Hos, Hookers, Call Girls, and Rent Boys: Professionals Writing on Life, Love, Money, and Sex

Description

The only thing the writers in this book have in common is that they've exchanged sex for money. They're PhDs and dropouts, soccer moms and jailbirds, $2,500-a-night call girls and $10 crack hos, and everything in between. This anthology lends a voice to an underrepresented population that is simultaneously reviled and worshipped. Hos, Hookers, Call Girls, and Rent Boys is a collection of short memoirs, rants, confessions, nightmares, journalism, and poetry covering life, love, work, family, and yes, sex. The editors gather pieces from the world of industrial sex, including contributions from art-porn priestess Dr. Annie Sprinkle, best-selling memoirist David Henry Sterry (Chicken: Self-Portrait of a Young Man for Rent), sex activist and musical diva Candye Kane, women and men right off the streets, girls participating in the first-ever National Summit of Commercially Sexually Exploited Youth, and Ruth Morgan Thomas, one of the organizers of the European Sex Work, Human Rights, and Migration Conference. Sex is a billion-dollar industry. Meet the real people who are its flesh and blood.

David Henry Sterry is the author of more than ten books, including Chicken, a memoir about his experiences as a young sex worker, Unzipped: A True Story of Sex, Drugs, Rollerskates and Murder, and Master of Ceremonies: A True Story of Love, Murder, Roller-skates and Chippendales. He's made over 300 media appearances and was a finalist for the Henry Miller Award.

"[A]n eye-opening, occasionally astonishing, brutally honest and frequently funny collection . . . unpolished, unpretentious, and riveting. . . [a] rare ability to tell the truth, an ability that education and sophistication often serve to conceal." --The New York Times "Sterry, author of sex-worker memoir Chicken (a fact he mentions often) compiles an exhaustive (and exhausting) collection of writing from sex workers of all stripes. The sprawling project, grouped loosely by topic (Life, Love, Money, Sex, etc.), offers insight into seemingly all aspects of the sex trade: high-profile celebrities like Xaviera "Happy Hooker" Hollander and Nina Hartley make notable contributors, but it's the unknown writers who will stick. The selections from the book's closing section alone, written by members of Sterry's San Francisco writer's workshop for sex workers, range from triumphant to harrowing, making up for a lack of style or form with passion. Aside from exposing the complex web of relationships among phone sex operators, dancers, massage parlor workers, prostitutes and their customers, the book is heavy with raw emotions ranging from celebratory to shameful, giving armchair sociologists plenty to ponder. It's not all dark and heavy: Sterry's own account of his experience as a birthday present for an 82-year-old grandmother is touching and sentimental; veteran performer Annie Sprinkle is characteristically blunt, funny and honest. Best consumed in small doses, this volume houses some real gems amongst a number of redundant space-fillers." --Publishers Weekly