Image of Lee from this intense gallery (plus videos).
It’s not only important for sex workers talk about the path that led them to sex work and how it feels to be on it: it’s necessary for the world to hear it. Locally based porn superstar Lorelei Lee tells her story in her own eloquent words (she’s a great writer, by the way) on my dear friend Stephen Elliott‘s site, The Rumpus. Snip from the middle:
(…) When I was fourteen my father came to San Diego. We had just moved there, I had no friends, and I was totally miserable. I was all dressed in black. This guy just walks in and is like, “Hi, I’m your father.”
I went to visit him in Provincetown, Massachusetts. He got me a summer job working for a theater company. My father’s gay and Provincetown is 50% gay in the summer. The streets are filled with men in leather and I worked at the theater with two other teenage girls. I loved the job but I was really bitter and angry about staying with him and him introducing me to his friends and saying, “This is my daughter.”
My mother is right about my father. He’s a totally brilliant, talented artist. Everyone loves him. He’s friends with people like Michael Cunningham and Nick Flynn. He’s a really good person. He wanted me to be his daughter. He wanted to open up to me. I wasn’t sad about missing him when I was a child. I didn’t even know what that meant to miss him. But a lot of shitty things happened to me. I didn’t even know how shitty they were until I became an adult and realized that I had to go out in the world and be a person with all these other people and I could not even manage it. I didn’t know how to take care of myself; I only knew how to take care of other people. And I met my father and he has this idyllic existence. He’s an artist, all his friends are artists. He lives in this gorgeous little town. He has enough money. He has fancy dinner parties. He took me to restaurants where the food cost fifty dollars. I can’t even explain the vast difference between his life and my mother’s life. I didn’t want him to know how different it was. That’s what was really painful, to see that contrast, and then for him to to say, “I want you to be part of my life.” I just felt fucked up, like this weird fucked up person. Things happened when I was a kid that maybe wouldn’t have happened if he was around. I stopped talking to him.
The first sex work I ever did I was 19. It was mostly photos of me stripping and fake masturbating. Then I made this recording pretending that I was talking about about the first time that I gave a blow job or something. The guy who did that shoot now owns Naughty America. It’s a huge porn company and they have like twelve websites. I was 19 and he was 18 and just starting. Now he has a million dollars and I don’t.
Then I moved to San Francisco. (…read more, therumpus.net)
English isnt my first language but you made me understand clearly, thank you.