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December 2014

by Tina Horn

I wrote the stories in Love Not Given Lightly to explain how and why I was transformed into Tina Horn.

or;

I wrote these stories because Tina Horn transformed into me.

or maybe;

Tina Horn wrote these stories, and you can send all complaints her way.

Actually, I’m not convinced that Tina Horn exists. I’m not entirely convinced it’s Tina Horn who is writing these words. Maybe it’s actually me.

But am I not Tina Horn?

If not, then who the hell is she, and why is she always hogging the bathroom?

Tina Horn was born in 2006 (fully-formed and perfectly legal), when, looking for a flexible gig to support my rock & roll lifestyle, I typed the word “dominatrix” into the Adult Gigs section of San Francisco Craigslist.

Or, was she in me, archetypically, all along? Is Tina Horn the real me? An amplification of my id, a creature of camp and confidence and creative impulse who animates my body? Did I have to become a sex worker in order to unleash her?

Robert Zimmerman once told Rolling Stone: “I didn’t create Bob Dylan. Bob Dylan has always been here.”

Obviously, I am Tina Horn, and I know what it’s like to Do, or Perform, Tina Horn. She looks like me, she sounds like me, and she finds the same things erotic. She puts more effort into her appearance, than I do. She’s more agreeable, less cerebral. But, am I only Tina Horn when you’re paying for my time? Am I Tina Horn when I sleep? When I die, will Tina Horn die too?

Most importantly: wardrobe and attitude and ontological status aside, what is Tina Horn good for?

Well, Tina Horn has made me some good money, for starters. Since 2006, I have worked as a professional BDSM1 switch, both in houses and as an independent, providing direct service fetish and fantasy exploration to clients who paid me an hourly rate. In 2009, I started to perform in independent, queer, and kinky hardcore videos in the Bay Area. In 2010, I began directing my own pornography, and co-founded QueerPorn.Tv, a membership site that won two Feminist Porn Awards, a Cinekink Award, and an AVN nomination during the time I was a producer there. Throughout this era, I created and distributed zines about sex work, later publishing essays online and in magazines. I taught workshops on spanking and dirty talk, and spoke on college panels. After moving to New York City, I worked in advocacy for people in the sex trades, especially with the Persist Health Project.

1 BDSM stands for: Bondage, Discipline, Domination, Submission, Sadism, and Masochism.

Here’s an excerpt from one of those zines, circa 2008.

Marxist critic Walter Benjamin used prostitutes as examples of dialectical images, where the commodity and seller are the same and reveal the system of representation that produces them. He was on to something, but somehow I doubt Benjamin ever strapped on six-inch stilettos and hogtied men for money (although, of course, we can never be sure).

I can’t remember exactly what I thought was going to happen when I created Tina Horn, but I know I got what I came for. Sex work is glamour and danger and boredom and drama and shock. Sex work is adrenaline highs and clandestine secrets and surprise orgasms. Sex work is a blue velvet Crown Royal bag stuffed full of lacy thongs, Bitches Brew on an Ipod shuffle, suggesting the girl you have a crush on for a double. It’s also the stench of shit and madacide, the misery of a zero’ing shift when you need to make rent, the insidious non-consent that hits you when your guard is down, the casual judgment from a friend at a party. For me, it was usually dangerous fun—occasionally violent, and always interesting.

Sex work defined my twenties, and continues to define my career even though I have slowly been retiring since 2013. As I did less and less sex work, I had to ask, where was Tina Horn going?

Well, I animated Tina Horn, and my clients enabled her to thrive. Yet it was my fellow sex workers that made her possible. That’s why I wanted to write about them. They made the job emotionally sustainable, significantly safer from harm.

These are the stories of people who have learned how to tell you the stories you want to hear, especially the ones that hurt.

The title Love Not Given Lightly comes from a song by my favorite musician, Lou Reed, who died not long after I finished the first draft of this book. The song is “Venus in Furs,” named for the Leopold von Sacher-Masoch novel of the same name, both of which are notorious odes to the erotics of domination and submission.

I used to play this song in session, slithering around to the pace of the tambourine, reveling in how weird it was and how much it made my clients squirm.

Maybe Lou Reed was a sadomasochist, or maybe he just enjoyed scandalizing people. Either way, Lou totally got it. He got the literary value, he got the irony, and he wrote a line that has always encapsulated both BDSM and sex work to me.

Taste the whip, in love not given lightly

Taste the whip, now bleed for me

I met the subjects of this book because we were all different kinds of professional lovers. For our clients, we provided intimacy, satisfaction, entertainment, adventure, and therapy—that kind of love. I learned early on that the best way to give what I gave at work without draining myself was to find love with my co-workers. We gave each other lust, camaraderie, support, humor, and care—that kind of love.

Being Tina Horn introduced me to myself. Being Tina Horn introduced me to many of the people who have shaped my life so far.

These are love stories. Not the love of default programming, or heteronormativity. They’re stories of the way love transforms us. A transman learns to love his body. A fetishist learns to love his own cravings. A queer woman and queer man find platonic friendship as they are renting out their intimacy by the hour. An ordinary house becomes the threshold to a world of fantasy.

Being Tina Horn taught me how to love by teaching me the value of my body and my talents. It took years of actual labor for me to realize what she was trying to tell me.

You gotta labor for love. You gotta work hard to understand how love can pass through a whip, how pain can be transcendent. When you know your way around the economy of love, you know that you have to earn it.