Author, book doctor, raker of muck

David Henry Sterry

Month: May 2010

Hookers, Writers & Other Strangers: Red Orbit Article on David Henry Sterry

http://www.redbankgreen.com/2010/02/in-orbit-writers-and-other-hookers/

American Manhood, from Mantle to Manchild Donovan & Why America Can Win World Cup 2010

Thanks once again to the Huffington Post for giving me some love. Nice to see World Cup fever is spreading.

http://huff.to/c4OEri

I’m 10. An American boy. When I walk into my first English sweet shop in Coxlodge, the tiny ex-mining village of my ancestors, it’s like entering a strange, exotic parallel universe. There’s candy, but it’s all different: Smarties, Crunchy Bars, Gob Stoppers. There’s newspapers, but they have pictures of naked women in them. This totally blows my little 10-year-old mind. Pretty women with naked knockers right there in the newspaper! What a world! And there, on the counter, is a box full of unopened soccer cards.

My little heart soars as my pulse spikes. Some of my earliest and most exhilarating memories involve my mom rewarding me for good behavior by buying me baseball cards. They’re one of my earliest attachments to a culture that was bigger than me and my family. An identity in the world. A way of defining myself by belonging to American institutions like Whitey Ford, Mickey Mantle and the Yankees. These iconic ballplayers are the heroes of my very early Wonder Years. Larger then life figures with extraterrestrial skills and talents you can count on in your hour of most dire need. Men who, even when limping, bloodied and bowed, triumph against seemingly insurmountable odds, and bring glory to you, your team, your tribe, and your country. These cardboard images of the best of the best were talismanic objects that stood for an ideal of American Manhood.

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Be prepared, brave, noble, kind, help your fellow man and be good to your school, your girl and your mom. So in that little sweetie shop outside Newcastle, I’m practically trembling with excitement as I plunk down my 10p (even the money’s different! big huge gigantic pennies!) and grab a pack. A whole new set of heroes unfolds before me. Bobby Moore, Gordon Banks, Bobby Charlton. I read about their superhuman exploits. The bone-crunching tackles, the rocket laser goals, the humanly impossible feline-like saves.

That’s when I first fall in love with soccer. Later that afternoon my budding romance is consummated with a bunch of local lads playing soccer in the little hardscrabble patch of scabby grass behind a block of industrial flats. Again I’m entranced by this parallel universe I’ve fallen into. These kids are just like the kids I play with back in America, only instead of pretending to be Whitey Ford, Mickey Mantle, and Willie Mays, we pretend to be Bobby Moore, Gordon Banks, and Bobby Charlton.

Now I’m 52. An American man. When I walk into my local soccer store in New Jersey, my heart still does a little hop skip pitterpat jig of joy when I see a box full of unopened soccer cards on the counter. $2.50. That’s what they cost now. As I start to open the first pack I have a mad flashback of that Coxlodge sweet shop of my ancestors when this is all it took to make me madly in love with life. To my mom rewarding me for being a good boy by buying me packs of baseball cards. To those Men who were the Olympian Gods of my childhood. At 52 I don’t rip open the pack anymore. Now I savor it. Take my time. As I uncover the first card I’m flabbergasted and gobsmacked. It’s Landon Manchild Donovan, arguably the greatest goalscoring threat America has ever produced. He’s the very first card in the very first pack. It is clearly a sign from the soccer gods. Obviously they’re telling me that Landyman is going to have a huge World Cup. I immediately make him my pre-World Cup favorite to win the Golden Boot for most goals scored in the tournament. If I was a betting man I’d lay a wager on that right now. When I look at the next card I’m both awe and dumb struck, can hardly believe the information my eyes is feeding my brain. It is… Tim T-Ho Howard, arguably the greatest goalkeeper in the world today. Mouth agape, eyes googly I’m like: These are the first two cards of the first pack I buy of 2010 South Africa World Cup soccer cards, are you kidding me? I’ve stated publicly that I think America’s going to win this World Cup. People scoff. Mock. Ridicule. Deride. But I don’t care anymore. I’ve never been able my entire life to muster any kind of religious belief. And I have tried. God, how I’ve tried. I envy those people who can believe in a religion that gives them spiritual ease and peace. A benevolent God, a Heaven full of angels and puppies and unicorns and all the people you’ve ever loved, who come running up to you in slow motion with open arms and hearts when you die. I don’t know why, but from since I was a little kind I believed that we create our own heaven and hell right here on Earth. I’ve never seen any evidence of what an afterlife might be. I believe in science. Matter is neither created nor destroyed. So whatever I am will turn into something else. I’ve just never seen any proof of what that something else might be.

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But in New Jersey last week when I opened that pack and I was blown sideways by the first two cards being the two hotshot superstars of American soccer, it struck me with a transcendent ecstatic flash that this ridiculous irrational belief I have that the United States is going to win this World Cup gives me great comfort. Sweet solace. Soccer succor. On June 12, against England, our former imperialist, colonialist oppressors, USA opens their World Cup 2010 in South Africa. Join me won’t you, and dive into the peaceful waters where awaits the blissful baptism of a true Believer. I know the more mojo, hoodoo and juju we can send through the power of our collective will to Team USA in South Africa, the more likely it is for our dream to come true, to see Lando and T-Ho hoisting the World Cup over their heads and forever basking in the pantheon of soccer gods with Booby Moore, Gordon Banks and Bobby Charlton.

David Henry Sterry is co-author, with Alan Black – San Francisco legend and notorious soccer lunatic – of The Glorious World Cup: A Fanatics Guide, featuring internationally renown soccer junkie Irvine Welsh, soccer crazy best-selling author Po Bronson, and the best soccer writer in the world Simon Kuper. A laugh-out-loud ride of a guide for the fanatic in all of us. http://www.davidhenrysterry.com/category/books/

Musical Playlist & Interview for Glorious World Cup from Largeheartedboy

I love this website, and the guy who runs it is way cool, David Gutowski. i had a blast putting this 2gether.

2010-fifa-world-cup-south-africa-artwork-wallpaper pg-44-iggy-pop-ap

http://www.largeheartedboy.com/blog/archive/2010/05/book_notes_davi_13.html

Book Notes – David Henry Sterry (“The Glorious World Cup: A Fanatic’s Guide”)

In the Book Notes series, authors create and discuss a music playlist that relates in some way to their recently published book.

As I grow older, my love for soccer increases every year while the appeal of other sports wanes (both as spectator and participant). The World Cup is my favorite sporting event, combining the international aspect of the Olympics with the fervent passion of soccer fans.

David Henry Sterry has co-written The Glorious World Cup: A Fanatic’s Guide, a wildly entertaining book on the event, its players, and its history. Whether describing historical rivalries, infamous events, or the great players of the game, Sterry and his co-author Alan Black deliver a thoughtful yet always entertaining commentary.

As a bonus, the guest essays (by Irvine Welsh, Po Bronson, and others) are among the best soccer writing I have read.

If, like me, you are looking forward to the World Cup, I cannot recommend this book strongly enough.


In his own words, here is David Henry Sterry’s Book Notes music playlist for his book, The Glorious World Cup: A Fanatic’s Guide:

I am genetically predisposed to kick balls with my feet and butt them with my head. My grandfather on my mother’s side was a professional soccer player in England, back when a professional soccer player had to have a day job to feed his family. At the age of 16 my father, who grew up in a tiny mining village outside Newcastle, had a choice: become an apprentice professional soccer player, or go to college. He had a coal mining dad later died a miserable death when black lung disease planted its flag into his respiratory system. So my father chose college, the first in his family to attend school past the age of 16. He immigrated to the United States just before I was born. When my parents became citizens, five years to the day after they arrived at Ellis Island, we had a huge party, sparklers twinkling atop a red white and blue sugar lard icing cake. When I was little, soccer was something played by dark swarthy men with too much body hair who spoke strange grunting languages. And it was certainly never seen on TV. But as I reached high school, the greatest players of their generation were brought to America to ply their trade as the bright light of their careers faded. Pelé, Franz Beckenbauer, Johan Cruyff. That’s when I really first fell in love with the game. I was lucky because the North American Soccer League sent there players out to coach high school kids. So I was trained by the center half of the Dallas Tornadoes, a man named John Best. He and my father taught me what it was to be a soccer player. The speed and the skill but most especially the cool under fire take no prisoners passion that characterizes the best soccer players.

After college I went and trained back in the mother country. Yes, I was taking coals to Newcastle. I played in the top amateur league in the northeast of England, and we were paid the equivalent of $50 a game, $100 bonus if you scored a goal. One of my teammates had been noticed by Newcastle United. At that point in history, being an American playing in England, I was such an anomaly that they wrote article about me in the local paper. So when my pal brought me along to the training ground of Newcastle United, one of the great teams in Europe (present circumstances notwithstanding) I was allowed to train with the under-21 squad. It’s kind of like a peasant from Outer Bumfuck Slovakia getting to practice with the New York Yankees.

There I learned the craft of being a Hardman. How to lurk in the shadows and deliver punishment without looking like you’re doing it. How to get inside the prima dona diva goalscorer’s head. To drive him crazy and take him out of his game and make him look over his shoulder every time the ball’s coming towards him, wondering if you’re going to chop the knees right out from under him, or plant the sharp bone of your elbow into his rib cage. Happy days.

It was there I also learned about the religious ecstatic tribal grandeur of soccer. It is truly a game of the people. Completely democratic, in part because you don’t have to be a genetic freak. So anyone can become great if they pay their dues to the Goddess of Soccer. And all you need to play is a ball. In fact if you don’t have a ball he can tape up a few old socks. Or, like Pelé did when he was a child, you can play with a grapefruit if you have to. I used to go to Newcastle United games and chills would electrify my spine while the roars would rattle my bones. And they’d break into these old ancient chants and songs spontaneously. No scoreboard telling a bunch of sheep when to cheer. It was organic, hewn out of the very earth from which my hearty, sentimental, sarcastic, hard yet generous working class people sprang. Anyone who ever tells you that soccer is boring has never been to a packed stadium full of Geordies in full throated roar as their beloved warriors try to bring home the glory.

When I got back to the good ol’ US of A, I was shocked to see fields of blonde haired blue-eyed children playing soccer. There was even a new idiomatic phrase that had slipped into the vernacular of America: Soccer Mom. I was offered a professional contract by the Vancouver Whitecaps, whose general manager was none other than John Best, the man who trained me so well. The day after I got the letter inviting me to Vancouver, I tore my left knee to shreds training. Shattered kneecap. Shattered dreams. I was in a cast for six months. In truth, I’ve never really recovered fully, physically, spiritually or emotionally.

Some Americans still don’t understand that the World Cup is like the Super Bowl, the World Series, the NCAA basketball championship, the NBA finals and Stanley Cup all rolled into one. If every nation in the world were invited to play. It is a pilgrimage, an odyssey, a journey to the center of what makes it a joy to be alive.

And this year, the mother of all sporting events will be landing for the first time on the mother of all contents: Africa. Yes, I love watching the greatest players in the world beating each other to a bloody pulp for a month. Yes, I believe in my heart that this is the year the United States could actually make it to the final (remember, they should’ve beaten Brazil in the finals of the Confederations Cup in South Africa last summer). But I think what I enjoy most about the World Cup is that it brings together and makes the strangest bedfellows out of humans from literally every corner of this great and crazy planet. I love that.

When Bay Area legend Alan Black, the transplanted Scotsman who made the Edinburgh Castle an epicenter of literary excellence in San Francisco, asked if I wanted to put together a guide for the upcoming World Cup, without even thinking I said yes. We really wanted to capture the grandeur, passion, madness, ecstasy, agony, misery and glory that is the World Cup.

Music has always been a big part of soccer. One of the pleasures of this brave new world in is it there are approximately 800 squazillion soccer videos floating around the World Wide Web, where people take music and put it over soccer greatest-hits highlights. So here’s some of the stuff I was listening to, and watching, as we put together this guide to World Cup South Africa 2010.

“Ole Ole Ole”
The classic crowd chant. There are so many different versions of this song it kind of boggles the mind. But unless you’ve ever been in a stadium with 100,000 people chanting it while blowing whistles and beating drums, and as will be the case in South Africa, playing the vuvuzela, the local insane fan trumpet, you have not truly lived.

“We Are the Champions”
God bless Freddy Mercury. The world was truly a sadder, less exciting, more fucked up place when he left us. There’s something about his over-the-top yet totally sincere bravado to that matches the Olympian scale of the World Cup, when literally the whole planet sits on the edge of its seat holding its breath to see what happens next. And this song, of course, has been sung all over the world by rabid fanatics celebrating their team’s triumph.
Another video

“Lust for Life”
Nothing quite says lust for life like the World Cup. And I just love those drums and that yowling howling Iggy Pop. Here’s a very cool video with that song in it and how it figured in the movie Trainspotting, which was written by Irvine Welsh, who just happens to be a contributor to our book. It’s the story of the most famous goal in the history of Scotland and how it relates to pornography and tartan folklore. By the way, the goal that Scotsman Archie Gemmill scores became the basis for a modern dance piece.

“Pata Pata”
By the terribly missed Miriam Makeba. So sad she’s not gonna be able to sing for the globe when it comes calling for the World Cup. A beautiful artist who really captures the rhythms and the spirit of Africa.

“The Lion Sleeps Tonight”
I know it’s the most overplayed song in the world, but I still love it and I wanted to put some images of Africa in here.

Soweto Gospel Choir

When I was performing at the Edinburgh Fringe Festival, I was on a radio show with an American comedian named Greg Proops. He’s a very funny fellow. I knew him from my stand in San Francisco in the 80s. The musical guest that day was the Soweto Gospel choir and they completely tore for the roof off the joint. Just blew the whole place up. I make a point of trying to see them whenever I possibly can.

“Fabio”

And here, the best England World Cup song ever.

I don’t necessarily like the music in the links below, but the soccer action is amazing.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QbQVdLRqJ1w
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SveYH_Dxudc
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=p21ZC9pBZDs
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=B9L9rj4swhs
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jBHICeJ1ZmY
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=d3ys_2UUEpk

Thanks again, Largehearted Boy, and enjoy the Greatest Show on Earth, as the Glorious World Cup crash lands in South Africa this summer.

David Henry Sterry and The Glorious World Cup: A Fanatic’s Guide links:

the author’s website
the book’s website
Facebook page for the book

Bollocks review
Soccer Insider review

Largehearted Boy Book Notes music playlist by the author for Hos, Hookers, Call Girls & Rent Boys
Sports Cackle Pop interview with the author

The Glorious World Cup

To buy the book click here.

glorious world cup_If a guide book was a riot, then this is it. The Glorious World Cup is a smash and grab read with propellant laughs, and wicked satire. Expect some crunching tackles on the establishment with profiles on hooligans, World Cup villains and serious national grudges. Stuffed with country and player profiles, bags of footie history, and all you need to know about South Africa. Shooting on target are contributors Irvine Welsh, author of Trainspotting, best-selling author Po Bronson, and the world’s best soccer writer, Simon Kuper. This is the rebel guide for the soccer masses and the fanatic. Score one.

Now you know…

*1 million condoms have recently been shipped to South Africa.

*USA v England on June 12, the second day of the tournament, around the 60th anniversary of one of the World Cup’s most famous matches – USA’s shock 1-0  victory over England in the 1950 tournament in Brazil.

*The first recorded soccer game in America took place at Plymouth Rock on what is now known as Thanksgiving.  They used a pumpkin for a ball.

*Henry Kissinger is soccer mad. Kobe Bryant too.

Welcome to the club.

The Glorious World Cup getting a very nice shout out from Washington Post: Original article.

From Library Journal:

A fun yet informative guide to the World Cup, this inexpensive volume provides group match ups, player and country profiles, trivia, and brief histories to cups of the past. Generously illustrated, the book is ideal for reading on your flight to observe the World Cup firsthand-or for browsing between television viewings….a useful guide to casual or serious soccer fan.

Hysterical High Schoolers Writing

English Teachers Award

1. Her face was a perfect oval, like a circle that had its two sides
gently compressed by a Thigh Master.

2. His thoughts tumbled in his head, making and breaking alliances like
underpants in a dryer without Cling Free.

3. He spoke with the wisdom that can only come from experience, like a
guy who went blind because he looked at a solar eclipse without one of
those boxes with a pinhole in it and now goes around the country
speaking at high schools about the dangers of looking at a solar
eclipse without one of those boxes with a pinhole in it.

4. She grew on him like she was a colony of E. Coli, and he was
room-temperature Canadian beef.

5. She had a deep, throaty, genuine laugh, like that sound a dog makes
just before it throws up.

6. Her vocabulary was as bad as, like, whatever.

7. He was as tall as a six-foot, three-inch tree.

8. The revelation that his marriage of 30 years had disintegrated
because of his wife’s infidelity came as a rude shock, like a surcharge
at a
formerly surcharge-free ATM machine.

9. The little boat gently drifted across the pond exactly the way a
bowling ball wouldn’t.

10. McBride fell 12 stories, hitting the pavement like a Hefty bag
filled with vegetable soup.

11. From the attic came an unearthly howl. The whole scene had an
eerie, surreal quality, like when you’re on vacation in another city and
Jeopardy comes on at 7:00 p.m. Instead of 7:30.

12. Her hair glistened in the rain like a nose hair after a sneeze.

13. The hailstones leaped from the pavement, just like maggots when you
fry them in hot grease.

14. Long separated by cruel fate, the star-crossed lovers raced across
the grassy field toward each other like two freight trains, one having
left Cleveland at 6:36 p.m. Traveling at 55 mph, the other from Topeka
at 4:19 p.m., at a speed of 35 mph.

15. They lived in a typical suburban neighborhood with picket fences
that resembled Nancy Kerrigan’s teeth.

16. John and Mary had never met. They were like two hummingbirds who
had also never met.

17. He fell for her like his heart was a mob informant, and she was the
East River.

18. Even in his last years, Granddad had a mind like a steel trap, only
one that had been left out so long, it had rusted shut.

19. Shots rang out, as shots are wont to do.

20. The plan was simple, like my brother-in-law Phil. But unlike Phil,
this plan just might work.

21. The young fighter had a hungry look, the kind you get from not
eating for a while.

22. He was as lame as a duck. Not the metaphorical lame duck, either,
but a real duck that was actually lame, maybe from stepping on a land
mine or something.

23. The ballerina rose gracefully en Pointe and extended one slender
leg behind her, like a dog at a fire hydrant.

24. It was an American tradition, like fathers chasing kids around with
power tools.

25. He was deeply in love. When she spoke, he thought he heard bells,
as if she were a garbage truck backing up.

Violet Blue, Sex Brain Extraordinaire Interview Me about Being an Industrial Sex Technician

I was just going through my back pages on my website, I found this very cool link to an interview. I’m not sure if I posted this here yet, but this is by Violet Blue. I shared a bed with her and San Francisco during Lit Quake. As part of a night of erotica at which I was the master of ceremonies. She was extremely saucy and extravagantly smart. Then I was recently in Richmond Virginia doing a gig with the James Valley Writing Group, Slash, and Valley Haggard, I was in my hotel room I turned on the TV, and BOOM! There was Violet Blue on Oprah, being all smart and sexy.

http://www.tinynibbles.com/blogarchives/2009/11/the-industrial-sex-technician-an-interview-with-david-henry-sterry.html

violetblue

The industrial sex technician: An interview with David Henry Sterry

In my recent SF Chronicle column I had the exciting opportunity to interview David Henry Sterry — after being wowed by sharing a stage with him at Supperclub. His answers had me and my editor at the Chron doing a double take; here Sterry confronts sex work from every angle. I’d love to someday see video interviews with many of his subjects, running the gamut. Instead of the usual tropes, we’d see some really interesting stories, I think. Here’s a snip from The Ultimate Dirty Job – Violet Blue: David Henry Sterry’s new book reality checks sex work in America:

The Discovery TV series “Dirty Jobs” with Mike Rowe covers all manner of occupations full of filthy, fascinating hazards. While a stint in a sexier spectrum of employment would hold just as much peril, (and equal fascination), I doubt we’ll ever see Rowe learning to sling a whip for a night at The Gates. Because it’s “a dirty job, but someone’s gotta (and going to) do it” — sex work in all its permutations is a prime subject for hands-on storytelling.

The problem is, it’s only ever told from one side of the coin or the other: rose-colored glasses, or the victim’s tale. Yet since the nonfiction essay collection “Hos, Hookers, Call Girls and Rent Boys” edited by David Henry Sterry hit the bookshelves, the NYT’s rave review list, and landed in my hot little reader’s hands, that’s all changed. Sterry is up for showing every angle of the world’s oldest profession. It’s absolutely riveting — and poised to change the cultural conversation about work for sex in an honest, unflinching cocktail of real-life stories that go down like a mix of sweetened poison and intellectual jet fuel.

After reading with Sterry for Litquake‘s now-infamous Supperclub SF Readings In Bed, I cornered him for the real dirt on “Hos, Hookers, Call Girls and Rent Boys.”

Violet Blue: What drove you to pick the range of sex work covered in “Hos”?
David Henry Sterry:
 Right now in these great United States, in every major metropolis, there are people at the very bottom of the food chain, who are basically sex slaves, being exploited in the worst ways imaginable by the most vile evil predators. And there are women, men and transsexuals who are over the age of 18, in full command of all their faculties, and are choosing to use their body and their brain to make money in the sex business. And the crazy thing is, these two sides have a hard time acknowledging the truth of the other. So I tried in my own small way, to document all voices.

I had no political axe to grind: if you worked in the sex business, and you had a story to tell, and you had the skill to tell it, you were welcome in our book. As a result, I have writing by 15-year-old girls who were raped, beaten, burned, starved, degraded and exploited by the worst scum of the earth. And I have women who used sex work to pay for their master of fine arts degree at Berkeley. And everything in between: Working class, meat-and-potatoes sex workers; fabulous rent boys; phone-sex operators; former Olympic athletes; undereducated and overeducated.

VB: You are a former sex worker — what kind of work did you do?

DHS: I was an industrial sex technician, which is my preferred term for the work, for nine months — one human gestation period — when I was 17 years old, living in Hollywood, and studying existentialism at Immaculate Heart College in Hollywood, California. I worked mostly with women, although I did, toward the end of my career, get paid to verbally and physically humiliate men. One of them was a judge. He came out of the bathroom in his judge’s robe. Underneath he was wearing a diaper. Even at 17, this made me seriously question the American judicial system.

This anthology, as it is, could only have happened because I used to be in “The Life”. One of the chief advantages to being an ex-ho myself is that I’m tapped into many of the networks that we have. All the best hos I know are excellent networkers. Netsexworkers. Plus, I was invited to teach a writing workshop with people in San Francisco who had been arrested for prostitution. Many of them were, or had been, drug addicts. I did this for two years, once a week. So I became friends with this population, from the poorest parts of America, as well.

Then I got invited by the United States Dept. of Justice to come to Washington for a Survivors Conference, leading this writing workshop with all these young women who had been savaged in the sex business. These are voices it would be virtually impossible to get if you were not in fact someone who had been in the business. But I was determined to show America the human face of all the people in the sex business, to get people to understand that we are sisters and brothers, aunts and uncles, cousins, grandmothers, dads and moms. I would never have gotten the opportunity to do this, if I hadn’t come out myself as a sex worker.

When I got into that room, to run that writing workshop in Washington, with all those diamond-hard girls, they laughed at me, made fun of me. But then when I told them my story, all of a sudden they wanted to tell their stories. Over and over I’ve seen the healing properties of telling your story while putting this book together. And if I hadn’t first done this myself, struggled for years to try to tell my story, then finally to come out of the sex-worker closet, I wouldn’t have been able to help other people do it.

VB: What’s the most unforgettable story in the book?

DHS: Well, my own of course, because it happened to me. You don’t easily forget executing some extremely challenging cunnilingus on an 82-year-old woman. But as I look beyond the narcissistic shackles of myself, it’s hard for me to single one out, because the stories have become like my children. I don’t want to disrespect any of them. I love them all, even the worst of them.

In “My Daughter is a Prostitute” this woman keeps trying to explain to her Russian mother that she’s a dominatrix, that she doesn’t actually have sex with men. But her mother just will not understand, keeps saying over and over again, “My daughter is a prostitute.” “It’s a Shame About Ray” by Bay Area luminary Kirk Read, is a funny, poignant beautiful piece of writing. I could go on, but I won’t.

VB: What will people be most shocked by in these stories?

DHS: I think “Raped 97 Times” is horrifying. There’s also a very, very disturbing story by a great, great Bay Area writer, Mattilda Bernstein Sycamore. And there’s a story in the back of the book by a woman who is trying to kick heroin. Her mom comes and visits her, and shoots up in front of her, tells her, “Too bad you can’t try any cuz yer pregnant.” That piece is called “Thanks A Lot.” And of course the most disturbing is a piece by a woman who has become my friend, Jessica Bertucci, it’s called “Helping Daddy Pay the Rent.” Enough said.

VB: The need for sex and the need for money is blurred throughout many of the very real stories in this collection. Why did you make that choice as an editor?

DHS: In the exchange of sex for money, a window in the soul opens. I want people to take a peek. I’m fascinated by what happens when love, power, money, sex, obsession, and God knows what else all collide, usually in a small room. I think people make the mistake, when they’re writing about this subject, and in fact generally speaking when the write about sex, of focusing on the sex organs. I’m much more interested in how these encounters affect people mentally, spiritually, emotionally, how it changes them as human beings. And of course as everyone knows, the most important sexual organ is located not between the legs, but between the ears.

VB: As an aside, I’m curious: how do you think this all relates to the client fairytale-fantasy of having their sex worker fall in love with them and “leave the life for true love”?

DHS: “Sir Save-A-Ho,” is one variation on that theme. It’s a story in the book by a very gifted writer and filmmaker, Juliana Piccillo, about this very subject. In it, a vice cop kind of tries to save her when she’s a 17-year-old massage parlor girl. But yes, those Julia Roberts/Richard Gere/Pretty Woman fairy tales are so powerful. If anything, I’m afraid this book might make clients realize how profoundly these industrial sex technicians just want to get P-A-I-D. As my employment counselor/pimp used to say to me, the three most important rules of the world of sex for money are: 1) Get the money up front; 2) Get The Money Up Front!; and 3) GET THE MONEY UP FRONT!!!

Hos, Hookers, Call Girls, and Rent Boys: Professionals Writing on Life, Love, Money, and Sex” by David Henry Sterry (with R. J. Martin Jr.) is available thanks to cutting edge publisher Soft Skull Press.

Big thanks to Sterry for taking time out to answer my nerrrrrdy questions on an irrational schedule.

Violet Blue

Violet Blue

The London Times named Violet Blue “One of the 40 bloggers who really count” and Self Magazine named TinyNibbles one of the “Best Sex Resources for Women.” Blue is an author and journalist on sex and technology, hacking and security, porn for women, privacy and bleeding-edge tech culture. She is a columnist for Engadget; she’s an educator, speaker, crisis counselor, volunteer NGO trainer, and the author and editor of over 40 award-winning books. Blue is also an advisor for Without My Consent, as well as a member of the Internet Press

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