Amber Dawn is a writer, filmmaker, and performance artist based in Vancouver. In 2012, she won the $4,000 Dayne Ogilvie Prize from the Writers’ Trust of Canada, an annual award given to a lesbian, bisexual or transgender writer who shows promise in their work. In 2013, she released How Poetry Saved My Life, a memoir about sex work and how Amber Dawn changed her life through the power of writing.
How Poetry Saved My Life won the Vancouver Book Award and was a finalist for a Lambda Literary Award.
From How Poetry Saved My Life:
“How old are you?” he asks as he opens the door.
There is no right answer to this question, so I guess. “Twenty-seven.”
“Becky told me you were twenty-five.”
Becky isn’t a real woman. She is the name that all three of the receptionists at the escort agency use when arranging outcalls. Becky’s job is to move product. The product is sexual fantasy, which differs from other products in that the buyer wants to be an uninformed consumer. In this marketplace of attractive inaccuracy, if the client on the phone likes breasts, Becky makes double Ds out of C-cups. If he likes younger women, Becky tells him I am twenty-five.
As the worker–the sex worker–the job is less about embodying the client’s fantasy and more about making the imitation seem like money well spent. Lying about my age, breast size, weight, cultural background, hair colour, college education, lust for certain sex acts and so on, is a routine guile that routinely causes me anxiety. Where will the client draw the line between fantasy and deception? The fantasy holds my payment. But finding myself on the side of deception is delicate. Let’s just say that in sex work, there is no standardized way for a client to lodge a complaint.
Standing rigid and at least six feet tall in the threshold of his waterfront home, this man begrudgingly decides it is worth $250 to pretend that I am twenty-five, when actually I am thirty. He hands me a billfold and ushers me in.
From How Poetry Saved My Life by Amber Dawn ©2013. Published by Arsenal Pulp Press.
