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It entails waiting, hustling, and negotiating personal physical boundaries in a place where strangers assume access to your body.
Unlike gamblers or stand-up comics, though, sometimes we got arrested. Sometimes we got STIs from our coworkers. Sometimes we got robbed or thrown in a pool. Sometimes we went missing. Sometimes we were murdered.
There was a sense that what she performed in the world wasn’t necessarily her true self. It was just this external thing that she gave the world that was based on herself, but she never confused the two.
Each of them was powerfully individual, yet all shared a silkily sensual confidence that I, though full of earnest and awkward commitment to the form, possessed in no abundance.
feel like some of the past work—not all of it, but some past work, couldn’t get published unless there was an element of regret or poignancy; that was the endgame. Right? For the publisher, you have to be redeemed, you have to have regret, the sadness has to be the point of the story.
But their boundaries don’t extend to their right for me to not exist and not be seen. If your boundary is that you don’t even want to know that I exist, that you don’t want to hear about my kind of presentation or sexuality, that’s not right.
I was always really clear on that. Your desire to not look at me until you want to use me is not okay. Whether you want to use me to engage my services, or use me nonconsensually to make yourself look moral by contrast, it is not okay. If you want to engage me, you’ve got to respect me. And if you don’t respect me, I don’t respect your point of view, because everybody’s human.
You’re only twenty-two years old! You haven’t ended up anywhere, you’re in motion
All night, I indicated with hand signals, to men I hadn’t met before, that I couldn’t speak. Afterward, when I got home, I realized I’d made more money than ever before.
Meanwhile, every fucking job under capitalism is that, but they don’t tell you. They
