Well hello my loves! Welcome back to our provider interview series, A Tryst With, we're so happy to have you. Today we're catching up with the bold, the scintillating, the gorgeous, New York Escort, Lilith Ico!
How did you get into the industry and what does your journey look like so far?
I started working seven years ago on SD websites in St. Louis, shortly after finishing art school. My origin sob story involved PTSD from intimate-partner violence that made it impossible for me to continue working part-time, minimum wage jobs in the tiny art community that my perpetrator and I were both part of. My thought was to make rent while also restoring my obliterated sense of sexual agency by getting paid for it. I tried camming and recognized immediately that I was not cut out for that work. So I pivoted to FS. I was very lucky. I found regulars who were socially conscious and tender, with compelling and sympathetic life stories. In this work I also found genuine erotic pleasure. I thought I’d had a plenitude of sexual experience when I started—I was known in university as that promiscuous chick with the shaved head, and had a sex blog where I would write about OKCupid and Craigslist hookups—but most of those encounters were things I was hazing myself through. I had my first real orgasm (with a partner as opposed to from pleasuring myself) with one of those first clients in St. Louis. The transactionality of the experience turned me on, and I found this empowering.
The income I made then allowed me to focus on creating artwork for my graduate school portfolio, which successfully got me into an MFA program and out of the Midwest. When I first moved to NYC, my income was made up mostly from working—with a little from teaching and a little from exhibiting and selling art—and then COVID happened. Thanks to a couple of regulars, I was able to dedicate myself to making art throughout the pandemic’s first year. By the time people were getting vaccinated and things were opening up, I was making meaningful income as an artist and started working with new clients again. Since then, I have been focusing equally and happily on my art career and this career. My clients like to think of themselves as patrons.
What is your favorite part of sex work culture? What communities, people, places, and memories are important to you as a provider?
As a kid, I was averse to hanging out in groups or clubs. I had a meaningful social life with profound and lasting friendships, but I did not see the appeal of larger communities. Doing SW might be the first time that I have felt excited about being part of a community. Even though I remain relatively peripheral and solitary in my work, the unique solidarity that you form with fellow providers—whether existing friends, lovers, or those you meet on the job—feels like none other. Several providers I met while working ended up becoming some of my closest friends, with whom I have also collaborated in my civ art practice: philosophers, artists, dancers, videographers, writers. While I never thought I would have a Twitter (as a bonafide Luddite), I finally joined a few months ago, and it has been exhilarating to connect and flirt ;) with other providers on there.
What do you think the general public could learn from sex workers?
This, rather, is what the general public should learn about SWers: we are the muses and creators of everything (humanly) beautiful in this world. We are at the root of foundational intellectual and cultural production, from the hetairai of ancient Greece to the courtesan poets of classical China, the ganikas of Vedic India, and the cortigiane oneste of the Venetian Renaissance. We have secured the longevity of countless marriages, family units, and governments of history worldwide. Why is this? Because, living on the fringe, we know how to deliver compassion without judgment. I believe that most people know this but refuse to internalize and accept it.
Every sex worker is an individual and does things their own way. How do you express your individuality at work?
In this line of work, as in my art, I do not pander or condescend to my client/audience. I talk about my immediate interests as an artist and writer, I tease and sling sarcasm in my unimpressed monotone, I laugh my unhinged, throaty laugh. I drop arcane reference after arcane reference. I assume that my interlocutor will keep up, and I think that is a sacred form of respect. This makes for a very specific client pool (and, indeed, art audience), but when it works, it works very well.
I am a romantic and sensual person, and my dynamic in the bedroom follows that. I fall in love easily. It makes this work pleasurable for me. I think sometimes, based on what I look like, some people assume I’m really freaky in bed, but my strength lies in creating tender and playful erotic exchanges. A client gets to feel something profoundly intimate without shouldering any of life’s pragmatic baggage. SW, after all, is one of humanity’s earliest forms of healing.
You’re an accomplished artist - have you found those spaces welcoming of sex workers? What needs to happen to make the art world more accessible and safer for sex workers?
I am out in my career as an artist; I have made artwork that addresses my experiences doing SW, and I am open with gallerists, curators, collectors, and fellow artists about my SW. In this landscape, there is a lot of social capital that comes with claiming proximity to SWers, so we are tokenized and welcomed in the art world until push comes to shove. At the end of the day, I am invariably reminded that whorephobia abounds. This takes many heartbreaking forms that I don’t care to detail, but ultimately it results in foreclosed opportunities and a gaslighty kind of pariahing. Nobody wants to be called a whorephobe, but their decision making is grounded in base fear and hatred of whores. I don’t know what needs to happen. Decrim would help many workers as far as legal protection, peace, and safety go. But in a relational sense, non-SWers need to wake up to their own hypocrisy and realize what it means to live with honor, grace, and compassion.
What’s your favorite intellectual subject to discuss over drinks with a like-minded client?
Of course I love talking about art, cinema, and poetry. One of my long-term clients studied Classics and is a collector of antiquities and Neoclassical art; he is always turning me onto historical references that sometimes end up appearing integrally in my artwork.
Is there a poem or a line from a poem that really speaks to you? Why?
Anne Carson’s “The Glass Essay” (https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/48636/the-glass-essay). It tells you everything you need to know about eros, loss, and redemption.
We love your ‘food porn’ photos on Twitter! Can you tell us about the last amazing dinner date you had and why it was special?
Thank you, I love sharing them, too. Most recently, I had an extraordinary meal at Tsukimi with a favored client. As an artist who makes sculptures, I am drawn to thoughtful, even improbable, presentations; and at Tsukimi, each course is a veritable multi-sensory world.
Do you have a favorite piece of sex-worker-made art?
I was very, very much looking forward to seeing Sophia Giovannitti’s recent performance Scorpion, Frog, which addresses SW in the context of political theory and the art world; but unfortunately I had to miss my viewing appointment. However, I have heard wonderful things about it and would encourage all to follow her challenging and dynamic work.
My dear friend Sonia Xue is a wildly talented visual artist and tattoo artist who works with ceramics, water transfers, vernacular images, and writing. In my reading, an important part of her work addresses big questions around labor, value, gender, and power; but it also has an incredible lightness that evokes longing, memory, and mourning. The most striking thought that comes to me when I am looking at Sonia’s work is that love is submerged violence.
And Nan Goldin is an ex-worker whose work has had an indelible influence on me and pretty much every artist worth their salt. Honestly, if you were to air out the closet skeletons of so many now-influential women and queer artists, I think you would find that they at some point had done SW.
Do you have a dream travel destination, and is there anything special you would like to do there?
I would love to go to Pompeii to see the plaster body casts there. A sculptor’s dream.
My favorite color is: That shade of green that people call celadon or sage.
My favorite scent is: Asphalt after summer rain. Which, I did not know for a long time, has a name: petrichor.
I get a big thrill out of: Being pedantic about grammar and trivia. JK. Uhm, selling art to a museum! Which has happened several times this year alone and is always incredibly satisfying.
The secret to getting to know me is: Being inquisitive, attentive, and Epicurean. Feed me good things for both the brain and the belly. I will bloom.
A historical figure I find inspiring is: The actress and courtesan Sarah Bernhardt. She really did it all, with panache, rigor, critical acclaim, and historic legacy.
Want to meet New York escort Lilith Ico in person?
Head over to her profile! 👇👇👇
