Center For Sex and Culture

San Francisco in Exile Presents:
Ecstacies & Elegies: In Honor of International Day to End Violence
Against Sex Workers
Friday, December 18th, 2009
7:30 doors, 8pm show
Center for Sex & Culture, 1519 Mission Street @ 11th, San Francisco
$10-20 sliding scale (nobody turned away)

International Day to End Violence Against Sex Workers is observed
annually on December 17th by sex workers, our advocates, friends,
families and allies. Originally conceived as a memorial and vigil for
the victims of the Green River Killer in Seattle Washington, it has
evolved into an annual international event. The day calls attention to
hate crimes committed against sex workers all over the globe, as well
as the need to remove the stigma and discrimination from all kinds of
sex work.

In “Elegies & Ecstacies,” current and former sex worker performance
artists, writers, and visionaries will honor sex worker community —
remembering our beloved dead and celebrating the living. Bring your
love, your sorrow, your rage, and your joy for what is sure to be an
incredible night.

Featuring:
ANNIE DANGER
RYKA AOKI DE LA CRUZ
JUBA KALAMKA
LOGAN KNIGHT
NOMY LAMM
and
the work of FRANCES VARIAN (as read by Gina de Vries)

Curated by Gina de Vries.

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**Please refrain from wearing scented products to ensure that audience
members and performers with chemical sensitivities can attend.

PERFORMER BIOS:

ANNIE DANGER is a fierce and fearsome performer. Raised in the desert
by a pack of drag queen werewolves who were themselves a litter
produced by Leigh Bowery, Marina Abramovic, and Andy Kaufman, Ms.
Danger wants nothing more than your allegiance to the tenets of your
own thoughtful ethics and a sturdy but flexible sense of humor. She is
a transsexual woman who lives and loves in the San Francisco Bay area
mostly. You can find out more at: www.anniedanger.webs.com

RYKA AOKI DE LA CRUZ has recently appeared at the 2009 National Queer
Arts Festival, 2009 Fresh Meat, 2007 San Francisco Pride Main Stage,
2006 National Gay and Lesbian Theatre Festival, Ladyfest South,
Atlanta Pride, UCLA’s OutCRY, Santa Cruz Pride, and Emory University’s
Pride Week. Ryka was keynote speaker at UC Santa Barbara’s 2005 Pride
Week and was the inaugural performer for San Francisco’s first ever
Transgender Stage at San Francisco Pride 2005. Ryka is the author of
five chapbooks and has been published in numerous literary journals.
Her work appears in American Eyes: New Asian American Short Stores for
Young Adults, which won an American Library Association Award as one
of its “Best Books for Young Adults.” She has also closely worked with
the American Association of Hiroshima-Nagasaki A-Bomb Survivors, and
two of her compositions have been adopted by the group as its official
“Songs of Peace.” Ryka has an MFA in Creative Writing from Cornell
University, is a founder of Cornell University’s Asian American
Playhouse and is the recipient of a University Award from the Academy
of American Poets. Ryka was a charter member of the Transgender
Advisory Committee for Asian Pacific Islanders for Human Rights
(APHIR), and was head judo coach at UCLA and Cornell University. She
is also the founder of Trans/Giving, LA’s only art/performance series
dedicated to trans, genderqueer, and intersex artists, and was
recently honored by the California State Senate for her “extraordinary
commitment to free speech and artistic expression, as well as the
visibility and well-being of Transgender people.” Ryka is currently a
professor of English at Santa Monica College.

JUBA KALAMKA appears extensively in Alex Hinton’s 2005 documentary
“Pick Up the Mic”, an active survey of the homohop scene through
documentation of artists on tour and in performance at the various
PeaceOUT festivals. An essay/interview with Kalamka and former
bandmate Tim’m West appears in hip hop writer Jeff Chang’s collection
Total Chaos: the Art and Aesthetics of Hip Hop (Basic Civitas
Books,2007). Kalamka was contacted by artist and sex worker advocate
Annie Oakley (whom he’d met at the Olympia, Washington queer arts fest
HomoAGoGo) and accepted an invitation to tour with The Sex Workers Art
Show, a month long cross-country cabaret style theater event featuring
current and former sex worker artist/activists. His second solo
recording, “Ooogabooga Under Fascism”, will be released on Sugartruck
in late 2009. In December 2006, Kalamka completed the MFA program in
Poetics (minoring in Queer and Activist Performance through the
schools Experimental Performance Institute) at New College of
California in San Francisco. He is still working at his really cool
day job like a real musician would and planning solo touring and
lecturing.

LOGAN KNIGHT is queer…southern…trash. He came to writing through
pornography that didn’t show his body; through crowded, tiny queer
open-mics that let him break five minute time limits over and over;
and because his family only speaks to each other in the past tense.
From a long line of Pentecostal preachers, he thinks this may be how
he’s channeled the charismatic impulses of his family. He’s currently
working through an MFA program in fiction at San Francisco State
University.

NOMY LAMM is a writer, performer and voice teacher. she recently
performed in Sins Invalid, an event that highlights work by queers and
people of color with disabilities on subjects of sexuality,
embodiment, and social justice; and at Flabulous! with her band
OBEAST. she is currently a student in the MFA creative writing program
at State, where she is working on her first novel, The Best Part Comes
After the End. nomy has toured with the Sex Workers Art Show and
served on the board of the Young Women’s Empowerment Project, an
organization by and for young women and girls in the sex trade and
street economies (youarepriceless.org).

FRANCES VARIAN is a writer, performer, and community activist who
currently lives in Durham, North Carolina with her partner. In the
past decade she has worked in nearly every facet of the sex work
industry in between low paying gigs in abortion clinics and no-paying
gigs teaching inner city Youth the power of language and embracing
their own stories. She is proud to be a working-class queer femme
women’s health expert, poet, essayist, a sensual massage parlor
manager, phone sex operator, soft core porn voice-over starlet and
fetish model. In September of 2004 she premiered a 30 minute feature
length poem, choreographed to the opera Carmen written for the women
killed by Gary Ridgway - The Green River Killer - for the Bumbershoot
Arts Festival in Seattle, Washington. She believes that capitalism
killed the Sacred Whore and that we must think critically about the
ways privilege affects the safety of all working folks, especially
those who are more vulnerably gendered. She also holds fast to the
belief that sex is one of the most profoundly sacred and joyful gifts
we are given in this life. She is a femmeinist, a working girl’s
working girl, and a proud member of many different communities who
have had to hold too many damn memorial services and funerals for
people who should still be alive. She carries their ghosts with her
every day of her life in a pocket she has sewn over her heart. She is
currently fighting advanced late stage neurological, cardiac and
musculoskelatal Lyme Disease. She is uninsured and unemployed and
relies solely on the generous contributions of her community to obtain
medical care - for the past year her ability to treat her disease has
been negatively impacted by the devastating economic crisis everyone
is facing - and as a result her disease has had the upper hand for far
too long. Though she considered herself “retired” from the business
she is currently planning on re-entering the world of sex work in an
attempt to earn enough money to win her life back. She would greatly
prefer to write a poem that speaks to some stranger, or sit and talk
with a 16 year old girl until she understands the necessity of finding
her own voice and loving it enough to use it. She would prefer to make
enough money stopping a beautiful woman from bleeding out after an
abortion but none of those things are worth a tiny fraction of what
she can be payed for providing an executive gentleman with a happy
ending. She prays every day for a happy ending for all of us. And she
believes every single one of us holds the power to create change and
could do so immediately if we simply embraced our own limitless supply
of strength, courage and compassion. She is honored to participate in
this event. Please feel free to drop by her site and learn a bit about
Lyme Disease and leave a note in her guest book - she really loves
that: www.helphealfran.org

GINA DE VRIES is a writer, rabble-rouser, writing instructor,
performer, cultural worker, porn model, seasonal pro-switch, and queer
femme Paisan pervert. Her work has appeared dozens of places, ranging
from the academic to the pornographic, and she has performed, taught,
and lectured in chapels, leatherbar backrooms, and the halls of the
Ivy League. Other shows she’s curated include “Girl Talk: a cis &
trans woman dialogue” (with Julia Serano) and “Rebel Girl: a riot
grrrl nostalgia show.” Gina teaches a writing workshop for sex workers
at San Francisco’s Center for Sex & Culture (where she also serves on
the Advisory Board). She’s currently pursuing her MFA in Fiction
Writing at San Francisco State University, where she is working on a
kinda-fictional-kinda-not novel that is mostly about witchy Southern
Italian Catholicism and her family lineage of queers, whores, &
witches; and a book of short fiction that is mostly about sex, gender,
& desire. She believes in the transformative spiritual powers of
writing, sex, and justice, and enjoys political discussion as
foreplay. Cruise her online at queershoulder.tumblr.com.

ABOUT SAN FRANCISCO IN EXILE (SFinX): Founded in 2001 by queer arts
visionaries Kris Kovick and Sara Moore, San Francisco in Exile is a
longstanding cornerstone of San Franciscan queer and outsider culture
— promoting new and emerging queer artists alongside queer arts Most
Valuable Players. Find out more at www.sfinx.org.



--
ginadevries.com /// queershoulder.tumblr.com