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.

This Wednesday, December 17th was the 6th Annual Day to End Violence Against Sex Workers — with over 20 documented observances around the world, vigils and marches & memorials & protests. I took on bringing together the San Francisco vigil. A huge part of our local sex worker community had gone to Washington, DC to march on the Department of Justice, read the names of sex workers that we’ve lost to violence, issue some very cogent and community-driven demands to the incoming Obama administration. Bringing the San Francisco vigil together was my way of recommitting to the local: after two years of focusing on international activism, and a year of trying my best to be both a journalist and an activist but coming up stretched thin the whole way, it was a risk I wanted to take. Maybe no one would come. We all think this before every party.

On Wednesday afternoon, just as the sun started to slip behind Twin Peaks, just as I was headed out of my place and over to the Hall of Justice, which is what San Francisco City & County government call their jail and court and where we decided to convene our vigil, I saw that Dacia had twittered that her speech for the New York City vigil was posted online. In typical Max Fischer “It was totally improvised!” fashion, I hadn’t even written my own speech yet — Dacia’s words were all I had going in to the San Francisco vigil, even as Kirk Read, who met us on the steps, walked into the Hall of Justice with me and stood with me as I told the sheriff’s office staff at the door that we’d be holding a vigil out front shortly. “Some people don’t believe in telling them first,” said Kirk. So we told, not asked.

Kirk & Sadie performed two powerful pieces, and Shelly & Acire from Sex Workers’ Outreach Project spoke about the value of coming together in opposition to police harassment & violence done against our people, and Naomi led a moment of silence and then marched us down Bryant Street, up Sixth Street, and over to Mission Street — past St. James Infirmary, and to the Center for Sex & Culture. And with our march delivered there to the memorial, I passed my Mary Magdalene candle to Annie Sprinkle, and kissed Gina on the forehead, and slipped away with Nick and had soup and dim sum and a little guilt over needing to slip away.

Dacia’s words were about needing to take care of ourselves. “Even when it seems like there’s nothing but struggle in front of us,” I said, on the steps of the jail and courthouse, we need to take care of ourselves. Why did I guilt myself for needing to eat, be held, and be comforted after that night? Why are so many of us used to pushing ourselves to the breaking point? There is too much risk already in this work, in moving in the world as those who carry so much of people’s sexual shame and fear and pain. I don’t want to care for my community from that place, of near martyrdom. So why do I hold myself to that impossible standard, of going and going and going until I can’t?

There is always more to do. There is always further to go. But even in a world that reviles us most of the time, will click and page-turn hungrily to read about our trauma all of the time, we took charge of the mic ourselves for a night, all over the world, and said, Here we are, we are still surviving, we are still here. And the more of us there are, the more we can share this work, the harder & smarter we can fight, and a million other platitudes I’m sure I’ve been handed for years about activism, which right now, in this moment, mean we all have the permission to step back and be held and fed dumplings, that holding our own alone is not what makes you “good” for a cause, that the cause is us.

May no one utter our names on these steps and in these streets in memory of a life ripped short. If we don’t take time to hold each other, our voices may start to break from all our needed sounding out:

Never again, Ruby and countless nameless other transgender women, picked up off one street and left for dead on another, their murders ignored, their killers at large.

And never again, Eliot Spitzer & Randall Tobias & Harlan “Shock And Awe” Ullman, politicians glad to fuck us over for their cause, and also glad to fuck us for a fee, and then go free themselves, while we hang.

“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.”

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.

Right now, holding sorrow, my first instinct is to be a caregiver. I’m heartbroken, and I’m — for the moment anyway — not able to do anything about it except to turn in and care for my own self. Which is the hardest thing to do. Which is why they hire, isn’t it? To be held.

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.