Midnight Sex Talk

CROSS BONES GRAVEYARD - EVENTS AND PETITION

There's lots happening around Cross Bones at the moment. If you've come here for the first time, welcome - and if you'd like to know more about this important part of London's sexual history, go here (about our show Dirty Old Town), and here (about our Halloween show all about this ancient prostitutes' burial place, featuring John Constable, aka John Crow (see below) and Jahnet DeLight).

Here's another link to the petition about creating a memorial garden at the site in Southwark, London SE1. Grab it and get everyone you know to fill it in.
Cross Bones Petition pdf (41.8K).

And here's what's coming up in the next few weeks...

LGBT History Walk
Tuesday 28th February 2006 at 7pm
Southwark poet and performer John Constable conducts this free walk especially commissioned for LGBT history month. John reveals the secret history of Southwark's medieval Liberty with its cross-dressing actors and prostitutes licensed by Bishops, and performs excerpts from The Southwark Mysteries, his own work inspired by it. This unusual guided tour explores the history of sexual identity, with particular reference to LGBT-related stories. You are also welcome to come and share your own knowledge and personal anecdotes, to help recover a lost part of LGBT history. You don't have to be Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual or Transgendered to come on this walk (your guide long ago outed himself as happily heterosexual - though he's always willing to discuss his youthful attempts to swing both ways!) but no homophobes please!
Meet at The George Inn, 77 Borough High Street. The walk lasts up to 2 hours. Free.

Cross Bones Graveyard, Redcross Way, SE1
Thursday 23rd March (happens every 23rd of the month)
At 7pm on the 23rd of each month, the mysterious Friends of Cross Bones meet at the gates of the old cemetery - to renew the shrine with flowers, candles, incense and other totemic offerings; to invoke and sing songs; to honour the Goose and her outcast dead who are buried there; and to envision the memorial garden of the future. If John Crow and Kate E Kaos can't be there in the flesh, they will leave signs and sigils on the gate for celebrants to find and activate. We hope you will come and help hold this sacred space.
Free. (Borough or London Bridge tubes)

and, looking ahead:

'The Great Southwark Dragon Quest'
Saturday 22nd and Sunday 23rd April (St George's Day weekend) £5.00
In association with Mental Fight Club (MFC) Southwark Mysteries present two guided Dragon Quests, searching for signs of St George and the Dragon around the Borough (including the area formerly known as St George's Fields).

'The Outcast Goddess': A Night with John Crow
Wednesday 10th May - 7.15 for 7.30pm start. £5.00
Performer, poet, cult figure and urban shaman: such is how people have variously described John Crow, aka John Constable. Tonight he talks on challenging fundamentalist thought and reconnecting to the hermetic Mysteries in 21st century London. To illustrate these ideas, he will perform a selection of his poems and songs. Many of these were received from his spirit guide, The Goose - the spirit of a medieval prostitute, licensed by the church yet buried in the unconsecrated Cross Bones graveyard. Go here for booking details.

More on John:

John Constable is a playwright, poet and performer. He is the author of The Southwark Mysteries, an epic cycle of poems and mystery plays which have been performed in Shakespeare's Globe, Southwark Cathedral and at many festivals. The Southwark Mysteries and a collection of his Sha-Manic Plays are both published by Oberon Books. John’s plays include Black Mas, Tulip Futures and the stage adaptation of Mervyn Peake's Gormenghast (David Glass Ensemble at The Lyric, Hammersmith, and British Council world tours, due to be revived in 2006). His solo shows include I Was An Alien Sex God and Raingods Become Me. John also directs community dramas, holds storytelling workshops and leads unusual guided walks. As the shaman John Crow, he conducts rituals, initiations and workshops including his Shamanic Playhouse - teaching ways to access the vision world and transform perceptions of reality. gooseandcrow.co.uk" (film clips) and Southwark Mysteries.

SUNDAY 26th FEBRUARY - TAKING A BREAK

Yes, my lovelies - even your intrepid presenters need some time off now and again, so we won't be in the studio this week.

But wait! You will instead be able to hear our second ever show, Porn versus Erotica. With guests Robert Posner and Lou Errington, we tease out the similarities between these two supposedly dissimilar concepts. And watch out for the hand-selected worst porn movie titles ever. Here I must namecheck the dude who sat down and sourced all this stuff. Brad Yung, we salute you. If you missed it first time round, here's a chance to catch it again.

WHEN: Sunday 26th February, 11.30pm-12.30am UK time.
WHERE: Resonance 104.4 FM in London, or online worldwide at http://www.resonancefm.com.

Email us anytime at midnightsextalk at gmail dot com, and we'll be back live in the studio on Sunday 12th March.

PROSTITUTION ROUNDUP

To the left, a brief nod to yesterday's Hallmark festival. Sadly, the Natural History Museum's Diamonds exhibition, of which this was a souvenir, had to close before I got to see it.

At the last minute, we were pleased to welcome Jahnet DeLight back on the show, who always has her own take on things, and is less depressed about the law changes than anyone she knows.

Others are less patient about the continuing refusal, by policy makers, to admit that sex has been sold for thousands of years, and will continue to be so, whatever the law says. All is not lost everywhere, though, as it was generally agreed that New Zealand currently has the most enlightened attitude to sex work.

Founder of the International Union of Sex Workers Dr Ana Lopes's main point was that without unionisation, it would have been much harder to get sex workers' voices heard during the consultation, and that the government stance on sex work should be about workers' safety and rights, rather than continuing to pathologise prostitution as a social problem.

She also made the very important point that if sex workers can unionise, with all the ongoing complications in their lives, then anyone can. This has implications for any groups of women, or anyone at all, who ought to be heard as one voice, such as single mothers, and women working at home. In fact, Cari Mitchell of the English Collective of Prostitutes reminded us that the majority of sex workers are single mothers. She also pointed out that, although there was disappointment when the idea of having special safety (or 'tolerance') zones was thrown out, the reality is that they would not have been enlightened utopian enclaves, but dark car parks in already dodgy areas that would attract more trouble for those working there.

Finally, here's more from Jahnet, in an email before the show:

"It is a business like any other and we should be able to work just like any therapist or entertainer.

"The street trade will always exist. It's the first and the easiest way to be able to trade. You don't need to be hired or judged to earn fast cash. You go there when you need and you get. The young, inexperienced, alone, desperate, on drugs, can earn enough money to survive.

"Respectable sex workers are a boon to society and only in this way can we change the status quo. Porn is now mainstream. I would like to see new definitions of our work that leads to men and women regarding us with interest and discovery. Perhaps even generating the need for training places that train students how to be a surrogate, how to massage, how to deal with stress, and how to run a business.

"Some kind of amnesty is needed as well, so we can all begin again, start afresh creating an industry and a revenue not just for ourselves but also the society we live in. We have done this in the past. Many of our great buildings were built on revenue from the sex trade. Let's not give it to an ugly black market that simply builds nightmares..."

The show will be podcast soon. Meanwhile - finally, a subscription icon!

SUNDAY 12th FEBRUARY - PROSTITUTION AND THE NEW UK SEX LAWS

There's been a lot going on with our sex laws recently, here in the UK.

Similar to the abortion debate, there is the usual forest of moral panic to negotiate, before you get anywhere near the people who actually do it, or who work with those who do. As always, there are conflicting sets of arguments, between those who say that many sex workers are not coerced, and are doing it of their own free will, and those who say the opposite.

Then there is the class argument, whose two poles are the girl who is addicted to drugs and has to work on the street just to keep going, and the more middle class sex worker, who does it to support her studies, or just likes the shopping possibilities.

We'll be speaking to Ana Lopes of the International Union of Sex Workers, who is also president of the sex workers' branch of the GMB. We will also be speaking to a representative from the English Collective of Prostitutes.

Tune in, as usual, from 11.30pm-12.30am UK time, on Resonance 104.4 FM in London, and on the internet at Resonancefm.com. You can text us during the show on 07957 362 182, and you can email us anytime using the 'Email me' link to the left. If you want to talk live on air, send us your number and we'll you back.

Below, UK parliament. Who knows what goes on there?

CROSS BONES PETITION
Finally, here's the petition we've been promising, about creating a memorial garden at the site of the old Cross Bones prostitutes graveyard in Southwark. Grab it and get everyone you know to fill it in.
Cross Bones Petition pdf (41.8K).

ADDICTION ROUNDUP

Question of the night:

What happens, exactly, in a Sex Addicts Anonymous meeting?

OK, you could be sitting in an AA meeting, and someone might perhaps tell a story about how they were cracking up one night, HALT and all that, went out and bought a bottle of whisky, had one glass and then felt so terrible about it that they chucked the rest of it down the sink. But how would a sex addict tell the same story?

Does some guy really stand up and talk about how he'd given up doing the cleaning lady three months ago, but then the other afternoon she was doing the bath and he just couldn't stop himself, and was half way inside her when he suddenly saw the error of his ways and sent her home early with double pay?

Surely not. There's a pornography of booze and drugs, sure, but there's no obliging interface here, no conceptual buffer. A shag story's a shag story, really. Fascinating stuff.

Here's one of my Time Out problem page columns, from a couple of years ago. They never got onto the web the first time round, but later on this year I should be getting a website up and running, and some of them will live on. As always, enjoy...

SEX ADDICTION – FACT OR FICTION?

A mate of mine just got his car scratched up for the third time in a year. He jokes about ‘new bird – new paint job’ because he can’t stay faithful to a woman for more than a few days. I almost admire him for his shagging habits – where he finds the energy I just don’t know. But does he have a problem? Does this mean he’s a ‘sex addict’?
Tony

Tony, my love, didn’t you realise? We’re All Addicts Now. In a society where you can go to a clinic and be treated for too much text-messaging, rest assured that your fondness for collecting foreign fag packets, or walking the same route to work every day, will soon have a medical name, and a billable therapy session available to correct it.

Looking back, I’ve met a lot of people (mainly men) who would qualify as sex addicts. They showed all the symptoms: relentless lying about their whereabouts; well-practised methods of telling you that ‘you’re the one with the problem’ if you don’t believe their stories; astonishing manipulation techniques when unmasked; and theatrical helplessness in the face of their ‘needs’. But no-one would have suggested they went to therapy. They’d more likely be given a pat on the back, while the women snarled in a corner, ignoring each other’s advice.

I actually find the concept of sex addiction pretty creepy. It’s one thing using a substance to take yourself away from reality for a while, but using another person is something else. It‘s not about orgasms, or real desire, but about power and insecurity. Your friend is quite clearly trying to fill a hole, if you’ll forgive the analogy. But unless a rejected lady takes him hostage at gunpoint, he may never get the shock he needs to stop messing around.

A sexual compulsion as strong as this can be seen as an illness, particularly when others are getting hurt. But call it an addiction as well, and everyone wants one: it’s increasingly fashionable to define yourself as helpless in the face of your body chemistry. ‘My illness made me do it’ is becoming more popular as an excuse for all kinds of behaviour. Willpower alone cannot cure cancer, so why should it cure the urge to fuck everything in sight? And it’s far safer to admit to an addiction, which still seems ‘cool’, than to admit to the mental disturbance that underlies it. Ruby Wax, in her autobiography How Do You Want Me?, notes that in the smart clinic she attended, the addicts looked down on the mere depressives as pathetic.

You don’t mention whether your friend has a wife and kids. If he’s officially single, you could argue that he’s just doing what he feels like, and caveat emptor to any woman who things she can ‘change him’. Also, what happened to free love? A lot of women dream of having several men in their lives, one for security and niceness, and one for hot sex. This guy might have an important role to play, somewhere. He could even start charging. But, to get out of fantasyland for a minute, until your he realises he’s got a problem, there’s nothing you can do except keep your girlfriends away from him. And were he to become a Recovery Bore, you might well start to miss his Casanova side.

As an aside, it’s funny how women who publicly declare their sexual freedom, such as Anais Nin, get held up as underground heroines. But not by those who knew them personally, it has to be said.

We'll be back in the studio on February 12th. Happy Trying To Ignore The Two-Week Build-Up To Valentine's Day.