“When sex workers are presented in art and culture, they’re either a titillation or a victim,” said Alexis Heller, curator of a new exhibition bringing together untold queer stories within the sex industry.
On Our Backs: The Revolutionary Art of Queer Sex Work, opening at the Leslie Lohman Museum in New York on 28 September, aims to be a course corrector of sorts. Around 200 images, from the 70s onwards, are used to show how art and activism have existed alongside sex work.
“There’s an incredible history of queer and trans sex workers, who were at the forefront of the gay rights movement, also having a tremendous impact on art,” Heller said. “I wanted to explore the empowered history of the community, I wanted their stories to be told in an authentic way.”
There’s are artworks by Juniper Fleming, feminist pornographer Ms Naughty and comics by David Wojnarowicz, all which tie into the phrase “sex work”, which was first coined by artist-activist Carol Leigh at a Women Against Violence in Pornography and Media conference in 1978.
The exhibition also features film stills by gay film-maker Bruce LaBruce from his short film Refugees Welcome, alongside his photos of Canadian trans performance artist Nina Arsenault, as well as Hanky Panky, a painting by Patrick Angus from 1980, showing a group of men in a pornography cinema. His work is a sort of diary of memories, depicting gay life in New York, from burlesque shows to revues and scenes from Times Square bathhouses.
Annie Sprinkle, the San Francisco-based feminist artist and former porn star, is showing ephemera from her extensive sex work career; from contact sheets to jewelry, business cards and Polaroid photos.
She’s also showing Who’s Zoomin’ Who? which is a photo she co-created with her longtime partner Beth Stephens in 1992, showing them sitting on a Harley Davidson motorcycle. “It looks at the female gaze when everyone was talking about the male gaze,” said Sprinkle. “It was the moment of lesbian chic.”
Sprinkle broke new ground with her first one-woman show Post Porn Modernist in the late 1980s, when she let the audience view her cervix with a flashlight. “It was edgy performance art, it was sex positive and was explicit,” she said. “It was always a creative impulse for me with sex work – prostitution was private performance art and theater to me, it’s all the same.”
Pink & White Productions, a queer porn company which has been in production for 15 years, is showing 65 photographs of their cast members who work with them. “They’re showing a diverse group of performers, not just white gay men, all genders, types of people and body sizes,” said Heller.
The production company’s founder, Shine Louise Houston, notes: “I believe there is a lot of room and need to create adult content that’s real, that’s respectful, and powerful. It’s the perfect place to become political.”
There are also photographs by Leon Mostovoy, a transgender artist who photographed lesbian strippers for his Market Street Cinema series shot in San Francisco in the 1980s. “In this series, I hoped to depict the lives of dancers in an intimate way, to introduce people to the nuanced softness found underneath the tough exteriors of the dancers,” said the artist. “I strived to capture on film the relationships they built, the dressing room camaraderie, the dark shabby stage and a glimpse of their customers.”
The photographer aims to photograph women “outside of heteronormative expectations”, namely, queer feminists. “I saw it as a 20something punk, butch queer, and I experience it as a trans man,” he said. “These are real women, fierce and beautiful in their own way, and society doesn’t take well to empowered women, let alone sex workers. In fact, women in control are not something people to want to see, not then, not now.”
The exhibition also features black and white photos by Efrain John Gonzalez, including stunning landscapes shot at night in New York’s meatpacking district, where the gay community gathered. “He photographed the leather community, gay clubs and sex clubs in the 1980s and 1990s, producing a huge archive of fringe communities,” said Heller. “He was looking for himself, too.”
Though sex workers have come a long way in terms of rights and visibility, there’s still a long way to go to decriminalize sex work, according to LaBruce, the director of over 10 feature films, many of which are explicit.
“There is still a huge stigma attached to sex trade work, and in fact it’s gotten worse; politicians and ‘activists’ tend to paint the entire world of prostitution with a single brush – trafficking, which of course needs to be fought like any form of human trafficking – ignoring the entire spectrum of sex trade workers who are also sex therapists, healers, or simply professionals who provide a vital service,” LaBruce said.
“The trend is to push prostitution back underground, making it less safe for both prostitutes and clients,” he adds. “It’s now more important than ever to legalize, or at least decriminalize prostitution and to protect and respect the rights of sex trade workers.”
