The Money Shot
Onstage, sex workers exploit you.
Show & Tell
Twenty-six-year-old Lorelei Lee, a perky, platinum-haired coed with a kinky white scar etched into her upper thigh, calls herself an artist. Lee deals in “bodily performance,” and you can catch her work in such video art pieces as Belladonna’s Fucking Girls 4 and Tristan Taormino’s Expert Guide to Anal Sex. “Tristan’s is educational,” Lee explains. “Fucking Girls 4 was just fucking.”
When Lee isn’t fucking, she focuses on her other art: short fiction and poetry, which she studies at a San Francisco university, the name of which she doesn’t want published. For the past three weeks, she has read her work across the country as part of the Sex Workers’ Art Show, a traveling pastiche of cabaret, spoken word, and performance art put on by prostitutes, porn stars, burlesque dancers, and drag queens.
“I don’t want to say that all porn is art,” says Lee, who lifts her stage name from the Marilyn Monroe character in Gentlemen Prefer Blondes. “But porn can most certainly be artistic.”
According to the literature, the Sex Workers’ Art Show intends to “dispel the myth that [sex workers] are anything short of artists, innovators, and geniuses!” But having sex for money isn’t always so inspired. “Sometimes, I feel like I’m on a factory line,” Lee admits before the Feb. 7 show at the Rock and Roll Hotel. “Sometimes I feel like I’m just making hamburgers.”... Continued
Fri. Jan. 29, 2010 - Thu. Feb. 4, 2010