I usually use my tumblr for this sort of notetaking, but for the sake of all of it one place (and having more than one video to go with it), here’s some of what I’ve been watching, in all its bashed-up, barely captured and YouTubed resolution — the next lifesaving blonde icon of us daughters of the pop 90’s. First there was Laura Palmer (we’ve killed that one), and now, Madonna.

Truth of Dare. My mother canceled our MTV after the 1984 “Like A Virgin” performance. My godmother was the one allowed to hint to me that Madonna existed. She took my nearly albino cousin, not me, to go see her, with sprayed red M’s on their white-blonde hair. My mother flipped the channel in silent embarrassment when an afternoon show tried to explain how controversial the “Like A Prayer” Pepsi ad was while showing as little of it as possible. My mother helped me get on birth control. She reminded me often to “be modest.”

So with my bedroom door shut, I taped Madonna off the radio I got on my own in seventh grade, and made out with my first boy to “Crazy For You” and insisted a best girlfriend give me the new Immaculate Collection on CD because I wanted it forever and I knew it was all silly but Madonna was the first thing I liked that everyone liked and the first thing that made me love about myself what no one else did: my desire to be desired myself, my affection for fame, my messy and upsetting need to be loved.

My mother believes in appearances of the Blessed Virgin.

Someone broke into the house where I grew up, where my mother still lived, right before Christmas the year after I’d gone to college. We always wondered it if was my father, because of what was rifled through (divorce papers, financial statements), what was left behind (all the Christmas presents). Only one actual valuable was stolen: my mother’s gold rosary from Medugorje, Bosnia-Herzegovina. I’m not sure what kind of gold it was, or how much it was worth: she told me it had turned to gold when children to whom the Blessed Virgin had appeared had held it.

“It was kind of my protection,” she said.

I did my Catholic best and went to a gift shop in the suburbs near Boston, the kind that sells saints for bedside tables and tall votive candles in rainbow colors, that were it on Mission and 24th Street in San Francisco or Atlantic Avenue in Brooklyn or South Street in Philadelphia, she would never dream of entering, even if the inventory was identical. I go into all of those. I feel better in the ones in cities, where my Catholicism is as complicated as anything I could get over-the-counter in there.

The only Medugorje rosary I could find her was silver, but I got it for her anyway, telling her it had been blessed, too. That I had to do myself, kneeling for the last time before the peach-lit statue of Mary in the Church in which I was raised. I never called her the Blessed Virgin, the Holy Mother. There was always another Madonna who came first.

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.

Laugh, cry, rend your fishnets and ask for extra credit: Eliot Spitzer is now an adjunct political science professor at City College of New York, teaching a three hour section once a week on law and public policy. In another reality commanded by the New York Post, he’s also plotting a return to office.

I was not serious, New York, when I lamented not being on the ground in March 2008 to cover his “downfall” from having “availed himself” of the “services” of a “prostitution ring” — and a porn-load of other gross, gross metaphors that do nothing resembling fair reporting on the fact that “Client 9″ is no different than scores of other elected officials who are happy to legislate and enforce prostitution as far as they can from the guilty, nasty, professional sex they enjoy in expense-accounted suites.

(And they are so guilty. You can see how guilty quite a bit on MSNBC. Or at Slate.)

It’s not happening. And if I’m wrong, you can tease me for ever having shamefully hoped I might get my chance at him.

(image: my inbox, just last week.)

I first met Stephanie Hankey like nearly every amazing woman I’ve met in the last ten years — over the Internet. The NGO that Stephanie co-founded, Tactical Tech Collective, was beginning a project for sex workers who use technology for advocacy, and I had been brought on to work with her and Tactical Tech’s Movement Building lead, Dirk Slater (who took this lovely photo). Tactical Tech is at the absolute forefront of keeping technology relevant, accessible, and powerful, for advocates and the communities we are part of and serve. I’ve never had so much asked of me and been so thankful for it.

When I try to explain Tactical Tech and Stephanie (its Executive Director) to people who have never been to one of their trainings — like the Info-Activism Camp in Bangalore this February — what I try to capture is her conviction and her resilience. Working through all kinds of barriers — whether that’s language and geography, or finding the funding, or getting a workshop going in spite of intermittent electricity — Stephanie guides us all in holding space for truly diverse groups of people to learn together, from each other.

Tactical Tech’s ethos is that nobody knows everything, and everybody knows something. It’s a beautiful philosophy, but it plays out pragmatically, as well. How else do you get so many people to huddle around laptops showing each other around a new CMS (especially with a very inviting pool outside)? The crazy thing is, we keep asking for more. I met people at the Bangalore camp who come back to Tactical Tech’s events to re-orient themselves as much as to pick up new skills. An international, mobile, multi-issue community has formed through Tactical Tech. It’s not just Tactical Tech or Stephanie’s network — it’s all of ours now who make it, to lean on one another, to collaborate and co-conspire, to take inspiration from and take solace in — because this work can still be as exhausting as it is energizing.

For the hundreds, and likely thousands, of people who, through Tactical Tech, have taken their power, claimed their rights, and carried that work on to countless others, thank you, Stephanie, for your vision, and your willingness and your perseverance. There’s still something radical in doing it ourselves, but something even more powerful in doing it ourselves together.

“You’ve never been one of them,” one of my friends told me after I leaned on her to decompress from one of the most male-dominated, fuck male-dominated, suit-dominated conferences I’d ever attended. Not one of them, being, the women, the dozen or so women in the room who, if I’d been more naive, I’d be assuming would have my back.

“I bet they never see you coming,” said one of my bosses once. “I bet you clean up nice.” She was tattooed, older than me, had a graduate degree I’m still years from, and was the new executive director of the nonprofit health clinic that had just hired me. My job was to hustle — to write grants, get us money, keep us afloat. “How do you feel about sitting across from a table full of old men in suits and asking them for money?” a former board member asked me. “That sounds like what I do all the time,” I said.

I started in on this thing, about passing, in a comment on Dacia’s post on class and elitism in the sex industry — on how, without visible body mods, with white skin, with blonde (not as natural as it could be) hair, and WASPy looks (I’m Italian and Catholic, actually), I get away with a hell of a lot more than a filthy whore like I supposedly am is supposed to get away. I’ve been in and out of academia, of faith organizations, with NGO’s, circled the tech scene, the sex industry itself — all of these male-dominated spaces. I’m comfortable in them. If anything, it’s because I’ve seen the same men who dominate them, naked and on their knees and crying and aching and handing me their cash for the honor.

But aside from that? I’ve been lucky. I’ve never had a straight male boss. I’ve worked in female-dominated workplaces, for female-dominated boards, with female-dominated supervision. I sat on my first corporate board of directors when I was 26. All of that comes from having spent as much time in the non-profit world as I have in the sex industry, and in my last job, at the sex worker health clinic St. James Infirmary, the marriage of both.

When I enter a room of suits (like the conference last week, which was called Supernova and was concerned with the business of the internet and which I was covering for Valleywag), it’s never the women who put me at instant ease. It’s the the other freaks: the femmey guys, the queers, the girl with the lip ring, the boy with the crazy boots. The women in tech I once looked to for support, though they may have once thought I was a cute enough anomaly to tolerate when I could be their Token Whore Speaker, are not the instant allies the web sisterhood wants you to believe they are. It’s not okay to say this, but I’m scared that for most women, period, feminism is no longer about breaking the rules men have set, but learning men’s rules well enough to seem like they’re playing along. But that’s probably exactly what some women think I’m doing when I take (or took) my clothes off for money. I’m out of reasons to explain why it wasn’t. I can point to my home, my city, my lovers, my friends, my community, my work as reasons, as proof — that I made it in my own fucking Sinatra way, and that my voice is worthy.

Last night Nick and I went to see Taylor Mac, a wholly fierce drag performer, at a little theatre half a block from the Infirmary. I bumped into two of my co-workers, Blake — a podcaster and phlebotomist and filmmaker — and Ginger — a burlesque performer and researcher. Both are shaking shit up in the world in ways that are so severe, from organizing support groups for transgender women with HIV to volunteering to translate for sex worker human rights activists in Taiwan to just fucking showing up at the clinic to do what needs to be done. They smiled and were warm and we just went back to being family in our tiny hellos on a dark street.

Taylor Mac sings ukulele-accompanied love songs about Saddam Hussein and Lynne Cheney, gets a straight audience member to dress in a magenta mylar deconstructed frock and sing “The Revolution Will Not Be Masculinized.” Before he started he asked all the heterosexuals to raise their hands, and here Nick does and I don’t and no one really notices. Even walking around the Mission and holding hands and eating ice cream and looking for all intents and purposes like a painfully straight couple on a day of gay marriage in a month of queer jubilation, we could still get away with snickering at the out of town lesbians who were too overwhelmed to cross 16th and Valencia Streets — not for being dykes, but for being tourists. There are places in this city that permit slippage and ones that don’t. We just spent three days in one that certainly didn’t, washed it away with a decent amount of complimentary white wine and a few bouts of sweaty unexpected summer night sex. I felt badly about feeling badly for the Supernova conference goers who couldn’t, but then, I also got relief just walking home and plotting the removal of my corporate drag as soon as I got in the door. But that’s the thing: for me, it’s drag. I spent as much as on my two custom pinstripe wool skirts as I did on a leather corset and a latex dress: because they are fetish, and I only have to wear them when I really want to.

Taylor talks about drag bombs, that he wished he could drop from the sky to hit people rushing head-down to their desks every morning. He says he is fearless because his mentor, a drag queen named Mother Flawless Sabrina, was once shot in the ass as she was walking down the street in New York in all her finery. “Mother Flawless Sabrina, that is awful that is awful that is AWFUL what those men did to you!” he exclaimed.

And of course I dress business sexy when I want to. Of course I work a room. I work everything I’ve got. Once it was called survival. Now I call it work.

“No, no, honey,” Mother Flawless Sabrina told Taylor Mac. “It wasn’t.”

And if that makes other women fearful, that these rules don’t scare me, that I’ve fought and found a way within them, that I have community enough outside them to hold me so when I go to those dull places, I know laughter and wetness and joy and drunkenness and pleasure and bare skin and love is waiting for me when I leave them, that even as they sustain me, that they don’t define me?

“They weren’t bad people,” said Mother Flawless Sabrina. “They just wanted to be part of the show.”

This is my obsession: that all writing about sex is taken as an authoritative voice because the vacuum that ought to contain hundreds of voices is still so deafening and boring; that what “sex writers” are asked to sell is their ability to be sexy by some standard of sexy that’s easy to sell; that combine that cult of personality with the promise of delivering the “truth” about sex and you get a whole lot of nothing.

It’s not that maintaining privacy affords more opportunities to tell a bigger story, which it does. It’s not that we can’t tell the truth so long as our face is on it. It’s that when your face is on it, your career in sex itself is riding on who and how you fuck. How few sex writers do keep their personal sex lives out of their writing, or don’t sexualize themselves even when getting the story (substitute here for: giving advice, doing education, making a movie, teaching a class) isn’t even about that?

Right now, then, for the record, I’m not fucking. I did yesterday, and it was his skinny hips like the boy in Debauchette’s story that made me start in on this piece in the first place. That I straddled them as soon as I filed my stories to my editor for the day doesn’t make me any more right about the porn case I was writing about, or about any of this, but I’m putting it here all the same.

I’m eating chicken breasts and thighs with my fingers tonight, in honor of the first night I got to seriously spend time with Annie Sprinkle. To all the whore sisters who’ve been questioning my sanity of late, this story is for you:

(“Annie’s Breasts,” Northampton, MA 2003, and read with the love you’d give a poor little rich girl)

This would have to be the first story. Annie’s breasts. My own mother’s brand of maternal love, that being suffocation, denial, and repression, kept me from going after that golden oldie of psychotherapy, the comfort of the tit. Throwing my head on momma’s boobies, and just letting out a cathartic, helpless wail was not in my cards, not until I was twenty three years old, alone in San Francisco, letting loose a little torrent of tears into the cleavage of Annie Sprinkle.

A few years after, when my actual cards were being read by my teacher, Mary, she asked me, “Does Inanna have any mothering qualities to you? Because that’s what you need right now. You need to know that your mother loves you. Not your birth mother. She’s not happening. You need to know, and not just know, but feel, in your whole being, that the Goddess is your mother and she loves you.”

It doesn’t sound like, “Jesus loves me, this I know, cause the child molesting priest, he told me so.” Not really. I’m sure a part of me felt so still, held mom at arm’s length still. My mom, my real mom, I knew it, was a whore — not the one whose cunt I first knew, but the one whose cunt first taught me. My cunt. My own.

I was my own whore-momma, until Annie. It wasn’t a new age rebirthing with crystal dildos or forced labor breaths that owed more to porno than Lamaze. It was just me, standing on uneasy legs in a tiny black box theatre in the Mission, holding onto candy I bought in the lobby to benefit some leftie-sex political cause. Annie was in front of me, taking questions from the stragglers. My legs were still gooey from the massage she gave me mid-show, cooing, “Are you old enough to be here? Does your momma know you’re here?” in that voice you use with clients, but that didn’t split us up — even though it should have, it didn’t. I had paid to be here, and if my self-consciousness had gotten out of the way, I would have told you, if you were the ticket taker, Yes, I’m here for a religious experience.

So Annie had run her Magic Wand (made by Hitachi, in this instance), over my shoulders and neck and back, as a twenty year old image of her flickered on the screen behind her, of starlet Annie with a similar vibrator on her pussy. I don’t remember much except I couldn’t overcome my total body silence, which, if you have ever shared a sexual experience with me, especially one running heavy with whoring, you’d know was dangerous. Am I dissociating, or helplessly blissed? The line is awfully thin.

“Come back to Northampton, Annie,” I said to her bosom, as we melted into an embrace. I thanked her for sending traffic to my website, sacredwhore, which was linked partially as a mistake from her site, as she knew the woman who used to own it. “Yes, I saw that — keep it up,” she said, in that heavy-light sigh. When I finally made it back to the car, I wept and wept. The trip home detoured to Ocean Beach so I could scream at the Pacific, “How am I supposed to do this? Why am I supposed to do this?”

I didn’t use the word problematic, but I would have if it weren’t so cold. Annie’s problematic, sacred whoring is problematic, being stuck for another two weeks in San Francisco with less than a hundred bucks is problematic. Between all the choices, I pitted working-class survival wits against adopted-elitist academese, and went with the most profitable (and therefore, least “problematic”) option. I did my first massage call and the fever broke.

Whore fever. What soothes it is salt water, and cash. Like the well-stocked womb I made for myself, where I’ve got a full bookshelf and my laptop and incense and my candles from the city I love like heaven, and not just heaven for whores. It’s never clear-cut, never one or the other, just spiritual, just for the money. It’s to stop the fever, and it’s to stay alive. It’s for God the Momma and for God Inside of Me. It’s for my cunt and for my wallet, and when those slits start melding more, the fever may break forever. Right now I just ask Momma for a healing salve when I start burning up, and when She comes, I do, too.

I’m being a lot more open on my tumble log, but because I am restricted. How information moves there — a video posted elicits comments, that elicit repost, not to mention back channel email and other conversations — fascinates me. Aggregate truth. Something intimate. “The last refuge on the Internet for girls,” Nick said. For the lack of comments. But it’s not that. The narrative flow of a blog is so expansive, it’s easy to get lost in your own myth, in the details, in being grandiose. When your contribution is so neatly framed, and your choices for how to express yourself purposefully limited (hello, twitter, which still only asks, “What are you doing?”), the tension that comes from being “constrained” produces a taut, dense result: both in content, and (it’s premature) community.

Roxanne M. Carter (kore) influences me to stick with the web, always. Her original site, at the sadly dead prettie.com, got me bugged about the web diary as legitimate storytelling.

This was in 1998.

We’ve never met. I’ve only ever heard her voice now that she has a videoblog. This is the most recent.

[edited to add: I'm gravely abusing the tumblelog. So much more is happening there. Best intentions, etc. etc. This tends to be how it shakes out for me. Solution? See above. Stick with it.]