How My Book was Banned by the Prostitutes

HOW MY BOOK WAS BANNED BY THE PROSTITUTES
David Henry Sterry

Recently I agreed to be the token breeder whiteman on the Sex Worker Art Show (SWAS) tour that bumped, ground and belted its way all across the USA. Ten well-met ex-sex worker women, one fine transgendered fellow and me, a forty-six year old ex-gigolo-ho-rentboy. I will now tell the true story of how my book got banned by the prostitutes, and how I became a better man for it.

It starts at the beginning, on the West Coast fish-netted leg of the SWAS, a traveling menagerie of musicians, artists, spoken worders, exotic dancers, and madcap activists, all of whom have worked in the sex industry. As I fly up to Portland, I'm excitedly optimistic and trepidatiously terrified. But I believe that despite our differences, there will be room for their whore stories, and my whore stories; that we will represent this under-represented population who've been reviled and glorified, jailed and inhaled, raped and worshiped, put on a pedestal and spat upon for centuries; that we will celebrate the humor and the beauty, the anger and the tragedy, the pure power of the artist-whore who makes people squeal and feel and laugh and cry, and screams that the emperor has no clothes on. Personally this is the next step in my attempt to unite my above-ground suburban whiteman half and my underground-raped-ho'-drug-addict half; so I can become my whole truth-telling, sweet-hearted, spreading, evolution-friendly, being-of-service self in every moment. As opposed to the apologizing, desperately-attempting-to-make-every-single-person-like-me self which I manifest so often in public.

Opening night I arrive at the club a mass of jangling nerves, the world-weary-weight of whiteman's burden yoking and choking me, terrified that in this sex worker world a 46 year-old Caucasian breeder will be booed, heckled and hated, will never in a million years be able to rock the house. It's January cold in rain-as-usual Portland. I stalk skittish through the skeevy club, like a freaked animal trying to pretend everything's normal, but knowing he's going to be eaten alive.