It's always a good idea to start at the beginning....which is why today, I picked the book that really started me off reading what I refer to as "strip-lit", memoirs, studies, and explorations of the sex industry. A category that will, hopefully, one day include a book of my own.
Strip City chronicles Lily Burana as she does a pre-wedding strip trip across the US, hitting all of the cities, clubs, and hotspots that she had dreamed about, heard about, wondered about....back when she was a full-time stripper in her early twenties.
This remains probably my favorite of the strip-lit genre (so far) because it combines two of the great loves of my life - stripping, and travel. The concept of setting out with nothing more than a bag of costumes and a list of clubs will always hold great appeal, although I wonder if I will ever be able to actually do it - stripping, unlike camming, has a definite age range, and I am no longer at the lower end of it. Or even, really, the middle. But if I never manage to set out on the open highway, then I can still simply re-read this book.
Lily moves back and forth between her present travels, and her memories of stripping in NYC in the late 80s. She also researches the history of the striptease - going to Exotic World Museum, speaking to past dancers, covering the history of some of the major clubs....basically, she covers all the bases, and it makes for fascinating reading.
The best part? That she manages to cover the highs and lows of getting naked for pocket change without presenting an unbalanced picture. When writing about the sex industry, the temptation seems to always be to either gloss over everything, and create a glamorous, fun ideal, or to assume that all is darkness and doubt. Sex workers (myself included) are fairly reticent to talk about the bad times, because for some reason, people love to use even the smallest of dissatisfaction to damn the entire industry. On the other hand, many people want to prevent young women from getting sucked in to the evils of sex work, and so only talk about the worst aspects - afraid that the slightest whiff of enjoyment would convert even the purest virgin. But Lily covers those nights that are thoroughly glamorous, exciting, and lucrative...but doesn't shy away from describing the times where she feels like she has been turned inside out and emotionally beaten six ways from sunday.
For once, I actually have nothing bad to say about it. I love this book.
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