Sex workers have become much more visible in politics and culture over the last couple of decades. Thanks to a surge of activism starting in the 1990s, memoirs and essays about sex work have become their own subgenre. Even in liberal circles, a lot of stigma still remains, but publicly admitting that you're an escort, stripper, or porn star is a lot more likely to be accepted as a valid choice.

But while the workers have been able to edge ever so slightly into the daylight, the clients have remained securely and silently in the shadows. With their new anthology, Johns, Marks, Tricks, and Chicken Hawks: Professionals and Clients Writing About Each Other, co-editors David Henry Sterry and R.J. Martin, Jr. are trying to shift the conversation to include both sides of the transaction. Sterry, and Martin will be reading at The Booksmith on Haight Street tonight along with several contributors. Sterry, who worked as a rent boy when he was 17, talked to us about sex, money, and how to be a good client.

SF Weekly: Why did you take the approach of doing a book about clients?

Well, the first book that we put together [Hos, Hookers, Call Girls and Rent Boys] was all sex workers. I just felt like it would be cool to see what people who are buying sex are thinking about it as opposed to people who are just selling it. People buy and sell sex for such different reasons, depending on who they are and what their circumstances are. People who are buying sex -- they're not heard from. It's this billion-dollar industry with no customers. So, I really wanted to find people who would write articulately about what the experience is like for them.

Ian Tuttle

I attended at least 134 literary events in 2012. Below are my 10 favorites. I've considered mainly two factors in compiling this list: the quality of work, and how interesting or memorable the experience was. The latter category intentionally allows for many considerations, which I enjoyed keeping in mind while looking back over the year.

I have not included many outstanding solo readings (D.A. Powell, Lyn Hejinian, and Adam Johnson come immediately to mind). Also, memorable readings as part of a show that didn't quite make the top 10: Ali Liebegott and Gypsee Yo, specifically, will always stay with me. While re-watching shows to make decisions, I came across Donald Dunbar (visiting from Portland): "This poem only works if you're touching somebody you don't already know." In that spirit, these were some of my favorite literary experiences this year. 

See also:

The Write Stuff: Zack Haber on Wiggling and the Fun in the Difficult

The Write Stuff: Tim (Toaster) Henderson on Running Toward the Disturbing

courtesy of Michael Bush

Growing up among the cornfields of Ohio, Michael Bush never dreamed of becoming a fashion designer. He learned to sew from his mother and grandmother, but it was a chore then, not a passion. "It was getting the Butterick pattern and following the instruction sheet," he says. Yet Bush went on to create some of the most iconic clothing in the world -- pearl-frosted military jackets, glittering armbands, and rhinestone-encrusted socks.

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Jean Paul Gaultier Talks Couture, Tattoos, Vintage Shopping in S.F.

Kitti Homme

Joe Christiano, creator of First Person Singular

Working at Berkeley's Pegasus Books, writer Joe Christiano has seen his share of readings. And sometimes, they weren't all he hoped for.

"No matter how dynamic the prose is, the authors were not always great performers," he said. "Sometimes there was all this dead air around the words. Some writers know how to deliver it on the page, but not the stage."

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Brett Hall

At a reading not long ago, award-winning author Dorothy Allison (Bastard out of Carolina, Trash, The Women Who Hate Me) smiled in that knowing Southern way and told the audience, "I'ma fuck you up."

The crowd laughed, but underneath the breezy sentiment lay the startling truth: She does fuck you up -- brutally, irrevocably, magnificently -- and sometimes all those ways at once.

See also:

Michelle Tea on Sister Spit, Dorothy Allison, and Valencia: The Movie

Femmepire Records: Celeste Chan on Unapologetic, Riotous Femmedom

An ear here, a life there: Vincent van Gogh, Virginia Woolf, and Sylvia Plath each had their own way of dealing with mood disorders. In her new graphic novel, cartoonist and storyteller Ellen Forney asks an important question: For artists, are mental disorders a gift or a curse? Marbles: Mania, Depression, Michelangelo, and Me: A Graphic Memoir, explores the aftermath of the bipolar diagnosis that arrived just before her 30th birthday, prompting Forney to fear that the requisite medications would decimate her creativity, and eventually, her entire career.

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Crafting with Cat Hair: Not Just for Crazy Cat Ladies

MAD Magazine Taught Us How to Laugh at Fame and Power

The Rumpus, brainchild of local author Stephen Elliott, has always been a literary darling, publishing top-notch essays and interviews, incubating the Dear Sugar phenomenon, and single-handedly bringing written correspondences back en vogue with Letters in the Mail, where authors like Dave Eggers, Margaret Cho, and Jonathan Ames pen intimate notes to subscribers. Now The Rumpus is hopping into even bigger britches with the making of its first feature film, Happy Baby, based on Elliott's grim and affecting novel about growing up in the child welfare system.

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Kink.com Co-Stars with James Franco in About Cherry

Author Cheryl Strayed: on Dear Sugar, Keeping the Faith, and Palling around with Oprah

william mercer mcleod

Ambush Review at Muddy Waters

By Sam Prestianni

Lit Crawl is the ultimate proving ground for San Francisco writers and readers. It's the highlight and closing ceremony of Litquake's nine-day mega-celebration of words that fly off the page, a Mission pub crawl for bookworms en masse. Along with standard readings by hundreds of novelists, poets, and nonfiction writers of every genre imaginable, you'll also find literary performances the likes of which are hard to come by anywhere else.

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Bookstore Hero Wanted: Two San Francisco Stores in Trouble

Litquake's Writers in Recovery: "All of My Artistic Heroes Were Addicts

Tim Faust

Sara Fran Wisby

Literary Death Match -- the adjudicated reading series that hugs the obscure middle ground between Sartre's The Roads to Freedom trilogy and America's Got Talent. Created by Adrian Todd Zuniga, Literary Death Match has long been a part of Litquake's annual festivities, in addition to being a celebrated podcast and, soon, a TV series. The format consists of four writers (ranging from established to emerging) performing their liveliest work in under seven minutes before a panel of judges who respond with witty, and occasionally barbed, commentary.

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Literary Death Match: Marshmallows, Comedy -- and, Oh Yeah, Literature

The Write Stuff: Writers on Writing, Life, and More Bike Lanes

Davy Rothbart is a really nice guy. A really nice guy who, at 30-something, has chosen to maintain a transient lifestyle, where being the guy that'll exchange unabashedly genuine conversation with just about anyone (from Ira Glass to Kid Rock) is an open invitation for peculiar experiences around the country.

And if you're hanging out with him, you're getting the same.

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The Write Stuff: Writers on Writing, Life, and More Bike Lanes

Talking with '80s Sweetheart and New Author Molly Ringwald About Her Debut Novel