Best of
Sex-Work

2020

Making Love to a Boss


Nat Love - 2020
    By night, she is the baddest stripper in the city, and by day, she teaches dance to less fortunate kids. A bitter betrayal by two people who never deserved her love causes Natia’s heart to freeze. Vowing to never fall in love again, she becomes celibate and buries herself in her work. Natia is committed to helping kids succeed in life by using their dance talents and her strict guidance. Her hard work finally pays off when rap star, Calif, invites her crew to dance in his music video. The charismatic rapper has Natia reconsidering her stance on men and relationships, but experience is a good teacher, so she tries her best to resist his charm. Cortez “Calif” Ahmeen is everything a woman desires. He’s good looking, has long money, and is an up and coming rapper. A devastating loss sends Calif into a deep depression, and he gives up on love and rap. His best friend arranges for him to record a song with two popular rappers, and it becomes a hit. After rediscovering his love for music, Calif leaves California and all it’s bad memories behind and settles in the Midwest. When Calif meets Natia at a video shoot for one of his new songs, he is immediately intrigued. She awakens feelings in him that he thought were buried. However, Natia wants nothing to do with Calif, which amuses and frustrates him at the same time. Refusing to give up, Calif slowly but surely wears Natia down, but of course, nothing in life is ever that easy, right? Transcend into the world of two people who come together at a time when they need each other the most. Strap in for a rollercoaster ride of undeniable drama as Natia and Calif try to navigate through life, love, and heartbreak.

My Art Is Killing Me and Other Poems


Amber Dawn - 2020
    In this, her second poetry collection, Amber Dawn takes stock of the costs of coming out on the page in a heartrendingly honest and intimate investigation of the toll that artmaking takes on artists. These long poems offer difficult truths within their intricate narratives that are alternately incendiary, tender, and rapturous. In a cultural era when intersectional and marginalized writers are topping bestseller lists, Amber Dawn invites her readers to take an unflinching look at we expect from writers, and from each other.

Pizza, Pincushions and Playing it Straight


Rayne Constantine - 2020
    Surprising. Insightful. Don't drink liquids while reading. This is not a “Happy Hooker” story. This is a “Hooker who is sick of your bullshit” story.

Neon Girls: A Stripper's Education in Protest and Power


Jennifer Worley - 2020
    When graduate student Jenny Worley needed a fast way to earn more money, she found herself at the door of the Lusty Lady Theater in San Francisco, auditioning on a stage surrounded by mirrors, in platform heels, and not much else. So began Jenny’s career as a stripper strutting the peepshow stage as her alter-ego “Polly” alongside women called Octopussy and Amnesia. But this wasn’t your run-of-the-mill strip club—it was a peepshow populated by free-thinking women who talked feminist theory and swapped radical zines like lipstick.As management’s discriminatory practices and the rise of hidden cameras stir up tension among the dancers, Jenny rallies them to demand change. Together, they organize the first strippers’ union in the world and risk it all to take over the club and run it as a co-operative. Refusing to be treated as sex objects or disposable labor, they become instead the rulers of their kingdom. Jenny’s elation over the Lusty Lady’s revolution is tempered by her evolving understanding of the toll dancing has taken on her. When she finally hangs up her heels for good to finish her Ph.D., neither Jenny nor San Francisco are the same—but she and the cadre of wild, beautiful, brave women who run the Lusty Lady come out on top despite it all. A first-hand account as only an insider could tell it, Neon Girls paints a vivid picture of a bygone San Francisco and a fiercely feminist world within the sex industry, asking sharp questions about what keeps women from fighting for their rights, who benefits from capitalizing on desire, and how we can change entrenched systems of power.

The Distance from Four Points


Margo Orlando Littell - 2020
    Forced to return after decades, Robin and her daughter, Haley, set out to renovate the properties as quickly as possible―before anyone exposes Robin's secret past as a teenage prostitute. Disaster strikes when Haley befriends a troubled teen mother, hurling Robin back into a past she'd worked so hard to escape. Robin must reshape her idea of home or risk repeating her greatest mistakes. Margo Orlando Littell, author of Each Vagabond by Name, tells an enthralling and nuanced story about family, womanhood, and coming to terms with a left-behind past.

Hitler's Brothel


Steve Matthews - 2020
    Ania is imprisoned and forced to endure the atrocities of a Nazi concentration camp. Danuta’s search for her sister leads her into the dangers of the Polish Underground. Each will do what they must to survive long enough to find each other. Their dream of being reunited is crushed in shocking circumstances.In an astonishing twist of fate, the opportunity for revenge presents itself 60 years later. But faced with the ultimate decision what will be the outcome ... seek justice or revenge? Spanning decades, Hitler’s Brothel is a tragic and gripping tale of deception, courage and survival.

Money for Something: Sex Work. Drugs. Life. Need.


Mia Walsch - 2020
    Look where we are. What else do we have to hide?'When nineteen-year-old Mia is fired from her job at an insurance company, she answers an ad in the newspaper. The ad says: 'Erotic Massage. Good Money. No Sex.'Mia takes to her new job with recklessness, aplomb and good humour. Over the next few years, as she works her way through Sydney's many parlours, she meets exquisite and complex women from every walk of life who choose sex work for myriad reasons. While juggling the demands of her new job, she battles her problematic drug use, and the mental illness that has shaped her life.But rather than needing saving from sex work, it is the work that sometimes helps to save Mia from herself.A raw and honest memoir about surviving, sex work, friendships, drugs and mental illness.

Tumblr Porn (Remember the Internet, vol. 1)


Ana Valens - 2020
    LGBTQIA Studies. Art. In this first volume of REMEMBER THE INTERNET, a series that tells a complete history of the Internet, one book at a time, journalist Ana Valens introduces us to the erotic gifs, hashtag fetish fan art, and sex worker resource blogs that combined to transform Tumblr into the vanguard of a user-generated sexual revolution. As she tells the story of her own online sexual and political awakening, Valens investigates how Tumblr's technical architecture made it a convenient laboratory for social justice and sexual freedom, one that would ultimately clash with the government's crackdown on sexuality online.

Freedom & Prostitution


Cassandra Troyan - 2020
    LGBTQIA Studies. Women's Studies. Freedom & Prostitution proposes the dream of a world without work, without money, without gender, while imagining forms of survival now for those who often have little to no choices, refuse to submit to the demands of tedious underpaid or unwaged labor, an abusive partner, or seek a life beyond work. Sex work is not a "better" type of labor but a proposal for the abolition of all work.

Capitalism's Sexual History


Nicola J. Smith - 2020
    Economic and sexual practices are assumed to be not only separable but antithetical, hence why paid sex is so often criminalized and morally condemned. Yet, whilesexuality is highly politicized in moral terms, it has largely been overlooked in the discipline devoted to the study of global capitalism, international political economy (IPE). Likewise, the prevailing field in sexuality studies, queer theory, has frequently sidelined questions of politicaleconomy. This book calls for critical scholarship to challenge the economy/sexuality dichotomy as it not only structures disciplinary debates but is part and parcel of capitalism itself.Capitalism's Sexual History brings IPE and queer theory into close dialogue to explore how the division between economy and sexuality has been historically produced to appear both natural and moral. By examining sex work in Britain, Nicola J. Smith draws on in-depth archival research to chart ahistory of capitalism's sexual relations from medieval times to the present day. She shows how capitalist development was made possible by the appropriation of unpaid sexual labor that relied, in turn, on the repression and production of paid sex. By tracing the historical construction of boundariesaround sex and work, this book exposes how capitalism has long profited from the notion that the sexual and economic spheres can and must be kept apart. In so doing, it offers a distinctive contribution to the study of sex and work as well as to wider scholarly, activist, and policy debates aboutpolitical economy, reproductive labor, gender equality, and sexual justice.

My Thread


Vera Schneider - 2020
    Possession and jealousy. Dominance and submission. Disobey the rules and get punished...This book contains graphic descriptions of sex and is definitely intended for an 18+ Audience.

The Last Dance


John Inman - 2020
    After all, he’s been around the block a few times. And a few times after that. Still, there’s something about Johnny Cotton that catches his eye. And his heart. When Johnny and his best friend find themselves in over their heads with the woman who owns them lock, stock, and barrel, Martin knows he has to step in. Martin and his old buddy, Charlie Bass, might be retired from the Firm, but they still know how to manage a gunfight. And how to go underground with a couple of male hookers less than half their age. Just for the purpose of keeping them safe, you understand. No funny business intended. Odd, though, how funny business tends to creep in when you least expect it. It’s sort of like love that way, Martin decides. One minute you’re minding your own business, the next minute you’re in a world of hurt. Or, if you’re lucky, a world of happy.