|
Annie’s note: California Lawyer magazine invited me to write an article for them. I was delighted to reach a new audience, and to get to tell war stories of my legal battles, in both my sex work and my performance art work. Also, I was dating a lawyer at the time and I wanted to impress her. I wrote this piece during the heat of the O.J. Simpson trial.  "Annie Sprinkle was a NYC prostitute and porn star for twenty years, then morphed into an artist and sexologist. She has passionately explored sexuality for over forty years, sharing her experiences through making her own unique brand of feminist sex films, writing books and articles, visual art making, creating theater performances, and teaching. Annie has consistently championed sex worker rights and health care and was one of the pivotal players of the Sex Positive Movement of the 1980's. She got her BFA at School of Visual Arts in NYC was the first porn star to earn a Ph.D.. She’s a popular lecturer whose work is studied in many colleges and Universities. For the past 12 years she has been collaborating on art projects with her partner, an artist and UCSC professor, Elizabeth Stephens. They are movers and shakers in the new “ecosex movement,” committed to making environmentalism more sexy, fun and diverse. In 2013, Sprinkle proudly received the Artist/Activist/Scholar Award from Performance Studies International at Stanford, and was awarded the Acker Award for Excellence in the Avant Garde. Click here for Annie Sprinkle's more detailed CV." (http://anniesprinkle.org/mini-biography/)
 Laura is a dedicated campaigner for sex workers' rights. She is challenging the Human Trafficking and Exploitation Act (Criminal Justice and Support for Victims) Act (Northern Ireland) 2015. She argues that the recent law passed in Northern Ireland which criminalizes the purchase of sex is an infringement on her human rights, her labour rights and her ability to keep herself safe in her work.
You don’t come to sex work at the age of 55 without a story, so here in brief is mine. For 26 years I was a social worker and for the last ten I worked in emergency psychiatry. I also have some history of activism, in the peace and women’s movements of the 1980’s, through to Occupy and environmentalist support currently. In 2014 I developed a close friendship with an ex client who had a significant criminal justice history. I lost my career, left my marriage, and ended up in a new town in an unaffordable house, with my expensive and addicted friend, and with no means of support. And so Clio put on heels for the first time in her life, and in March of 2015 she came tottering into my new Whoring Room. I am now retired, after working on my own, in brothels and developing my own Domme practice. This is an article I wrote a few months into my whoring, once it began to perturb me that I didn’t feel oppressed.
You can read more of Clio's work at AmberOHara.com. You may also follow her on Fetlife under Astarte37x18. |
Sex Worker Voices
|
RSS Feed