Sometimes I Wish I Had Had an Abortion.

Review: Velvet Collar Issue 1: Unhappy Endings

Velvet Collar, a comic book series written and produced by Bryan Knight and drawn by queer comic artist Dave Davenport, depicts the lives of five male escorts. In Issue 1, “Unhappy Endings,” their escort listing service is shut down by the feds, making it a thinly-veiled representation of the 2015 Rentboy raid.

Davenport had previously represented a sex worker in his homoerotic series Hard to Swallow. Set in fictional Fogtown, the series features Doug, a compact young tough who works as a stripper at a gay club. Doug has a special bond with two supernatural characters: a preppie gay who transforms into a sexually ravenous werewolf (Feral), and the Ghost Skater, a skateboarding ex of Doug’s, now a horny ghost. With each story line, the characters’ unashamed, raucous sexuality is an instrument of resolution. The supernaturals rescue Doug from danger, then fuck him silly.

To date, two full-color issues of Velvet Collar has been realized and financed through crowdsourcing, with a third in production. Volume 1 opens with expository blocks offering the backstories of the five male sex workers. Each is based on an actual worker who consented to participate in the project. Some names are changed to avoid disclosure. For their likenesses, Davenport worked from photos and videos.

Davenport’s hand in drawing Velvet Collar v. 1 is tighter than it is in Hard to Swallow, perhaps because there are more characters and interwoven storylines. The characters are faithfully rendered and colored, and the New York City settings are drafted with precision. The reader shifts from one character depiction to the next via a chain of phone calls gathering up the group to attend an event at the offices of “Rentman,” the world’s largest online escort listing service. This narrative device centers technology, reflecting the current reality of technology-mediated sex work. As with Hard to Swallow, many of the depictions of sex—both personal and transactional—are explicit, raucous fun.

Part of the mission of Velvet Collar is to depict sex workers as fully realized protagonists with complex emotional lives. The five represent a range of ethnicities, body types, and ages. The character Abel Rey is based on a Latino worker active in New York. In his frames, he is seen arguing with a love interest who has “discovered” that he’s a sex worker, despite a previous disclosure “on (their) second date.” The sequence, charged with emotion and sexual heat, resolves with Abel giving him a worker-in-relationship go-to: “Other people pay cash, all you have to do is pay attention.”

Bearish Billy is shown in the midst of a call with a submissive who worships his hairy body and big belly. The character Rica Shay is a composite, partly inspired by the Los Angeles-based gay hip-hop performer and dancer. Frames depict Rica Shay saying goodbye to a loving partner while he pursues his music career, which is in turn financed by sex work. One of his regulars is shown being supportive of his musical ambitions. The character navigates a romantic relationship, his creative aspirations, and client expectations.

African-American Storm is based on the true experiences of a “down-low” escort who requested that his name and likeness be withheld. He is married with a wife and child; in the opening sequence, the silos between his sex work and family life come crashing down when his young daughter announces, “Dad, I know you’re a prostitute.” This story line grapples with deeper questions of disclosure in the lives of sex workers. While his daughter is understanding, his wife raises serious risks: “If child services finds out, they’ll take her away from you.”

The last of the quintet is Scott, aka Daddy. Daddy is a trapeze instructor and a sex worker at 62. The characterization draws on a veteran worker whose longevity also defies stereotypes. These five convene for the launch party of an ad campaign in which they are featured at the offices of Rentman on the occasion of the company’s 20th anniversary. Federal agents in black crash the party, and overrun the office with force, to the astonishment of our five, who are turning the corner just as Rentman’s handcuffed employees are being perp-walked towards a police cruiser.

The cover art depicts the founder of Rentman bound up in yellow crime-scene tape. While stylized, it accurately conveys the circumstance of founder Jeffrey Hurant, who—after being arrested and charged with promoting prostitution and conspiracy to commit money laundering—was convicted and sentenced to six months in federal prison. The acting U.S. attorney who prosecuted the case described the business as an “Internet brothel.” Before it was shuttered by ICE/Homeland Security, Rentboy.com was the single largest global platform for male sex workers. Prior to 2015, it had operated without any significant federal scrutiny. The raid was part of a coordinated effort—in advance of the passage of SESTA/FOSTA—to shut down websites with prominent sex worker presence (Backpage was seized soon afterwards).

In its detailed frames, Unhappy Endings does an excellent job of presenting its five main characters navigating sex work in their individual lives. It also establishes the Rentboy raid as a turning point in male sex workers’ access to online platforms, a topic to be unpacked in subsequent issues.

Former sex worker and activist Dale Corvino’s short fiction and essays have appeared in various publications, including online at the Rumpus and Salon. He won the 2018 Gertrude Press Fiction Chapbook contest with a trio of short stories; Worker Names was published in 2019. Recent publications include a reflection on Chile’s massive populist uprising and the legacy of queer writer Pedro Lemebel for the Gay & Lesbian Review and an essay on growing constraints on adult online content in Matt Keegan: 1996, from New York Consolidated/Inventory Press. He lives in New York City. https://dalecorvino.com

Guest Author 3/22/21 Guest Author 3/22/21

Breaking into Male Sex Work and Society, Representation in Comics

Have you lifted the 500+ page Male Sex Work & Society? The 2014 textbook is something of a staple in gender studies programs around the country, but the publishers got some flack from the sex worker community for relying on researchers and excluding the voices of, you know, actual sex workers. A funny thing happened after my interview with sex worker Bryan Knight and artist Dave Davenport—collaborators on the Velvet Collar comic series depicting the 2015 federal raid on rentboy.com--posted on Tits & Sass, the long-running sex worker blog with the tag line ‘service journalism by and for sex workers.’ Some time after the post ran, I was approached by Harrington Park Press, the book’s publisher, and asked to contribute to their follow-up title, Male Sex Work: Culture & Society, volume 2. I buckled down and wrote a whole damn chapter on the wide breadth of representations of male sex workers in comics, starting with Seven Miles a Second by artist David Wojnarowicz. So yea, we can represent ourselves, and we can also talk about representing ourselves.

Tits & Sass, currently on hiatus, has also reviewed the work of Canadian stripper and writer Jacqueline Frances, known as Jacq the Stripper. Her crowdfunded graphic novel Striptastic! is a satirical look at the world of strip clubs. The author’s ear for the dark humor in interactions with choice customers, and the banter between strippers, is well-served by her irreverent, stripped-down (pun intended) drawing style. Striptastic! skewers male patrons’ sleaziness and turns the judgey things civilians say (“How can you do this job and call yourself a feminist?”) back on them, all while paying tribute to strippers’ backstage camaraderie and sisterhood.

But back to my assigned topic, representations of male sex workers in comics. There are not that many examples, so I endeavored to consider them all. Seven Miles a Second, which dates back to 1996, is pretty dark. Its narrator/protagonist recounts his origin story as a teen street hustler in New York’s Times Square circa late 70’s. From the outset, desire is entwined with violence and degradation; his first customer goads him into watching a female sex worker service her customer through a peephole, while the narrator is serviced by his customer. In a graphic frame, the woman turns to reveal extensive slash marks on her torso. The teen’s intro to sex work couples voyeurism and violence. In subsequent panels, artist James Romberger illustrates the protagonist’s apocalyptic rage against the cruelties of the universe—in particular the U.S. government’s indifference to gay mens’ suffering during the AIDS epidemic. As a comic book figure, Wojnarowicz’s superpower is his ability to transform suffering into art.

Seven Miles a Second demonstrates that for sex worker creators, comic books can infuse our narratives with requisite emotional depth and complexity. A level of artistic control is possible, keeping the work and the narratives in our hands. It’s an accessible, character- and action-driven medium for bringing stories based on true experiences to a receptive audience—without risks of disclosure.

Despite the fact that representations of male sex work in comics covers a brief 25-year period, the works I examined track the general migration of sex work from analog spaces like Wojnarowicz’s Times Square to online spaces like rentboy.com and locative apps such as Grindr to the present reality of increasingly scrutinized (and prosecuted) online platforms— from street trade to SESTA/FOSTA. In subsequent posts, I’ll review Velvet Collar to assess how it tackles the latter period.

*The book project has since changed publishers, and will be brought out as Handbook of Male Sex Work, Culture, and Society from Routledge Press (UK) this April.

Guest Author 12/15/20 Guest Author 12/15/20

How Sex Work Exposed My White Privilege

In 2020, people throughout the US and beyond have taken to the streets to protest systemic racism and injustice—yet how many of us have considered the effect of racism on sex workers? In my six years working as a professional submissive and switch at a commercial dungeon, I’ve seen firsthand how racism and other prejudices affect the entire sex worker community. In fact, my personal experience as a white sex worker, witnessing and questioning how to respond to acts of racism against my coworkers, is now mirrored by the way many white Americans are examining their own problematic attitudes and assumptions about race.

When I began working at a commercial dungeon in Los Angeles in 2013, the diversity of the dungeon community was one of the aspects I most appreciated. I worked with Black, Latinx, and Asian-American women, and ladies who’d grown up in countries including Ireland and Russia. Our community was also diverse in many other ways—we were different ages, came from different educational and economic backgrounds, and had different life trajectories, with some of us in college, others who were artists and still others pursuing successful business careers in addition to our dungeon lives.

The magic of our dungeon environment was that, as sex workers, we all shared a secret many in the outside world would judge us quite harshly for—and that one commonality frequently overpowered the other elements that might have divided us. I felt an instant bond with my coworkers that only grew stronger over time, as we all got to know each other in the often long waits between sessions. In the dungeon, I found a place where women didn’t judge each other by skin color, any more than we judged each other for our histories or our achievements.

Yet even as entering the dungeon allowed me to join an inclusive community of women, working in this environment also showed me, perhaps more than any other experience in my life, my own white privilege. It was common knowledge that women of color at the dungeon booked less sessions, especially when working as submissives. As my Black coworker Violet puts it, working as a submissive was “not as lucrative as I thought it would be” for two main reasons: One, the dungeon’s clientele consisted mainly of older white men who wanted to spank, tie up and tickle what they considered a sweet, innocent-looking girl. As Violet points out, these men were “trying to relive their youths, [which] did not typically include interacting with Black people in general, so they saw right past me and opted for the slim, pale-skinned, soft brown-haired girls-next-door.” Secondly, clients who were younger were still predominantly Caucasian and typically “felt a sense of white guilt, and were uncomfortable beating a Black woman.”

Similarly, Lulu, who was the only Mexican-American woman at the dungeon when she began working there, noticed “I wasn’t getting as many sessions as the other girls” and “came to the realization that clients favored white females.” Lulu decided to “get better instead of bitter” by “investing more in my fetish outfits” and attending workshops to “expand my experience as a player”—however, her efforts were not always as successful as she hoped.

Due to the exact issues Violet and Lulu describe, in my early days at the dungeon as a submissive, I was often in session making money while my African-American and Latinx coworkers sat in the waiting room downstairs—and the only reason I was working when they weren’t was the color of my skin. Violet describes the frustration of quitting her job to “dedicate my full-time hours to the dungeon,” while “only managing to score three to four sessions a MONTH”—and also having to “listen to my white coworkers complaining that they didn’t have a minute to rest between sessions.” Lulu similarly noted that while her hard work and skill “helped some,” white girls “who put in little to no effort in their craft continued to get session after session.”

Clearly, as women of color, Violet and Lulu had very different experiences at the dungeon than I did—ones that impacted their relationships with coworkers in addition to clients. And yes, I was one of those women complaining on days I had back-to-back sessions, without considering how my words might affect my fellow dungeon workers. My blind spots kept me from realizing that for some women, the dungeon might not always be the same welcoming, inclusive place I experienced—and my behavior directly contributed to that disparity.

As a white woman at the dungeon, I also didn’t have to deal with being confronted by stereotypes related to my race, the way many of my coworkers did. Asian-American submissives booked many sessions—as long as they were willing to play the “Asian schoolgirl.” My coworker Aimi, a first-generation Asian-American, says “there was definitely stereotyping—the worst of which was probably some guy calling to ask if I could speak English. When the desk mistress confirmed that I could, he was disappointed because he wanted an Asian girl who couldn’t.”

African-American women were also asked to take part in sessions that engaged directly with race. For instance, Violet recalls that her “very first client request was a plantation slave/master roleplay.” Women at the dungeon were never required to take these sessions, but even in being asked to do so, they had to deal with preconceptions based on the color of their skin—and I, as a white woman, did not. I was able to do my job without having to think about my greater ethnic identity, an added burden in an occupation that is already emotionally draining.

However, even as a white woman, I found that I couldn’t escape the negative effects of racism at the dungeon, just as none of us can deny the fact that racism affects us all in the larger world. At the dungeon, we had a repeat client we not-so-affectionately nicknamed “Racist Joe,” who liked to session with women of color and took every opportunity to comment on and ask about their ethnicities. One day, Racist Joe booked a double session with me and Lulu. By this point Lulu was a talented dominatrix, and I was always happy to session with her—with Joe, not so much. The two of us had sessioned with Joe before, and we knew what to expect: he wanted Lulu to “teach” me how to dominate him, how to give him a spanking and so on, even though I had already been a switch for a while and I knew how to do my job.

Lulu and I were suffering together through the session, trying to avoid Joe’s sweaty body as much as possible and pretend we were excited about the prospect of “torturing” this out-of-shape old white man, when out of nowhere, despite the fact that neither of us had uttered a curse word, Joe looked straight at Lulu’s lips and said: “You know, I’ve always wanted to wash a Mexican girl’s mouth out with soap, because you all have such dirty mouths.”

Lulu turned and walked right out of the session room, and I didn’t blame her. My shock had overtaken my own emotional reaction, and I knew my responsibility for the moment was to keep Joe occupied for however long Lulu needed to collect herself. I don’t even remember what I did for those minutes she was gone. I was panicked, caught up in a conflict that felt like it was both mine and not mine at the same time. I was disgusted by Joe’s words, but at the same time, I had no idea what Lulu—the person the comment had been aimed at—was experiencing. I could do my best to empathize, but since I had never received a derogatory comment based solely on my race, I couldn’t truly understand.

Eventually, Lulu returned holding the bottle of liquid hand soap we kept in the bathroom down the hall. She showed it to Joe and said, “I’d like to wash your mouth out with this right now,” but because she was a professional—even in a situation where her client was being completely unprofessional—she put the soap down and we finished the session.

As soon as Joe left and we were cleaning the room, I said, “I can’t believe he said that!”

Lulu replied, “Yeah, I just…I had to get out of there for a minute.” I wasn’t sure what else to say—or if Lulu even wanted to discuss the matter any further—and for better or for worse, that was the extent of our conversation. When I interviewed Lulu for this article, she said, “I remember feeling so angry and insulted I walked out of the session.”

Although I couldn’t understand exactly what Lulu was feeling, I was angry too.

Shortly after that session, I decided not to session with “Racist Joe” again. There were plenty of other things I disliked about his sessions, in addition to the offensive comments. But somehow, I couldn’t stop thinking about what had happened. I was writing a novel at the time, and without my consciously choosing to include him, “Racist Joe” became a part of my story. He morphed into an unsavory diner owner in the 1950s, who could assault his waitresses and spit out racial slurs with impunity. I spent hours imagining a scene where one of those waitresses—secretly a powerful dominatrix—corners Joe and nearly cuts his balls off until he promises to behave himself.

Clearly, even though the real-life Racist Joe’s comments weren’t aimed at me, they had a strong effect on my psyche. I’m still thinking about what Joe said—and about how I reacted, or didn’t, and what I could have done differently—more than two years after the incident took place. Maybe a part of me sensed this was about more than one isolated experience; now, a few years later, I’m seeing my own struggle reflected on a much broader level. White people who consider themselves on the side of equality are now acknowledging that they’ve contributed to the problem of systemic racism, simply by going along with the status quo.

I still don’t know what exactly I might have done during this situation: Should I have voiced my disapproval of Racist Joe’s comments to his face, even though he was a client? Should I have offered more support to Lulu after the fact, or would doing so have only made her uncomfortable? But I do know that in the greater upheaval we’re all living through at the moment, white people can’t remain inactive, paralyzed by our worries. We can’t go on blaming the “Racist Joes,” the people whose behavior is blatantly problematic, without acknowledging the larger system of inequality that allows injustice both obvious and insidious to continue.

If the escalating problem of police brutality and the higher impact of COVID among people of color has made one thing clear, it’s this: our society won’t change unless people of all races take part in dismantling systems of oppression. We have to ask the uncomfortable questions. We have to think about how racism, prejudice and inequality affect every aspect of our society, even the ones—like sex work—we might consider unimportant or overlook.

We have a long way to go, but one thing is clear: silence and inaction isn’t an option. Until we can acknowledge the impact of systemic racism in even the most marginalized areas of our society, we can’t truly take steps toward equality for all humans.

SC Stephanie is a graduate of the Master of Professional Writing program at USC, and I have been published in the HuffPost, Entropy, and many other publications.

Sometimes I Wish I Had Had an Abortion.

Recent Posts:

Review: Velvet Collar Issue 1: Unhappy Endings

Breaking into Male Sex Work and Society, Representation in Comics

How Sex Work Exposed My White Privilege

Reap what you hoe.

The Whorticulturalist