My Sex Work Life

In case you missed my recent TST Sober Faction talk about my experiences as a sex worker, I’ve written up this entry that discusses all the big points I hit during my talk.

It Begins: Devious Delights

My sex work adventures started back in 2005 in NYC. I’d recently started dating a young woman, and after discovering a mutual interest in kink we decided to check out a BDSM club called Paddles. At that time, Paddles was the longest-running and best-known BDSM club in the city. My understanding is that it closed down during the last week of June, but feel free to fact check that.

During maybe our second or third time attending Paddles, I struck up a conversation with a man named Saul who told me about his smaller, more private club: Devious Delights. His club differed from Paddles in several ways, but one of the chief differences was that his club allowed both BDSM and swinging. Paddles did not facilitate swinging and did not allow sex on premise. Saul invited us to attend one of his events, free of charge. He assured us we’d like it so much we’d want to pay to come back.

He wasn’t wrong. The venue for Devious Delights was a swanky Manhattan art gallery where, after hours on event nights, the rear wall literally swung open to reveal a massive, warehouse-sized play space filled with BDSM equipment, beds, a stage, and a long pit filled with mattresses and pillows.

I’m not going to tell a lot of personal stories not directly related to sex work. Suffice it to say that the conversation I had with that man that evening set my life on a new course. And that man became, without question, the single most important influence in my adult life.

Over a few months, we got to know Saul really well. He took a special shine to me and told me he was going to take me under his wing and teach him all the things he knew.

Saul was an incredible guy. He always had a ton of money on hand and always seemed to be skirting serious trouble. He’d been incarcerated on 3 continents at one point or another for stupid shit like smuggling hashish into from Lebanon into Israel. I picked him up from Rikers Island once after a conviction related to cocaine possession.

He was also an ordained Hasdic Rabbi, though he didn’t serve in a ministerial capacity at that point in his life. His day job was restaurateur and gallery owner. But his family, whom I got to know well, were still observant Hasidic Jews. It was a surreal experience for me having Shabbos dinner with Saul and his family as he talked about sex club business in front of his sons-in-law and his two grown daughters. They didn’t seem at all bothered by it. I later found out one of the sons-in-law ran some shady underground poker circuit.

I could write a whole book about how awesome Saul was. He truly remade who I was as a person. He was the type who would find the part of you that could shine the brightest, and would teach you how to make that part shine with dazzling brilliance.

My very first sex work took place at one of Saul’s parties. There was supposed to be a flogging performance / demonstration and the guy who was supposed to wield the flogger ended up having to leave before the performance started. So, Saul roped me in, and I got to go up on stage and spend 15 minutes flogging a stranger I’d just met for a cool $50.

As time went on, Saul began to entrust me with more and more stuff. After about a year of knowing him, he started to put me in charge of hosting some of his events. It was a pretty big deal. The party host sets the tone for everything that happens that night. A good host knows how to make people feel safe, comfortable, and respected. You facilitate conversations between party attendees. You monitor for safety, interject when there’s drama, and basically make it your business to know and establish rapport with every single person in attendance. You find out what experience they’re looking for and keep that little nugget in mind when talking to other attendees. Sometimes, the stars would align and you’d be able to say, “Oh hey, I was just talking to this cute couple over there, and I think you might have compatible interests.” And then, if desired, you’d make the introduction.

Sometimes, things would go wrong, and you’d end up consoling people instead. Usually, when things went wrong, it was because a man had dragged his very reluctant lady partner to the party, she ended up having more fun than him, and he got jealous and stormed out. The other big source of drama was people getting intoxicated and being told they couldn’t play anymore because intoxicated people are legally and ethically unable to give consent to sexual interactions. That’s where security often had to step in.

Most of the parties I hosted for Saul were run out of his primary venue, but he also had me host events on his behalf at other places like Le Trapeze or the Carousel Club, the latter of which is on the same block as the Empire State Building. One of my favorite memories of Carousel was listening to a woman screaming “Strong Island!!” over and over again as she orgasmed with the help of some guy she’d met just a few minutes ago (I’d introduced them!).

I won’t lie: being the host of upscale sex and BDSM parties in NYC made me feel like a badass. I met all kinds of extremely interesting people, got invited to all kinds of crazy events, and had all the drugs and alcohol a person could ever want literally just handed to me. All while making a bit of cash on the side!

Saul, unfortunately, passed away in the fall of 2017.

The Bacchus Society

In 2007, I moved back to Albany from NYC because my salary was not keeping up with NYC’s rapidly skyrocketing cost of living. Shortly after the move, I realized I wanted to recreate the experience of Devious Delights. I looked into all the existing local clubs, and found them all egregiously lacking for one reason or another.

After no small amount of effort, I established a club called the Bacchus Society. Real original, right? I operated on the same basic premise as Devious Delights: small-scale parties for a pre-approved list, everything on premise. My first event was in August 2007 and we ran events almost weekly for 7 years.

Bacchus was amazing. It rapidly became the envy of the other clubs in the area. The secret to our success was advanced screening of all attendees. We made them physically meet with me or a representative in a neutral, public venue – usually a coffee shop, just so we could get to know them. That way, we knew they were who they said they were, we had some idea of what they were like as people, and they’d have a rapport with us from the moment they arrived. This created a remarkably comfortable and safe environment for people to explore, play, and have fun. We operated basically at-cost and everything was on premise, so people who are usually priced out of the swing club scene were able to participate. Many swing club parties are $150+ to attend and then you also need to pay for a hotel room to go play in. Bacchus parties maxed at $50 per couple and everything took place on premise, so no hotel was needed.

Bacchus parties were designed off the template used by Devious Delights. We provided shark-coochie (charcuterie) and beverages in a plush setting with soft music, aromatherapy oil diffusers, and (electronic) candles and other mood lighting. The play areas had open-door policies for the safety of attendees. Every play area had multiple bins of assorted condoms and lubricants, sanitary wipes, and hand sanitizer. Fresh sheets and towels every night. We also provided literature on safer sex practices and STI screenings.

Each party started with a social time where attendees would mingle. I’d help facilitate conversation and introductions and answer attendees’ questions. At a certain point in the night, we offered a voluntary “ice breaker” game in which participants had the chance to interact with each other in increasingly risqué ways. Think of it as a more adult version of spin the bottle. At a certain point, more people would be more undressed than not, and I would recommend that people check out the play areas and enjoy themselves. After that, it was my job to monitor for safety and comfort more than anything else.

I only ever had one bad experience with Bacchus, and it happened because we took a chance and collaborated with another club. The owner of that club had contacted me and suggested we co-host a party at a strip club, which had a separate, upstairs area that was perfect as a play space for swingers. We hammered out details together and with the management of the strip club, and held what I hoped would be a really unique and interesting event. Basically, people could be downstairs enjoying shows with the dancers, or they could be upstairs getting their freak on without the dancers. Naked people weren’t allowed in the main part of the club and dancers couldn’t come upstairs (though one of the dancers did give me her number and we later hooked up / became friends).

The night was an absolute, unmitigated disaster. For one thing, the owner of the other swing club wasn’t consistent in charging his attendees. Around half of them ever paid. This resulted in us coming in way below our break-even point, and I ended up having to fork over around $1,700 of my own money to the management of the strip club at the end of the night. Worse, he didn’t vet all of his attendees, and some of the people who came created problems for my attendees and for the dancers downstairs. I made it a point to personally vet and know every single person who came to one of my events. This guy didn’t even know some of his attendees’ names. I later found out he’d advertised the event on fucking Craigslist, and any old person who saw the ad knew where the party was and how to get into it.

We ended up having to throw out a bunch of people and shut the party down early. I decided never to work with other clubs again. I apologized to all of the attendees who’d come from my club, all of whom insisted I’d done nothing wrong. Thankfully, no one got hurt or reported anything nonconsensual happening.

Aside from that one experience, Bacchus was an ongoing source of happiness and excitement. Some of my best friends to this day are people I met through Bacchus. I even officiated the wedding of one of the couples who attended our first party!

Things went great for the Bacchus Society until around 2013/2014, during which time my personal finances and mental health took huge hits simultaneously. Concurrent with that, new zoning law enforcement made running the club substantially harder to do. In February 2014, deciding that my mental health needed most of my focus, I closed the Bacchus Society.

Les Libertines

From 2014 to 2020, I didn’t do any form of sex work.

On Lupercalia 2020, my partner Chalice and I launched an independent porn project we called Les Libertines, which is French for “the libertines.” The purpose of Les Libertines was twofold: it was a way for us to express and explore our sexuality in new and exciting ways, and to share that with a willing audience. It was also a way for us to build up a little extra cash to pay for our frequent trips to see each other. For those who don’t know, Chalice and I live on opposite sides of the country. Having a couple hundred extra bucks a month really helped with the cost of travel.

Much to our shock and dismay, Les Libertines was met with quite a bit of disapproval from our Satanic community. There were plenty who liked it, too, but there was no small amount of bitching about leaders in TST making porn: how that made TST seem cult-like or unpalatable for mass consumption. Less respectable, I guess. All this, even though all of our work was advertised through social media accounts that were separate from our TST work, and even though our work was behind a paywall. We never advertised or posted our work on our TST-related accounts. It was extraordinarily disheartening to have our intimate work met with such hostility. Even crazier-making was that several of the members who attacked us were doing sex work themselves!

We also got doxxed for Les Libertines. A person who dislikes TST (not one of the people you’re probably thinking of, so please don’t go pestering the usual haters over this) posted a tweet that tagged my sex work Twitter account and called out my name and my day job. Someone who saw that post sent it to my employer, which led to Chalice and I having to have some very upsetting conversations with our bosses. While we came through it all unscathed, the fact is these people could have cost us our livelihoods and healthcare. The malice was unspeakable to me, especially from fellow Satanists, and especially being that we were attacked for doing sex work. When the person who posted the doxxing tweet was called out even by other people who don’t like us, they responded by posting a screenshot of a 4 year-old Facebook conversation that I wasn’t even part of and that wasn’t about me, and claimed in the text of their post that I “support Koch Brothers Media,” whatever the fuck that means. They didn’t doxx me for anything I’d done wrong. They didn’t doxx me in relation to TST work. They took it upon themselves to stalk our sex work accounts, made a grossly-worded, slut-shame-y tweet, and then dragged my daytime employer into it, simply because I was doing sex work and that presented a vulnerability.

That wasn’t even the end of the internet shaming. Other TST haters, some of whom I hadn’t even heard of before, started spreading an utterly untrue rumor on Facebook that Chalice and I were going to put on a live sex show (they called it a “peg-per-view”) at TST’s Utah Rally “to raise funds for International Council.” Now, we’d never even considered doing a live sex show. We’d never planned on going to the Utah Rally. And International Council never handled or spent money. But what even are facts, amiright? Watching them gleefully slut shame us while claiming to hold some sort of moral high ground was really something. As one of them said on Facebook, “I don’t support shaming sex workers, but these two are with TST so I’ll make an exception.”

I think, as much as anything, we were annoyed that we didn’t come up with the idea of a “peg-per-view” for Les Libertines content.

Out of sheer spite, we persisted for over a year, creating written erotica as well as explicit photos, gifs, and videos of the two of us exploring various fantasies and fetishes. I loved Les Libertines, and I still go back and read and watch our stuff when I need something to stimulate me. It was fun to share that intimate part of us with an interested audience. Chalice and I learned a lot about ourselves and each other through the process.

Distance and the pandemic ultimately finished off Les Libertines. The nature of our long-distance relationship had always made it difficult to create content with the frequency that paying subscribers expect. When we were together, we’d have to frantically generate as much content as possible for our subscribers, enough to get us through at least a couple months, during a time when all we wanted to do was enjoy each others’ company. Making porn, even with someone you love and are very attracted to, is still work. Pandemic made creation of regular content to post even harder. Deciding the situation was untenable, and losing subscribers due to irregularity of content posting, we shut down Les Libertines in June of 2021.

Since Then…

Most recently, Chalice and I had the opportunity to star in a pornographic music video! It hasn’t been released yet, and I have to keep details confidential until it is, but the footage I’ve seen was very hot and it was a ton of fun to film. It includes graphic sexual content. Even a strapon is involved! Filming took place in nearly freezing temperatures and at elevations much higher than my body is used to. Anyone who says sex work isn’t work clearly hasn’t had to kneel on metalic sand for 4 hours, naked, when it’s 37 degrees out, with mild hypoxia, while trying to maintain an erection in front of people holding lights and cameras.

That’s the broad-strokes version of my sex work experiences (so far). It’s been a real wild ride, and has furnished me with some of the most interesting, unexpected, and exciting experiences I’ve ever had. Doing sex work has made me smarter, tougher, and bolder. It helped me to become infinitely more comfortable with my body (especially Les Libertines) and my sexuality in general. It certainly hasn’t been all good times, but I wouldn't trade any of it for the world.