Buy your 2010 NYC Sex Bloggers Calendar and receive a special bonus!

$20 + $3.25 shipping – includes free download of director’s cut of Dacia’s Love Machine

The 2010 NYC Sex Blogger Calendar is unique in bringing together several of NYC’s writers, filmmakers and sex educators with twelve outstanding photographers and incorporating the participation of the larger sex-positive commUNITY to our efforts to support Sex Work Awareness. Last year’s calendar made the Speak Up! media training for sex workers possible, and with the enthusiasm that has met the project this year, we’ll be able to expand the media training from one day to a full weekend.

And through the holiday season, when you buy the 2010 Sex Blogger Calendar you will also get afree MP4 download of the 25 minute director’s cut of my film Dacia’s Love Machine, which debuted last year in Berlin. Link to download will be provided on checkout.

Calendars ship upon order and cost $20 apiece plus $3.25 for shipping. Check out the Time Out NY slideshow of the NYC Sex Blogger Calendar launch party to get a sampling of the hotness.

It’s been just over a week since the calendar release party and it’s taken that much time for both Diva and I to decompress from what was a beautifully crazy marathon of a weekend.  Awesome doesn’t even begin to describe what a wonderful, successful and jam packed party we put on.

It really all started a week before the party. That Friday, calendar model Lucy Vonne and Diva came to my house for the formidable task of stuffing two hundred gift bags.  Thanks to the beneficence of our sponsors and supporter, there was a lot of items to cram into those pretty black bags; bags that Diva & I had festooned with hot pink njoy stickers and pins in the wee hours of the morning.  When I suggested getting some pretty fluffy hot pink tissue paper to make the bags look even more festive, I swear felt death rays emanating out of those four pretty eyes.  Thanks so much, Lucy for all you did. We really can’t thank you enough.

Thursday, with the help of my husband, (thank you, babe) we stuffed Diva’s SUV (even though I’m firmly convinced Satan invented SUV’s, I was grateful that day that Diva had one, I would have hated to have had to rent a U-Haul to drag all that loot into the city) to brim with two hundred gift bags, one fucking machine, a Liberator scoop and a giant FYN rolling toy trunk that conveniently held most of the other awesome raffle prizes. That evening, after checking into the official calendar party hotel, Hotel Le Jolie in Williamsburg, we met with Monk and took him to Sex Worker Literati.  There are so many of you to thank for making this party outstanding.

Thank you to all the photographers who donated their time and gave us the kick ass images you see in your calendar.  (Haven’t bought yours yet, click here and do it now).

Thank you to the models who posted about and otherwise promoted the calendar and party.  You can read about our beautiful/debonair, brainy and brazen models here.

A special thanks to Time Out New York (shout out to Ashlea Halpern) for not only writing about the party in print and online but for donating two hundred issues (thanks to Mike Rucker and Jamie Mandel), sending Anna King to cover the party and posting thirty amazing shots in Own This City (linked below).

Thank you to all our amazing sponsors, gift bag donors,  and supporters who, despite trying economic times, rallied to support us with generous donations of both funds and merchandise.  We’re still hearing how amazing the gift bags and raffle prizes were.

Thank you to all the volunteers who worked so hard setting up, (allowing Diva and I two blessed hours of relaxation while we got our hair and makeup done at the awesome Tease salon.  Diva actually fell asleep mid makeup application), putting the final items in the gift bags, selling calendars and raffle tickets, minding the raffle table, making sure had the Chinese food containers stuffed with tickets all in line, and getting the loot all bagged up for the winners.

Thank you to all the people in this broad community who not only supported this project from beginning to end, but travelled far and wide to be here with us on this special day.  We can’t reiterate enough how heartwarming it is that not only New Yorker’s showed up in droves, but friends from places are far away as California, Seattle, Missouri and Canada cared enough to make the long journey and party with us.  It was awesome to see CarnalNation’s Chris Hall again and to meet CN’s Shaye aka @MR_CARNAL.

A huge thank you to N; you put on an awesome show and never faltered, not even when Con Ed decided our party was just too bright and killed the lights drowning us in darkness.  Thanks to all our performers and the stunning go-go dancers for treating our guests to their scintillating and sexy acts.

As far as we’re concerned, Fontana’s is the most awesome bar in the city.  Fontana’s is a fantastic space, staffed with the most chill people.  Holly and Brendan, you’re amazingly easy and delightful to work with and we hope to do many other events at Fontana’s.

Many thanks to photographers Nick McGlynn and Stacie Joy for documenting the night’s debauchery.

We remain eternally grateful for Monk.  In addition to functioning as the urban Sherpa I was unsuccessful in acquiring last year, he soothed our frazzled nerves with his calm and great off the wall sense of humor, used his extra strong rope makers hands to provide much needed massages and foot rubs (hot shoes are painful shoes), read the raffle numbers (both Diva and I are blind as bats without our reading glasses, and you thought we used him just for his good looks and theatrical skills, didn’t you?), and then suspended us from Fontana’s balcony on Saturday providing me with the best moments of Zen I have felt in ages.  His super power of making any song entirely filthy provided hours of laughter. Plus, for a big, bad top, that man gives wicked cuddle.

A special thanks once again to Greg DeLong and njoy. If you have your calendar, you’ll note that njoy’s days are hot pink.  We wanted a special way to show our overwhelming gratitude for rescuing us last year and providing us with the phenomenal design skills of Jason Tranchida this year and for donating our grand prize, the njoy Eleven.  Greg will always have a place in my cunt heart for being such a warm, giving person, not to  mention a wicked hot dildo designer.

And lastly, both Diva and I would like to thank our families, who never complained despite all the time we spent working on this project and culminated in our spending nearly four days away from home.

If you didn’t make the party, or just want to revisit the mayhem, following are links to some great photos.

Nick McGlynn – Random Night Out

Stacie Joy – Sex Blogger Calendar Party

Matthew  -  Matthew Has A Camera (Hit wander back to see more)

Anna King – Time Out New York – Own This City

We’re also happy to announce that we raised almost $2200 at the calendar release party that night.

But as fun as the project is, it’s not just fun. It’s also a fundraiser for Sex Work Awareness (SWA), an organization that works to do public education around sex workers’ issues and to support sex workers in speaking for themselves.

Since its official debut in March 2008, SWA has launched a handful of projects that fulfill its mission. Last year, SWA developed a media training workshop called Speak Up! Media Training for the Empowered Sex Worker, which was previously taught in abbreviated forms in Las Vegas and Chicago at the Desiree Alliance conferences. Using funds raised from sales of the Sex Blogger Calendar, we were able to grow the workshop into a day long session. The first workshop took place at the Harm Reduction Coalition in New York City on April 18th, 2008 and with further funding we plan to expand to a weekend-long workshop that will include guest speakers and more media-making fun. The participants of the workshop finished the training ready to take on the world both as media-makers and savvy interviewees.

During the workshop, we also created the following public service announcement:

Click to play

When you buy a calendar or a raffle ticket at the party, you’re helping to support Sex Work Awareness and the next Speak Up workshop, which will be bigger and better than the last one!

Sex Worker Literati, the new free monthly reading series that Audacia Ray is co-hosting with David Henry Sterry (who is rumored to be baking brownies for the occasion) kicks off tomorrow night at Happy Ending, 302 Broome Street between Eldridge and Forsyth, at 8 pm. If you’re in NYC, you should be there, because it is going to be awesome.

The inaugural reading features five performers from all corners of the sex business. Blues diva and pinup girl Candye Kane, Times Square wild girl Jodi Sh. Doff, and Scandinavian/African rent boy Damien Decker are all contributors to the anthology Hos, Hookers, Call Girls, and Rent Boys. They will be joined by renowned artist and former nude model Molly Crabapple, who is the illustrator and co-author of the graphic novel Scarlett Takes Manhatta,, and former go-go dancer and porn producer Sam Benjamin, author of Confessions of an Ivy League Pornographer.

Every month, we will donate a percentage of the funds raised from the bar tab, plus Soft Skull is donating $1 from the sale of each copy of the anthology at the reading. This month, we’ve chosen to make sex worker love bicoastal – funds raised at the reading will be donated to the St. James Infirmary in San Francisco. St. James offers free, confidential, nonjudgmental medical and social services for female, transgender, and male sex workers. They are the first occupational safety and health clinic for sex workers run by and for sex workers. The clinic has been hurting in this economy and as a result they have had to cut clinic hours.

You’ll also have the opportunity to take home a slice of sex worker culture with you: $pread magazine will be in the house with their latest issue, Bluestockings will be there selling copies of Hos, Hookers, Call Girls, and Rent Boys, and Molly Crabapple will surely have copies of Scarlett Takes Manhattan on hand. I’m sure that you’ll be able to get your favorite ho to sign copies of said merch should you want it.

If you have to miss it or are geographically challenged, the event will be captured in pictures by official event photographer Baby Sinead, plus there will be video of all the performers.

The next reading will take place on Thursday, September 3rd.

We hope that by tomorrow night all 18 of those remaining days will be sold with the full purchase price ($10) going directly to Sex Work Awareness.  If you follow us on twitter at NYCSexBlogCal you would have seen the announcement yesterday that the calendar is now fully sponsored.  In addition to selling the personalized dates on the calendar we also sold months for sponsorship.  We will be updating our Sponsor page over the next week to reflect all the wonderful people and companies who have generously donated funds to sponsor us and cover our production costs.

I thought I would post a round up of what our models have been up to lately and what some people are saying about us.  So here goes…..

To kick off the week Calico offered a little incentive to get people motivated buying days.  It appears to be a great success if her many posts are an indication. Mina took that idea and also posted some incentives of her own which if sales are any indication seems to have worked.  Mina also had her first Hogtied shoot up this week.

Mollena deciding to help out our sales purchased twelve days in the calendar but unbeknownst to her she somehow ended up renting two fetish models.  I can’t wait to see the photos.

N offered her own special incentive for buying days with tickets to HyperGender.

Nikol Hasler was talking about what she is up to out in Los Angeles.  Did you know Midwest Teen Sex Show is shooting a pilot for Comedy Central right now?  Don’t worry we’ll get Nikol back to NYC for the calendar release party on November 6th.

I wrote about my Mother’s Day gift this year over on our sponsor Beyond the Birds and Bees.  This is a great site to not only read but you can also submit your own story there.  You don’t have to be a blogger to do it either and can be anonymous if you’d like.  Just use their “Share Your Story” page.  Not sure what to write?   Check out their “Writing Prompts” page.

Jamye cooled off and gave us all a sneak preview of her calendar shot this year.

JC also gave us a sneak preview of the calendar photo shoot he did for us with Abiola.

Time Out New York names Audacia’s film The Bi-Apple one of the Best NYC pornos along with our sponsor Candida Royalle’s AfroDite Superstar.

Our sponsor eXtremeRestaints.com had some nice things to say about us on their blog Safe Words.

Babeland blog offered us some link love.

Tess gave an interview to Champagne and Benzedrine.

We have also added the final photographer to our calendar.  Sarah Sharp will be shooting Melissa Gira Grant for us.  If you’re in NYC you can check out her gallery show she has up right now at Babeland until August 20th.

That about wraps it up for this week.  It has been both a fun and a crazy week for us here as we finish up photo shoots, sponsors and selling the personalized days.  Yesterday we received a very generous donation toward the calendar that will go directly to Sex Work Awareness.   The support we have gotten once again this year has been overwhelming.  A giant Thank You to everyone who has been part of that.

Tomorrow is the last day you can purchase a personalize date on the calendar.  So buy your days now!  After that we will continue to pre-sell the calendars for $20.

Below is a PSA that was created that day along with a copy of Calico’s thoughts on what Speak Up! did for her. SWA has been asked to present their media training workshop in other cities around the country but that costs money and with the profits from this calendar they hope to be able to do that.

We have less then 25 days left that remain unsold on the calendar and our hope is that over the next three days we will sell all of them. 100% of your $10 purchase price will go to Sex Work Awareness and help to create more PSA’s like this one below.

cross-posted from Calico’s blog.

What Speak Up! did for me

I came out of Saturday’s Speak Up! Media Training for the Empowered Sex Worker with one simple, sweeping revelation: I am in charge of my message.

Audacia Ray, one of the day’s two trainers, spoke at KinkForAll and said something that made me sit right up: “Damn right I have an agenda.” Of course I have an agenda, too: everyone has one, especially the media. An agenda is not a bad thing, and what’s more, it’s necessary.

Our first exercise: How do we get from this powerful, inarticulate drive we all share to messages we can express? From there, we could move on the core of Speak Up: what can we do to make sure our messages stand up to disinterested, distorting, or actively destructive media interactions?

It was an emotional day for me, not least because we did our first ‘message’ exercise on the recent murder of a masseuse in Boston. I am a decent persuasive writer, but I started to realize my ignorance as we sorted through supporting arguments. (Would mentioning “arrests” arouse sympathy, or would “violence” be a better choice? Can you back up the statement “Sex work is like any other job”? Is the word “screening” insider jargon?)

There was talk of taking Speak Up! to San Francisco and Chicago and a couple of cities in Canada. I hope they can. I also would love to see this as a larger, longer, even more intensive program — perhaps twenty or thirty sex workers, really buckling down for a weekend. If you can donate, or know a potential donor, SWA wants to hear from you.

I want to give a world of thanks to Audacia Ray and Eliyanna Kaiser of Sex Work Awareness for creating this workshop, leading it, and doing the work to make it happen. And in equal measure, I want to thank the women of the NYC Sex Bloggers Calendar who raised the money that made it all possible.

I’m going to be pretty busy in the next couple of weeks as I go to San Francisco, Boston, DC and upstate — oh, and take my finals. But my new video camera will be traveling with me; I’ve done very little but shoot and edit video since I woke up this morning. When I travel, I meet a lot of people with amazing things to say, and I hope from here on out, I’ll be able to share more of those conversations with you.

You can download the 45 page CC licensed training manual PDF here.

This calendar is a fun project for all of us to be part of but it is also a very important one for Sex Work Awareness as their only funding of Speak Up!

If you haven’t seen one of the above yet you will over the next year. These badges were designed and created by Sinclair, one of our very own calendar pin-ups.

For us to produce this calendar it costs money and I think we all realize how scarce that is these days not just among us who write or read sex blogs but also among all the companies that are somehow associated with sex. Not long ago I started approaching companies asking them to support Sex Work Awareness and be a sponsor on the 2010 calendar.

It was a mixed reaction I received. There were some companies that didn’t even bother to respond to me, some that without asking any questions said no and then there were the wonderful ones that said yes. Sponsors who even in these hard economic times believed in the need for the work Sex Work Awareness is doing and understood how important that they have the funding they need to continue to do that work. To be able to hold more of their Speak Up! media training not just here in New York City but in other parts of the country too.

There are many companies out there who all want our business and who will offer us free products or a small percentage of their sales but there are only a select few who will put out actual money to support something such as Sex Work Awareness. These companies could be spending that money on actual advertising elsewhere but chose to instead give it to us and make the 2010 NYC Sex Blogger Calendar possible.

I hope as bloggers, readers, sex workers, sex worker allies just to name a few, thatwhen you are thinking of making a purchase from any online company and see these badges you will remember that part of what you are spending there is being donated to things such as the NYC Sex Blogger Calendar and Sex Work Awareness.

Without the support of our sponsors none of this would be possible.

eXtremeRestraints.com offered to sponsor a full month without hesitation when I asked.  For me personally this is something I value highly in these many companies we all deal with here online.  We know that they all want our business and many are looking for us to become affiliates but only a select few will donate their profits, especially in this current economy to projects such as the 2010 calendar. Without companies such as eXtremeRestraints.com it would not be possible for us to be able to do this and donate the sales to Sex Work Awareness. funding things such as Speak Up!

When talking with James Media of eXtremeRestraints.com I asked him why they would want to be part of this amazing project and here is what he told me,

We’re sponsoring for a couple of reasons.  First off, we believe in supporting the sex blogging community and feel that they provide a valuable voice on the internet.  We also like this cause that you’re promoting.  More awareness is hugely important in our society and anything that combats the shameful way that our society tends to view all things sexual is a good thing.  At eXtremeRestraints.com we strongly believe in making is easier for people to explore their sexualities and their fantasies without judgement.  We feel that Sex Work Awareness is a very positive movement.

When you’re looking for sites to place your business with I hope you’ll keep in mind that some of the money you spend at eXtremeRestraints.com is given back to our commUNITY and if you do visit them make sure you let them know you appreciate their being part of our commUNITY this way.

Thank You eXtremeRestraints.com.