Scenes from My Life as a Sex Writer

It's hard out there for a sexpert

By the time I moved to Los Angeles in 1998, I was keeping copies of every magazine in which my byline appeared and every VHS tape of every television show upon which I appeared. Five years later, I moved from Los Angeles to New Orleans. Two years after that, Hurricane Katrina slammed into the Crescent City. I evacuated the day before the Category 5 storm made landfall, taking a single suitcase with me. A couple months later, I returned to find portions of the roof of the pink shotgun style house in which I’d been living had been stripped off by the high winds. The inside of the half of the house I’d rented was crawling with mold, which covered the walls like lace. The ceiling plaster was in the bed. The giant tree—was it pecan?—out back had been uprooted and tossed like a toothpick. Most of the magazines and tapes I’d so carefully saved over the years were unsalvageable. More recently, I’ve been tracking down copies of the magazines I lost. On Etsy, I bought a copy of the August 1998 issue of the now defunct Detour. It had the first feature story I wrote for the magazine, and I started writing a monthly sex column for the magazine after that. The story is entitled “Sex Sells.” It was a state-of-the-sexual-union piece on the eve(-ish) of the new millennium. Since there was no digital copy online, I transcribed the story and posted it on my website. Interestingly, I’d forgotten many of the things that I’d done and which I’d referenced in the piece. That time I went to a sex dungeon in Van Nuys. That all-girl porn star orgy performance art I witnessed at a downtown Los Angeles gallery. That ex-prostitute I talked to who was looking to buy what she said was the oldest brothel in the country, in Butte, Montana. Where do these memories go? And what else have I forgotten? It’s a personal excavation. In any case, you can read the piece here.

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