Erik Martiny


Antonia Crane

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Antonia Crane’s memoir Spent was published by Rare Bird Books and translated into French to great acclaim by Tusitala last year. As a PhD candidate, she continues to advocate for strippers’ rights. She also writes essays for such outlets as The New York Times, PRISM and Buzzfeed.

 

Spent takes a wonderfully unflinching look at your younger years and your experience of life in the sex industry. Apart from the fact that it’s incredibly well written, what makes your book different to the average sex worker memoir?

You’re very kind. I’m not sure there is an “average sex worker memoir.” I’m not sure I’ve read one that’s “average”, but I hope in my lifetime to see a sex worker diaspora blossom with vibrant stories written from the inside of the sex trade that are not only about salacious tales, redemption, retiring, class jumping or being victimized by the big bad sex industry. My book is mostly one about raging with grief and hurling my body at the world and making the world hold me while I grieved my mother and paid my rent. The sections prior to my mother’s death mostly tell my story as a worker among workers. it’s a story about surviving in the precarious working conditions of strip clubs with no regulations and policies in place to check the abuse and extortion that club owners are used to getting away with.

I tried to write honestly about the adrenaline and compassion that surged through my body as a life-long stripper. I’m proud of my ending, which is more of an anti-ending because it conjures my enemies with that second person point of view by calling out sex workers who turned their backs on their workers when they retired due to respectability politics, shame, and internalized stigma and whorephobia. My ending is a dare. When I reread it now, I’m impressed by my ferocity.

In a uniquely American way, you’re able to combine journalism, university-level tuition, and sex work. Do you ever have trouble reconciling this somewhat unusual combination?

Combining and juggling too many odd jobs is a theme of my life for the past 20 years, but I would guess many people feel that way under late Capitalism. I’m not sure its uniquely American but explain to me what you mean in case I am misunderstanding your question. At one point, when I first moved to Los Angeles, I counted 6 jobs that I had for a couple years. Probably the most unusual job was being a phlebotomist to the porn industry. I think your question also may have to do with the combination of unusual jobs so let’s unpack that.

I taught teenagers creative writing for 3 different after school programs while I was also stripping. I think that combination is still considered taboo as if stripping will somehow infect children and cause them to consider doing sex work. This is a unique American sex panic that pervades society today and it’s ridiculous. Being queer or being a sex worker isn’t something you catch. I’ve worked with so many strippers who are now lawyers, professors, actors, teachers, and it takes a strong dose of misogyny to discredit them for working. Most sex workers I know also do other things like teach, raise children, write, attend school, or do an art form and none of those things clash with being a sex worker.

What I meant was that American writers seem unashamed of mentioning manual work, whereas in Europe people tend to keep that secret (but this is changing at the moment with recent books about factory work and the sex industry for instance). Will your next book come out of lived experience too or are you thinking of going in a different direction?

I see what you mean. I guess I do think that the American working class still internalizes palpable shame about manual labor, but it’s also changing here. It’s good to remind corporate America that forming unions is a desirable compromise—as opposed to dusting off the guillotines.  I’m writing a book about deep, boundary crossing friendships that combine romance, work, and sex work, like “Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas” but with queers, women and sex workers.

I came across Xaviera Hollander’s The Happy Hooker the other day in a book booth. It says the book sold 6 million copies within a year of its publication in 1972. Was there more interest in sex in the seventies or is it just that the sex worker memoir was a new phenomenon?

I’m not sure. Maybe 1972 was a sex-positive year in general. In 1972, fucking for pleasure enjoyed a surge when the U.S. Supreme Court ruled in favour of unmarried masses being able to legally possess birth control in Eisenstadt v. Baird. But also, a book selling millions may indicate other impulses as well— like the narrative heterosexual men prefer; that of a sex worker being relentlessly cheerful about her job performing sex acts for them, when the circumstances beneath a woman doing sex work are likely more nuanced. Punk provocative feminists like Virginie Despentes and Kathy Acker didn’t soar at the top of Best Seller lists even though their stories about sex work are powerfully rendered and provide astute analysis of systemic misogyny and gender discrimination. Let’s ask ourselves why?

What do you make of the fact that writers and filmmakers tend to avoid depicting sex these days?

Do they? What films and writers are you thinking of? There are many cultural indicators of extreme depression and loneliness, especially in the last few years. Covid didn’t help. More stories about sex and sex work are being celebrated right now though. The film “Pleasure” directed by Ninja Thyberg is a fantastic, disturbing film about the adult industry that came out in 2021. I’ve never seen more frontal nudity in my life than in Season 2 of “Euphoria.” And most important, the series “P-Valley” is the most vital disruption of whorephobia I’ve ever seen on TV. The sexuality is crackling in every scene with its flamboyant centering of Black strippers and genderqueer Black masculinity on display.

I mean mainstream films that appear in cinemas. Streaming platforms are probably more audacious, admittedly, but if you look at most films these days, there’s barely a kiss to be seen anymore. They’re all tailored to be PG so that the film can be viewed by the whole family and gross a bigger profit. Do you have any personal film projects at the moment? Have you had any offers to film Spent?

Sex work may never be packaged in a wholesome mainstream way and maybe that’s best. Do you want to see sex work Disneyfied for public consumption like an after school special for the whole family? And by family, if you are referring to a white, middle-class, heterosexual Christian viewer, I don’t want to pander to their point-of-view.

As it stands, I think many sex workers feel exploited, ripped off and excluded by Hollywood. Shows, films and books about sex work need to include and center sex workers because we have opinions and ideas about how we are represented.  To be clear, I mean sex workers need to be included on every level in a meaningful way, as writers, directors, and producers when material about sex work is engaged on the page. But since you asked about mainstream acceptance, “Pretty Woman” (1990) was beloved by mainstream audiences and Julia Roberts won an academy award for it. Notable also, is that “Pretty Woman” depicts a real friendship between two sex workers, devoid of hostility. And that is something that Hollywood fails at again and again.

I’m a fledgling filmmaker. I directed and wrote a short film that is part of a series called “Whoring” and my short is called “Lady Los Angeles.” It’s a story with no heroes and no villains about a Latinx Trans sex worker who makes her day in a post-SESTA/FOFSTA world. I also co-wrote a feature with Silas Howard called “The Lusty” about the unionization of The Lusty Lady that I was a part of in 1996-1998. I hope it gets made.

Do you think whorephobia is as strong as it used to be these days?

Yes and No. This is a generational dividing line question. If you refer to Gen Z, I think there is a ton of optimism about decriminalizing sex work and tons of enthusiasm about labor organizing and building worker power. When you have those things, you have more equity and dignity in the workplace, which leads to less whorephobia and the deep stigma that all depends on the criminalization of sex work. I’m an angry optimist. I tire of relentless pessimism about how we are all fucked. Every day is an opportunity to combat whorephobia, racism, misogyny, homophobia and other forms of oppression. Every day is an opportunity to implement and embody dignity.

 


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