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Hey sex workers!
I want to make a master post of your favourite sex worker books, from trashy memoir to labour theory! Please add on and I’ll keep editing this post to include additions.
_______________
Indecent (except for the epilogue)
Flesh for Fantasy-ed Kate Frank, Merri Lisa Johnson, R Danielle Egan
Making Work, Making Trouble -Deborah R Brock
Playing the Whore -Melissa Gira Grant
G-Strings and Sympathy - Kate Frank
In My Skin - Kate Holden
How to Make Love Like a Porn Star - Jenna Jameson
Concertina - Susan Winemaker
Call Me Sasha - Geena Leigh
Callgirl by Jeanette Angell
Prostitutes: Our Life ed by Claude Jaget
Back issues of $pread Magazine (a collection is upcoming! TAS will be interviewing Eliyanna Kaiser, one of the founding editors)
All four volumes of Prose and Lore
The Encyclopedia of Sex Work and Prostitution (now scanned online for free)
The Pleasure’s All Mine by Joan Kelly (v. weird pro sub memoir, not much on s work as labor but extremely compelling)
Honey, Honey, Miss Thang ed by Leon Pettiway ( Pettiway collects oral histories of black drug using trans women street workers in his city)
The Feminist Porn Book
Working by Dolores French (overlooked but essential!!! Memoir abt sex working her way across the world by early sex workers’ rights activist)
Tricks and Treats ed by Mattilda Bernstein Sycamore
Working Sex ed by Annie Oakley
The Other Hollywood: The Uncensored Oral History of the Porn Film Industry by Legs Mcneil
Workin It ed by Leon Pettiway (Pettiway collects oral histories by cis women drug using street workers/informal sex workers in his city)
Times Square Red, Times Square Blue by Samuel R Delany (scope is wider than just swork, but this is an important read)
Live Sex Acts by Wendy Chapkis
The Sexual Outlaw by John Rechy (plus City of Night)
Sex At The Margins by Laura Agustin
I’ve Got To Make My Livin’: Black Women’s Sex Work In Turn Of The Century Chicago
Leaving Las Vegas by John O’Brian
“Whore Carnival” ed Shannon Bell (is a bunch of interviews and art of mostly Canadian sex workers in the early nineties. It’s cheesy and weird and delightful, and oh so very nineties.
I just started “God’s Callgirl” by Carla Van Raay today, but so far so good.
Must add Erika Langley’s _The Lusty Lady_;
Norma Jean Almodovar’s _Cop to Call Girl_;
Annie Sprinkle’s _Post-Porn Modernist_.
wornsmooth: Probably my favorite is Danielle Willis’s writing (a lot of it is here:http://www.languageisavirus.com/danielle_willis/ also check the #danielle willistag)
The butch perspective on their femme sex worker partners in both Leslie Feinberg’s Stone Butch Blues and Lynn Breedlove’s Godspeed (spoilers: it’s not particularly nuanced in either case, even though the books are set 30 years apart).
Also Luke Davies’ Candy for the economics/tensions of a drug using couple where the woman brings home the majority of the money because she’s a sex worker.
Heather Lewis’s Notice, because I want everyone to love her work (though House Rules is probably the more readable book). Caty Simon’s essay is required co-reading
I’m currently reading (i.e. I started reading them at some point in the past and haven’t given up on them yet):
David Henry Sterry’s Chicken — not that you always need to get a man’s point of view, but so many of the arguments about sex work are so gendered, it’s interesting to see how it plays out with the genders reversed
Colette’s La Vagabonde — because, historical
I’m still working my way through Captive Genders (ed. by Nat Smith and Eric A Stanley). I mostly bought it for the piece on pre-Stonewall activism in the SF Tenderloin.
marginalite: Oh, yeah, I was going to put _Notice_ and _Captive Genders_ in there, but I feel like I’ve talked about them too much lately as is. And _Chicken_ is one of the worst/best memoirs ever. Also, I’ve wanted to read both the Collette and _Candy_ forever—gotta start working harder on getting a copy of the latter, the film is one of my favorite bad 90s movies, not to start a theme, here.
Good connection re: _Stone Butch Blues_ and _Godspeed_, the butch perspectives are so alike in both. Someone should write a paper.
clarawebbwillcutoffyourhead:
I haven’t seen these added, so ALL of Doezema and Kempadoo’s work on trafficking and sex worker organising in the third world:
Global Sex Workers
Sex Work and Trafficking Revisited
And of course The Comforts of Home by Luise White
Sex Work and Sex Workers ed Dark and Refinetti
I want to make a master post of your favourite sex worker books, from trashy memoir to labour theory! Please add on and I’ll keep editing this post to include additions.
_______________
Indecent (except for the epilogue)
Flesh for Fantasy-ed Kate Frank, Merri Lisa Johnson, R Danielle Egan
Making Work, Making Trouble -Deborah R Brock
Playing the Whore -Melissa Gira Grant
G-Strings and Sympathy - Kate Frank
In My Skin - Kate Holden
How to Make Love Like a Porn Star - Jenna Jameson
Concertina - Susan Winemaker
Call Me Sasha - Geena Leigh
Callgirl by Jeanette Angell
Prostitutes: Our Life ed by Claude Jaget
Back issues of $pread Magazine (a collection is upcoming! TAS will be interviewing Eliyanna Kaiser, one of the founding editors)
All four volumes of Prose and Lore
The Encyclopedia of Sex Work and Prostitution (now scanned online for free)
The Pleasure’s All Mine by Joan Kelly (v. weird pro sub memoir, not much on s work as labor but extremely compelling)
Honey, Honey, Miss Thang ed by Leon Pettiway ( Pettiway collects oral histories of black drug using trans women street workers in his city)
The Feminist Porn Book
Working by Dolores French (overlooked but essential!!! Memoir abt sex working her way across the world by early sex workers’ rights activist)
Tricks and Treats ed by Mattilda Bernstein Sycamore
Working Sex ed by Annie Oakley
The Other Hollywood: The Uncensored Oral History of the Porn Film Industry by Legs Mcneil
Workin It ed by Leon Pettiway (Pettiway collects oral histories by cis women drug using street workers/informal sex workers in his city)
Times Square Red, Times Square Blue by Samuel R Delany (scope is wider than just swork, but this is an important read)
Live Sex Acts by Wendy Chapkis
The Sexual Outlaw by John Rechy (plus City of Night)
Sex At The Margins by Laura Agustin
I’ve Got To Make My Livin’: Black Women’s Sex Work In Turn Of The Century Chicago
Leaving Las Vegas by John O’Brian
“Whore Carnival” ed Shannon Bell (is a bunch of interviews and art of mostly Canadian sex workers in the early nineties. It’s cheesy and weird and delightful, and oh so very nineties.
I just started “God’s Callgirl” by Carla Van Raay today, but so far so good.
Must add Erika Langley’s _The Lusty Lady_;
Norma Jean Almodovar’s _Cop to Call Girl_;
Annie Sprinkle’s _Post-Porn Modernist_.
wornsmooth: Probably my favorite is Danielle Willis’s writing (a lot of it is here:http://www.languageisavirus.com/danielle_willis/ also check the #danielle willistag)
The butch perspective on their femme sex worker partners in both Leslie Feinberg’s Stone Butch Blues and Lynn Breedlove’s Godspeed (spoilers: it’s not particularly nuanced in either case, even though the books are set 30 years apart).
Also Luke Davies’ Candy for the economics/tensions of a drug using couple where the woman brings home the majority of the money because she’s a sex worker.
Heather Lewis’s Notice, because I want everyone to love her work (though House Rules is probably the more readable book). Caty Simon’s essay is required co-reading
I’m currently reading (i.e. I started reading them at some point in the past and haven’t given up on them yet):
David Henry Sterry’s Chicken — not that you always need to get a man’s point of view, but so many of the arguments about sex work are so gendered, it’s interesting to see how it plays out with the genders reversed
Colette’s La Vagabonde — because, historical
I’m still working my way through Captive Genders (ed. by Nat Smith and Eric A Stanley). I mostly bought it for the piece on pre-Stonewall activism in the SF Tenderloin.
marginalite: Oh, yeah, I was going to put _Notice_ and _Captive Genders_ in there, but I feel like I’ve talked about them too much lately as is. And _Chicken_ is one of the worst/best memoirs ever. Also, I’ve wanted to read both the Collette and _Candy_ forever—gotta start working harder on getting a copy of the latter, the film is one of my favorite bad 90s movies, not to start a theme, here.
Good connection re: _Stone Butch Blues_ and _Godspeed_, the butch perspectives are so alike in both. Someone should write a paper.
clarawebbwillcutoffyourhead:
I haven’t seen these added, so ALL of Doezema and Kempadoo’s work on trafficking and sex worker organising in the third world:
Global Sex Workers
Sex Work and Trafficking Revisited
And of course The Comforts of Home by Luise White
Sex Work and Sex Workers ed Dark and Refinetti
