Audacia Ray's Blog, page 77

Research on Alternative Sexualities (Sex 2.0 Session)

Research on Alternative Sexualities

Escort Gets Robbed, Reports It, Gets Outed

I couldn’t help but bring attention to this article in the Providence Journal, which was emailed to me this morning by a Speak Up participant: Man charged with assaulting escort [link redacted to protect the escort, do a search of the Providence Journal or email me for the full link].

Here’s a snippet from the article. I’ve removed the legal name of the escort because I don’t want to make ever more search results turn up for her in this case.

Check out this serious bullshit:

Assistant Attorney Gene

Libby Lynn’s Ghost-Painted Self Portrait of Me

In this post on Rollertrain, Libby explains why she wanted to paint a portrait of me for her Ghost-Painted Portraits of My Internet Heroes series (which so far also includes Dan Carlin (Common Sense, Hardcore History) and Jad Abumrad (Radiolab).

You can see Libby’s full set of painting process photos here.

In the Rollertain post I link above, Libby says some awfully nice things about me and catalogs why she wanted to paint my portrait. I want to turn things around on her a little bit, because Libb

I Am a Sex Worker: Video and Audio PSA

There were a lot of things I loved about doing the Speak Up! training, but I am really excited about this public service announcement. I had the idea for this video last year but hadn’t had the opportunity to see it through until the media training. It’s just a minute long - check it out, spread it around, and please do get in touch if you have ideas about distributing it. I would love to get it some play on public television stations and the like.

The PSA is also available as an audio file (wit

Things I Learned About Love This Year

Me in my kitchen, rocking my birthday dress and a bowl of curried chickpeas and tomatoes, one of many dishes that I prepared for my birthday party this weekend. See more twitpics taken by Debauched Diva here. Lots of other pictures (some embarrassing) were taken too, and will probably be appearing on the internet sometime soon.

Last summer and fall, I went through an epic heartbreak. The kind that had me crying randomly in public. The kind that made it impossible for me to get out of bed some d

The Impact You Can Make: Speak Up and Other Communication Revelations

Since the story of the murder of a NYC-based sex worker in Boston broke last week, I’ve been keeping up on the details of the story mostly through Twitter and the enthusiasm and resources of sex worker advocates. Eliyanna and I used the sad and frustrating example of this story during the Speak Up media training last weekend. And you know what? It was upsetting to push people to talk about something so fresh and raw - a woman murdered by a client, a woman who could’ve been many of the people in

Speak Up! was amazing

I present to you: the first crop of Speak Up! participants.

I don’t quite have the words to describe Speak Up, except to say that it was seriously amazing, and I am so glad that I put in the (heaps of) time to make it happen.

I need some time to put my thoughts together, but I thought I’d put up a quick post to say that we survived and it was fantastic. I also want to do a big shout out to the people who made the workshop possible, especially the Sex Blogger Calendar ladies, the Harm Reduction Co

Sex Workers, Murder, and False Securities

This evening while I was at the grocery store stocking up on food to feed the sex workers who will convene at my apartment on Friday night for a pre-Speak Up night of eating, socializing, and analyzing media, I was checking my email (as I do, obsessively) and read this message:

Urgent: Masseuse Advertising on Craig’s List Murdered
Yesterday a sex worker from NYC was brutally murdered here in Boston. Police are saying they think its the second attack by the same guy (first was not killed). He mak

Celebrate the first Speak Up sex worker media training with us!

Last fall a group of NYC based sex bloggers got their brains (and boobs) together to make a gorgeous pin-up calendar, which you can learn all about here. Sales of the calendar benefit Sex Work Awareness (SWA), a young advocacy organization that I co-founded with several former $pread staffers. SWA works to do public education around sex workers’ issues and to support sex workers in speaking for themselves. To this end, we developed a media training workshop called Speak Up! Media Training for th

Tales of Fucking and Brunch

Once upon a time, this blog was a sex blog - like, the kind with hot sweaty fuckery and lots of noms de blog. That fact is an embedded part of my personal history of the internet, so I’m always surprised when people don’t seem to know that about me and about the dirty origins of Waking Vixen. Not that I expect new recruits to go back and read five years of archives (but if you did you might find interesting stuff there).

You probably want examples. I used to write about dating disasters (Date w