Searching for Lineage

I would really love to go live in Minnesota for a few months.

Now THAT is a phrase that I never thought I'd say.

Trust me, if I was putting together a top ten list of places I would be least likely to go, Minnesota would be in with a good shot of making it. As a general rule, I am a fan of big cities. Somewhere that is a player on the global stage. Somewhere that is a focus of movies, books, songs, histories. But Minnesota?

The thing is, I have never really felt a great sense of belonging anywhere. I have never actually lived anywhere for more than about five years, and it is fairly hard to put down substantial roots in half a decade, especially if you are aware that by the time you do so, it will be time to pull them up again. So I continue to travel through the world, feeling most at home with others that feel least at home - travelers, mostly.

Despite the bad reputation as weed-addled layabouts, I love travelers. There is something comforting about knowing that you are in the running to be the most informed about a place even if you only landed there two weeks ago. There is something even more comforting about spending time with people who not only support my refusal to accept the mantle of adulthood, but who actively celebrate the idea of remaining footloose and fancy free well into your thirties. Forties. Sixties.

However, my joy at the rootlessness to be found in youth hostels everywhere has everything to do with a feeling of belonging - hey, I am a tumbleweed too! - and nothing to do with the lack of a desire to belong.

When it comes down to it, I desperately want to be part of something larger. Hard to believe, for someone that runs in the opposite direction of small communities, but true, nonetheless. It is just that the larger something I wish to be part of is not contingent on having known the rest of the community since before they discovered jacking off. It has always seemed that age and history are rather arbitrary traits to build a community on, so I would rather find a sense of belonging among those who share my choices, not my postal code.

I have managed to do this in the same way that I have managed to make my living - through that wondrous thing called the internet. I have found a community of like-minded females that I have remained close to despite changes in career and continent, and I care for them with a deep, sincere love.

However. Belonging is not the same as history. And in the same way that people like to trace their family tree, I like to trace my industry tree. Except that the industry I am in is so clouded with shame and guilt that all the branches are faded. Stories are not passed from generation to generation, traditions are lost before they can even be started, and women wishing to start afresh eschew those that came before them, as though women hadn't been revealing themselves to men since Eve first donned a fig leaf, and then took it off again for a taste at the juiciest fig.

I am still left rootless. Lost in a world populated by my peers and my students - finding that at the ripe old age of 27, I am a veteran in my industry, guiding the future without any insight into the past. So I read all that I can. I devour the memoirs of those that have chosen to write them as though they are the dead sea scrolls. I collect and curate a small museum of literature - not just the memories of porn stars and peep show girls, but burlesque history, early theater, famous figures, feminist retrospectives and anthropological studies of sexuality and sin.

I read about those that have gone not too far before me, and those that have worked alongside me, but somewhere else. And still I feel....incomplete. I want to discover if the worlds that are described are the ones that  I will find. I want to connect to the sisterhood that has stretched back to when the first cavewoman decided that getting on her back was easier than breaking it to gather enough food for one more day. I want to feel what they felt, I want to stand where they stood. I want to feel like one of many - connect to all those gone before.

And so, Minnesota. It graces the list of places that I would never feel the need to go, if not for some club, some store - some place that has come up in multiple stories before. There are some places that come up again and again in the memoirs of others - places that I feel compelled to visit, to work if I can. Places that might allow me a feeling of history - that might let me start a breadcrumb trail for others to follow behind me.

These were the places that sex was first sold as a commodity, not just a pleasure.
This is where the greats danced, before they were great.
This is where burlesque hit the mainstream.
This is where porn built an empire.
This is the first of something.
This is the last.

I want, nay, I need. To seek out the last of the peepshows, before the world wide web renders them redundant. To find the one remaining ice box of a porno theater, where no one knows if the state of your nipples is a reaction to the screen or the thermostat. To walk the stage where Mamie Van Doren first licked her lips, to where Tempest twirled her tassels.

I need to breathe the same air. To connect to my history, and ask the ghosts of girly shows gone by if they felt the same draw that I do - the same addiction and power. I may never get to ask my idols what they feel - after all, there is no comic-con for the great flesh trade. No fan-signings for the first to fling their inhibitions and bathrobes to the wind. But I can follow in the footsteps that I can still see, and wonder how my print fits into theirs.

So, in no particular order, these are the places that I would like to visit. To work, if either I or they are still young enough to allow it, in the name of decent indecency. And starting with...

Minnesota. Just to work at SexWorld, and see if I could make it as  peep-show girl in the DollHouse, as mentioned in more than one memoir.
San Fran - for the Lusty Lady. Once a bastion of progressive, sex-positive activism, now a kitschy stop on the sex-work tour.
Dallas, TX - the Lodge. Arguably the most luxurious club in the world, at some point or other.
The Moulin Rouge. For obvious reasons.
Stringfellows, Paris. Having worked at the two in London, it seems only right to consider the final one, probably post Rouge.
Cheetas, Las Vegas. Oh showgirls. Doing so much, and yet so little, for sex workers everywhere.
Burlesque Hall of Fame, aka. Exotic World. To get back to the roots of it all.
The Mitchell Brothers O'Farrel Theatre. Thank you, Strip City. Now I have to.
New York. Just to stand and look at what Times Square is now. What Peepland is, now.

I could conceivably keep going, fill out a worldwide itinerary of places that I have heard of, dreamt of.  I do - in my idle moments. And one day,  I am sure that a wide-eyed zephyr will read what I have written and chase them all down, Secrets, Spearmint, Stringfellows, The Penthouse. Streamate. MyFreeCams. Maybe she will search, as I have, for a sense of carrying on a greater tradition. Maybe the taboo will be watered down enough that she can listen to stories of those that came before. Given tolerance, and time, I know that we will be given a section in the library, a history not shrouded in shame. I wish to be a part of that tradition. I wish to create a tradition, so that no more are left like I am, pulling back the curtain to see beyond the last 50 years, and left grasping at the odd memory in a sea of denial.