See, I’ve been going along on the phones for the past nine months, getting men off, and that steady stream of audio cock hypnotized me into thinking that I was only working that side of my resume, you know, the straight side. I’m a girl, they’re all boys, and that means straight. Truth be told, I was okay with that, because frankly, I felt like perhaps I was a little weak in that area and, as a PSO trying to be the best I can be, I could use some real practical experience in the verbalization of cock.

But when I began excavating my history and experiences, and sifting through even my current work for queer-relevant fragments that I could bring to the stage–so that I could even semi-legitimately make this stand-up set queer–I found instead big chunks of queer GOLD.

Let’s set aside the fact that, as someone who lived a dick-free existence from 1989 to 2001, I know more about eating pussy than most straight guys, and certainly most of the guys who call in wanting to talk about eating pussy, or about me eating pussy. It’s a relief to sit down to a bout of rug-munching, frankly: it’s an easy sound effect, much easier on my throat than pretending to choke on a monster cock. And when I get a chance to gently guide my caller on the finer points of eating pussy, I definitely feel that I am putting some positive points in the paying-it-forward column of sex education.

As I’ve mentioned in previous posts, a good chunk of the stuff that I narrate is male-on-male action. The infamous BBC constitutes a high percentage of that work, obviously, but dick-focused action–what I would call gay, in the context of paid phone sex–includes many other categories of calls: she-males on top, camping with the boy scout troop, cuckold action (especially any scene that involves the cuckold being the fluffer and/or cleanup boy). The fact that I’m a woman narrating these scenes doesn’t matter; what is being expressed, what is being fantasized, is homoerotic as hell.

And then there’s the gender-queer component. My sissy girls and panty boys remind me that there is a significant minority of dudes out there who might be feeling a little chafed by gender norms and expectations, and/or curious about at least some aspects of life and lust on the other side of the gender fence. For these callers, I get to be the voice of acceptance and surprise packages and cocksucker-red lipstick and color-coordinated satin lingerie. I love taking those calls; I mean, who doesn’t want to wear silky panties under your business suit? Briefs versus boxers is a false dichotomy! One’s choices in undergarments exist on a beautiful rainbow spectrum!

But conversation about the intersection of phone sex and queerness isn’t complete unless we include the underbelly, too. For most of my “queer” calls, I’m the voice of shame and degradation, at least occasionally. I end up making liberal use of epithets that I have spent most of my queer life avoiding: cocksucker, faggot, pansy. Most of my “queer” callers are wallowing in the dirtiness and taboo of their fantasies; if I don’t make them feel at least a little like shit for wanting it, I’m not doing my job.

Believe me, the dissonance between actually being queer and “doing” queer on the phones can be teeth-grinding. If nothing else, doing phone-queer all the time makes the REAL stuff look and feel that much better. I feel like I’m a waitress in a pie restaurant, talking to customers who have only eaten sugar-free, store-bought pie all their life. That’s what’s been marketed to them, and that’s what they want, and I have to go along with it, yum yum yum. But I know what a real, sticky-sweet, bourbon-laced, pecan pie tastes like, and gosh, I wish they did, too.

It has come to my attention that a certain amount of horizontal… I won’t say oppression, but hostility exists among and between some people in the adult industries. I have seen on industry boards how PSOs distance themselves from street workers; I have heard how dancers in “top-shelf” gentlemen’s clubs don’t see any connection between themselves and the girls dancing in your basic “trashy strip club”; I have heard burlesque dancers–not many, but a few–say they don’t want to work the crowd for tips because then they’d be “just strippers”.

Here’s the thing, folks: If you can pick the work you do, great. If you can do your work in a comfy chair or a warm club with a bouncer watching your back, awesome.  If you’re only posing a couple times a month to buy those shiny new shoes, hey, it’s your dough. If you get your money from the box office or the clean checks that come twice a month from the home office, or if you have some stage kitten coming around and picking up your clothes and those sweaty ones, swell. But if your work is designed to get someone hard and/or wet, you are a sex worker. You may not believe it now, you may never believe it. That doesn’t make it less objectively true. You don’t have to believe in gravity to crushed to death by a falling piano.

Moving on: all the mental juggling you do to justify your game without picking up the name isn’t going to protect you from the stigma that comes from working with sex. If you are open about your profession, the hate comes thick and fast. If you keep it on the DL, well, think about why you’re doing that. And you can’t keep it quiet forever. Eventually you’ll have to tell your girlfriend or roomie or partner or best friend, or someone will find you out, and when they do, there will be some people who make assumptions about your availability outside of work, your intellect, your spirituality, your self-respect, your politics.

One way or another, we all get slapped with the broad brushstroke; the effects of that mark depends on the nature of your work. If it’s legal, it’s still considered skeezy and leaves you open to personal attack. If you’re working in a gray area, like pro-domme work in Massachusetts or prostitution in Canada, for example, there’s a fear component (no one wants to be a legal test case). If your work is outright illegal, well, whatever happens to you, the police and the legal system don’t usually give two shits about you and your rights as a human being, even more so if you are poor, transgendered, and/or a person of color.

Here’s my thesis. It’s not original, but I’m feeling it strongly, today of all days: if you’re doing work in the sex industry, the adult industry, whatever you want to call it… get your head on straight and get in fucking line. Do it. Start today. Don’t diss other sex workers, or tell abusive jokes, or let your friends tell such jokes. Come out to someone in your life who didn’t know what you do. Attend events around International Day to End Violence Against Sex Workers.

Busy? Okay, here’s something real easy to do: get the fuck over the idea that you’re better than that girl in the suburban strip joint, or that “crack whore” on the corner, or that masseuse on craigslist, just because you don’t and wouldn’t do that work. We’re all sluts, in the minds of those who would see us disappear or die or otherwise learn our lesson and get what’s coming to us. Slut solidarity is the only way out.

Try me, I said, trying not to laugh. The young man on the other end sounded shy, and I didn’t want him to startle and disappear into the forest.

I really want to fuck those tits of yours…

Okay.

Can you just make sure to say “big white tits” and “big black cock”?

Sounds easy enough, right? I do have big white tits, and I can imagine wrapping those suckers around a decent-sized dick of any color. He said he was African-American, so hey, let me drop that rack all over you. But after about 10 minutes into his half-hour block, in the middle of a ritualistic, impressionistic, stream-of-consciousness narrative of black hardness and big-white-tit-ness, I am a) running out of ways to say ‘big white tits’ and ‘big black cock’–which makes me feel inadequate as a professional wordsmith–and b) wondering, yet again, what is it about this combo of white and black that turns many people on, so very much?

He seemed to be getting off on the visual of it, the idea of that contrast between his dark cock and the expanse of soft creamy white flesh. Every repetition of those words made him shudder, and when I said once, just to take a break, “you like how that looks?”, his response was, “Oh my god, it looks so amazing!” It is a striking contrast, for those who don’t see it often or only in carefully staged porn, so I imagine that it’s part of it.

But the taboo aspect is more interesting, being more difficult to untangle. White folks have been placed as sexually off-limits for people of color in American society, enforced by centuries of slavery and lynchings and laws, so to be able to have that flesh might feel, in some way, to some people, like a release or a challenge. (I’m not saying it’s a conscious thing. We’re all fucking soaking in this shit…) And for the white men who call up looking for that experience from the other side, perhaps the act of being done by a black man is the easiest line from A to B, owing to how marginalized, feared, and hated African-American men are in our culture. “I want 7 minutes of violation and degradation” = “quick, get a black man raping my ass”.

Now that I think about it, race-based fantasy is kinda like the fast food of phone sex. A lot of people like it, although they may be ashamed to admit it. It’s quick and easily accessible and doesn’t require a lot of thought, either as a provider or as a consumer. The whole fetishistic package uses images and emotions and cliches and stereotypes and ingrained gut response to go straight to the libido and satisfy it, for a time. And then, well, they’re hungry for more.

Like my titty fucker. He’s now a regular. I guess he likes the way I serve it up. I’m into it, he says, and describe it so well. But really, every time it’s the same damn meal.

Big white tits. Big black cock.

And always a milkshake to wash it down.

What?!

“That’s what he said.” She laughed. “Another 20 minutes.”

Does he not like me? I mean, he must like me because this is his second request for me in a row, but…

“Oh, don’t worry about it, hon.” More laughter. “You should hear what he calls me.”

Oh. Okay.

And it is okay, because really? When my daily work consists of talking through scenes that would get most people shunned by polite society, if not actually arrested and/or stoned, I don’t get tripped up by the words the callers throw at me. If they keep calling back, I must be doing something right. And yet.

And yet.

This particular caller dresses in panties and a garter belt and stockings to talk with me, at least, he says he does. He wears bright red lipstick, and gets a great deal of comfort out of wearing breast forms in VERY busty sizes. (The week after I told him about my 42DDDs, he said he had gone out and gotten a 42GG breast form. I think he’s trying to one-up me.)

He is dressing as best as he can to be a woman. He’s got a cock and all, but he wants to feel like a woman. But his casual misogyny when he’s feeling horny and demanding is just more hot air added to his inflated, twisted notion of what a woman should be. He dresses “like a slut”, so he can get used like one in our fantasy. He begs for details about my supposed sexual exploits, so he can call me a slut. It’s an imaginary slut sorority that he and I are in together, but outside our scenes together, that sisterhood evaporates and we’re back to the basics.

“Can I talk to that cunt again?”

It turns him on, to talk that way. It reinforces the paradigm quite firmly: virgin/whore. Dressing himself like a tramp, my caller gets to play with being degraded, with being a slut, with the trappings and behavior stereotypes that go along with being a horny woman. He eats it up, he loves it when I call him a greedy little slut. And yet.

“Can I talk to that cunt again?”

Yes, you can. But as a person who has actually been called a cunt numerous occasions, to another person who will never in real life be called a cunt, I wanted to let you know: Those last 20 minutes went by really slow.

Not that I had never slept with African-American men before (or women, for that matter). As a free-wheeling, sexually voracious woman, in a large-ish metropolis on the West Coast and with access to craigslist, it was statistically impossible for my pool of play partners to NOT include people of color.

But the BBC is different from just any old cock that happens to be attached to a black man. It’s different.

By definition, it’s Big. Not just bigger than average, but BIG. Double digits always, and really, you probably need both hands to maneuver it around and into your mouth, although why you’d want to do that when you are clearly running the risk of cracking your jaw, I don’t know.

Also by definition, it is Black, shining out like an inverse beacon against the (invariably) white or pale pink skin of whoever is getting fucked with it, whether it’s the hot cuckoldress wife or the cock-hungry caller himself. In the universe of the BBC, the relative skin colors of the fucker and fuckee are as dramatic as a United Colors of Benetton ad.

When I took that first BBC call, and then my second a few hours later, and then the third that night… I had to wonder about the appeal. Separate from the whole issue of homoerotic impulses, why Black? I mean, I get Big. But what was in the pigmentation of this mythical male that made his body in general, and his cock in particular, so unbearably, unbelievably attractive to my BBC callers?

I’m going to start by saying in some ways it doesn’t matter. If there’s one thing that I’m solid on in this business, it’s that you can’t argue away desire or fetish or lust. It may not make any sense to me at all, but if it makes you hard and/or wet, well, it is what it is and I will take you there and through it and out the other side panting.

But in other ways, it does matter. Because I think, given what I know about race in the US and our supposedly post-Obama-as-president society, a lot of people probably aren’t, you know, playing fair. Like, it’s okay to worship the BBC in your fantasy, but in real life maybe you lock your doors driving through “urban” neighborhoods. Or maybe you want that delicious, velvety dark rod so bad you’d make a third hole just for it, but you’d be nervous about your neighbors seeing the owner of that BBC standing on your doorstep.

Karma and ethics and race and psychological dissonance, okay, I get it. Not hot. Rest assured, BBC-lovers of the world, I’m not going to take away your cocoa-colored, rock-hard, jizz-blowing binkie. I’m definitely not going to stop taking those calls (I’d be losing at least 40 percent of my call volume if I did, seriously!) But in my BBC series, starting next week, I’m gonna encourage you to think about your kink. Just a little.

Fantasies don’t exist on an island, sprung from nothing. They come from somewhere. And in some cases, like this one, I really want to know where.