Unless you have an erotic fixation with jazz hands, few things are less sexy than the average musical comedy. At first blush, this might make a musical about porn sound like a terrible idea, two great tastes that just don't go well together, like semen and Starbucks.
But if your goal is to examine porn as a business first and a fuck fest second, as The Civilians have done in their new musical Pretty Filthy, then the resolute asexuality of the Great White Way is an asset.
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Israel Oka was 22 years old when he started doing sex work—a mixture of professional domination, erotic massage, and escorting. He’d been “working a minimum wage job at a movie theater” at the height of the Great Recession. Eventually, a dominatrix friend inspired him to consider sex work as a way to make ends meet. “It started off as supplementary income,” about a $100 a week, Oka said. Sometimes, this gave him the financial resources to pursue other interests, like political activism. Other times, it was survival sex work, helping him get by when he was homeless.
Read MoreEffective censorship is invisible. Its true power lies not in preventing the audience from seeing a certain work, but rather in preventing the audience from seeing the mechanisms of censorship in action. It is the hole that swallows itself.
Read MoreAt various points she's been a clown, a juggler, and a freak; nowadays she's the slack-rope-walking, stilt-striding, shit-stirring ringleader of the free, mostly-annual political spectacle known as Circus Amok,
Read MoreLike the ticking hand on a clock, violence against trans women (especially women of color) is so routine we barely hear it.
Read MoreFouts lived every Downton Abbey–esque Anglophile fantasy you've ever daintily jerked off to. He was the life of every party, right up until he snorted all the coke and left with the host's boyfriend, or son—Fouts had a well-deserved reputation as a chicken hawk. A few of his affairs with teen boys are chronicled in the biography The Best-Kept Boy in the World, by Arthur Vanderbilt.
Read MoreI am a master at leaving.
The first time I left home, I was four years old. Without telling anyone or asking permission, I carted all my toys up the stairs to where my grandmother lived – on the second floor of our house in the suburbs of New York City – and declared that I lived with her. Over the following decade, I did – and that was 10 times longer than I would stay in any one place for the next 20 years.
Read MoreOn the cover, Wonder Woman resembles a 16-year-old model doing a pee-pee dance. Her first full scene is a shower sequence where she’s in a towel. She has ridiculous mood swings.
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