PLEASE NOTE: We apologize in advance for a delay in sending you this book, as the reprint is in the works right now and will become available in a couple weeks. Rest assured we will send you your copy/copies ASAP. Thanks for your patience. It's well worth the wait!

Check out the NYTBR:
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/08/23/books/review/Bentley-t.html

Hos, Hookers, Call Girls and Rent Boys: Professionals Writing on Life, Love, Money, and Sex was born in the basement of SAGE - Standing Against Global Exploitation - a San Francisco nonprofit dedicated to helping people who have worked in the sex business. Their writer and former sex worker David Henry Sterry and his wife ran a weekly writers' workshop for participants who, as Sterry explains, "had one thing in common: they'd all sold sex for money."


The workshop brought together "old, middle-aged and young; black, white, brown, red, and yellow; urban and rural; men and women; gay, straight, and transgender; college educated and high school dropouts; upper-class, middle-class and from dire poverty"--all seeking creative outlet to share experiences and develop their voices. Inspired by the wealth of talent and strength they witnessed at the SAGE workshop, Sterry and his wife initiated an even broader search for writing by sex workers and, according to Sterry, work streamed in "from street hustlers to Ph.D.'s. From some people who wanted to be anonymous. From some people who wanted their names to be public for all to see." Hos, Hookers, Call-Girls and Rent Boys is compiled from this overwhelming response and work produced at the SAGE writers' workshop.


Contributors to the anthology include art-porn priestess Annie Sprinkle, who provides "40 Reasons Why Whores Are My Heroes," and young women participating in the first ever National Summit of Commercially Sexually Exploited Youth who, by sharing stories of abuse and suffering, begin the deeply emotional process of healing. An antidote to the sensationalism of recent political scandals, television shows like Secret Diary of a Call Girl, and the public's growing fascination with sex work, Hos, Hookers, Call-Girls and Rent Boys edited by David Henry Sterry and SAGE director of development R. J. Martin, Jr., offers an honest, stunning, and often painful picture of modern sex work in America.

David Henry Sterry was completely uneducated in the public schools he attended in New Jersey, Alabama, Minnesota and Texas. Previous occupations include babysitter, lawn care specialist, soda jerk, soccer coach, soccer player, soccer referee, chicken fryer, industrial sex technician, “chicken”, actor (commercials, industrial, TV series, feature films and theater), stand up comedian, barker, limo driver, building inspector, telephone solicitation technician, book doctor, presentation doctor, conflict resolution specialist, and marriage counselor. He is the author of over 10 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 which recognizes outstanding sex scenes in contemporary fiction.


R.J. Martin, Jr. was born in Bossier City Louisiana, the son of an Air Force pilot. When his father died in a plane crash in 1956, Richard and his mother moved back to New York City. At the age of seven, they moved to San Francisco, where Richard has lived ever since. At the age of 26, Richard became a barker at San Francisco’s infamous Condor nightclub, the first venue in the United States to feature topless, and later, bottomless entertainment. This led to a period of employment in North Beach sex clubs in which he worked not only as a barker, but as a panderer, thief, con artist and business manager for a few independent businesswomen. After a 20-year battle with heroin addiction, and facing a lengthy prison sentence, Mr. Martin entered treatment in 1996. From 2001 to 2004, he served as director of development at the SAGE Project, award-winning and internationally renowned nonprofit serving prostitutes and other survivors of trauma, abuse and addiction. In 2004, the Mayor of San Francisco presented Mr. Martin with a Certificate of Honor, recognizing the impact his work has had on the City. In that year, Mr. Martin also graduated San Francisco State University with a degree in English. He was accepted into the San Francisco State University Master of Arts Program in Creative Writing and at age 52, is still not the oldest person in the program. He has contributed to the forthcoming anthology Drugs, Thugs and Rock-n-Roll.

From IT’S A SHAME ABOUT RAY, by Kirk Read

I was looking for size 12 heels, which is not an easy thing to find, even in San Francisco. There is the drag queen store, the Foxy Lady, but I was committed to finding the shoes at a discount store like Ross. All the queens call that place Cross Dress for Less. It’s my favorite store. All my kitchen stuff is from there. And they have that section over by the underwear with miscellaneous items like yoga mats and headphones. My mother goes to the east coast version of Ross, which is called TJ Maxx. Our shared retail addiction is one way that we kindle our relationship.

Because of work, I go shopping at Ross about once a month. My clients have an appetite for new ideas. I love the guys who are exploring. About a year ago, I rewrote my internet ad so that it specifically appealed to these kinds of guys. I thought of it as outreach. I used phrases like “non-judgmental” and “open to the fantasies that grip you.” Remember that Burger King commercial? The one with the jingle “Hold the pickles; hold the lettuce, special orders don’t upset us…” It was kind of like that. As a guy in this business, you’re surrounded by thousands of ads where the escorts reduce themselves to a hand full of stock ad copy, passing their bodies off as fast cars worthy of worship and frequent waxing. I was never interested in being that kind of car. I always saw myself as a Toyota Camry — attractive but not showy, reliable and practical. This is an indication of how deeply entrenched I am in the capitalist machinery. I’m a Camry. I say this voluntarily, I am a Camry.

It’s certainly better in the age of internet advertising. In the old days, when guys ran print ads, each word was extra money. Those print ads were haiku. Three lines of text.

Something along the lines of:
Swimmer’s build, a body guys love to service,
Hung top, young and fun, clean,
No attitude.

In any given ad, a potential client could be triggered by a single word — “athletic” might mean that the escort would be willing to reenact a client’s childhood trauma of nearly drowning and being resuscitated by a lifeguard’s hour-long certification training in CPR. The word “service” might mean that the escort was straight and possibly married at some point, with small children in some other state. A man’s children are only sexy when they reside elsewhere. The print ad format created a social dynamic wherein the escort becomes a projection screen for every fear and fantasy the client could possibly have. It’s all so open-ended, the way someone’s identity is compressed into fifteen words. He sounds like an ex-con. Maybe he’s a nice kid putting himself through college. The whole enterprise is a giant guessing game.

The internet has mitigated this situation somewhat. On the web, escorts have more room to spread out. Surprisingly few take advantage of this liberty. It’s the sad dilemma of democracy: that we as a people have all this leeway and we do nothing with it. Even on a website where one is afforded 500 words of text, you see the same clipped language, the same numbers and stats and meaningless phrases like “no attitude.” Why would someone say they had no attitude? It’s like saying you don’t have an ego. You do. The question is not whether you have an attitude or an ego. The question is whether you’re a conceited prick. Attitude and ego are conditions, not unlike the weather. Can you imagine the tourist bureau of a vacation spot bragging that the island has “no weather?”

I never had one of those ads, which seem to be written by people with no sentences at their disposal whatsoever. English as a third or fourth language. All of that said, I am reluctant to set down the exact text of my ad because I’ve built it up into this mythic, messianic sacred text. Like it’s not on the god damn internet at all, rather it’s on a scroll that you unroll with the help of two clerics. At the risk of being overly simplistic, I’ll say that all I did was use complete sentences. We live in an age of fission. All around us, the language is being split into tiny, marketable pieces. Three-second chunks of information — visual media is edited in such a way that we’re all careening toward epilepsy. Meanwhile, the sentence is an old friend. The sentence is a familiar revolution. I trust the sentence.

Okay, I’ll give you a few of the sentences, but I’m changing the text, because I’m still out there working. This is not something I’m writing about as a quaint indiscretion of youth. This is how I make my living. Here’s a short piece of my ad:
I have a rolling suitcase of toys and erotic clothes I can bring to your hotel room or home; if you want, we can play with what’s there, or you can just look through it. I’ve seen or imagined damn near everything, so if you’ve got a fantasy that’s particularly out there, it’s only going to delight me. Why not? You might as well.

The new clients who came to me after I ran that ad were hungry men. They were a varied lot, but they had a few things in common. Many had been through unsatisfying experiences with other escorts who didn’t accommodate their peculiar fantasies and in some cases shamed them for asking in the first place. Another thing these clients had in common was a sense of devotion. They’d carried these secrets for many years, enacting their fetish lives in private. They’d kept bags of lingerie hidden in a shoebox in the basement. They’d hidden porn videos under floorboards. They’d gotten ashamed and thrown everything away, only to re-gather a new set of taboo items. To me, they’re heroic, like the people in Fahrenheit 451 who memorize books to preserve literature. Erotic freedom by any means necessary.