I'll be in the Bay Area next week for the San Francisco Sex Worker Festival. Here's a summary of scheduled events, make sure to check the web site for full details.

* Saturday, May 30: Radar Spectacle Benefit with Michelle Tea and more
* Sunday, May 31: BelleBazaar: An Orgy of Shopping
* Sunday, May 31: SWOP Benefit Party at Diva's
* Monday, June 1: SWOP Roundtable and Hospitality Day
* Tuesday, June 2: Whore-A-Palooza
* Wednesday, Thursday, June 3 & 4: Army of Lovers
* Friday, June 5th: Migration, Sex Work and The Evil Empire: Movies and Discussion
* Friday, June 5th: Cirque X, a St. James Infirmary benefit
* Saturday, June 6th: Movies at The Roxie
* Sunday, June 7th: Intersections: Krip Sex! Krip Sex Work!

For just $40, buy a pass to most of the week's events here.

I'm proud that my company is a sponsor, along with a lot of other great companies and groups.

Like many loudmouth sluts, I am contacted by people who want to get quotes from me for their school newspaper, class assignment, or an article they're hoping to have published. The following is a guide mostly for college kids, but it also applies to freelancers and writers from small publications/web sites. It's culled from my personal experiences, and I'd like to think it's useful reading for anyone interested in interviewing sex workers.

* The primary rule to remember is that you are asking me to do you a favor by being your interview subject, and you must treat my time and my expertise with respect. You get paid, get a good grade, or sell ads based on generating pageviews. In return, I get a small altruistic glow of hoping that more people will think about the politics of sex work. I'm not trying to be snobby and belabor this point, but often, the more obscure and tiny the intended audience, the more a writer has a chip on their shoulder about how I'm supposed to be grateful to them.

* (As an aside: If you're inquiring from an established media outlet with a significant following, it's different. I have something to gain from reaching large numbers of people. If more people see my blog every day than will ever see your project, it's clearly you who's the one benefitting from our exchange.)

* Be honest (with yourself) about the size and importance of your audience. Don't cop an attitude as though I should be thanking you profusely for this very special opportunity to be in your sociology term paper. On the personal side, I already am getting my opinions out there on my own terms without someone else shaping my words to suit a moral agenda, so "being able to tell my story" isn't a big motivator for me. On the business side, a blurb in your women's studies thesis is the last place on earth where I think I'll make a lot of pornography sales. I once had a guy huffily tell me I was flushing away untold amounts of money by declining to be in his college newspaper. I run specialty adult web sites with niche audiences, and if I thought that The Tinytown Junior Tech Journal was the best place to find customers, I'd already be advertising there.

* If you're coming at me breathless about having just gotten interested in the topic, I have to disabuse you of the notion that you are a unique snowflake for wanting to write about "alternative porn". Not having the money or the debt-lust to attend university myself, I can't know for certain, but I'm pretty sure that colleges these days require all students to write at least one essay on "alternative porn" to obtain degrees.

* While the idea that intelligent, politically-aware people opt to sell sexual services might be news to you, it is not actually a new thing, and it's patronizing if you treat it like a fad. Think of it this way: would you interview a black person and ask, "Now that Obama is our president, what do you think of this trend where people of color say smart stuff and achieve things with their lives?" Clever people have been amongst the ranks of sex workers since the dawn of time, so please don't assume that we began existing three months ago when you first discovered Suicide Girls. The non-newness doesn't make smart sex workers any less compelling - far form it - I'm just not into being treated as an amusing novelty.

* Never, ever tell me that you'll only "let" me be interviewed by you if I tell you my real name. I've had several people do this. It's like walking up to a stranger and saying in a smarmy voice, "I'll let you give me $20, but only if you buy me an iPhone, too." It's all fail.

* Do not contact me at the last minute because you have been procrastinating and need an interview done in a day or two. I'd say a week is the minimum notice you should provide. Nothing makes an interview subject fell less special than being treated as your half-assed last-ditch effort at cranking out a quick essay.

* Do tell me the deadline for your project. It's incredibly dickish if, after I answer your questions in a week, you reply back and tell me your project was already due and you can't use my quotes any more.

* Do some basic background research and familiarize yourself with what I do. Make your questions count. Ask me things that show you've actually put more than 2 minutes of thought into the topic. Read the public pages on my web site(s) that you are interviewing me about. It's rude to expect me to fill in every single blank for you when it's obvious that you've never really looked at any of my work. For example, one of the questions I've been asked in almost every interview request about VegPorn.com is how many models the site has. Seriously- you can't go to the model page and count them yourself? Or even notice that the site repeatedly states how many models appear on it?

* Search for interviews that other people have conducted with me so you can get a feel for what I think about things. Or read my blog. You can then tailor your own questions more specifically to me so I don't feel like I got a form letter that you sent to dozens of other indie porn webmasters.

If you're a socially inept person who cannot follow these rules, you are still welcome to conduct an interview with me live on my web cam at the rate of $3 a minute. You'll get to see my tits and have an anecdote to repeat to your straight friends for years to come.

To prepare for a British friend coming to visit Seattle, I picked up "Weird and Wacky Washington Places" from the library to see if there's anything neat I hadn't heard of. What's weird and wacky? A banana museum, the Space Needle, Slug Fest, the Jimi Hendrix statue, and the Green River Killer, Gary Ridgeway.

As surprised as I was that Gary Ridgeway is listed in a guidebook of zany and funny things for tourists, I was also struck by the authors' omission of the fact that his victims were (mostly) sex workers. Is that a good thing- does it reduce the horror of his crimes in the eyes of normal people if he was "just" killing prostitutes? Or is it a bad thing- glossing over an important case in terms of getting international attention focused on the violence against sex workers?

I'm still not sure which part of this perturbs me the most.

On a 2008 episode of the Point of Inquiry podcast, civil rights attorney Edward Tabash touched on an issue that, to me, resonated well beyond beyond the Prop 8 topic he was discussing.

If people with a religious motive can appeal to bogus junk science to get around the church-state issue, then church-state separation has been nullified. So, let me elaborate. So if somebody says, "Well, I'm not trying to restrict gay rights because of any religious belief, but these scientific studies show these psychological problems with gay men, or show these psychological problems with women who've had abortions," then what they are doing is using pseudo-science to try to create a bogus - but smokescreen alternative - to their true religious motive, and they've made an end run around church-state separation. So that is the danger. If we have pseudo-science, and you say, "You cannot base your law on religion, you have to have an empirical study", and they have a bogus scientific study, what they have done is that they have done a devious end run around church-state separation by bootstrapping fake science into some kind of fake - but possibly passable - secular justification for what's really a religious motivation.

I remember someone once arguing with me that they read a study that showed that most sex offenders have looked at pornography, so therefor, pornography makes people become sex offenders. That line of reasoning makes total sense- but only if you're grasping at straws to justify your unflinching moral beliefs (whether or not those moral beliefs are directly based on a religion). I bet most sex offenders also enjoy masturbation, but that doesn't mean that rubbing your happy places turns you into a rapist.

"Junk science" is used by many different kinds of groups trying to make their religious/moral message appeal to wider audiences. Don't let people do an end-run around logic by throwing in the words "study" or "research".

Conference organizer Match and I at the porn and brownies party. We're 2 of only 4 people at the conference of 166 who don't call ourselves feminists. Photo by Diva.

Since the weekend in DC, I've been decompressing in a friend's place in Manhattan, objectifying his body and eating the city's most delicious vegan foods.

This year's Sex 2.0 conference had at least 50% growth since last year's event in Atlanta. There were a lot of awesome faces, a sexycute porn shoot, tons of cupcakes, a strong representation of sex worker issues, oodles of intelligent conversations, and very few creepers. On the down side, I barely got to say hello to some people since there was just so much good stuff happening. For a reclusive pervnerd like me, it was overwhelming, but in a positive way. FurryGirl.com has been online for over six years and receives over half a million unique visitors per month, but this was the first time I really felt like anyone has ever heard of me. Even when not wearing my name tag, I had some people do the "O hai, you're Furry Girl, right?" Strangeness.

In my mind, Sex 2.0 2009 kicked off online, with a critical post by previous conference organizer Amber Rhea. Coupled with the many comments, it was a perfect microcosm of why I longer identify as a feminist. It was like playing a game of Cliche Bingo, down to how the commenters (basically) split apart into two camps of opinion: The Feminists and The Sex Workers. (And, of course, it didn't occur to any of the feminists that if the sex workers and a transwoman felt unwelcome by feminists, then maybe the problem wasn't that the sex workers and transwoman were the ones who needed to modify their beliefs.)

There was a pinch of other random bitching and moaning here and there at the conference- complaints that carried as much weight as freaking out about how unfair it is that Wikipedia's entry on your favorite subject is only a stub. While I do plenty of criticizing the world myself, I'm not one to knock a transparently-organized unconference for not reading my mind and creating the panels I wanted to watch. One of my greatest hot buttons is when people complain about that which they have taken absolutely no steps to positively remedy, instead, choosing to pick at people who are doing something.

Moving on- I was a part of two panels. (See the list of the all talks/panels here.) I even wore my Inter-Web Debaters Club shirt so as to solidify my commitment to not fighting too much with people in person. I experienced not one real clash, bless my caustic little heart.

The first panel, Customer Relations for Sex Workers (with Sabrina Morgan, Renegade Evolution, Kimberlee Cline, Monica, Ellie Lumpesse, and David) started in a really solid direction to address issues of safety, how we've changed how we relate to our clients over the years, and a bit about how to screen clients for sex workers who do offline work. The conversation got a bit derailed into a discussion on one's rights when arrested and how to deal with the police, but it only goes to show how many different sex work topics the audience was interested in talking about. A group of us later convened in the hotel bar over champagne to get into a lengthier discussion about the ways in which we stay in touch with clients, the development of genuine friendships, fantasies we feel uncomfortable with (forced feminization and race play were two topics), and an annoyance with sex workers who engage in shit-talking on clients with "weird" fetishes.

The second panel I was a part of, Revisiting Naked on the Internet (with Audacia Ray, Amber Rhea, and Melissa Gira) had me as a bit of the odd-duckling-out. Not being a professional writer or someone who's changed a lot in the two years since the book's release, I didn't have much to give as an update. Dacia turned the conversation to online feminist spaces, where I had to try and not panel-jack by briefly explaining why I no longer identify as a feminist and why the term doesn't mean anything to me any more. (The writer from Feministing.com didn't even jump out of her chair and stab me in the eye with a fork, which was pleasantly surprising.) I told the group, "I was sick of seeing 'feminism' as a euphemism for 'awesome'." Jack hollered out at me, "Are you an awesome-ist?", to which I replied, "I am a militant awesome-ist!" (Thank you, dear Jack, for helping me inject some levity.) One of the other issues brought up in the panel was how profoundly exhausting is is for sex workers (and their allies) to always be on the defensive and doing "101" work. Surprise: We get tired of having to justify our existence to feminists who can't be bothered to educate themselves about our real issues and demands.

All in all, an excellent fucking weekend.

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