What do standup comedy and stripping have in common? “I see them as the same, but one is better paid and heavily stigmatised. They’re both disappointments to your parents,” says Jacqueline Frances, who has careers in each and has the online pseudonym Jacq the Stripper. “Strip clubs and comedy clubs used to be the same thing: cabarets. You’re getting people to feel something, and don’t have a lot of time to do it, so you need to be swift and clever.”
There have always been performers who combine both jobs. “A lot of people in the arts have dabbled, out of necessity, in various areas of the sex industry, while in between jobs or to finance the Edinburgh fringe,” says comedian Siân Docksey, who has worked as a stripper before.
Some comedians have made shows about their experiences of the sex industry, including Desiree Burch on her career as a professional dominatrix and Fern Brady on working as a stripper to help fund her university studies. Frances says “money drew me to stripping” and comedy was a way “to channel all the shit I couldn’t say (but desperately needed to) at the club”.
The pandemic has hit these industries hard, leaving those who rely on one or both in a precarious position. With venues shut, standups and strippers found their workplaces off limits, while many sex workers lost all income as they weighed up the risks of being exposed to the virus.
In March, the Sex Worker Advocacy and Resistance Movement (Swarm) started making plans for a hardship fund. By the end of June, the grassroots activist group had raised and distributed over a quarter of a million pounds to more than 1,200 sex workers in financial hardship.
Meanwhile, in a report released in July, the Live Comedy Association found that 57% of respondents had already lost more than half of their annual income as a result of the pandemic. With some locked out of arts council funding or unable to access a grant through the UK government’s self-employment income support scheme (SEISS), schemes including The Fleabag Fund, NextUp’s Heckle the Virus and Bryony Kimmings’ Gig Aid were established to help plug the gaps.
“For comics, I feel so bad for people who’ve spent years building a career in a precarious industry to then have that disappear overnight,” says Docksey. “Sex workers are stigmatised for the job anyway – to then not be getting any clients, that’s a tough situation. There is a bit of a stereotype of comics and strippers as just in it for themselves, but in my own experience, the best thing about stripping was other strippers. And you can’t do comedy without other people. People in these professions go out of their way to support each other.”
While there are parallels between the experiences of gig workers in both industries, Swarm’s statement on the impact of Covid-19 highlighted the key difference: “Sex workers’ particular vulnerability stems not only from the inevitable bodily contact involved in face-to-face sex work but from the fact that our work is partially criminalised and hugely stigmatised.”
Recognising this, Docksey decided to organise an event to raise emergency funds for Swarm and National Ugly Mugs (an organisation that works to end violence against sex workers). Stand Up for Sex Workers will combine comedy, pole dancing, drag and more in a live show on Zoom. The lineup includes Frances, Burch and Brady, alongside pole performers Kitty Velour and Lauren Elise, drag act That Ray, sex worker and comedian Carmen Ali, and others.
Ali and Frances have both experienced the solidarity inherent in Swarm’s pandemic mutual aid efforts and Docksey’s fundraising. “Strippers are taking care of each other because we’ve always operated on the fringes and are used to being excluded from help from the government. We take care of each other like we always have,” Frances says.
With times tough for all performers, Docksey was determined no one would work for free. She teamed up with HIV charity Wandsworth Oasis, with which she’s run an LGBTQ+ comedy night in the past, allowing her to pay performers and send all money raised to sex worker organisations.
The benefit takes place on International Day to End Violence Against Sex Workers. “Sex workers are still subject to a disproportionate amount of violence,” Docksey says. “If people claim to be feminist and don’t include sex workers within that feminism, it’s bad feminism. I try to be careful about not glamorising or spreading false myths about work in the sex industry, because there’s still a lot of misapprehension that people start escorting and all of their problems are solved. The reality for a lot of people is very different.”
Not everyone can talk openly about working in the sex industry – one of many layers of privilege. Stripping, for example, often carries less risk and stigma than in-person sex work, and some would not class strippers as “sex workers”. Part of the night’s goal is to explore different experiences, which includes making space for people to speak for themselves. Ali will be performing standup inspired by her on-and-off work as a stripper with the alter ego April Fiasco.
“Sometimes you go to a comedy club and see a joke about sex work, but it’s often the male, heterosexual consumer view,” says Ali. “The sex worker is the butt of the joke. It’s important to use my privilege as a sex worker who is ‘out’ to speak about that. Sex work is hard and complicated. Sometimes it’s amazing, sometimes it’s not. But I can take the piss out of it because I’ve done it.”
Docksey agrees: “We still have quite a voyeuristic approach to talking about sex work. The things I really enjoyed about Desiree and Fern’s shows – where they talked about strip clubs and pro-domming stuff – was that it’s in periods where things are really mundane that really funny stuff happens.”
Pre-lockdown, Docksey was writing a comedy show (paused for now as it’s “too doom and gloom”) exploring “what stripping told me about men’s mental health”, inspired by “this weird period where I was working for a men’s mental health charity during the day, then at evenings and weekends I was working in a strip club doing hands-on men’s mental health in a totally different context.”
Meanwhile, Ali’s found much humour in work incidents – from tampon strings falling out and holding in farts during private dances, to unbelievable things customers have said to her in the club.
Ali has also co-created a new kind of strip club community allowing strippers to keep working during the pandemic. Cybertease, which hosts an afterparty to the benefit gig, is a self-proclaimed feminist, socialist virtual strip club. This means all performers are paid equally and no one has to “pay to play” – a practice in mainstream clubs where strippers are charged to work at the venue. It also means welcoming a more diverse range of performers – and customers – than standard strip clubs.
“Whereas some people might not feel comfortable walking into a mainstream strip club, we have loads of female audience members, loads of couples watching, a massive queer following,” Ali says. “It’s about creating a space that is more inclusive – we want to challenge the stigma around sex work and dismantle the patriarchal norms that people associate with strip clubs.” Ali hopes to continue running Cybertease after venues reopen. Running the club has reaffirmed her love of her sex work community.
While acknowledging the grim reality of the pandemic, Docksey also sees community solidarity as a silver lining. “Mutual aid isn’t enough to compensate for the immense hardship people have found themselves in, but the fact that it comes from a peer support network is really meaningful,” Docksey says. “As soon as the lockdown happened, in my bubble it was queers and sex workers who sprang into action.
“These are not demographics who expect anyone else to come to your rescue. We have to create this from the ground up.”
The Link LonkDecember 11, 2020 at 02:40PM
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Standups and sex workers unite: 'I can joke about it because I've done it' - The Guardian
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