Sex Worker Storytelling

Peekaboo Pointe's Tales From The Strip

This is what I moved to New York for, folks.

Above: Peekaboo photographed by Lee Barrett.

Peekaboo Pointe is one of my dear friends, someone I’ve been working with for well over a decade. She and her wife Sarah are regular Thanksgiving guests (usually they do all the cooking), and they are aunts to our dog, who likes to chew the face of their dog.

Above: my dog.

She’s one of the most dedicated and committed performing artists I know, and this year she decided to add to her repertoire by starting a storytelling show series, and I was tickled that she invited me to be part of her first one. Besides Peekaboo and me there were two other panelists, MiscAllaneous DomTop , one of my art crushes, and Madame Namio, who I had admired only from afar and is now one of my favorite storytellers.

The event took place in the back room at Freddy’s , a classic and wonderful neighborhood bar in Brooklyn. We had a great crowd with lots of familiar faces that reminded me just how supportive the burlesque community can be – online there are a lot of very mouthy jerks in the community, but at an actual show, especially in New York, they have an authentic love of burlesque and the potential of its performers to do the unexpected.

I had so much fun. Since the pandemic lockdown I’ve struggled hard with performing, and with going out in general, but the crowd was so enthusiastic and warm and so THERE FOR IT. Peekaboo started the show with a story about when she was working at Pumps and had a pole-dancing accident. The resulting injury kept her from dancing the way she was used to and as she adapted to it she developed a new layer of movement that changed her approach to performing. It was a great example of what it’s like to depend on your body for work, get injured, not have insurance to manage it properly, and have to keep going. She also managed to make it hilarious. She’s kind of a genius.

Miscellaneous told a story about going to the Kit Kat Club in Berlin , where there was some serious live sex going on. It was outrageous and filthy, and their physicality and movement through the audience made the room roar. Most of the story concerned watching a guy with a massive hardon who just kept going. It wasn’t a story about sex workers doing sex work, but it gave a sense of what we tend to find memorable about world travel.

Madame Namio talked about being a dominatrix and about a diaper-wearing client called Dennis. Even the experienced fetish people in the audience were oh-my-godding and laughing. I think I might have known Dennis, or at least someone equally persnickety about their diapers.

I was the only one who did a reading. I read an excerpt from my chapter on getting a boob job. I was relieved that the audience was thoroughly responsive even though it didn’t have the raucousness and off-the-cuff hilarity of the others. At the end, I said, “Do you want to see ‘em?” and they screamed, “YES!” I made them chant, “Big fake titties! Big fake titties!” while I lowered the top of my dress and took off my bra, and then I twirled the tassels I’d been wearing under my outfit.

It’s more important than ever for us to get our stories out there, to tell the truth about who we are and what we do, and not to be ashamed of it. The current administration is going to use fighting pornography as one of their stupid maga platforms, and, as I mentioned in a previous article, their definition is extremely broad and includes any mention of trans people that isn’t about persecuting them, and they intend to harass not only those they deem pornographers, but librarians and teachers who help people access books and movies about sex, even those works with educational and literary value. They have said plainly that that’s what they want to do. They’d have shut down what we did that night – even though it’s extremely likely that one of them is named Dennis.