Jeez, it took me a bit to get around to writing this… but, better late than never.
Last Monday, Jamye, Eliyanna and I finally piled into my car around 1 pm, just after finding out that our first stop of the day, The Jersey Boys radio show, had been canceled. Apparently they’ve been having some troubles with the FCC, and their producers were pissed that they were planning on having a former sex worker on air to talk about prostitution and whatnot. (Who me?) 
Supposedly that will be rescheduled when they have their shit together, but whatever. Driving around with Eliyanna and Jamye was totally awesome, and it was weird to realize that two ladies who I count among my best friends had actually never met before. When we got to Philly, we did some shopping and then met up with the ladies of Hot Movies for Her for dinner. Meeting up with and meeting new people (and eating!) was basically my favorite thing about the whole trip. It’s so inspiring to meet people who are doing work that’s similar to mine and people who find inspiration (or as my boyfriend calls it, inspirado) in the work I’m doing. It really fuels my fire.
The other thing that got me really jazzed was doing the events themselves. Though I find doing press perpetually exhausting, I love love love the public speaking/reading/Q&A stuff. I know the Q&A stuff makes some people uncomfortable, but I get excited about the prospect of being asked a variety of questions. Also, I’ve gotten comfortable enough with my knowledge base that I don’t try to pull answers out of my ass if I don’t know what I’m talking about. The answers were pretty broad in range at the different events, though with a definite tendency towards questions about the sex industry. These questions were asked to the extent that at one reading, a woman asked, “Is the book only about commercial sex?” It isn’t at all, but that’s what people obsess over, I guess especially because I write and talk about the dialogue that needs to happen between commercial and non-commercial online sex stuff. Plus the part of my bio where it says I’m a former sex worker, which is apparently the only interesting thing about me.
One question that I’ve had at pretty much all my readings is about globalization and the exclusion of some women from the goings-on online, particularly in terms of race and class. 
Eliyanna and I started to play the game where we pick out the person in the crowd who will ask that question, but then we thought better of it and decided that instead I should read the section from the first chapter of my book that directly addresses the issue. Much better. Sometimes at readings I say smart things that I didn’t realize I thought or knew until I started talking (this works equally for stupid things, which I’ll get to in a moment), and in Baltimore when I talked about the globalization thing, I said that of course there are many women and sex workers all over the world who are not online, and that the Internet might not be the solution to their problems; instead, different kinds of community-based action and support might benefit them much more thoroughly. As soon as I said it, I thought, how about that - something new that I hadn’t thought about before. I was impressed with myself.
And now to counterbalance (undermine?) that eloquent and insightful statement. After the Baltimore reading, Eliyanna raised an issue with me, namely the fact that I refer to sex in two ways: as “paid sex” and “free sex.” Apparently, that’s off-putting, and not really how most of the world views sex (who knew?). The funniest thing is that this was a habit I was totally unaware of. I guess you can take the girl out of sex work but you can’t take the sex worker out of the girl. Yikes. After that, I made a solid effort to let “sex” be the default setting word and “comercial sex” be the aberration. Which makes sense to most people’s understanding of the world.
In Chapel Hill, we got to hang out with Libby, tour the Adam & Eve warehouse and offices (left), see some recently-transplanted-to-NC friends, and be famous. The Independent, the local alt weekly, ran a feature piece about me, which included a photo of me on the contents page, and it led to being recognized a lot in town. However, people were consistently too shy to come say hi to me directly, so whenever I left the room they’d talk to Eliyanna and gush and ask how she came to know me, or if she’s my publicist/full-time personal assistant, when in reality she’s my friend who was paying her own way on the trip. Ha! We joked later that in a weird way I had become her wingman, because she was getting flirted with constantly because of me. I remember back when I thought sex industry stardom would get me laid all the time - ha! I’m less socially awkward these days, but I’m still either unaware that I’m being hit on (unless its super awkward bordering on scary), weirdly unapproachable, or… something.
On Friday we drove seven hours to Philadelphia and got there early enough to see the Mutter Museum, a medical museum whose tagline is “disturbingly informative.” It was glorious and awesome. And then the day got terrible. But hilarious. My boyfriend was unable to come to Philly due to a ridiculous set of circumstances (I won’t totally embarrass him here, but suffice to say these circumstances involved the loss of a wool hat), his friends were variously drunk and MIA, and though until 6.15 I thought the event started at 6, it really started at 7. People who showed up earlier didn’t come back. There was lots of confusion, and I did my reading for four people, two of whom were Eliyanna and my lawyer.
There was, however, alcohol! 
So I did the entirely unprofessional thing and poured myself a vodka cran, very heavy on the vodka, and said to everyone else, “What, you’re going to let me drink alone?” They did. I was definitely more than a little tipsy by the time we went to dinner. Also, to commemorate being asked the globalization/race/class question at all my readings, Eliyanna became that girl and succeeded in not laughing her ass off as she watched me answer the question in the quickest possible way.
This reading, like getting hopelessly lost in the bad parts of Baltimore (which is to say, 90% of the city) until 5 minutes before an appearance on NPR, was one of the things that, had I been by myself, would have been cause for tears. However, with Eliyanna there, such mishaps were goddamn hilarious! Later, we rewarded ourselves with a night at a swanky hotel, complete with indulgence in room service dessert and booze and a pay-per-view movie. An excellent ending to a 95% awesome week.
