Bio

Melissa Gira (“jee-rha”) Grant is a writer, and also an educator and artist working in sex & technology. She is the co-founder of Boffery, an online tool for organizing and discussing one’s sex life with trusted personal contacts. She’s a contributor to Gawker and Black Book. Her work has appeared in print in $pread, Make:, and in the anthologies Best Sex Writing 2008 (Cleis Press) and Dirty Girls (Seal Press).

An early sex blogger and one of the last remaining webcam girls, she has been writing about sex on the web since 1998. From 2002 to 2005, she operated Sacredwhore.org, one of a handful of blogs written by sex workers to gain wider attention, including her podcast, Whorecast, which in 2005 occupied the highest-ranking spots for a Political, Religious, Sexuality, and Business podcast in the iTunes Music Store. In 2005, she launched the award-winning Sexerati. At the height of the “DC Madam” prostitution scandal in 2007, she and the Desiree Alliance founded the sex worker group blog Bound, Not Gagged, recognized as one of the best sources of coverage on former New York Governor Eliot Spitzer’s relations with high-priced escorts hired over the internet. In 2008, she reported daily on sex and the internet for Valleywag.

Melissa has been a consultant with the Soros Foundation’s Sexual Health and Rights’ Project and the St. James Infirmary on using blogging, podcasting, videoblogging, and online social networks for advocacy and movement building among sex workers. She has also written a sex education curriculum for teenagers on MySpace, as part of a National Institute for Health funded study, for the Internet Sex Information Service. She has presented her work on sexual health, human rights, and new media at the 2008 International AIDS Conference in Mexico City, the Third Wave Feminist Foundation, the University of San Francisco, the Institute for the Advanced Study of Human Sexuality, the Center for Sex and Culture, the New School for Social Research, and the UC Berkeley Labor Center.

Other sex/tech notorieties include having been one of the first webcam girl performance artists, delivering the first podcasted orgasm, and promoting “prostitution hacks” from Silicon Valley to Scandinavia as part of The Aphrodite Project. In addition to appearing regularly in the media to comment on the future of sex and the internet sex industry, she guest lectures to public health, sexuality, political science and sociology students on sex, media, technology, and human rights, and teaches hands-on media making skills for community-based organizations around the world.

Melissa (melissa @ melissagira dot com) is based in New York.