Comics aren’t all superhero stories! In the 1960s, the American Comics Code Authority imposed increased censorship on violence and nudity in comics, and so the underground comics movement was born. Comics published independently were free to cover anything, including pornography. At the same time, the Western feminist movement was taking off. Comics became the perfect medium for women artists such as Aline Kominsky-Crumb to express their uncensored selves.
Covering everything from bodies to sexuality, comics are an incredible medium for women to express themselves. As one of my favourite authors Hillary Chute writes about in Graphic Women, the words and images of comics often contradict each other, meaning women can express all the contradictory aspects of their lives. In comics, past and present can be right next to each other, allowing women to reconstruct their lives. One of my favourite autobiographical comics is Persepolis by Marjane Satrapi, an exploration of her life growing up as a young girl in Iran.
All this considered, it’s no wonder that comics are the perfect medium for sex workers! As I said in Part One of this series, sex workers are often maligned in traditional Western art. We’re the subjects, but rarely appreciated as artists ourselves. Yet, there is a growing trend of sex workers capturing the nuances of our lives in comics and graphic novels. Here are my top three.
Melody: Story of Nude Dancer by Sylvie Rancourt
Melody is Sylvie Rancourt’s memoir of working as a stripper in 1980s Montreal. Through Rancourt’s self-taught, naive style, we see Melody go from civilian to hustling at the club. Like any sex worker of any era, she has to learn to juggle sex work with job satisfaction, her partner, her family, and her aspirations as a person. She works a comedy and puppet routine into her dancing, because that’s what she enjoys. She learns to handle difficult clients, and to appreciate her kind ones. She fights with her husband at home, and her boss at the club. She spends time with her family, and worries about her relationships with them. It’s a pleasure to just absorb Rancourt’s words and images, drinking in her matter of fact depiction of the nuances of being a sex worker.
Rancourt worked as a stripper just at the time that outdoor sex work was becoming increasingly criminalised in Montreal. This pushed more sex workers into strip clubs, who would offer extras in the safer, less criminalised environment of the club toilets. So Melody is an insight into the stigma, whorephobia, and whorearchy of being a sex worker too. Melody looks down at other strippers, and even herself. There are significant scenes where Melody walks in on full service workers, and her disgust at this is what drives the plot, to leave both stripping and her wayward husband. Melody is a memoir that’s truthful about Rancourt’s own experiences, but it doesn’t go any further to think about other sex workers, or the context in which Rancourt was working. I wouldn’t recommend Melody as a feel-good or activist piece of sex worker literature; but it is a valuable piece of sex worker history.
Rent Girl by Michelle Tea and Lauren McCubbins
Just like Melody, Rent Girl is Michelle Tea’s exploration of her entry into, and journey through, being a sex worker. And just like Melody, Michelle draws on a range of experiences; she’s neither victim nor superhero. There are the "cocaine calls" that "are the best" because Michelle can delve into her client’s fridge. There is the incall apartment with the pigeons that she and her fellow sex worker get deeply attached to. There’s the client who does her astrological chart, and there are the close, often lesbian, relationships she has with other sex workers. There’s the duos with frenemies, the failed touring holiday, and the clients who like to give women pleasure.
If Melody is naïve and DIY, Rent Girl is bold and brash. Michelle Tea has a wry sense of humour that leaps off every page. Most of her stories are explicit, told in a deadpan voice, capturing her indifference to being neither victimised or empowered. As she dryly writes, "I would look into the mirror and think, I Am A Prostitute, and wait for an appropriate wave of horror and revulsion. I would wait and wait and feel nothing, and I’d wash my face and go back upstairs." Each story is on a separate page, captured as a beautiful line drawing by Lauren McCubbin. Throughout the book, these line drawings are linked together by splashes of red and black, to create a narrative that meanders through Michelle’s life. It's these drawings that make Rent Girl the nuanced, vivacious depiction of sex work that it is. The sex workers are full of life, their angled lines filling the page. They look away in boredom and disgust, but also at themselves, each other and the reader, with curiosity, love, lust, and power. As explicit as the text is, no sex worker is an object in Rent Girl – just both the subject and creator of an artistic gaze that captures all our nuances .
SfSx by Tina Horn
SfSx (Safe Sex) is a series of comics, written by Tina Horn, and brought to life by a team including Jen Hickman, Alejandta Gutierrez, Michael Dowling, Steve Wands, G Romero-Johnson, Kelly Fitzpatrick, and Rent Girl’s Lauren McCubbin. SfSx is the most overtly political of these three recommendations. In the last decade under FOSTA-SESTA and the EARN-IT Act, sex workers have seen state censorship, tech, purportedly feminist anti trafficking organisations, and Evangelists work together to restrict sex workers’ right to advertise, pushing us further into criminalisation and poverty. In SfSx , an organisation led by right wing feminists and religious fascists called “The Party” works to cleanse society of all sexual deviants . So sex workers in this dystopia must work and organise underground, at increasing risk to themselves.
In SfSx, there are pornographers trying to live a straight edge life; dominatrices searching for their lost girlfriends; kinksters practicing safer sex at literal underground orgies; and appropriately hypocritical, horny party leaders. Each chapter is inked in a different artist's unique style. Through this variety of stories, characters, and styles, sex workers are presented as a kaleidoscopic yet strong community. At times, the depiction of sex workers does veer away from being material to fantastical. While Melody and Rent Girl do include the work part of sex work, SfSx focuses mostly on the sex part. But SfSx is not autobiographical – it is science fiction. This is a world in which sex workers use their skills as sex workers to fight for the sexual liberation they deserve. It's a depiction of sex workers that isn't passive, but rather, full of colour, riot, and imagination.
Are you a sex worker with a story, opinion, news, or tips to share? We'd love to hear from you!
We started the tryst.link sex worker blog to help amplify those who aren't handed the mic and bring attention to the issues ya'll care about the most. Got a tale to tell? 👇☂️✨
