SEXIS WRONG

Some of My Best Friends
Are Naked
Interviews With Seven Erotic Dancers
Tim Keefe
Editor’s Note: From 1985 to 1991, former therapist, teacher,
and manager Tim Keefe had a backstage job at a San Francisco
peep show in which all the individual booths look onto
a single, large stage occupied by several dancers (late in
Keefe’s stay, they added a single one-on-one booth). During
his stay, he conducted long, epic interviews with seven of
the women. The results were published in early 1993 as the
383-page tome Some of My Best Friends Are Naked, which
remains one of the best, most insightful books ever published
about sex workers. Unfortunately, it was put out by the tiny,
short-lived Barbary Coast Press and has never gotten the recognition
it deserves. What follows are excerpts that present a
sliver of this scarce, overlooked book.
Minx Manx
Part of the promotion for your show says, “Live Nude
Dancing, Lovely Lusty Ladies, Naked Naughty Nasty.”
Is this a good description of who you are and how you
perform at work? ~ It’s a good partial description. Certainly
the “Lovely, Lusty, Naughty, Nasty” talk about fantasy, and at
work I’m working off a fantasy. I guess for some folks it’s just
a job, but to me it’s part of my erotic playtime. And I’m checking
out who are the people and what are they doing on the
other side of that window. It’s my anthropology. There isn’t
anything on the sign that says, “Lovely, anthro pological nymphet
will be watching you as hard as you’re watching her,”
although I suppose some folks know that. It’s about a fantasy
of women who want to show off for all the guys who walk in.
And yeah, part of that’s true for me. The role of the place is
purveying fantasy.
Describe how you dance, display, and touch your body
during your stage performance. ~ I start out actually dancing.
It warms me up. There’s a lot of posing, vogueing, showing
off, and sticking my pussy up as close to the window as
I can get it. I watch myself in the mirror—it’s voyeurism and
exhibitionism at the same time. That’s fun. I pick customers
to inter act with, and, depending on their energy, I’ll be somewhat
desultory and save my energy. I’ll show pussy, pose,
and do mostly eye contact interaction, or else get into pretty
active masturbation. Partly because it’s hot for me to be there
and it makes time go more quickly to be actually erotic rather
than potentially erotic, or to be an erotic subject rather than
an erot ic object. Because it turns me on to be an erotic object
and an erotic sub ject, I go, more often than not, to the corner
booths where there’s a ledge and I can do a lot of body
movement. I kneel, lean back on one hand, and display my
upper torso, arched back. I masturbate with my other hand
till it gets tired. It’s really bad for the spine, so I get up and do
something else for awhile. I’ve learned how to get my whole
body much more involved in my active eroticism and orgasm.
I do come onstage, and it can be just from undulating and
moving my hips rather than putting my finger there and wiggling
it. That’s how I was masturbating when I first got there.
A lot of times people have to remind me to take my break.
What sexual depictions do you perform? ~ Depictions of
reality. I do masturbation. It’s fun to spread my legs, bend my
knees, and pretend to be on top during a fuck. I do it to the
air or place my palm against my ass and fuck my own fingers.
I key in to the men who are masturbating to make the situation
mutual. It turns it into an overtly sexual situation for me.
I wanted to be an erotic performer to be erotic, more than to
perform. More often than not, the sexual and orgasmic depictions
and the actual orgasmic faces are the stuff that I go for,
probably because if I was on the other side of the window
that’s the stuff I would like to watch. “Do unto others what
SOME OF MY BEST FRIENDS ARE NAKED 191