Hookers, Pimps, and Priests

I’ve done sex work and I’ve dated sex workers. I’ve also spent some time with pimps. Ya gal gets around: as you do, when you have been homeless and desperately poor with people to support. I will do whatever I need to, to support them as needs me.

I have to say my favorite thing about both hookers and pimps is that their job, essentially, is to say “I embody what you want and what you fear. I make real what you fantasize about, and turn your dreams into (sometimes grossly, always humorously) physical activity.”

There is no more hilariously educating conversations than the ones hookers have when commiserating about their johns.

Sex is one of the great joys of life. Human contact is one of the requirements of sanity. We do not do well alone as human beings and we do not do well without touch. Yet we demonize sex and human contact outside some very strict guidelines, whether the Judeo-Christian mummery of marriage—no touching without a permit from the church!—or through the strange and arcane rules for consent which try to proscribe when it is safe to touch, to avoid the accusation of violence.

Sex is only safe when it’s imaginary. The question is what you risk.

In a very real way, I view being a vodou priest as being a little like both hookers and pimps: the priest embodies what people want (power, success) and what they fear (condemnation, damnation.) A priest is the intersection between the fantastic and the (sometimes grossly, always humorously) physical, and a priest is outside our various mummeries and rules which govern what we’re “allowed” to do.

I’ve met someone whom I will be the godmother of, when I have that capacity.

I will not ask him for consent. I will do as the spirit tells me, because I will do whatever I need to, to support them as needs me. I will embody whatever I need to, to get that done.