lot of asks this time of year, especially as we ramp up to the December 17th International Day to End Violence Against Sex Workers, among many other things. But $20 isn’t much, and you’ll have a shiny, well photographed blogger pin-up calendar for your wall - or to take out of a drawer and peek at when the mood strikes you.
Buying a calendar for $20 helps Sex Work Awareness work towards reducing the stigmas faced by sex workers, provide support, and build a culture where sex workers can speak up and be proud.
