SerpentLibertine

Sex Worker, Activist, Antagonistic Sympathizer

Today I did court advocacy for a woman named Goddess Diana, a tantric massage provider that was arrested and as of this afternoon, evicted from her condo on Chicago’s north side. Diana is a wild-child, free spirit type who has been practicing tantra for several years and was providing sessions out of her condo building on a major street in a hip, yet highly gentrified neighborhood. Normally tantra providers usually fall under the radar of law enforcement, as their practice is a bit too esoteric for the average joe to understand, but in this particular case, Diana was basically railroaded by her nosy neighbors.

Unfortunately, Diana’s biggest folly may have been purchasing a condo in a three flat sandwiched between two yuppified, similarly surnamed couples, one with a child. Of course, yuppies are always trying to protect their children from something they might perceive to be dangerous, despite how harmless it really is. Diana’s neighbors took offense to her artistic lifestyle and bohemian appearance and began mounting a plot to get her out of the building. They searched online for information about her business, found it was sexual in nature, and mounted a camera in the lobby of their building to watch the comings and goings of Diana, her friends, and her clients. The video from these tapes was then posted on You Tube, complete with Diana’s name calling her a “whore” for all the world to see. (It has since been pulled down off the site.)

But that’s not all. Her neighbors filed a complaint with the alderman about her line of business, who eventually got the police involved. An undercover officer was set to to visit Diana and receive a tantric massage. Despite not having touched the officer’s genitalia, she was arrested and charged with prostitution and massage without a license. As if this weren’t bad enough, she was found in violation of the condo association board rules for working from home. As a result, the condo association began the eviction process to get her removed from the place she bought and owned…her property! (Yet another reason I think condos are bullshit purchases. Why do you have to follow “rules” dictated by someone else if you “own” a place?)

Last week Diana was found guilty of prostitution, massage without a license, and working illegally from home. She was sentenced to court supervision and 40 hours community service. Today she was formally evicted from her condo, given 60 days to vacate the premises and one week to re-list it for sale. If she can’t sell the place within six months, she will be able to rent it out to a tenant, provided that the tenant is “not a friend or family member of Diana’s” and must be approved by a judge. Unbelievable!

The sad thing here is that this girl wouldn’t hurt a fly. She is a loving, trusting soul who just wanted to provide healing sessions for clients and did very well for herself until she was basically put out of business by these nosy neighbors and so called do-gooders who see fit to intrude on other people’s livelihoods. As part of her court agreement, Diana was told to take down her website and cease all advertising, therefore denying her an source of income. She is now faced with eviction, the possibility of foreclosure, and the likelihood of having to relocate to a different part of the country all because of this.

All because why?

She tried to provide men with a unique, relaxing and positive experience that, though sexual in nature, was not exactly prostitution. There were no negative events that caused her neighbors to take these actions, just their common dislike of Diana’s non-conformity among their bland wholesomeness in a neighborhood know for its independently owned boutiques and arts community.

Yet we see this every day…a sex worker railroaded by those around her (or him) who believe they’re so high and mighty that they can ruin another person’s life just because of their falsely moralistic beliefs. We’ve seen it before in these scandal with politicians slapping down sex workers with one hand yet using their services with another. Does it make everyone feel better in the end? No, it doesn’t.

What could I do here, for this woman? I really struggled with my anger over her situation for awhile as I could see it happening to myself or anyone I knew. I didn’t know how I could help her, but the least I could do was provide support. So Miss Jasmine and I from SWOP accompanied her to court today, grilled her lawyer on various topics, and basically cheered her up in what was a shitty situation. I videotaped her telling her entire story for a future episode of RedLightDistrict, as well as Miss Jasmine’s response to how the case was handled. Diana admitted by the end of the afternoon we had cheered her up and she felt a lot better about her situation.

It still sucks, but at least she knows she’s not alone. And that’s what matters.

Several weeks ago I was lucky enough to sit down for an interview with author, pornographer, and sex educator Tristan Taormino. View parts one and two of our conversation at RedLightDistrictChicago.com

I also review Tristan’s educational seminar on Anal Sex 201 over at Sex-kitten.net!

Check out this awesome video Renegade Evolution put together to honor sex workers and the death of Deborah Jeane Palfrey…

Desiree Alliance Presents~
In partnership with BAYSWAN, Sex Workers Outreach Project-USA, SWANK, H.I.P.S. Different Avenues, COYOTE, Best
Practices Policy Project, $pread Magazine, St. James Infirmary, Harm Reduction Coalition, PONY, SWOP-Chicago,
SWOP-Las Vegas, SWOP-Los Angeles, SWOP- Northern California, SWOP-Arizona, SWOP-Portland, & SWOP-EAST

“Pulling Back the Sheets: Sex, Work and Social Justice”
July 16-20, 2008 Chicago, IL

REGISTER NOW!
The Desiree Alliance is a diverse, volunteer-based, sex worker-led network of organizations,
communities and individuals across the US working in harm reduction, direct services, political
advocacy and health services for sex workers. We provide leadership development and create
space for sex workers and supporters to come together to advocate for human, labor and civil
rights for all workers in the sex industry.
This convergence will create space for dialogue between hundreds of sex workers and their allies
to share their personal experience and skills, identify workers’ most pressing needs, share
training and networking skills for developing solutions, and to collaborate on strategies for social
and political change on local, state, national and international levels.

Some of the scheduled workshops include:
“Safety for Sex Workers Through personal Privacy
Legal and relatively simple ways for working and living out of harms way”
“Tantra: How it can uplift the plight and struggle of sex workers and clientele”
“Self marketing and self branding: How to run a profitable (and more safe) sex worker
business”
“Safety 411″
“Falling Through All the Cracks: Young adult transgender sex workers”
“Challenging Discrimination Among Sex Workers: Reconstructing ‘sex work’”
“Bad Date Line: How to start, run + maintain a damn good project”
“Sex Workers Against Rape”
“Sex Workers Rights and Direct Services in Urban Los Angeles”
“Adult Entertainer’s Guide to Disabled Customers”
“We, Asian Sex Workers”

The Desiree Alliance is a diverse, volunteer-based, sex worker-led network of
organizations, communities and individuals across the US working in harm reduction,
direct services, political advocacy and health services for sex workers. We provide
leadership development and create space for sex workers and supporters to come together
to advocate for human, labor and civil rights for all workers in the sex industry.

Desiree Alliance-Conference Registration

Desiree Alliance is a Project of Social and Environmental Entrepreneurs (SEE), a 501(c)(3) non-profit.

Conference registration fees are $150 if you register by June 1st, and $200 if you register
between June 2nd and July 10th. All participants must register no later than July 10th. Fees
include registration materials, admission to the opening reception, breakfast and lunch Thur-Sat,
admission to the after party on Sat and brunch on Sunday. To register for the conference visit our
site and submit the registrant screening form. After you submit this form, a registration packet and
payment information will be sent to you.
For more information on registration scholarships, contact: Liz Copl at hdfemme@gmail.com
If you have registration questions please contact: tara@birl.org

We are also looking for volunteer house photographers and videographers for the conference! You must be a registered attendee to participate.

APPLY HERE!

So for the past year or so I’ve been working off and on with a middle-aged couple whose dream it is to create a “MILF” website featuring the female of the couple having sex with various men. When we originally began shooting in 2006, the idea was to have the both of them in different sexual situations with various people, pending that everyone on the site was in the 35-55 range.

One house fire and several setbacks later, we are back filming for the as-yet-to-be launched website, this time without the male participating in the action, as he finally realized he could get fired from his job if he ever appeared on such a website. He came up with what he thought was a “brilliant” idea of having the theme be “whoring my wife out to pay the rent” and bought the webdomain mywifesawhore.com or something like that. In each scene, the wife is supposed to be an escort seeing clients as a last ditch desperate attempt to pay the rent. he insisted there was only one other website on the ‘net that was just like it. Hmmmm…

Initially, I was really turned off by this idea. Thought both husband and wife are really enthusiastic about shooting content for the site, I get the feeling that all of this is masterminded by the guy and the woman is just kind of playing along in order to keep him happy. I also wasn’t comfortable with the sexism of the theme, as my goal is to do more feminist-based porn that doesn’t play on male fantasies. I’d also heard the male throw around the term “hooker” here and there in a deragatory fashion to describe escorts (they have no idea I’m one) even though it’s quite clear that he has plenty of experience using the services of them. I even took the couple to some sex-work socials that were held here awhile back and they claimed the title “sex worker” for themselves, even though they somewhat dissed the same people who could fall under that category. It was more than a little irritating at times.

Don’t get me wrong, though. These are really nice people, like family even, and they opened up to me right away and have the utmost respect for my professionalism. But like all family members, they can get on my nerves sometime.

So to embark on his new master plan, the male in the couple began placing ads on craigslist and Adult Friend Finder to look for men willing to fuck his wife for “$300 or free if you let us film it.” Oh brother. Not the way to go about this at all. He said he received hundreds of responses, but after exchanging emails for weeks with potential candidates, he’d only been able to round up a handful of guys to meet with us for a pre-shoot interview at a local bar. We met with three guys total, one guy blew us off and one guy was just too inappropriate for what we were doing. So that left us with two decent guys willing to be filmed fucking on camera.

You wouldn’t need a crystal ball to predict that a week later, when it came down to scheduling these guys for the actual shoot, they both went MIA. Actually one exchanged emails a bit, and just concluded that he wouldn’t be able to get away from his wife to be filmed fucking some other guy’s wife while her husband watched. Desperate to get a day of filming in the can, Mr. MILF scoured Craigslist again, finding a professional performer and hiring him the day before the shoot. Sometime you have to shell out a little cash in order to make things work. I believe this is something I had told him before but for some reason he chose not to listen.

The “professional” they ended up hiring was actually a professional actor, not a porn performer and had actually never been hired out to do porn before, despite many attempts. His name was “Frank” and he was an attractive African American guy in his 40′s, but looked ten years younger (hey, black don’t crack). if Frank was nervous at all off the bat, he didn’t seem it, as he sat down right away and began making Mrs. MILF feel comfortable. Frank had some ideas of his own about how the scene should go and he seemed like a take-charge kind of guy, which was appropriate for the situation.

We were aiming for as much “reality” of the situation as possible, so Frank and Mrs. MILF began talking like they were actually in an escort/client situation and suprisingly, it was very believable. He completely led the scene and she played the slightly nervous, but submissive wife who was experiencing her first time as an escort. Frank’s background in acting really helped here, as he was able to get into character and take charge. They began with some foreplay, slow undressing and he going down on her, three things that are often missing from porn. The two performers actually had a lot of chemistry with each other and the result was totally hot.

We moved over to do the sex scene on the bed, but like most novice male porn performers, Frank ran into some problems staying hard. He was rock hard for the first half of the scene, but once we started taking breaks and moving lights around, he lost his concentration…and his erection. Frank was a great sport, though, and apologized profusely, but he continued on with the scene and improvised some positions he could do without a hard cock. The result was absolutely smokin’ hot.

Frank started doing some rough play, spanking, a little biting, hair pulling, and forceful thrusting. A couple of times the result was a little comical (more the result of Mrs. Milf’s phony moaning)but the dripping sweat coming off both performers was very real and Frank totally made up for his flaccid cock in other ways. I’d honestly have to say it was one of the hotter scenes I’ve ever shot. And I was totally not expecting it to be at all.

Funny how porn is like that.

The sad news yesterday of D.C. Madam Deborah Jeane Palfrey’s suicide once again sent waves throughout the sex worker community. Geez…can we go at least a month without a sex worker scandal? Pleeeze!

It was a tragedy when Palfrey was found guilty last month of racketeering, mail fraud, and money laundering but her high-profile clients (Randall Tobias, et al) got off Scot-free, despite the fact that they were the real criminals here. Is it fun for people to watch these women go down? Because really, women don’t commit as heinous crimes as men or as often as men, so it’s the prostitutes and madams such as Palfrey that get used as examples in the media for what “bad” women look like. Still, you’d have to search far and wide to find someone who actually believed that Palfrey was dangerous and should be locked away from the public.

Palfrey insisted that she didn’t want to spend even one more day in federal prison again (she’d been before) and she made good on that promise yesterday, despite the fact that she may have only gotten a sentence of five years or so and been out in even less than that. I understand, though. If I was in Palfrey’s case, I may have even done the same thing. What would she do once she was released from prison? Perhaps she felt there was nothing left to turn to.

It’s hard to say, though and I wouldn’t want to speak for someone else. I think a lot of us in sex work activism felt that maybe Palfrey was stronger than we though and would have the moxie to move on despite whatever sentence was handed down to her. we hoped she’d get a book or movie-of-the-week deal, netting her the big bucks. She’d always insisted that the clients should be held just as accountable as she was, which I agree with. Supply=demand. If she’s going to go down then take the clients down to. This happens all the time in prostitution cases. It’s easier to bust the women than the men.

Palfrey’s trail didn’t get much attention. In fact, it was called downright boring by some reports. However, several clients and providers testified and one reported any negative effects as the result of their work or the services provided to them. Hmmm…either we were too busy with the Spitzer scandal or for some reason the media didn’t find that to be newsworthy enough to report. I can’t imagine Diane Sawyer and the rest of the uninformed news media anting to hear that these “fantasy sex providers” actually enjoyed what they did.

What Palfrey, Spitzer, and who-knows-next are all victims of really is the US War on Sex. We live in a huge country of prudes, where sex is used to sell just about everything you can imagine, but -gasp!- selling sex is demonized to the level of rape, murder, and much more heinous crimes. Talk about sending mixed messages. Yes, I know we are a puritanical society, but just think of all the heinous crimes that happen each day, from the war in Iraq, to the FCLDS nutjobs forcing their teenage girls to marry older men (without pay!), to the random shootings that happen every day nearly everywhere. Do I sound like a broken record here? Maybe I am. Now think of the Spitzers, the Deborah Jeane Palfreys, the Heidi Fleiss’ and wonder why these people ever made the front page news.

It’s because we are obsessed with sex.