Baring Their Beliefs : Sex Workers Celebrate Profession at Forum’s X-Rated Talent Show

The entertainment would have shocked your grandmother, unless your grandmother used to be a topless dancer.

And it was on display at the Whore Carnival, an X-rated talent show held to complement an otherwise serious conference on prostitution.

Marked by the baring of breasts and the sharing of insights learned on the streets, the Thursday evening gathering at the Airtel Plaza Hotel was a raunchy, often silly, sometimes boring celebration of the notion that people have the right to sell sex, no matter what the law says.

Some participants had been hookers at some point in their lives, although they were at the hotel as conferees in this week’s International Conference on Prostitution, co-sponsored by the Center for Sex Research at Cal State Northridge and COYOTE, a prostitutes’ rights group.

The conference, which attracted about 400, is the first in the world to bring academics, sex workers and their advocates together to discuss issues of common interest, from decriminalization to AIDS. Most of the sessions, which continue through Sunday, feature scholarly papers and expert panels from both academia and the workers’ community.

But Thursday night, the 200 revelers forgot the stigma, dangers and darker side of prostitution, the subject of some of the conference sessions. This was their night to be as exuberant as they wanted to be for an audience of open-minded peers.

The university chose to distance itself somewhat from the carnival, which was a joint effort of COYOTE, an acronym for Call Off Your Old Tired Ethics, and the Exotic Dancers Alliance of San Francisco.

“This is their event, not ours,” said Northridge’s James Elias, one of the conference coordinators.

The high spirits of the event were epitomized by Carol Leigh, known professionally as Scarlot Harlot.

As one of the evening’s mistresses of ceremony, Leigh made her first appearance looking remarkably like Belle Watling, the madam with a heart of gold in the epic “Gone With the Wind.”

A lusty advocate for prostitutes’ rights, Leigh led a group of porn stars and peep-show veterans in singing “Bad Laws,” her protest against anti-hooker legislation, to the tune of Donna Summer’s “Bad Girls.”

The women brandished signs that read, “Keep Your Laws Off My Body” and “Sluts Unite.”

“I’m aiming to be the oldest woman in the oldest profession,” said Leigh, whose feminist mother was in the audience.

In the course of the evening, porn star Nina Hartley danced and stripped, dedicating her first lip-synched song to “all those women who are tired of giving it away but don’t yet know how to sell it.”

Annie Sprinkle, porn star turned performance artist who grew up in Granada Hills, performed a hilarious “Bosom Ballet.” Let’s just say that her act consisted of a mammary pas de deux.

Later, co-host Sprinkle showed the audience her Pleasure Activist Playing Cards. As she displayed these “postmodern pinups,” sly parodies of the naughty playing cards once secreted in millions of night stands, she cataloged the virtues of hookers.

“Whores are multicultural and multi-gendered,” she observed. “Whores make very good money, and they always have a job. . . . Whores have the courage to wear very big wigs.”

“My motto,” she said, “is let there be pleasure on Earth, and let it begin with me.”

Hailed as an activist pioneer, Xaviera Hollander, the self-styled Happy Hooker, performed in a skit about a nun and a cab driver with Jim Geffert, a piano player she had met on the Internet.

Margo St. James, who founded COYOTE in San Francisco in 1973, said the carnival was a chance to share the talents of many current and former sex workers (as many prefer to be called) and also a way for conference participants to bond.

But mostly the idea was to have a good time. St. James said she, too, has a motto: “I won’t do it unless it’s fun.”

Affixed to her chic red jacket was a $100 bill fashioned into a lapel ribbon, a light-hearted variation on the ribbons that have been adopted by virtually every cause in the U.S., from AIDS to breast cancer.

St. James said she founded COYOTE “because women weren’t being included in the women’s movement.”

Because so many feminists condemn pornography, prostitutes continue to be marginalized in the movement, St. James said.

She also took a moment to wax nostalgic about the 1960s, when she was a call girl and the going rate was $20 (it is $200 today, she said). In the Summer of Love, it was possible to make a living in spite of serious competition from tie-dyed and musk-scented amateurs.

“I had three customers a day and two freebies,” she said.