RH: What was your initial motivation for putting this
together?
JN: I met Veronica Monet in 1991, when I was visiting friends
in the Bay Area. I was very impressed with her. She was an out
prostitute. She rocked my world. Meeting articulate, strong, feminist
sex workers like her was one motivation. Another was the
dissonance in my mind between the sex workers I knew as well as
my own experiences in the sex industry and how mainstream
feminism represented the sex industry as something that can only
ever be bad for sex workers.
Another impetus was a roundtable on pornography that Ms.
published in their January/February '94 issue. That article clinched it
for me. It had Andrea Dworkin, Ntozake Shange, Marilyn French, and
others...none of whom said they were involved in the sex industry,
except for Dworkin who had been involved a long time ago and had a
terrible experience with it. While I honor her experience, it's not
representative of all women. So I wrote to the magazine and asked
how they could have a panel discussion on the sex industry without
including any participants? If you were having a roundtable on
lesbianism, would you only invite heterosexual married women, one
of whom had a negative sexual experience with a woman? They
never responded.
RH: You make the point in your contribution to the book that anti-
sex activism is part of a broader system or pattern of
oppression.
JN: I see a lot of seemingly disparate movements as being part
of white male supremacy. Abortion clinic bombings, for example, are
more often than not white-on-white; they're done by white males
who go into white neighborhoods. White preachers spout hellfire and
damnation against the feminists and the queers that will bring about
the downfall of the nation. Of course, non-whites take part in these
types of actions as well, but it's overwhelmingly the territory of
white males. It's an attempt to keep the sexual behavior of white
women in line as a defense against the growing numbers of non-
white persons, a natural extension of the European imperialist
mindset.
I'm not saying that white supremacy is the only thing informing
anti-sex activism, but I do see a connection. And that should put us
in alliance with heterosexual people of color, feminists, and other
groups targetted by white supremacists, but I think we often get
blindsided by other issues.
RH: That's why it's disheartening to see feminists aligning
themselves with the religious right on issues like
pornography.
JN: You can see the temptation for them to do it, though. A lot
of feminists come to that position through having experienced what
it's like to be treated as a sexual object inappropriately, whether it's
unwelcome comments on the street, harassment in the workplace,
rape, or one of the many other forms objectification can take. The
reaction is to demand to not be treated as a sex object.
It's a natural -- and I think a necessary -- response. If it weren't for
that kind of feminism, we wouldn't have rape crisis centers or
battered women shelters. But we also need to see that sex isn't just a
world of danger, it's a world of possibilities as well. The point of
saying no to danger is to be able to say yes to pleasure. The kind of
feminism engendered in what the sex workers I know are doing is
going to change the face of feminism if word ever gets out, so I've
put it upon myself to get the word out.
RH: It seems, with the high percentage of lesbian and bi
contributors to the anthology, that there's a lot of queerness in the
sex industry.
JN: Through and through. Perhaps once you transgress one
sexual taboo, it becomes easier to transgress others, although I admit
that I haven't found that to be true across the board. You do get
people who believe that their transgression is okay but that other
people's transgressions aren't. But if you're queer, and you have to
think about that, you already have the tools for thinking about sex
work.
RH: How many publishers did you approach with this book?
JN: I had pretty much had my heart set on Routledge from the
beginning. I wanted an academic press, but I wanted one that was a
bit "racy." I didn't want to go with a mainstream house because I
didn't want them to exploit the subject matter. I wanted this book to
be taken seriously as an intellectual work. But when I first
approached Routledge they were initially lukewarm about it. As a
result, I came very close to signing with another university press,
until there had been a rollover at Routledge and the new person
assigned to my book called me and told me he wanted to do the
book, that he knew what I was trying to do with it. So I asked him
what he thought I was trying to do, he told me, and he was right.
RH: How did you go about recruiting your writers?
JN: I went to the famous people first, so that afterwards, when
I was recruiting others, I could say, "Well, I've got Annie Sprinkle
and Nina Hartley and Carol Queen. How would you like to be in?" Just
about everybody that I spoke to was overwhelmingly enthusiastic
about the project. Even if they didn't have time to participate, or I
couldn't use what they gave me, they all said that this needed to
happen.
Feminist sex workers have been excluded so many times from
feminist discussions. So this time we're not knocking on the door,
asking to be included, to have the name of a workshop changed or a
special panel included for us. We're doing the book ourselves. We
don't have to ask to be included. We're including ourselves.
RH: And you can make just as intelligent an argument for your
feminism as mainstream feminists can for theirs.
JN: We're not bimbos! (laughs) The irony is that so
many sex workers are like drag queens; they use the trappings of
femininity to entertain, to earn money, to seduce and beguile. There's
a sense of camp that gets overlooked a lot. Resistance takes many
forms.
