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Sex, Love, and Money Every Other Year

By kevinjamesgardner

The Biters. Photo courtesy of Carol Leigh

Asian sex workers shared their handicraft, humor, and horrors with their international colleagues and local supporters at the 2nd San Francisco Sex Worker Film & Video Festival last weekend, May 25-27.

What’s a “sex worker,” you ask? It’s a modern, inclusive term coined by Scarlet Harlot, a.k.a. Carol Leigh, the organizer of the film festival, which includes anyone engaged in sex-related acts for hire — sex therapists, erotic masseurs and masseuses, prostitutes, telephone sex operators, porn makers and strippers, for starters.

Miss Erochika. Photo by Maurice Ramirez.

Miss Erochika, an impressive, bubbly burlesque dancer enveloped in feathers and sequins, flew in from Tokyo especially to help launch the sex worker film festival. “Hello, I love you,” Erochika laughs, instantly warming up the Roxie Cinema audience with her cabaret charm and honest elegance. And her 7-minute video, Miss Erochika’s Burlesque Photo Diary, takes us straight back to the times of Marilyn Monroe and Betty Page, with snapshots of stunningly beautiful Japanese women with stylish coiffes wearing old-fashioned pearls, followed by snippets of Erochika’s sensual, and tasteful, exceptionally well-performed dance sequences.

Erochika, née Chika Noguchi, began stripping while a student in art school about 12 years ago. Tired of waiting for her oils to dry, she let a friend talk her into trying it — and she liked it. “This is my life’s work,” Erochika explains in an exclusive, late-night interview with AsianWeek, kicking back in the retro upstairs lounge of Jezebels Joint after wowing the crowd of naughty practitioners down below. “The important thing is for me to make people happy.” Judging from the looks on everyone’s faces and the sounds of smacking palms, she does just that.

“I don’t show my private parts because the important thing is imagination,” Erochika adds.

That's about all that was left to the imagination in this film festival.

U.S. West Coast sex workers have strong relationships with Asian sex workers, according to Leigh, which is why she included four Asian films in the festival. “I was very interested in the similarities of the work many artists produce here and [in Asia], and the similar perspectives on sex, sex-positive, and queer-positive culture,” she explains.

Erochika’s colleague friend, Bubu de la Madeleine, showed her 21-minute video, Whore’s Diary: Pornography made by me & my client, a po-mo, slo-mo film shot in — where else? — her bedroom. “M is my client,” explains Bubu in this warm vérité short documenting her relationship with a client in Japan. “He is also my friend.” Mixing dreamy sequences of passing landscapes, imaginative poetry, and shots of setting up the main production camera while playing together with smaller home video cameras in bed and bath, Bubu pulls off a sweet, brilliant glimpse into the interpersonal side of business as pleasure.

And she continues her playful antics in The Biters, a 30-minute erotic parody of home shopping, cooking shows and contemporary post-sexual-identity, starring Japanese performance artists/sexual health activists. Featuring Mission Impossible music, Peewee Herman-like sets, and lots and lots of condoms, Biters No. 1, 2 and 3 — two women and one man — deliver lessons in how to be a better, safer lover, pushing the adult film industry’s new but growing genre of “infonography” or “eduporn.”

As striking as the Biters themselves are the verbal bites scrolling across the screen: “Sex Love Money Life Death.” While other, Western films in the festival suggest that the exchange of money separates love from sex, all these Japanese flicks — The Biters, Whore’s Diary and Erochika’s Burlesque Diary — keep sex and love together. Nice. At the same time, however, The Biters doesn’t shirk from the fact that sex work also involves life and death issues.

The Story of the Taipei Licensed Prostitutes, a 27-min video produced by Formosa Television last year, presents the stark socio-economic realities faced by women whose sole livelihood is taken away when then-Mayor, now-President Chen abolishes legal prostitution in the capital of Taiwan, whose sexual culture remains more conservative than Japan’s. The prostitutes organize and stage fierce protests with the help of women’s rights advocates, a labor union and the intellectual elite of Taiwan’s academia. This video documents the lives of these women who struggle to keep rotten ramen off the tables of their poor families, all in the context of global human rights and stopping violence against women.

Sex worker advocate Carol Leigh (center) protests Taipei mayor’s repeal of legal prostitution there, where she later met Miss Erochika. Photo courtesy of Carol Leigh.

As world-famous performer Annie Sprinkle points out at the festival’s panel discussion, “we cannot be out as sex workers, but we can be out as ‘filmmakers.’" Having sex for money is illegal in most of America, but if you stick a camera in the room it’s suddenly adult filmmaking, which is legal, she explains.

Unfortunately, these films only come together every two years. So if you’re even remotely interested in life-changing catharsis, awakening parts of yourself you never knew existed, transforming your understanding of human sexuality and relationships, and getting over your biases against sex workers, make sure you stay in town for Memorial Day weekend, 2003. And if you don’t have any sex worker friends, you’d better get some. Ain’t nuthin’ like a bunch o’ professional strumpets, courtesans, gigolos, lovers and entertainers to tell it like it is.

“These women [and men] are so unusual — it’s like a closeness in a family because there’s no bullshit,” one of the sex worker’s mother shares in a private entre-nous chat at Jezebels’ closing party. Coming from a straight, Jewish upper-middle-class woman with a strong traditional background, her insight cuts deep. “There’s a reality of behavior here that you can’t find in any other community.”