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Interviews, Articles, Kind Words
March 15, 2006
Audacia Ray, Writer, Sex Worker Rights Advocate
Gothamist.com
March 28, 2006
Feminist sex worker rights advocate Audacia Ray is part of a burgeoning movement of young women (and some men) looking to reclaim words like hooker, prostitute, and whore that were formerly used as epithets. She proudly takes off her clothes to reveal her ringlets of brown hair, glasses … and often not much else. But this naked girl uses her brain as much as her bod, whether it’s working as Executive Editor of $pread magazine, reviewing porn sites for Sugarclick.com, getting her master’s degree, or blogging at WakingVixen.com. She’s also modeled—nude, in mud, in boxing gloves, in paint and on the New York City subway—for a host of alt porn sites, earning her the ranking of Fleshbot’s #3 Hottie of the Year for 2005.
On top of her already full plate, she’s curating an exhibit of sex worker art debuting this Wednesday called Sex Worker Visions, helping to organize the conference Sex Work Matters: Beyond Divides, and booking local sex bloggers for next week’s Perverts Saloon. The silicone-free model, writer, organizer and activist emailed Gothamist about studying sexuality in Amsterdam, why she loves getting naked for her favorite photographers, running a magazine, being taken seriously as a sex worker and academic, and what makes for good porn.
Click here for the full interview.
Tired of the Private Show: Taking sex work out of the shadows and into public consciousness
NYC24.org
March 27, 2006
“When people tell me that sex workers should remain behind closed doors I basically tell them that is bullshit,” said [Audacia] Ray. “Culture, society and the legal world are set up to shame sex workers. I think it’s really important that sex workers come out of their own volition and combat the way they are portrayed in the media.”
[Annie] Oakley agrees, noting that the porn industry alone makes more money than professional baseball, hockey and football combined. “Americans consume porn and sex voraciously,” she said. “But people are very invested in not knowing anything about the people who are servicing them. And it’s that otherness that allows the abuses that happen in the sex industry to go on.”
Click here for the full story and two videos that feature me, the Blogs and the Magazine.
$pread Magazine
SexTV
Episode 8-13
$pread Magazine is the only magazine by and for sex workers of all genders, sexualities, and backgrounds, across the globe. Including writing by professionals in all areas of the sex industry, with a focus on personal experience and political insights, the magazine aims to provide a forum for marginalized voices and a sense of community and support among sex workers, as well as a balanced and honest view of the sex industry.
Click here for a video preview of the story.
What Are You Working On? Interview with Audacia Ray
Mark Pritchard’s Too Beautiful
March 4, 2006
What led you to this project?
The organizers of Sex Work Matters asked $pread to help them out by throwing a party on March 29th to welcome conference participants and to raise the profile of the event a bit. $pread has thrown a party for each issue we’ve released — its part of how we do fundraising to publish the magazine — including a fashion show this past November and a Sex Worker Olympics in January, which included a challenge where participants had to wear stilettos through an obstacle course while not spilling a very full martini glass. For this event, however, we wanted to do something a little less raucous, where people could actually talk to each other, and we came up with the idea for the exhibition, Sex Worker Visions. The show will feature art by and about people who work in the sex industry.
Click here for the full interview.
Miss Meep interviews Audacia Ray
Bella Vendetta
December 29, 2005
How did it feel to go from being one on end of things (editing porn, working at the Museum of Sex) to actually being a sex worker, or was it more of a continuum?
To use a word that some may think is wildly inappropriate for this case - it felt natural. In the late eighteenth century and throughout the nineteenth century as novels became more widely read, there was a continuous debate about the degenerative effects novel-reading would have on the minds and morals of young women - I like to joke that this is exactly what happened to me. I got the knowledge, the mind-expansion and the degenerate viewpoint from books and people I met along the way, got the curiosity bug, and ended up a sex worker and porn performer. The horrors!
Click here for the full interview.
An Interview With Waking Vixen’s Audacia Ray
Goodie Bag TV
November 22, 2005
In addition to her roles as a teacher, model, and sex worker activist, Audacia Ray is the dynamo behind the superb sex blog Waking Vixen, where she regularly posts her literate and increasingly expansive thoughts on sex and sexuality. The site�s links serve as an excellent primer on the world of alt porn, and if you just want some juicy erotica, take a peak in the archives.
Click HERE for the full interview.
An Old Profession That’s New to Doing Taxes
New York Times
April 5, 2006
The tax outreach program “helps sex workers who don’t know they can and should file taxes,” said Audacia Ray, 26, of Brooklyn, an executive editor at Spread magazine, a quarterly publication based in New York, who also reviews pornography for a Web site — and pays her taxes, she said.
“A lot of prostitutes are making just enough to get by and can qualify for certain tax credits, so filing can help them as well as make them feel like part of society,” she said.
Click HERE to read the article.
New York Show to Feature Porn Star Art
Adult Video News
March 23, 2006
New York indy auteur and VCA contract director, Joe Gallant, along with adult performer April Flores are among the industry members whose art work will be featured in Sex Worker Visions exhibit at the LGBT Community Center and David Bohnett Cyber Center, 208 W. 13th St. in Manhattan.
The event, scheduled to run from next Wednesday to May 20, will feature a number of industry members’ works including Gallant’s fresh enema painting, made in a collaboration with one of his starlets.
Click HERE to read the article, about a show I curated.
Audacia Ray’s Comprehensive Safer Sex/Safer Sex for Sluts Workshops
NotForTourists.com
February 16, 2006
Whether you’re single or taken, sex educator Audacia Ray can teach you a thing or two. With her extensive background in all matters sexual (she is a sex worker rights advocate, alternative model, and the executive editor of $pread), she has developed two workshops for those delving in to the world of sexual exploration. Before masterminding a night of romance, flirtation, and mindblowing sex, consider attending either the Comprehensive Safer Sex or the Safer Sex for Sluts workshop. Taking into account monogamy, open relationships, and other alternative sexual practices, Ray teaches the down and dirty facts surrounding all sexually transmitted infections, and then leads disucssions of safer sex strategies, stressing the fact that everyone has a different comfort level when it comes to the risks they are willing to take in the name of pleasure. These workshops are reminiscent of our old high school sex ed classes, but who was paying attention back then anyway? Attend this much-needed refresher course and leave with a goody bag of condoms and a determination to have safer sex. Lots of it.
Click HERE for this and other sexy reviews.
The Cogs of Porn
Photographs by Brad Nelson
Time Out New York
October 6-12, 2005
They work hard for the money: writing, shooting, performing and promoting. Meet the folks who help keep New York’s smut factory in business.
“I’m the news and shorts editor of $pread magazine, a new sex-workers’-rights magazine. I write a blog at WakingVixen.com and do porn reviews, erotica and personal essays for various publications. I also get naked for fine art and porn projects, am a professional foot and leg fetishist and teach HIV prevention workshops.”
Click HERE to read the complete article.
Waking Vixen
Review by Sara at Jane’s Guide
May 30, 2005
Audacia Ray is no Sleeping Beauty. That’s her tag line, and it is perfect. This poly-slut sex activist model-writer makes her home in Brooklyn, NY. Her writing is fresh, real, and very, very hot. She seems to be as at home describing anal masturbation, female ejaculation, her new boyfriend’s first foray into a sex party, or her wardrobe dilemmas. For extras, there are fabulous photos of our heroine scattered throughout the blog, and links to websites that are actually meaningful to her. This blog is definitely a keeper - Audacia is that rare mix of bright, sexy and interesting that definitely makes me damp! Click here to check out Jane’s Guide
Meet Audacia Ray
Fleshbot
May 18, 2005
If there’s such a thing as an alt porn renaissance woman, it’s the proudly silicone-free Audacia Ray: not only does she share her thoughts on a variety of sex topics (including genital piercing, female ejaculation, and wrestling around in fake blood for charity) on her well-written and entertaining blog, she also puts her money where her, er, mouth is via an active nude modeling career and her upcoming hardcore debut in the next volume of Profane Pirate’s “Psychocandy” series. (All that, and she wears glasses too. We think we’re in love.) Click here to read the Fleshbot original
Sex Worker Blogs, Sacred Whores, and $pread
by William Dean in Clean Sheets
April 6, 2005
Before the World Wide Web, few sex workers had what might be called a “public voice.” The most usual historical form was the tell-all autobiography, such as A House is Not a Home, by Polly Adler, published in 1953, and Xaviera Hollander’s The Happy Hooker, in 1972. More recently, we have seen Michelle Tea’s illustrated and autobiographical book, Rent Girl, Nelly Arcan’s novel Whore, and Tracy Quan’s Diary of a Manhattan Call Girl: A Novel. These books garnered both public acclaim and pseudo-scandalized reactions from media book panderers.
For more cogent and gritty information, these days, however, interested readers turn to those formidable WWW inventions, the blog and the e-zine. Why are sex workers becoming web-columnists, and what are they achieving? Click here to read the rest of the article
Whore Pride: Young, Empowered Sex Workers Want Respect Along With Your Dollars
by Rachel Kramer Bussel / Village Voice column “Lusty Lady”
January 13th, 2005
For blogger [Audacia] Ray, being open and honest with most people she knows is vital to her. “It’s important to me to be outspoken because I’m putting my cunt where my sex-positive mouth is. The combination of talking, writing, and doing is really the only way to destigmatize sex work and diverse sexualities generally.”
Click here to read the rest of the article
Posted by Dacia at March 15, 2006 12:04 AM
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