Largehearted Boy’s Book Notes series showcases authors’ music playlists to relate to their published books. David Henry Sterry created a seven song playlist to accompany Hos, Hookers, Call Girls and Rent Boys, and lists his Top 25 songs about sex workers. Read the full article here!
Hos, Hookers, Call Girls & Rent Boys took me six years to write. Which is odd when you consider I didn’t actually write it. It’s an anthology I put together with my partner in crime RJ Martin, Jr. There are 71 writers in this book, and the only thing they all have in common is that they made money in the sex business. They are from the creamy top and shitty bottom of the economic food chain, and everywhere in between. $2,500 an hour escorts, $100 rent boys, and $10 crack hos are bedfellows in our book. Trust me, it’s just as strange as it sounds to wrangle 71 industrial sex technicians. A bit like herding cats in heat. With many of the same drawbacks and benefits. Ironically, this book full of hos was an act of pure love. After we paid everyone, we actually lost money. And it was such a stupidly difficult book to put together. We were inundated with submissions from industrial sex technicians all over the world. From Xavier Hollander, the happy hooker; to Dr. Annie Sprinkle, Post Modernists Porn Priestess; to Georgina Spelvin, legendary star of the great movie with sex in it ever made, the Devil in Miss Jones. And lots of work-a-day, meat and potatoes, working stiffs. Frankly, most of the writing was atrocious. Actually, that was the only other thing these people have to have in common. Their writing had to be good. But a big huge chunk of it came in handwritten scrawls. We had transcribe and edit all that. Add teh fact that it took us years of constant failure and rejection, from huge publishing houses, C-list agents, university presses, publishing houses that specialize in exactly this kind of book, even publishers so small that when you call them, someone picks up the phone and says, “Hello, this is Joe’s Publishing, I’m Joe, talk to me.” This book changed my life profoundly, from Hollywood calling, to prostitution abolitionists and decriminalizationists both calling for my head on a pike. But while I was making it, I often felt like Sisyphus, pushing that big huge rock up that big huge mountain for what seemed like eternity. Agony, ecstasy, exhilaration, exhaustipaton, and finally a sense of intense satisfaction. And with me every step of the way was teh thing that has always soothed my savage beast : music. These are the songs I turned to a lot when I put this together. I also accumulated a long list of songs about industrial sex technicians, which I’m including.
1. ”Just a Gigolo/I. Ain’t Go Nobody,” Louis Prima
2. ”Louise,” by Paul Siebel
3. ”Sex Machine,” by the hardest working man in show business, James Brown
4. ”Cocaine,” by Rev. Gary Davis
5. ”Lady Marmalade,” written by Bob Crewe and Kenny Nolan
6. ”Walk on the Wild Side,” by Lou Reed
7. ”YMCA,” written by Jacques Morali, Victor Willis, Henry Belolo, and made famous of course by the one, the only Village People
Read the rest of the article & Top 25 songs here!
