My trip to New York City was a whirlwind of amazing, and I've barely had time to wash my clothes and read my email before I'm back to the airport tomorrow- although, this time, for a family visit.

I knew I was going to visit New York this fall to shoot for Cocksexual.com, and the universe was especially kind in putting together a great week of pervert events so I could have fun in the evenings, too.  Alongside a full dance card of taking pictures of cocks, there was also a sex-positive drinkup, the Sex Worker Literati reading series, the 2010 Sex Blogger Calendar release party, and Audacia Ray's second screening of her Pay As You Go collection of shorts.  (Thank you to the organizers of these events!)

I was able to shoot 8 new models for the site, from cute boner-filled posing to an amazing double-penetration scene.  (This was my first time shooting a DP, and I found it challenging to know what to focus on when there's so much hotness happening all at once.  I love meeting new challenges!)  The cheapie light kit has been great to work with- it packs down small enough that I can fit everything in a large backpack.  In spite of some hurdles like missed trains, lost models, and the A and C subways not operating, everything still ended up working out, and 23 gigs of great porn was shot.

I feel as though I was dragged quickly through a massive scrumptious buffet, and barely had a chance to stick my fork in but a few trays of food as I passed.  I met and caught up with many great sexual intellectuals, but it was all so short.  Ten minutes of conversation here, a late-night dinner there, a quick hug and "nice to see you!" shouted in a crowded bar in the middle, and I have found myself back at home, wondering what happened to me.  As a bit of a recluse, that level of constant social interactions dazzles me, and I wonder if that's actually just what every week is like for normal people- the ones who don't work at home, in fleece pants, cat on their lap, with podcasts to keep them apprised of the outside world.

I've officially declared February 1st to be the launch date of Cocksexual.com, so that's when you'll get to see all the great stuff I've been doing.

As always, I am seeking models, but right now, I am most interested in finding cisgender (non-trans) men to work with in the Bay Area or Seattle.  If you are a cisguy, partnered to one, or know one who might be interested in being pegged on camera, check out my casting page.

A parting shot:

I was recently in the Bay Area for two noble purposes: shooting strapon porn and attending the third Arse Elektronika conference.  And, somewhere in-between, accomplishing plenty of eating, drinking, and socializing with many of my favorite nerdverts.

On the porn end of things, I got a lot done.  I shot my first five models for Cocksexual.com, including this lovely lady:

There was much cuteness to be had, as well as hot cocksucking, fucking, drag and gender play, jerking off, and a certain amazing woman who can suck her own dick.  (You'll have to wait until February 2010 to see who!)

I also had a great time at Arse Elektronika.  Here's Annalee Newitz (currently of io9.com fame) presenting her talk on the history and future of love, with potential scenarios for how we might be having relationships 300 years from now.

Thank you to all of the awesome people with whom I had a chance to re-connect or meet for the first time!  It would take me too long to list you all, but know that you're still my beautiful and unique snowflakes (of frozen sexual secretions).

One of the themes of conversation for the weekend was how We (in the most royal and vague sense) would like to live in a world where They accept our kinks, geekery, genders, and modes of sexual expression.  While I was in that frame of mind for the conference, many San Franciscans were spending their Saturday having a daytime rave.  The BART into the city was besieged by young people in their best "freak" outfits comprised of shiny/neon things from American Apparel.  They were there to have fun and play weirdo dress-up for a day, and then go back to being frat boys and Forever 21 clerks or whatever it is that normal young people do.

It was a contrast that highlighted an important social division for me.  Some of us try to de-stigmatize our communities, while others work to stigmatize themselves (in shallow, temporary ways).  It's interesting to observe which subcultures revolve around which approach.

In the next few, I plan to visit New York for Audacia Ray and David Henry Sterry's new reading series, Sex Worker Literati.  In her blog post after the event, Audacia wrote,

The evening also made me reflect on an annoying phrase that gets thrown at sex worker activists: “the happy hooker lobby.”

In the sex work versus trafficking debates, one of the things that happens is that people who focus on trafficking (and specifically on the idea that all people in prostitution are “prostituted” and essentially being raped every day at their jobs) try to derail and discount the perspective of people who identify as sex workers by calling us the “happy hooker lobby.” But here’s the thing: most of the people who use the phrase “sex work” and address the issues in the sex industry from a labor and human rights perspective haven’t had a straight forward “empowering” or uncomplicated experience of the sex work that they’ve done. This much was certainly reflected in the stories told on Thursday night.

It's always been interesting to me - as a part of the "happy hooker lobby", I suppose - how we lobbyists seem to be the ones with the longest lists of grievances about our industries and how things could be improved.  This is because we live it, rather than putting on airs after reading an article on the internet, or having gotten offended/titillated when our crabby women's studies professor told us how degrading she imagines sex work must be.

But, informed critique requires more than theory and self-righteous outrage to even know to complain about things like strip clubs charging stage fees, or escort services taking too large a chunk for too little client screening, or a porn company spitefully reselling a model's images to sites on which she didn't want to appear.  That sort of stuff requires, you know- listening to sex workers.  And learning about how the industries really work.

The people with no stake in a given issue tend to be the ones most prone to moral absolutism.  The less they're invested - the less they're truly interested, even - the more people can project their perfect black-and-white-isms onto the lives of others.  ("Pornography is always exploitative," "no prostitute genuinely consents to the work," etc.)

So, for the ambiguous and fascinating good stuff, I encourage folk to attend (or watch videos from) Sex Worker Literati, the first Thursday of every month in Manhattan.

Organizer Scarlot Harlot during a screening. I thought she looked lovely in this light.

At the beginning of June, I spent 10 days in the Bay Area.  I was in town primarily for the 2009 Sex Worker Film Festival, but I also had a chance to go to shoot photos of Roxxie (and vice versa), pick up a new fuck buddy, tour Kink.com, get kissed and spanked by a number of cute boys and girls, and have lunches with famous folks like Dr. Marty Klein, Violet Blue [photo], and Thomas Roche, so it was a well-rounded (and sleep-deprived) adventure.

Of the many events of the festival, I attended Whore-A-Palooza, which included movies and performances in a bar; Sex Work, Trafficking and Labor Migration: Views from Inside The Sex Industry, which featured movies and discussion; Cirque X, a benefit for the St. James Infirmary; and the main event, the Sex Worker Film Festival at The Roxie, which ran all day on Saturday.  (However, in true slut fashion, I didn't make it until the 6pm block of movies because I'd been up past sunrise the night before screwing in a hot tub after the benefit party. Many thanks to Match for supplying me with condoms and lube for said screwing. You're a true sex worker ally, baby.)

The main movie event was a powerful night of hanging out in the Roxie with sex worker activists, allies, and other interested folk. The materials ranged from horribly sad to sweet and funny, and the real standout for me was Carolyn Allain's A Safer Sex Trade.  The 48-minute film covered the lives of three different people in Vancouver, Canada: a middle-aged escort/madam who'd been in the business a long time, a young independent escort with high hourly rates, and a former street worker turned volunteer who delivers free food to women still working outdoors in dangerous parts of the city.  (Read more about the film, view the trailer, or order the DVD here.)

I'm really glad I made a point of traveling for the event, and I look forward to the next one.

If you're looking for a way to contribute to meaningful sex worker projects, I highly recommend donating to San Francisco's St. James Infirmary, which has been facing severe budget cuts this year.

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.

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.