Risqué business

AT LEAST SHE’S PINK Sex Workers’ Art Show founder Annie Oakley, along with a lineup of performers, shoots from the hip.

When the tenth annual Sex Workers’ Art Show rolls into town for a one-night-only performance at Mo Pitkin’s this week, it’ll certainly be greeted with the type of freak-flag–waving East Village reception that makes queer New Yorkers proud. But the traveling cabaret—a creative, polysexual crew of strippers, escorts, dominatrices and other sex-for-pay types—doesn’t always get such an easy welcome.

“We do lots of college campuses, and several school groups have had to fight with their administrations to get us there,” says Annie Oakley, the show’s Olympia, Washington–based founder and director. “It’s usually women’s studies or queer groups that succeed.”

Last year, administrators at the College of William and Mary in Williamsburg, Virginia, were so scandalized by the impending show that they called in the state’s attorney general to advise them on how best to handle the sex workers’ presence on campus. “This year,” says Oakley, “the entire women’s studies department is required to attend.” It was just one example of a college’s turnaround in response to the show’s yearly tour. “Our show definitely has an impact on the places we go, and I feel really lucky to be involved with something that lets me see the results of our efforts.”

Oakley, 31, founded the event back when she was employed as a stripper, in response to some fellow Olympia activists who had derided her job as being antifeminist. “They were questioning my ability to make decisions for myself, and I was really surprised,” she recalls. “I was kind of angry, and I wanted people to deal with the stereotypes that they had—to realize that their judgments of, ‘Oh, you’re demeaning yourself,’ are coming from a privileged place, from people who are never going to have to make those kinds of decisions for themselves.”

Oakley (who says her name was randomly given to her by a fellow performer just before going onstage for the first Art Show) was able to round up five performers and five visual artists for that inaugural show, which was a hit in Olympia. It grew into a bigger venue the following year, and eventually went on the road, now drawing nearly 100 submissions annually from sex workers around the world—from those who work “outside,” as street prostitutes, to those employed in safer or more upscale environments. This year’s collective brings a variety of acts—including burlesque, spoken word, music and “weird performance art”—to the stage. “The point is not to show one particular view of the industry,” says Oakley, “but many honest ones.”

LGBT perspectives are in grand supply. “Queer history and sex-worker history are definitely intertwined,” she adds, taking into account both the need for such work (especially among some trans people) and the open-mindedness that’s required to consider making it one’s profession.

“I feel so lucky that I’m a queer sex worker,” says Art Show spoken-word performer Amber Dawn. “I feel like my community is more open to my life experience and doesn’t vilify the choices I’ve made in my life.” Dawn, 32, supported herself (and put herself through college and a writing M.F.A. program) as a street prostitute in the roughest section of her native Vancouver, beginning when she was “very young—underage.” She’s also danced in clubs, made porn and worked in Vancouver massage parlors, where sexual services are legal. This year, her third in the Art Show, Dawn says she’s delving into some of her “grave and topical” material, much of it about her early years in the biz.

The show is certainly not all dark, though, as Kirk Read, a spoken-word performer with a forthcoming memoir called This Is the Thing, indicates. “I definitely feel sometimes like I’m an anomaly because I just love being a sex worker,” says Read, 34, a Virginia native who says he decided on a career as an escort after reading Hustling, John Preston’s how-to book, while he was in his twenties.

“I’ve always been attracted to men over 40,” he explains, “and it dawned on me that I could have a job I really deeply enjoyed, plus have time for my writing and a social life. I’m a double Aquarius, so I have a sunny outlook anyway. But I really do enjoy my job.”

To equal out the karma and lend support to those who aren’t lucky enough to have a choice about their profession, Read says, he works at a free health-care clinic for sex workers in San Francisco. “There’s an enormous class privilege if you work indoors,” he admits. “And there’s an enormous gender privilege for men in this business. So I am very aware of the fact that I breathe rarefied air.” 

The Sex Workers’ Art Show is Fri 23 at Mo Pitkin’s.