On The Importance Of Being Unprincipled, Or A Whore

[+ stevenkesslar]

I'm writing this thread for three reasons.

 

First, I got called out for using the word "whore" on another thread. I've used the word "whore" repeatedly in the last week on various threads, and I like the word because it actually speaks to the core of my self esteem. So I am going to go off ad nauseum on what the word "whore" means to me.

 

Second, to let you know that if you haven't made a donation to the Sex Workers Outreach Project yet, I would deeply appreciate it if you did. The link to that thread, including a way to donate and an emotional and eloquent statement about escorts by a client that I will refer to as my "calling out party", is here:

 

http://www.companyofmen.org/threads/support-the-sex-workers-outreach-project-los-angeles.104785/

 

Third, I am suffering from a serious case of VD, meaning verbal diarrhea. As people who've been around this site for a while know, I have been AWOL for years, mostly because I started feeling burnt out and wanted to take a break and enjoy the tranquility of my garden and the desert. (Not to mention a few months a year with long-term clients in Puerto Vallarta). Call it my 10 year sabbatical. For several years Epigonos, among others, predicted, I would never write a word on this forum again. Hmmm. Famous last words, my friend. :-) Speaking of 10 years, May 12 was my 10 year anniversary as a forum member. Woo hoo!

 

Believe it or not, writing epistles like this is actually one way I have fun, and learn things, and integrate my experiences, and keep my mental health. What follows is a PhD dissertation on whoring that touches on semantics, politics, religion, race, sex, and God knows what else. I learned at the Palm Springs pool party that people like the way I mix strawberry margaritas. So hopefully this will be an interesting mix, too. If you're not interested or don't have the time, thank you, and have a nice day! :-) And since it's about whoring first and foremost, and Danny's thread on SWOP is in The Lounge, I'm posting it in The Lounge. Fell free to move it elsewhere if you think that's inappropriate, Daddy and Deej.

 

Here's three definitions of the word "whore", all of which I can proudly say describe me, especially if you consider that whether it's meant literally or rhetorically, I love to kiss and play "tongue in cheek:" 1) a male who engages in sexual acts for money, 2) a promiscuous or immoral person, 3) Whores traditionally whored their bodies out for money. But today a whore can be a person that compromises himself in any kind of way for monetary gain.

 

There is another "ego" word for whore, which is "courtesan", which is defined this way: "a prostitute, especially one with wealthy or upper-class clients." I say it's an "ego" word because "courtsean" could be used to say what a funny button I own says more crassly - "a gold digger is like a whore, just smarter" - or it could be used by somebody upper-class to rationalize why they don't really hire prostitutes. Either way, if you call me a courtesan, I'll take it as a compliment. If you really want to compliment me, though, call me a whore.

 

Here's why I like each of the three definitions of whore above:

 

1) I have no regrets that in 2000 I quit one successful career to start another successful career as a whore, and I do what I do for money. I have no regrets that it has been one cornerstone to my financial success. All along the way clients and other escorts have told me, "enjoy it while it lasts", and God have I.

 

2) I love sex, so to me it is a compliment to say I am promiscuous. And while I was a religion major, I treat people who consider themselves the arbiters of morality, like the Catholic Church I grew up in, with suspicion. For about a year during my escorting I had a fuck buddy who was a hot, very intelligent, and very kind Catholic priest. At first I thought it was really cool that he could embrace the parts of religion I love and ignore the parts that were drenched in ugliness or hypocrisy. The Catholic church sucks when it comes to being gay. I feel comfortable as a gay man despite, rather than because of, my Catholic upbringing. In their defense, anybody who believes in anything is eventually going to be a hypocrite, because none of us are perfect. I am proud of the fact that when my priest friend was going through an internal church investigation because someone he refused to have sex with privately called him out to his bishop as gay, I could be the shoulder he cried on, not to mention the top he came over. But this all happened right after I got involved in California's gay marriage campaign, and the Catholic and LDS churches were working hand in hand to defeat LGBT marriage rights. That was a bridge too far for me. My last conversation with my priest fuck buddy was when I was working on an EQCA phone bank in San Francisco to raise money for the marriage campaign and I called him and asked him for a donation. He laughed and said, "You know I can't have my name associated with this, but I'll give you a donation in cash when I see you again." I never saw him again, and what I did was basically my bitchy way of announcing I'd had it with the hypocrisy. In fairness to him, this is the pot calling the kettle black, because he wanted to protect his name, and I get that, because my real name is not Steven Kesslar. But if what the Catholic church does to gays, including gay priests, to this day is called "morality," I am proud to be one of the most immoral whores in the world. When I was growing up Catholic I was often told I should become a priest. At the risk of sounding smug, and with all due respect to priests, I think many whores are priests, except we are more honest about who we are and what we do.

 

3) It sounds bad, on the face of it, to say I am a person who compromises myself for monetary gain. But some version of what that means is at the core of my first career as a political activist and community organizer. I constantly made decisions with others that involved compromising some part of what we believed in, for some larger goal that often involved monetary gain, like helping low-income people buy homes. I am incredibly proud of what I am and what I did. I've had various job titles, but I hope when I am dead people remember me as a great whore, including a great political whore. To throw religion back into it, at one point in my career as a lobbyist I sought out and created a political alliance with one of the most virulently anti-gay Republican state legislators in the the state I was organizing in. He was a right wing religious guy, but as such he was open to the idea that God calls on us to help the poor. I privately got shit from several members of the liberal coalition I helped build because they found the idea of working with this guy to be distasteful. The outcome was he was my chief ally in getting a very non-Republican thing done - a progressive and permanent tax on corporate electric bills to help low-income people pay their heating bills - that was part of a larger bill that beat the living shit out of Enron before anybody, including me, knew that the word Enron would become a synonym for "corporate criminal." My biggest fear was that this Republican politician would at some point find out I was gay (I wasn't publicly out yet), although honestly he was enough of a political whore that he may have known, and it just didn't matter. He would probably be shocked if he knew he had essentially gotten in bed (politically) with somebody who is now a courtesan, sex worker, prostitute, whore, or whatever else you want to call me. In essence, I did compromise myself for monetary gain, in the form of $10 million a year to help low-income people from having their heat shut off in the Winter. I love being a whore!

[+ stevenkesslar]

As much as sex is fun to talk about, most of what I say from here on out is going to deal with the political whore part of who I am. In the Sex Worker Outreach Project thread I linked to above, there are two threads written by Yooper Mike that speak to the emotional core of what it means to be an escort, from the perspective of a client. To me, what he wrote just nails the best that can be said about what people like me are and do. I'm not going to try to top him. (I mean, verbally). :-)

 

Here is an essay that was given to me by a political science professor in college that is the basis for the title of this thread - on the importance of being unprincipled. The larger circumstances surrounding who gave me this essay are interesting, and they amount to a tragic irony, and a profound life lesson for me. I'll return to that later in this thread. For now, what I'll say is this is a good essay to keep by your bed if you don't have an escort in it and don't want to stay up fucking all night - because reading this will definitely put you to sleep.

 

http://greaterclevelandcongregations.org/sites/default/files/On%20the%20Importance%20of%20Being%20Unprincipled.pdf

 

For those of you who don't want to go nighty night, here is an excerpt from the essay that captures the main point:

 

"Now there seems to be a very close connection between this decline in political intelligence and the rise of the appeal to principles. In fact most of the world's political difficulties today focus in men's preference for laying down principles and fighting over them rather than engaging in the give and take of dicussion and eventual compromise".

 

Hmmm, sound like anything happening today? Those words were written in 1933. To me, what the guy is saying is the world would be a better place if we were all just better whores. I put the Tea Party now and the anti-war left in the 60's in the same category - they are reactionary and emotional and lots of things - but I'd rather have emotional hotheads like them serving as democratic counterbalances at the grassroots than principled tyrants at the top. What defines the absolute worst of politics boils down to elevating principles to absolutes and forgetting about compromise. If you just go by body count, Hitler, Stalin, and Mao are all great examples of the worst slaughters history can dish out, and all of them in a certain sense were men of "principle," whether it was the principle of the "master race" or the principle of "communism."

 

I could write a book filled with examples I care about on this point, about effective political whoring, but I'll focus on two examples that are closer to home than Mao, Stalin, or Hitler, dealing with the worst part of our history - slavery - and the movement for civil rights. And I'll state upfront that while I am a white liberal, I am intentionally choosing examples that illustrate that being a good political whore is all about compromise, and discussion, and openness, and in my view nothing, nothing, nothing is ever black and white.

 

I spent a long time this week on a trip down memory lane, reading articles and watching videos on the 1983 mayoral campaign of Harold Washington, Chicago's first black Mayor. I took a term off college to volunteer on his campaign, and after he won I spent a Summer as an intern in the Mayor's office. That campaign was the first of many on which I cut my political teeth. It was thoroughly racist, as this article describes:

 

http://historynewsnetwork.org/article/153060

 

http://historynewsnetwork.org/sites/default/files/780px-Harold_Washington_at_the_commissioning_of_USS_Chicago_(SSN-721)_cropped.jpg

 

The reason I included this article is that I just learned something from it that I didn't know, because for decades it was a campaign secret. The authors of the article are two white campaign strategists. As the article details, they intentionally deceived the black finance committee of Washington's campaign and ran two advertising spots that the finance committee had vetoed. In the view of Zimmerman and Katz, the white strategists, running those two ads put Washington over the top in a very bitter and close election. The article describes how racist messages were eating away at Washington's lead in a general election campaign that had previously always been a cake walk, until the Democratic nominee happened to be black. Zimmerman and Katz ran two ads that essentially laid a huge guilt trip on white liberals, which they think got Washington just enough white votes to win. It was the political equivalent of dropping a huge turd in the pool, and then denying it. Had Washington lost, as they say, it would have sucked the life out of an amazing and transformational grassroots organizing campaign. His victory not only changed Chicago, but set the stage for the election of our first black President. As an intern in Washington's office I remember seeing David Axelrod milling around as a political reporter for the Chicago Tribune. Who could have known he'd become one of the key white strategists on Obama's 2008 campaign, and what the Chicago black political class learned that year would contribute mightily to Obama's election?

 

In essence, at a pivotal moment, a few white know-it-alls decided to ignore a committee of accomplished blacks, because they thought the blacks making decisions were politically naive and were too afraid of pushing white people too hard, and they now claim guilt tripping white liberals like me against orders won Washington the election. In a word, they were unprincipled. Were they right? We'll never know. Either way, it doesn't negate the truth of the words Washington spoke during that campaign: ""I can't believe there is no redemption. But that redemption is not gonna come out in hatred. It is gonna come out in positive attitude toward our fellow man.... We are high and good and moral people." Harold proved to me, and to many, that there is redemption.

 

Thank you, Harold, for being a great political whore.

[+ stevenkesslar]

As good as Harold was, I would single out two men for setting the gold standard for effective political whoring during my lifetime: MLK and LBJ. Let's start this with a video of an interview between the director of Selma, Ava DuVernay, and the reporter Gwen Ifill.

 

 

Here's one thing Ifill says during the interview that really resonated for me: "I've seen this movie twice. The first time my heart was in my throat. The second time I was looking at it with a little bit of historical scrutiny, because there's been so many questions raised about some of the choices that you made."

 

Bingo! I'd seen the movie with my friend Dane Scott, and we sat next to each other with tears in our eyes during the scene when future leaders of the black community were being clubbed like thugs on the Edmund Pettis bridge by racist white cops. When we left the movie, we were both deeply moved, and Dane said "that's going to win Best Picture." I bring Dane in to this because he politely tolerates my occasional bouts of PVD (political verbal diarrhea) and after the movie I started trying to describe to him this weird feeling that I loved the movie, but something also bothered me about it. Dane was happy to leave it at being deeply moved, but I went home and spent the next day researching the movie and LBJ and King and watching LBJ's address to Congress portrayed in the movie.

 

I'm still not 100 % sure who is ignorant about what, but here's some things I feel fairly solid about, all of which involve lessons in good political whoring.

The legitimate questions that have now been raised are: 1) why was Selma snubbed at the Oscars?, 2) why were all the acting nominees white?, and most important 3) why is the Academy 94 % white and 77 % male?

 

Here's one answer to that question that I don't like: "In response to the all-white Academy Award nominations, actor Gbenga Akinnagbe told CNN’s Brian Stelter that Hollywood, much like Washington D.C., was a closed, self-perpetuating system that resisted change, and that African Americans were best to work outside of it by funding their own projects. “Ava’s not a safe black woman,” Akinnagbe said. “She’d be more likely to be nominated if she was more demure, if she kept her opinions to herself, if she didn’t make projects having to do with political or racial issues.”

 

If you want to tear that argument apart, I'd say all you have to do is listen to Ava DuVernay herself: ""I'm just gonna say that, you know, my voice, David's voice, the voices of all of the artists that gathered to do this, of Paramount Pictures, which allowed us to amplify this story to the world, is really focused on issues of justice and dignity. And for this to be reduced — reduced is really what all of this is — to one talking point of a small contingent of people who don't like one thing, is unfortunate, because this film is a celebration of people, a celebration of people who gathered to lift their voices — black, white, otherwise, all classes, nationalities, faiths — to do something amazing......... Selma is not King's story only....I felt very, very adamant about the fact that this film be broadened to include the community of people that came together....It's important to deconstruct our heroes...To say this was a skip in the park, and they [MLK and LBJ] were holding hands the whole way, is really disingenious about what was happening at that point.....I'm trying to invite people into the spirit of the movement. That was my intention."

 

Paramount Pictures is not a project of the United Nations, but at least in this case DuVernay is right: Paramount did in fact serve as a loudspeaker to amplify a story about racial justice. Fortunately, thanks in large part to MLK and the movement he helped lead, I think Hollywood is a safe place for black women. This movie proves it. And there are two excellent reasons I can think of that Ava DuVernay should have been the first black woman to win the Best Director Oscar. It would be a nice correction to the undeniable fact that the Academy is dominated by white men. And she absolutely hit the ball out of the park in what she primarily intended to do - inviting people into the spirit of a movement that is one we can now mostly all view as an incredible, and incredibly successful, celebration of freedom and democracy.

[+ stevenkesslar]

Having said that, here's where Ava DuVernay starts to lose me, in her own words: "I'm not a historian. I am an artist. I understand people wanting to see history through their own gaze, through their own lens. And this is the way I see it, this is the way I interpret it..... " Okay, but speaking of disingenious, that's a word I'd use to describe the contradiction between saying she is "shocked" that a lot of blacks don't know who Congressman John Lewis is, and she wants to elevate his role in history, but when it comes to her portyral of LBJ as a villian, she is "not a historian" and she is equally shocked that a lot of white liberals are hung up on "one talking point." Whatever you think about LBJ's role in the enactment of the Voting Rights Act and the War On Poverty legislation, LBJ's role is a little more than "one talking point." Joe Califano, who worked for LBJ and who led the campaign to shun Selma, made an idiotic and disrespectful claim that made it sound like LBJ was actually the architect of Selma. MLK, not LBJ, and blacks, not whites, led the civil rights movement. But that doesn't mean that LBJ was a villian. On a scene that implies that Johnson sicked the FBI on MLK, DuVernay says this: "I have questions about it, and those questions I put in the film. It does leave room for the grey areas as I see them. It is one vision of it, and it's valid."

Ava, with all due respect, welcome to the Glenn Beck School of History and Fact. On the thread on Amtrak on the board now, I parody an idotic consultant for Fox News who implies that being gay may cause train derailment, and then dismisses her own idiotic accusation by using the all-purpose Glenn Beck alibi: "I'm just asking questions." It is a matter of historical record that LBJ used the "N" word frequently and was a political bully. It is also a matter of historical record that the civil rights legislation he bullied Congress to vote for on a bipartisan basis was his hardest won and proudest achievement, and it is now being systematically disassembled by a right-leaning Supreme Court, which Congressman John Lewis, who was almost beaten to death on the Edmund Pettis bridge by racist cops, says makes him "want to cry.". How all these elements of history and personality and courage played together, we may never know. It's one thing to deconstruct heroes. It's another thing to turn them into villians. In Selma, it's understandable that many white liberals feel DuVernay crossed the line.

 

That's one thing that bothered me, looking at the movie through the lens of a white. What bothered me more is that by portraying LBJ the way she did, I think the movie undercut what I actually view as one of the best examples of effective political whoring ever. This article spells out precisely why it matters if Selma got LBJ wrong:

 

http://time.com/3658593/selma-lbj-history/

 

The article is great if you are a student of history. But if you are not, and you are still following my diatribe, here's an excerpt of what it says: "Selma fails to illuminate how further progress might be made in the future. We still have serious racial problems in this nation. We can only solve them by working together based on shared values. That is what both Martin Luther King Jr. and Lyndon Baines Johnson understood, and that is why they both deserve to be remembered for their enormous achievements today."

 

To be very specific about those achievements, blacks won the right to vote without harrassment, and the black poverty rate went from 55 % in 1959 to 35 % in 1968. Whether MLK or LBJ should get more credit for that is a good question. I'd say MLK, in part because it literally happened over his dead body. If you really want to piss me off, try to convince me that The War On Poverty failed. But if I wanted to elevate LBJ, I'd point to another fact: black poverty continued to decline under Nixon, after both LBJ and MLK were gone, bottoming out at 30 % in 1974, in Nixon's second term - until Clinton brought it into the 20's when he was President, where it still is today. LBJ was intentional about wanting to force his legislation through on a bipartisan basis, so much so that even after his Presidency ended, Republicans like Nixon embraced Great Society programs, I would argue in part because the political center shifted so much because of LBJ and MLK. Maybe Nixon wanted to continue the legacy of MLK and LBJ, but as a political reality, he had to. And we know for sure he was a political whore.

 

Part of what felt wrong about Selma to me is that, if anything, you could accuse LBJ of complicity in the opposite crime. Instead of seeing what happened in Selma as an obstacle, most historians agree that LBJ understood that it was a historial necessity to unify blacks and whites around images of horror that would galvanize the whole nation to act. There is a sad and touching scene in Selma where King consoles the father of Jimmie Lee Jackson, a black activist and church deacon beaten and shot to death by white cops during a peaceful rally. I am sure neither LBJ nor MLK wanted that to happen, but symbols and sacrifices like that are what won the political battles and changed history, just like I suspect the image of a black man being shot in the back 8 times by a white cop earlier this year will eventually change history as well.

 

Selma implies a false dichotomy between principle, as represented by MLK, and pragmatism bordering on obstruction, as represented by LBJ. While we know for sure the two men had tactical differences, they are the best liberal example in my lifetime of exactly why it is important to be unprincipled. They were both consummate political whores. They were both masters of compromise. Thank you, MLK and LBJ. Your achievements could not have happened without each other, and they were in fact enormous.

 

Like I said above, there is a big part of me that feels DuVernay should have won the Best Director Oscar anyway. Even if everything I said is right, nobody is perfect. But hell hath no wrath like pissing off Hollywood's white liberal establishment. This forced a useful conversation that hopefully sets a high bar for everybody, and will result in more black and female members of the Academy. I would not have felt comfortable if 12 Years A Slave falsely portrayed slave owners as heroes who have a God-given right to buy and bully black slaves - which is actually how a lot of so called "religious" leaders rationalized slavery at the time. So I'm not sure why I should feel different about a movie that falsely portrays in scene after scene King having to bully LBJ to agree to the very legislation that LBJ masterfully orchestrated through Congress. You can decide whether this means that once again blacks have to work harder to achieve the same award whites win almost every year, anyway, or whether or not the bar for historical accuracy should simply be set really high for everyone. Either way, I'm grateful to DuVernay for making an incredibly powerful and moving film and starting a conversation people should be having.

 

The other good news is that Selma was #61 at the box office and earned $52 million so far, way more than its production budget of $20 million. Paramount may have been a loudspeaker for civil rights on this movie, but they are first and foremost whores, too, so the fact that the movie made a fair amount of money and got mostly fantastic critical acclaim suggests that Selma will lead to more black-made movies about more black heroes. The #1 movie last year was American Sniper, which netted $349 million so far. Being the liberal I am, I wish those results would have been reversed. Both movies sensitively portray American heroes who died for what they believed in, and both fallen heroes deserve the utmost respect. For me, I'd elevate the man of peace above the man of war.

[+ stevenkesslar]

Speaking about men of peace, I will wind down my epistle (who knew there was a Gospel According To Steven?) by going back to the essay that inspired the title of this thread. As I stated above, the larger circumstances surrounding the political science professor who gave me this essay are interesting, and they amount to a tragic irony, and a profound life lesson for me that goes to the core of what I feel it means to be a political whore.

 

My college professor's name was Paul Wellstone. I read this essay on political principles as a freshman in one of his classes on protest politics, and if I recall right the debate in class the day we discussed it actually centered on civil rights - the specific example being whether or not it was "unprincipled" for white Southern Democrats should to vote against civil rights legislation, knowing if they voted for it they'd be thrown out of office and be replaced by Republicans who would simply reverse what had briefly been won. Paul cut his teeth as both a political activist and academician on the civil rights movement. The question goes to the essence of why we have to be whores, and be willing to stand up for our principles even as we bend them. I have no clue what I said or felt back then, but now my take is that LBJ did his best to forestall what happened - the gradual abandonment of the Democratic Party by Southern whites - by orchestrating events with MLK to force a bipartisan majority for racial equality. It's facile to say that the issue is that white Southerners are simply racists. They are more culturally conservative, so a whole set of issues including gays in the military and gay marriage helped push them where they've gone.

Being a whore doesn't mean you don't have a conscience. In fact, what I loved about Paul was that he spoke, and voted, his conscience. Paul got a chance to put his vote his conscience a few decades later, on an issue even more divisive than civil rights, when he was the only Democratic US Senator running for re-election to vote against authorizing the War in Iraq. We went to war anyway, tragically, in a war that even Republicans running for President like Jeb Bush say was a mistake. We'll never know whether that vote would have cost Paul his seat, because he died in a plane crash a few weeks before the Senate elections in 2002. In some ways his action disproves the whole point of my rant - because he cast a highly principled vote against a wrong war for all the right reasons. But even in that, there was a political calculation. 2002 was not a good year for Democrats, and at various points tracking polls showed him behind in the polls. When he announced his opposition to the Iraq War, he actually bounced back in the polls, because it reminded Minnesotans that he was a conviction politician.

 

The other thing that being a political whore means to me is community, and Paul was a master at building community.

 

Paul once told me while I was in college that he yearned to help start one more movement before he died. On the face of it, Paul did not get his wish. In the Senate, he was a pragmatist who carved out some compromise legaislative victories. But because of his death we'll never know what he might have accomplished if he'd been in the Senate longer.

 

Look below the surface, though, and Paul did get his wish. He did help start a movement: the kind that survives him and will continue to flourish. As a college professor and activist, Paul personally and deeply inspired thousands of people to act on their principles, and on their beliefs about justice. He taught us to do it in an unprincipled way, to compromise, and to win. Many [like me] became professional activists. What I learned from Paul was my motivation. As with so many others, Paul and his ideas are at the core of my conscience. Thank you, Paul, for helping me develop the conscience of a whore.

 

Harold Washington. MLK. LBJ. Paul Wellstone. Those are my heroes. Heroes die, but conscience lives on. It is always there, at the core of us, needing a voice like Paul's to call it into action. If you make a list of what those taught and inspired by Paul accomplished, and will accomplish in the future, he got exactly the kind of movement he yearned for.

 

I wrote this because I thought it would be fun, and because it allowed me to think about different parts of the unprincipled whore I've become.

 

Let me end by restating the excerpt from above, On the Importance Of Being Unprincipled:

 

Now there seems to be a very close connection between this decline in political intelligence and the rise of the appeal to principles. In fact most of the world's political difficulties today focus in men's preference for laying down principles and fighting over them rather than engaging in the give and take of discussion and eventual compromise.

 

Those are the author's words. Now here is my updated paraphrase, applying what I learned as a political whore to what I am now - a whore:

 

Most the the world's difficulties in acceptance of LGBT people result from institutions - religious, governmental, cultural, and otherwise - that lay down intolerant morals and principles and fight over them, rather than simply accepting reality and allowing LGBT people to be themselves and engage in the give and take of sexual fulfillment and eventual personal integration.

 

This is why I am proud to be a whore. If you agree with me, or want to support a community of whores like me, please make a contribution to the Sex Worker's Organizing Project now:

 

http://www.companyofmen.org/threads/support-the-sex-workers-outreach-project-los-angeles.104785/

[+ Chris Eisenhower]

I've always wanted a French lieutenant as a client, so I could say that I was the "French lieutenant's WHORE!"

 

Like Meryl.

[Lankypeters]

Time was, the "W" word was banned from this site. Just sayin'.

[+ WmClarke]

I've always wanted a French lieutenant as a client, so I could say that I was the "French lieutenant's WHORE!"

 

Like Meryl.

Or the Bette Midler parody.

 

"I was up for that part. I read that line. 'I'm the French Lieutenant's WHORE! What's it to ya?!!' I don't know why I didn't get that part..."

[+ Robster]

Or the Bette Midler parody.

 

"I was up for that part. I read that line. 'I'm the French Lieutenant's WHORE! What's it to ya?!!' I don't know why I didn't get that part..."

That's from "Mud Will Be Flung Tonight", correct? Such a great comedy album. Absolutely hilarious.

 

Rob

[+ WmClarke]

That's from "Mud Will Be Flung Tonight", correct? Such a great comedy album. Absolutely hilarious.

 

Rob

Yes. That album still makes me laugh, 30 years later.

[+ WmClarke]

To get his thread back on topic....

 

Great topic, Steven. I found it interesting, illuminating, and insightful. The word "whore" is certainly controversial, but 'owning it' is an important....something. I'm not sure of the right word/phrase to use. An important step--toward what? An important concept--for what and for whom? Words like "whore" are usually used to put someone down; I always like to see someone turn a word like that's on its ear.

[YooperMike]

As much as sex is fun to talk about, most of what I say from here on out is going to deal with the political whore part of who I am. In the Sex Worker Outreach Project thread I linked to above, there are two threads written by Yooper Mike that speak to the emotional core of what it means to be an escort, from the perspective of a client. To me, what he wrote just nails the best that can be said about what people like me are and do. I'm not going to try to top him. (I mean, verbally).

 

Here is an essay that was given to me by a political science professor in college that is the basis for the title of this thread - on the importance of being unprincipled. The larger circumstances surrounding who gave me this essay are interesting, and they amount to a tragic irony, and a profound life lesson for me. I'll return to that later in this thread. For now, what I'll say is this is a good essay to keep by your bed if you don't have an escort in it and don't want to stay up fucking all night - because reading this will definitely put you to sleep.

 

http://greaterclevelandcongregations.org/sites/default/files/On the Importance of Being Unprincipled.pdf

 

For those of you who don't want to go nighty night, here is an excerpt from the essay that captures the main point:

 

"Now there seems to be a very close connection between this decline in political intelligence and the rise of the appeal to principles. In fact most of the world's political difficulties today focus in men's preference for laying down principles and fighting over them rather than engaging in the give and take of dicussion and eventual compromise".

 

Hmmm, sound like anything happening today? Those words were written in 1933. To me, what the guy is saying is the world would be a better place if we were all just better whores. I put the Tea Party now and the anti-war left in the 60's in the same category - they are reactionary and emotional and lots of things - but I'd rather have emotional hotheads like them serving as democratic counterbalances at the grassroots than principled tyrants at the top. What defines the absolute worst of politics boils down to elevating principles to absolutes and forgetting about compromise. If you just go by body count, Hitler, Stalin, and Mao are all great examples of the worst slaughters history can dish out, and all of them in a certain sense were men of "principle," whether it was the principle of the "master race" or the principle of "communism."

 

I could write a book filled with examples I care about on this point, about effective political whoring, but I'll focus on two examples that are closer to home than Mao, Stalin, or Hitler, dealing with the worst part of our history - slavery - and the movement for civil rights. And I'll state upfront that while I am a white liberal, I am intentionally choosing examples that illustrate that being a good political whore is all about compromise, and discussion, and openness, and in my view nothing, nothing, nothing is ever black and white.

 

I spent a long time this week on a trip down memory lane, reading articles and watching videos on the 1983 mayoral campaign of Harold Washington, Chicago's first black Mayor. I took a term off college to volunteer on his campaign, and after he won I spent a Summer as an intern in the Mayor's office. That campaign was the first of many on which I cut my political teeth. It was thoroughly racist, as this article describes:

 

http://historynewsnetwork.org/article/153060

 

http://historynewsnetwork.org/sites/default/files/780px-Harold_Washington_at_the_commissioning_of_USS_Chicago_(SSN-721)_cropped.jpg

 

The reason I included this article is that I just learned something from it that I didn't know, because for decades it was a campaign secret. The authors of the article are two white campaign strategists. As the article details, they intentionally deceived the black finance committee of Washington's campaign and ran two advertising spots that the finance committee had vetoed. In the view of Zimmerman and Katz, the white strategists, running those two ads put Washington over the top in a very bitter and close election. The article describes how racist messages were eating away at Washington's lead in a general election campaign that had previously always been a cake walk, until the Democratic nominee happened to be black. Zimmerman and Katz ran two ads that essentially laid a huge guilt trip on white liberals, which they think got Washington just enough white votes to win. It was the political equivalent of dropping a huge turd in the pool, and then denying it. Had Washington lost, as they say, it would have sucked the life out of an amazing and transformational grassroots organizing campaign. His victory not only changed Chicago, but set the stage for the election of our first black President. As an intern in Washington's office I remember seeing David Axelrod milling around as a political reporter for the Chicago Tribune. Who could have known he'd become one of the key white strategists on Obama's 2008 campaign, and what the Chicago black political class learned that year would contribute mightily to Obama's election?

 

In essence, at a pivotal moment, a few white know-it-alls decided to ignore a committee of accomplished blacks, because they thought the blacks making decisions were politically naive and were too afraid of pushing white people too hard, and they now claim guilt tripping white liberals like me against orders won Washington the election. In a word, they were unprincipled. Were they right? We'll never know. Either way, it doesn't negate the truth of the words Washington spoke during that campaign: ""I can't believe there is no redemption. But that redemption is not gonna come out in hatred. It is gonna come out in positive attitude toward our fellow man.... We are high and good and moral people." Harold proved to me, and to many, that there is redemption.

 

Thank you, Harold, for being a great political whore.

 

Steven,

Thank you for the time and effort you have put into your post. Even with 27 years of formal education, it is a lot for me to digest.

While I do not want to degrade anything you mentioned, please remember the site we are on:

If you have any desire to look into my eyes, make a connection with me and top me, it would be a fantasy come true for me.

If the term whore works for you, or anyone else in this industry, and you (and they) do not feel degraded by it, I can adjust.

For me, it just simply does not give the respect that you guys deserve.

I have met a whole bunch of whores in my life.

So far, none of them have been escorts.

Maybe I should still be looking?

[+ WilliamM]

Harold Washington. MLK. LBJ. Paul Wellstone. Those are my heroes. Heroes die, but conscience lives on. It is always there, at the core of us, needing a voice like Paul's to call it into action. If you make a list of what those taught and inspired by Paul accomplished, and will accomplish in the future, he got exactly the kind of movement he yearned for.

 

I wrote this because I thought it would be fun, and because it allowed me to think about different parts of the unprincipled whore I've become.

 

Steven, I was in college when Lydon Johnson sent the two landmark Civil Rights bills to Congress in 1964 and 1965. Passing the two bills into law was a huge achievement for LBJ, Martin Luther King and the Civil Rights movement. In a poll of political scientists and historians released in 2009, LBJ was rated either #1 or #2 in presidential history for his relationship with Congress. But, the African-Americans civil right advocates were vital as well.

 

Thanks for a very interesting six or seven paragraphs. Please write something else here soon!!

[+ stevenkesslar]

I've always wanted a French lieutenant as a client, so I could say that I was the "French lieutenant's WHORE!"

 

Like Meryl.

Or the Bette Midler parody.

 

"I was up for that part. I read that line. 'I'm the French Lieutenant's WHORE! What's it to ya?!!' I don't know why I didn't get that part..."

 

Chris:

 

I don't know about Meryl, but I'm sure Bette would give you the same advice she gave to Ariana Grande: "Trust your talent. You don't have to make a whore out of yourself to get ahead."

 

And as Lady Gaga sang, "Cause you were born this way, baby." "-)

 

[+ purplekow]

Steven:

 

I will try to be brief because I post more often than every 10 years and as a result I send out my shit in squirts rather than in one 10 year in the making, turd.

I enjoyed your post.

You should write more often.

Selma left me cold, not sure why, but I certainly would not have selected it as best picture nor Ms. DuVernay as best director. I am an old white man, so I am not sure my voice should matter.

It was an artistic point of view, not a documentary. Hence she made her heroes more heroic and your hero a villain. Artiste.

LBJ was a pragmatist above all else, with a keen eye for where the money was and how he could get it. So by your definition, a whore. I am not sure where the money was for LBJ on civil rights and the Great Society, perhaps it was the coin of legacy he was trying to obtain. I am sure there was something in it for him.

Finally, back to a conversation we had between the sheets in 2008 and continued briefly in Palm Springs, I look upon this posting a proof positive that you now agree with me that Hillary was a better choice in 2008 and Obama would have done better to wait until 2016, because in 2008 there was no bigger whore than Hillary. She knew then and knows now, how to compromise principle for the bigger prize and BO unfortunately did not have those skills and that, as much as Republican intransigence, has led to 8 year of less than optimal progress and more recent rule by fiat rather than compromise.

As far as voting for or against the war, voting for the war was the whorish thing to do. In general, one could be against it, but in 2002, a large and increasingly vocal majority of people wanted some blood for the events of 9/11. Those Democrats, looking forward to presidential runs in the near future were smart to vote for the war, given the information and the climate. Just turns out that Bush 2 was a very ineffective liar and the house of cards he built support for the war on, fell so flat, so fast that, by 2008, most of us who were kinda against the war in 2002 but were concerned that Bush 2 might know something we did not, forgot all about the fact that we were kind of okay with the war as well. I can almost hear Hillary saying to Bill in post coital sweet talk, "where are those fucking WMD, that asshole in the White House better find those fucking things or this vote is going to bite me in the ass in a few years. "

[Andy2]

Steven,

 

Thank you for a witty, thoughtful, intelligent, and self-revealing series of posts.

 

One thing I would add is this: When I was growing up, "queer" was a vicious put-down, demonizing and degrading gay people (though of course language-thugs would apply the word to any man whom they wanted to denigrate). In the last generation, many gay people have "reclaimed" the term queer and proudly made it a marker of a sex-positive, anti-hypocrisy sensibility.

 

I interpret your posts here as an intelligent (and, for me, cogent) reclaiming of the word "whore," repurposing it in a positive way and thumbing your nose at those who use the term to judge and put down other people (especially people they desire but cannot "possess").

 

Bravo!

[YooperMike]

Thank you Andy,

Please, I hope that my posts have not implied that Steven's posts were not thoughtful, intelligent and informative. They have given me a great deal to think about.

Thank you Steven.

I may not ever choose to use the term whore to refer to the escorts who have (and are) helping me during a difficult time in my life, as whore is still a term that I find demeaning.

It is a term I use it to describe people of intelligence, or means, or gifts who use those gifts to take advantage of others.

Of course, that can be deceiving, and many times my judgement of what is taking advantage of, and what is actually helpful is just that: judgement.

While I will gentle my interpretation of the word, and see if I can be more accepting of it, I hope my point here is simply that I have great respect, and have benefited from the work of the escorts I have met.

[mike carey]

Steven, that was a wonderful series of posts, as Andy said, witty, thoughtful, intelligent and self-revealing. I still think that using the term 'whore' to someone is demeaning, but I accept your right to use it about yourself. It seems to be one of those terms that while it may be ok to use about yourself is not acceptable to use about someone else. In a way, it works in an essay like the ones you have written because they give it context. Saying the same thing without that context may not work so well. We had a state Premier here who called himself a media tart, which is much the same thing, and it seemed ok to talk about him in such terms. Changing it to media whore would have seemed wrong.

 

I take issue with the 'unprincipled' part of your posts. I don't think the things you cited were unprincipled. Rather, they seemed to me to be sticking to principles when the decision to do so was really difficult.

[+ stevenkesslar]

I hope that my posts have not implied that Steven's posts were not thoughtful, intelligent and informative. I may not ever choose to use the term whore to refer to the escorts who have (and are) helping me during a difficult time in my life, as whore is still a term that I find demeaning.

 

Your posts have not implied that, Mike. The opposite. You are a total sweetheart. The words you used to describe escorts in Danny's thread are some of the most tender and eloquent words I've read describing why escorts deserve respect and support. As I said at the top of my post, one of the reasons I wrote it is to encourage people who haven't done so to support, like you and I both have, Danny's effort to organize and outreach to escorts.

 

Here's the link to Danny's effort again:

 

http://www.companyofmen.org/threads/support-the-sex-workers-outreach-project-los-angeles.104785/page-2#post-966371

 

I am definitely NOT on a campaign to encourage people to use the word whore. Most people see it as a derogatory word, and if you do so, that's fine with me. That's partly what I intended by going into Ava DuVernay's thoughts - she's absolutely right that we should all strive to be open-minded. What I intended to do is be revealing about the thoughts and experiences and feelings of one particular whore - me! - in a way that made it clear that I have a ton of self esteem and have enjoyed my ride, which happily ain't over yet. I feel blessed to be a whore and to have been able to have so many fulfilling experiences.

 

Since I posted my epistle Danny added a new message about his long term plans for SWOP which I hope everyone will read. He is thinking very clearly about this, and I deeply admire what he wants to do. I could write a book about my experiences. But here's a few more words. At one point I was being stalked and needed to hire an attorney. I had the resources to do so. Many escorts don't. I have had my exit strategy as an escort mapped out for over a decade. That's why I had the luxury of buying a home in the desert and playing in my garden and taking time to reflect. Many escorts don't. Kudos to you, Danny, for wanting to help those escorts who are vulnerable and who don't have those resources. That's why I got 100 % behind what Danny's doing (I mean - seriously - who wouldn't want to get behind a hot guy like Danny?)

 

And kudos to you Mike just for being you! :-) Big hugs!

[+ stevenkesslar]

I will try to be brief because I post more often than every 10 years and as a result I send out my shit in squirts rather than in one 10 year in the making, turd....As far as voting for or against the war, voting for the war was the whorish thing to do.

 

We definitely agree about that, PK. I'll go to the grave believing that Hillary and a lot of Democrats voted for the Iraq War in 2002 mostly to protect their asses. Paul stood by his principles, and did something that was very unwhorish. I feel like he has been redeemed by history, as has Max Cleland, the Democratic triple amputee and decorated Vietnam War veteran who lost his Georgia Senate seat in 2002 in a very whorish and ugly campaign that questioned Cleland's commitment to homeland security and compared him to Osama bin Laden and Saddam Hussein.

 

Speaking of war and whore, and just to prove I can at least try to be open-minded, right after I posted my epistle yesterday I went over to Real Clear Politics and found this excellent article:

 

http://time.com/3858793/ronald-reagan-history/

 

Ronald Reagan was not a hero of mine, but like LBJ he was one of the greatest political whores of my lifetime. Poverty did not go down during the Reagan recovery in the way it did in the LBJ or Clinton years, and that does not surprise me, because nothing suggests that the elimination of poverty was Reagan's priority. Defeating the Soviet Union was, and he did that, masterfully, as the TIME piece details. I have read leftish articles that suggest that the Cold War ended despite Reagan, not because of him, and I find claims like that as ridiculous as the claim that Selma proves that Hollywood is NOT a safe place for black women. Reagan was a brilliant political whore, as this article says: "Yet Reagan’s value as a conservative model must begin with recognition of his flexibility in the pursuit of his conservative goals. He understood that the point of politics, ultimately, is not to make speeches but to make progress, and that progress often requires compromise. It’s a lesson for today’s conservatives—and reformers of any stripe".

I have a selfish reason for posting the Reagan article. Yesterday I had to endure 30 minutes on the phone of an Epigonos rant reacting my diatribe. Since he has been my partner in crime and Puerto Vallarta for over a decade, and he had to endure reading my endless liberal crap, I felt like I owed him that much. So read the article on Reagan with contentment, my dear Grasshopper, and you won't have to disagree like you do to about every other word that comes out of my filthy and liberal mouth.

[+ stevenkesslar]

One thing I would add is this: When I was growing up, "queer" was a vicious put-down, demonizing and degrading gay people (though of course language-thugs would apply the word to any man whom they wanted to denigrate). In the last generation, many gay people have "reclaimed" the term queer and proudly made it a marker of a sex-positive, anti-hypocrisy sensibility.

 

I interpret your posts here as an intelligent (and, for me, cogent) reclaiming of the word "whore," repurposing it in a positive way and thumbing your nose at those who use the term to judge and put down other people (especially people they desire but cannot "possess").

 

 

Absofuckinglutely!!!

 

One last time. I'm not on a campaign to promote the use of the word whore, but I am on a campaign to stick up for me and other escorts and us as a diverse community of what I think of as "whores" who are decent and principled and - let's hear it Harold - "high and good and moral people."

 

This was partly a "rear view mirror" post, and partly meant to be "tongue in cheek". I recently learned that JD Daniels enjoyed looking at what's behind me, so I assumed, perhaps egotistically, that you guys might as well. Like JD, who is also thoughtful and witty and warm, I try to be - well, penetrating. I mean, him and I can go on talking for hours, and we never run out of things to say, so I wouldn't mind having someone like him stick it to me, and some of what I wrote is about present and future, and taking words that can be derogatory and flipping them over and, well - you know, sticking it to them. :-)

 

Case in point. My post kind of went to the line of violating my own privacy, so this anecdote will go to the line of violating a client's confidentiality, without hopefully going over.

 

I got an email yesterday from a client who has been one of my "partners in crime" for over a decade, and is one of the people in my network I most respect in terms of the amazing things he has accomplished, and in the context of updating me he shared that he'd spent some quality time with Jeb Bush recently. I know he knows Jeb well and will vote for him, so I wrote back and said, geez, what a coincidence. I just posted something about him on Daddy's forum, and you might want to take a look at it.

 

http://www.companyofmen.org/threads/jeb-bush-on-gay-marriage-the-silver-foot-award.104831/#post-966047

 

Seeing as how Jeb is a decent guy, and he is openly confessing that he finds it "hard to fathom" why the LGBT community has been organizing hard to change "thousands of years of culture and history.....at warp speed" I suggested that it might be swell of my client to take the time to explain to Jeb how he has a very close personal relationship with a "whore" like me and use the opportunity to enlighten Jeb a little about how maybe LGBT families can thrive in and actually strengthen a community of shared values built around what Jeb aptly calls "committed family life." I mean, even someone I truly despise, Dick Cheney, because of the lying he engineered to get us to invade Iraq, got the memo about LGBT equality and dignity when it turned out his daughter was a lesbian.

 

Needless to say, that is a conversation that won't occur, although my client was kind enough to tell me he thought my post was "thoughtful." And I am not necessarily a fan of the Harvey Milk, "in your face" school of pushy self-disclosure. It took a long time for me to feel as comfortable in my skin as I do now, which is in large part my whole point. So as much as I'm all for having people stick it to me, the words and rhythm and styles we each use has to emerge naturally - just like with sex.

 

Sex and whoring has taught me to be open and accepting, just like Paul did, but in a different and actually deeper way. So if anybody else out there wants to stick it to me - I say, "Absofuckinglutely."

[+ Charlie]

Steven, if you haven't yet read Clay Risen's The Bill of the Century, about the politics of passing the Civil Rights Act, you might find it interesting. I am only halfway through it, but having lived through the period in question, I have found the insights presented so far to be quite enlightening about people and events that I observed only from the outside.

[AdamSmith]

Wonderful series of essays, Steven. Don't stop!

 

This note is to underscore/amplify just one of the many insights explicit or implicit in what you wrote:

 

In sociology and cultural studies,reappropriation is the cultural process by which a group reclaims—re-appropriates—terms or artifacts that were previously used in a way disparaging of that group.[1] For example, since the early 1970s, attempts have been made to reappropriate terminology referring tohomosexuality—such as gay and (to a lesser extent) queer and poof. Another example of reappropriation would be anAfrican American collecting lawn jockeys or other artifacts of darky iconography. The term reappropriationcan also extend to counter-hegemonicre-purposing, such as citizens with no formal authority seizing unused publicor private land for community use.

 

The term reappropriation is an extension of the term appropriation orcultural appropriation used inanthropology, sociology and cultural studies to describe the reabsorbing ofsubcultural styles and forms, or those from other cultures, into mass culture through a process of commodification: the mass-marketing of alternate lifestyles, practices, and artifacts...

 

http://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reappropriation

[adannyboy]

In a recent discussion on PrEP and HIV prevention, I was invited to be a panelist and speak on my experience taking truvada. I spoke about taking it while doing sex work and somehow in the conversation, reclaimed/reappropriated the phrase "cum dumpster."

[YooperMike]

Your posts have not implied that, Mike. The opposite. You are a total sweetheart. The words you used to describe escorts in Danny's thread are some of the most tender and eloquent words I've read describing why escorts deserve respect and support. As I said at the top of my post, one of the reasons I wrote it is to encourage people who haven't done so to support, like you and I both have, Danny's effort to organize and outreach to escorts.

 

Here's the link to Danny's effort again:

 

http://www.companyofmen.org/threads/support-the-sex-workers-outreach-project-los-angeles.104785/page-2#post-966371

 

I am definitely NOT on a campaign to encourage people to use the word whore. Most people see it as a derogatory word, and if you do so, that's fine with me. That's partly what I intended by going into Ava DuVernay's thoughts - she's absolutely right that we should all strive to be open-minded. What I intended to do is be revealing about the thoughts and experiences and feelings of one particular whore - me! - in a way that made it clear that I have a ton of self esteem and have enjoyed my ride, which happily ain't over yet. I feel blessed to be a whore and to have been able to have so many fulfilling experiences.

 

Since I posted my epistle Danny added a new message about his long term plans for SWOP which I hope everyone will read. He is thinking very clearly about this, and I deeply admire what he wants to do. I could write a book about my experiences. But here's a few more words. At one point I was being stalked and needed to hire an attorney. I had the resources to do so. Many escorts don't. I have had my exit strategy as an escort mapped out for over a decade. That's why I had the luxury of buying a home in the desert and playing in my garden and taking time to reflect. Many escorts don't. Kudos to you, Danny, for wanting to help those escorts who are vulnerable and who don't have those resources. That's why I got 100 % behind what Danny's doing (I mean - seriously - who wouldn't want to get behind a hot guy like Danny?)

 

And kudos to you Mike just for being you! Big hugs!

 

Thank you for the big hugs!

I will do my best to figured out a way to experience them in person.

If anyone wants to invest in Exxon, now is probably a good time. I will take Stevens hugs with me as I hook the 20' Yukon XL behind the 40' coach and run away from the beautiful desert to northern Michigan for most of the summer. If any of you find your self that far north (it's north of Canada), please let me know.

We seem to be very far and few up there. Even if there's no chemistry, I am sure I can show you hospilatilty.

Thank you for the feeling that I am not alone.