In your recent article ‘Race, Pleasure, and Ruin’, you reflect on your research and artistic project I Am For You Can Enjoy, that started from an intent to analyse the multiple impacts of Blackness on queer sex work, through the voices of Black sex workers. Can you tell us more about this project?
Basically, the project began as a little bit of a navel gazing exercise because its main questions and concerns animate from my own experiences moonlighting as a sex worker, escort, erotic masseur, and physique model, over a period of almost 20 years, primarily in the US and the UK, and my growing understanding that the bulk of study focused on erotic labour never included people like me. Most of the work devoted to male and masculine-identified sex work centres on white men, addiction, trauma, the pathological, and misses the opportunity to treat sex work as a rich place where the co-informing relations between identity, desire, performance, and capital can be explored by working through race – specifically blackness.
I open the article about the project with a small meditation on the American documentary 101 Rent Boys because it perfectly reflects these tropes and topical elisions. Well into the 21st century, even though for many scholars and artists, blackness has long been discursively integral to treatments of sex, sexuality, capital, and modernity, the black subject appears seldom, and never centrally, in studies of sex work and men performing erotic labour.
For me, the absence of the black male figure in the discussion of what volitional sex work is – and what a ‘sex worker’ is or can be, and what our motivations and boundaries are, for example – ignores crucial encounters in the histories and theories of work, (erotic) capital, raced gender, agency, pleasure, and being, as they collide with black masculine identity across the diaspora.
I imagined the project as a book, initially – an autoethnography that would have collected my own essays, interviews with my clients, and a visual element pulling together footage of my sessions and other ‘industrial ephemera’, like my advertisements, promotional images, text and email strings with johns, etc. Thankfully, eventually I got bored enough with myself to rethink it as a group oral history project, in which other voices would build a more dynamic picture of blackness, masculinity, and erotic labour across my and my conversants’ spaces of origin and migration in the black Atlantic.
The expansion to group oral history led to other changes, namely vis-à-vis form. I began to imagine a larger work that could function as a piece of public oral history for a wider audience. I applied for and received a grant from Arts Council England. I made the decision to film my conversations, and with a grand photographic component in mind, I began to collaborate with my friend, the London-based photographer Ajamu, who shot bold, large-scale black and white portraits of each of conversant. His portraits are as vital to the project as my films are, because they provide a grounding and concrete counterpoint to my reels which, by design, obey a more roving, trans-temporal, and disjointed visual logics.
How did the interviews you carried out challenge your assumptions on the historical connections between race, sexuality, and sex work?
This really strikes at the core of the article, with relation to the project’s impulse, process, and content. Without going too far in the way of summary: as a starting point, my assumption was that our shared identification as black men would lead to similar or highly correspondent perspectives and experiences as we reckoned with the psychic weight of selling bodily services in the wake of the transatlantic slave trade, which saw our black flesh captured and sold by others – those “others” also now forming the majority of our client base.
Outside of these more exact considerations and in more broad terms, my assumptions were that distinctions (local, national, ‘cultural’) between different places of origin in the black diaspora could, or necessarily would, be collapsed under what I felt would automatically be a shared experience of black masculine identity and presentation in Britain, the country in which we all found ourselves.
Media portrayals on sex work are still sometimes characterised by stereotyping, spectacularisation and oversimplification. Do you think your research could contribute to a more informed public debate?
Ajamu and I definitely hope so.
Over the years, the work has been presented internationally as a large-scale exhibition, most notably at the Lesley Lohman Museum in Manhattan, as part of the Sex Worker’s Pop Up (also in New York City), at Harbourfront Centre in Toronto, and several UK galleries, including Liverpool’s Foundation for Creative Technology (FACT).
Each of these installations has been very public. At the Lesley Lohman, the work was installed and available for nearly four months. At FACT, the work was installed in the building’s most prominent space – on the ground floor in the main gallery – which all visitors must move through to access any other gallery or part of the building.
Here, as well as at Harbourfront Centre and another four-month installation at Contact (a multi-arts venue in Manchester), broad audiences of all ages and backgrounds were able to watch the films, listen to our stories, see Ajamu’s portraits. This is all to say that wherever possible, we’ve worked with spaces to maximise viewership, and we’ve been lucky to have exhibitions facilitated by curators who understand the capacity of the work in its full form – with five 30-inch screens and eight three-foot-tall portraits – to be impactful across a diverse viewership.
As an oral history production with academic framing, but with an intended audience that enfolds and exceeds what we might call academic culture, I feel satisfied in its reach and the conversations generated not only because of its content, but also its manifest publicness in the cities and countries where it has shown.
As far as the impact it will have to a more history-disciplinary concern, I guess that I have the same careful, humble optimism that I think many cross-practice or interdisciplinary oral historians would. Paraphrasing Paul, one of my conversants: conversations around sex work and how we view and name it in the context of labour, respectability, and subjectivity, are very much changing in the 21st century. In that vein, and in a very basic way, I would hope that the project’s existence speaks to underthought currents in scholarly engagements with erotic labour.
From the dual perspective of ‘(former) sex worker’ and ‘oral historian’, I would hope most deeply that the project does the lives and insights of my conversants justice: that it honours their candour and sharpness. I hope it, and any consideration of it, can be a part of developing discussions about blackness, specifically, and its relationship to erotic capital and labour, with practical impacts for black people of any declared or undeclared sexuality who do sex work. I would also hope, more broadly, that it can be a generative point for other memory and oral history work initiated by sex workers and purposed toward exploring the impacts of identity on intimacy sector work from the expert perspective of those actually involved in the sector.