Naked Girls Reading: Lady Monster and Friends Show How to Feel Words With Your Body

Jolene Torr

Not yet naked, not yet reading

​In a city abundant with literary events, one must wonder: how do you keep an audience listening with rapt attention? You'd suppose disrobing would detract, would draw eyes below the collarbone, which for brief moments, it did, but Sunday night's Naked Girls Reading series demonstrated that nudity, when recontextualized, can be normalized into a sex-positive approach to public reading with a witty approach to sexuality.

Naked Girls Reading is a group of beautiful ladies who love to read without a stitch of clothing, save for a pair of rainbow knee-highs or a belly dancer's belt shimmying and jangling up to the mic. It originated in Chicago two years ago as a spontaneous moment between founder Michelle L'amour and her partner Franky Vivid where the husband caught the wife naked in repose with book in hand. The two agreed that there was something powerful and beautiful about the breast beside the book.

Now the event has expanded to more than 10 cities, with famed burlesque performer Lady Monster heading the San Francisco chapter. June's event took place at the Center for Sex and Culture where each performer read their favorite selections from queer literature in honor of PRIDE.

An empowering event amongst a supportive audience, Naked Girls Reading allowed the audience to connect with the performers intimately without the pretensions of, say, articles of clothing. The nudity was nearly overlooked, normalized, as it was secondary to the works the performers presented, and any sense of vulnerability lifted, from both the naked readers baring all and clothed spectators bearing witness.

The space, a converted church, was outfitted in parlor-room kitsch, complete with Persian rugs and luxuriously upholstered arm chairs suggestive of Masterpiece Theater. Ophelia Coeur de Noir opened with two passages from Armistead Maupin's Tales of the City, stating that this was a seminal San Francisco work and if she could, she'd have read the book in its entirety.

Jolene Torr

​Cozying into her armchair and propping her stilettos onto a velvet ottoman, Ophelia read "Confession in the Nude," pausing for a moment on "nude" and smirking at the audience. With chipper inflections bubbling over to total giddiness, Ophelia told the tale of Mona and Michael's mini beach vacation up the coast. 

Each of the readers were just as excited about their pieces, committed to keeping the audience engaged. Carol Queen read from Kirk Read's memoir How I Learned to Snap, in which the author describes himself as a gay Rosa Parks in Reagan-era Virginia.

Queen stops reading for a moment to pull in the audience, asking, "Can we just try this for a moment? Let's all do three circles and a snap and say it together, 'I am NOT afraid.'" Her command over the audience, connecting them physically to the text, truly brought this piece to life. It's appropriate to take notice here that when your body is in full motion, when your reading comes alive, your body tunes itself to respond to stimulation involuntarily. Meaning: Queen's breasts perked up when she did.

Jolene Torr

​When the readers chose softer, more sensual pieces, their bodies told the stories as well, with Cherry Galette reading poems from literary friends, her body softening over the gentle advisory line: "The sun is bright and our bodies are all too human."

Or for instance, how poet Kirya Traber, a first-time Naked Girl, took to standing for her selected poem, a reading of "Yo Daddy" in the quintessential spoken-word pose: power hips to the side, shoulders cocked, chin projected, ready to deliver us a message. Her collarbone popped and mellowed with each verse.

When Lady Monster read, she stayed seated, shoulders back, snarling over the words "Hag" and pulling in laughs with "Bastard in Love."

Jolene Torr

​ Poet Daphne Gottlieb closed the night, fully clothed, with her own poetry accompanied by Cindy Emch on the accordion and Vera DeVille burlesquing. Gottlieb also enlisted the audience to participate by yelling out places they'd had sex; at first, the crowd was apprehensive, but as more people revealed where their lusty locations, others eased into their confessions, with the biggest applause coming from someone who'd had sex in the girls locker room of a Catholic school.

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