Today I put into play something I’d put in my own diary about a month ago: slowblogging, a microperformance, a call to action best answered by just a small handful of people. For three hours, I invited anybody who wanted to come get a private reading from my diary, if they managed to catch the announcement I made about it as I was doing it (on Twitter, Tumblr, and Facebook).

Why not just put it in your blaaaaaag Melissa? I wanted to tell stories without them being part of the awkward, extended performance that is my ten years of blogging. I wanted a private place in public. I wanted to share it.

Blogging had done something corrupt to my diary writing. So I took the last few months to turn almost completely away from (sorry) personal-storytelling-on-the-internet and headed back to the diary, which can keep a secret for at least a few minutes. There’s nothing pure or sacred about it. It’s really just about being fair to time and to memory. (Even if I go back and read it almost immediately.)

My diary is my favorite book to pull out on the train or waiting for the train or waiting for someone or after someone. It’s my constant. I’ve been keeping track of everything that way — dates, lovers, transformations, scraps of stories — for as long as I’ve been writing, which is almost thirty years. The first one I still have is from when I was six and even then, there is a sense in it that it will be read. There is kissing in it.

There’s an element of performance to it, keeping a diary. The diary itself is compromised: let’s blame the rise of the memoir, and the death of books, and Facebook, and Anaïs Nin, who never got enough credit for her work as the first blogger. Nin lied in hers. She never let anyone read it. She’s got over a dozen volumes in print.

We don’t believe in diaries. They are instruments for writers to build bigger stories about themselves, or, they are boring. There’s not room much in the middle, and they don’t even sell for that much money these days.

My diary is the first thing I wanted to put on the internet. I’ve scanned so many pages I’ll never let anyone upload. This was before all of this: before it was easy, before it was an act.

But this, even this is a performance. Telling you this. Telling you I have a secret. Even in bed when a lover runs down a list of our night previous, I have to make fun of myself — “Oh, are you just doing the sketch for the diary yourself now?” — before he takes his own turn at me. It’s not narcissism. I’m not in love with myself. I’m in love with the story.

But if you saw me pawing through my bag at half past two on the F train headed back to Brooklyn, this is what I would have told you makes it all okay:

Amazing headphones. And learning how to get in and out of them and swipe your Metrocard and balance your laptop bag and get on the train going the right way. Purchasing them is also an excuse to go into B&H for the first time, where the first salesguy will not know which headphones are iPhone compatible, but the second will, and will request to be your friend on Facebook after. I showed his profile to a friend, who instructed me to not reply, but if I did, to say no more than “Dude, I am definitely not kosher.”

Boots. All of my clothes were wrong right away, and especially the shoes. The black dresses I wore when I was sixteen and still wear were okay, but still. You cannot be a kindergoth every day. This did not stop me from buying my first Fluevogs in ten years.

Ladies. Fancy-heeled teevee women of Manhattan be damned, you really do need people to call at three in the morning. (Even if San Francisco is still awake.) I am too lucky and I will not embarrass myself or anyone else further with stories of what women-friends do. But — almost nearly unrelated — I think New York has made me a little more gay? Or at least more head-turning-ly drawn towards any outwardly queer-looking woman I see around town? (Butch/femme visibility, it’s just not what it used to be.) It’s complicated. In one weekend I got to tell a genderqueer pal, Yes I Do Too Like Girls, and a metrosexually ambiguous dude, No I Am Not A Lesbian. I miss you too San Francisco!

Good sex. Also almost nearly unrelated. Attentive readers will note that the word “sex” there does not contain a hyperlink. So but and.

Amazing photographer. Better if she can also teach you how to play poker on short notice. Sarah Sharp (aka Trixie Bedlam) and I palled around Times Square with her camera and my mic and produced the photos that will haunt me should I ever get more involved with public radio someday. A few have already made it to Time Out New York. The best one is saved just for a charity calendar to benefit Sex Work Awareness, a community-based organization in New York that produces media trainings for sex workers. I will still work it for a cause.

But more and more, I want to appear on camera completely undone. I did a series of portraits when I first got to town that are the first I’ve ever posed for, that raw and also, the first under my full name. More on those when they are ready for that kind of thing,

Proseco. Because gin is a three-letter-word for bad behavior.

The iPhone Holy Trinity: Google Maps, iTrans NYC, and Foursquare (also for where you don’t want to be).

Mascarpone. On gelato, with whatever fresh fruit you can get that doesn’t completely make you miss the Mission.

Virgin America. Hello California? What’s the weather like out there now?

Unlimited texting, unlimited weekly MTA pass. For getting lost, getting back in the right direction.

Notebook. I am starting to write better in transit: subway platforms, in line for coffee, from beds.

Local guides. My grade school “boyfriend” now lives with his partner on the Upper West Side, and recommends we go fantasy Craigslist apartment hunting as a form of tourism. And with my best city friend, we executed a comparative evaluation of Prospect Park and Dolores Park (ratio of children to dogs three feet tall or greater, bare chests to bear chests, etc.), a few Saturdays at a time. Throw in learning how to get from Rivington to Houston while not quite in one’s right mind, and I’ve got a healthy start.

Out of town guests. At least once a month, to reinforce that illusion that you live here.

Some books to swap. I managed to ship myself just over a dozen boxes of books, but not enough to keep me from borrowing off of everyone’s shelves almost immediately. Ensuring that I cannot move again, I also made sure to accrue some library fines.

Hide all my old music from myself. If I were Karl Lagerfeld, I’d have bought seven new iPods, too.

Loading up again on the black eyeliner. Because evincing all my favorite shards of 90’s subculture makes me feel as if I never left and Kim Gordon would not be a bad idea to grow up looking like.

But also because no matter how perfect I will work to make it, smearing the mess that’s left on my cheeks was always the point.

The biggest opposition to Prop K isn’t anti-prostitution feminist groups. It’s “neighborhood associations.” Unlike even the most socially conservative feminists, they never say, I don’t want sex workers to be raped. They say, I don’t want to see sex workers. Don’t want to see them on their front steps. Don’t want to see their clients or “pimps.” Don’t want to see condoms, or syringes. In short: don’t want to see poverty, don’t want to see poor people.

What these groups do, when pushing this image of the mini-skirted tranny with a needle in her arm, seducing the children from their front steps, is to make sex workers seem so alien, so less-than, that jailing them can sound like a step up. I say this not as an expert personally on living and working as a street-based sex worker; I’ve been privileged in my choice of venue and clients as a sex worker. It’s that I’ve been even more privileged to work with community-based organizations in San Francisco that serve the needs of street-based sex workers, including those who use drugs and lack stable housing.

The reality is, street-based sex work makes up the minority of prostitution in San Francisco. For every girl you see working the Polk, there’s a half dozen sharing one of those 500 square foot studio apartments up and down the Lower Nob to give “sensual massages” or to provide “companionship.” Indoor prostitution, where sex workers find clients not through street solicitation but through print and online ads, is the rule, and street work is the exception. Even street workers have sex indoors.

What I did learn from working in the sex trade is that the very people who can most likely afford to hire a sex worker are in the same socioeconomic demographic that rallies against the rights of sex workers. Where are these roving hordes of hookers they rave about? How can you tell that condom or syringe on your doorstep came from a working girl or boy, or from a careless slutty hipster?

What K opponents will never say in public, is that it’s not prostitutes that are hard to live next to — it’s poverty. And when I hear even liberal San Franciscans claim sex workers are making San Francisco “unsafe” for them, I never hear them propose what to do to ensure the safety of sex workers.

A Yes vote on Prop K will not make San Francisco a “safe haven” for pimps. The number one function of a pimp isn’t to get sex workers clients; it’s to keep the cops and others who would prey on a prostitute’s vulnerability at bay. The criminalization of sex work is part of what gives pimps a job. Pimps are not sex workers, and no one would call them that; and in fact, much of sex work takes place without the intervention or control of pimps and managers.

A Yes vote on Prop K will not create an “unregulated” industry where sex workers are in more danger than they already face. Remember: the only publicly-funded body regulating the sex trade right now is law enforcement. In a City where 1 in 7 sex workers say that police have forced them to have sex with them to avoid arrest, cops have as much to gain from criminalization as pimps do. Those who should take the lead in regulating the sex industry — sex workers and social service professionals — cannot when they must compete with cops. San Francisco’s Director of STD Control & Prevention supports Prop K for this reason: if cops are using condoms against sex workers as evidence of intention to commit a crime, how does that keep anyone in San Francisco safe?

A Yes vote on Prop K is a vote for human rights. For the last thirty years, regional, national, and international networks of sex workers and sex worker advocacy organizations have been fighting to protect the civil rights of sex workers. This summer, UN Secretary General Ban-Ki Moon joined sex workers in calling for the end to laws that discriminate against us by making us criminals. Prop K is just one step towards achieving that goal. If you believe your property values are inconsistent with the human rights of your fellow and sister citizens, there’s probably nothing I can say to convince you otherwise. If you’d like to stand for a San Francisco where our most vulnerable citizens are as safe as you are, too, behind your closed doors, then vote Yes on K.

So I fell in love with my Ho Hill, with the rent boys who checked their messages on the pay phone I could see from the window, with the girls in knee-high faux leather boots breaking hundred dollar bills at the Walgreens by the cable car at three in the morning, with the proud women walking the Tenderloin ignoring my taxi cab’s windows as I rolled through home at night, and the mamasans in the massage parlors watering the plants in the windows as I walked to my morning coffee, and the quick hustle of men exiting the strip club cum brothel sharing a building with the Church of Scientology and a Subway. I fell gooey, messy, shamelessly, naively, without full knowledge and precisely without full knowledge, for my hill, and the people who made it and who made San Francisco “it” for sex & the future in the first place.

I watched a women in spiky-heeled boots stride out of her cab and towards the callbox of one of the grander dames of the hill tonight, a great old building with an imposing foyer. She carried a floral print duffel, like a carpetbagger, and had the kind of pink and white dyejob that would usually mark her as not a whore at all. But the wisps around her eyes, the fine blonde ones, were curled, and the rest matted as if it had been under a wig. She straddled that line between don’tfuckwithme punk and takemehomefuckme that could be a working girl getting off work for the day, or just some hipster chick out to… yeah. It’s impossible to tell anymore, the little flares of prostitution the city once threw up for me wherever I walked.

And of course I wonder what my neighbors think, too.

A few weeks after I moved in, around Christmastime, I’d taken a boy home from a bar, a real defiantly tragic single girl gesture, something in all my experience I had never been (a single girl) or done (a boy, from a bar). My apartment door was hardly revolving at the time, but I did get a note slid under shortly after that episode, the woman next to me or under me, I never found out, complaining of noise (“men’s voices at a late hour!,” “loud music after midnight!”). I tried to knock on her door and introduce myself but she never answered it, though of course I heard her inside, watching television. A girl who worked at a “massage parlor” (really, a cheap one bedroom apartment up the hill a few blocks, since broken up, a respite for tattooed girls looking to make holiday cash) came by one night and I showed it to her and she insisted it didn’t have to be about sex, it wasn’t about sex, it was just me being paranoid and creepy and now knocking on my neighbor’s doors and what was I going to say, “It’s true, I used to be a whore, but I’m retired, and all this sex is for free, really, and please, don’t judge me, I pay my rent on time just like everybody else!”

Sex continued without interruption on my corner of the hill, and just the other day, my neighbor lamented my moving out, her loss of “such a nice girl,” even if I’m only “next door” by virtue of my address, not my behavior.

It’s that I’m moving off my hill that I can say any of this. My retirement complete that I can talk about it. My being in love that let’s me go back to when I lost it.

It’s because I fell in love with this hill, and then on this hill, that I said the words without reason just a few blocks up the street and again in my bed, when I wanted it and didn’t have it, when I had it in a moment and killed it with saying it, and finally, when I had it and didn’t know it and didn’t care and had to say it anyway. The fantasy of the hill gave way to the fantasy of a lover and then that, too gave way to something I could still hold onto in the morning, and not because he or she was there still, but because it wasn’t just about saying something hard in the moment: it was saying fuck the moment, this is what I live for.

The hazard of all this writing-in-the-moment, right? You live for a story, but if you write about your life, how do you not write about the story of your life? How are you not that observer, wondering how this will “play” later? You think I have a hard-on for the web because of some greater virtue? Fuck no, it’s the story: it’s that my story is there now, and I didn’t even have to do much but show up. Scores of photos, other people’s blogs, videos and videos I don’t even know about, and people, people who may wish they were never there with me, but there it is, there it’s been told, there we’re all told it, and even when all parties haven’t been recorded, the absence is just as telling.

I could say, I was a whore, I stopped, and now I’m in love. But that’s the reduction of my experience that made me so unbelievable to my lovers in the first place. It’s why being in love with a place made more sense. I can read her history, and then make it my own when my own actual history is so perpetually in progress that I have to get outside of it just to recognize time has passed at all.

I was a whore. I was chasing love. I lived here.

And, and I can never forget this, here, too.