A is a Queer Chicano who has been selling sex for over two years. A uses poetry to examine and discover identities.
La Chingada is a series of poems that use historical and imagined native/brown narratives in a matriarchal framework to find the spiritual lines that connect us to our native/brown past. La Chingada is a work of historical rewriting and spiritual healing.

Performative poet, Aimee Herman, works as editor of erotica for Oysters & Chocolate. She is a sex positive, queer, gender-deconstructing word slinger who has been featured on radio, various festivals and reading series including: In the Flesh erotic salon, Queer Lit Carnival, Hyper Gender, and The Red Umbrella Diaries. She can be read in the anthologies Best Lesbian Love Stories 2010(Alyson Books), Best Women’s Erotica 2010 (Cleis Press), and Nice Girls, Naughty Sex (Seal). Her poems can be found in Clean Sheets, and/or journal, InStereo Press, Audio Zine, Caketrain, Pregnant Moon Review and Cliterature Journal, among others. Aimee will be presenting her performative piece, the importance of condoms and hand-washing that speaks on the politics of safe sex, HPV overwhelm and the need to swallow copious amounts of protection to promise away the stains of one’s sexual histories.

Forget what you may think, The Incredible, Edible, Akynos is not 5’7″. She’s a mere 4’11″ award winning burlesque performer and curator. Born on July 22 in Kingston, Jamaica she came out of her mother’s womb with her dancing shoes on. She was a dance major at Martin Luther King Jr High School and has competed in many talent shows since the age of 12. She began burlesque in 2007 after attending Star Shine Burlesque and being amazed at the fact there was a place for her to create routines and perform them other than her bedroom mirror. Her style has been described as seeing a burlesque routine and music video at the same time. She’s been on many stages such as Symphony Space, Public Assembly and The Zipper Factory. You may have seen her in The New York Burlesque Festival, The Toronto Burlesque Festival and The Boston Burlesque Expo where she won a legend’s choice award and the best soloist award in 2009 with her signature number Centipede dedicated to The Hottentot Venus. She was first runner up in The Miss North American Showgirl Pageant at the Hedonism II resort in 2009. She produces her own monthly variety show *POP* ( A Vaudeville Experience) at Public Assembly in Brooklyn. She produced a successful monthly show An Incredible, Edible Cabaret Show at the Triad Theater and will bring burlesque to Negril, Jamaica in later 2010. Her burlesque is not considered classic or neo but different in a class by herself. But she’s no one trick pony. Whatever style you need she can adhere to and has routines to suit you. You can see her on the web by logging on to www.akynos.com or by visiting her at www.facebook.com/pages/The-Incredible-Edible-Akynos.

Audacia Ray is a former sex worker and current media maker (and shaker). She has blogged about sexuality, culture, and politics since 2004 and spent three years as an executive editor at the Utne Reader award-winning $preadmagazine. She is the author of Naked on the Internet: Hookups, Downloads, and Cashing In on Internet Sexploration and won a Feminist Porn Award for her film The Bi Apple. These days, Audacia is the director of the Red Umbrella Project, which amplifies the voices of people in the sex trade through live storytelling events, media training, and advocacy workshops. Her monthly storytelling series the Red Umbrella Diaries and her blog Waking Vixen were named to the Village Voice’s Best of 2010 list. Learn more about her work atredumbrellaproject.org and audaciaray.com.

Essence is a dual degreed, former lap dance engineer of the upscale gentlemen’s club scene, from NY to Vegas and sweet, sticky places in between.  Essence Revealed, the solo show acting, burlesque dancing, empowering women in sensuality leading Head Mistress of Stripper Essence: Ladies Lap Dance Class.

Canadian-born inter-disciplinary/ multi-media artist was born on January 22nd, 1980, Grande Prairie, Alberta. Since 2005 Inbred Hybrid Collective has been living and working in New York, developing diverse events and exhibitions of increasingly significant scale.

Inbred Hybrid Collective’s mandate is to stimulate a consciousness of the external factors affecting our human existence, through the creation of provocative, experientially immersive work.

Lady Moustaché is a writer, editor, cabaret enthusiast, fishnet fetishist, verbal assassin, and lady about town — if by “town” you mean “bodegas still dodgy enough to sell whippits.” She comes from a short line of Jewish Czech tank commanders who spent all their post-war celebratory money on beer, leaving them penniless by the time the prostitutes showed up. This performance is for her deprived, drunken lineage. On June 12, Ms. Moustaché will drop a dose of character-driven cabaret comedy so dangerous, you’ll be thankful for the powders she just sprinkled in your drink.

twitter.com/msmarikopassion | facebook.com/marikopassionsongs

Mariko Passion, Educated Whore and Urban Geisha is a performance artist | activist | educator | whore revolutionary. She sings and rhymes her experiences and reality over beats and produces auto-documentary videos. She educates the community and fights for social justice issues related to sex workers rights in LA, across the U.S and the world.

An urban geisha takes the skillset, beauty and charm of a traditional geisha and places her with an urban working class Craigslist.com graveyard shift clientele. Mariko Passion is an “upper working class”, urban geisha [of color] in the sprawling police city state known as Los Angeles. She speaks of her personal journey exploring whether one can ever find dignity as the neighborhood golddigger or if shady style drug client sex hustling is all she will know as economic empowerment for her future. In and out of court, on and off probation, caught up in a sting, landed in county jail, fighting for her rights and pursued by pimps, kicked out of the one brothel she tried to work at..Mariko Passion struggles to live her life as an artist and a righteous whore; the Tupac of prostitution, an educated courtesan whose mission is to educate workers, clients, Facebook friends, and family members alike AND to create a bond, a mentorship, and a community resource for with those that are already part of the sex worker rights movement or who would like to be. Sex workers are part of every community. Our struggle permeates and intersects with your struggle for liberation, rights and visibility. We permeate and intersect with your life, liberty and pursuit of happiness.  Ms. Passion works to create that connection between other social awareness and rights based movements with every project or performance that she does.

Exotic dancer and puppeteer Venus Flytrap presents a black & white spectacle for the 2nd Annual Sex Worker Cabaret, entitled: “Billy From Medford, His Erection, and a Very Special Lesson”. Using the magic of shadow puppetry, and with all the charm and allure of a seasoned stripper, Venus will delight and amuse you with anecdotal evidence of the inherent decency of humankind.

little wings is a writer, performer, dancer, mover and shaker, culture creator & ritual maker, gogo boy of the movement, and a flagrant faggot of the diasporic, yiddishe variety. community college educated and from a mixed-class background, he writes and makes art around queer bodies, desire and narratives. little wings was most recently the writer, director and performer in his debut solo performance, Tearoom Sympathy, a multi-media performance about restroom cruising in grand central station, which premiered at the laguardia performing arts center. he is a dancer and spectacle creator with the rude mechanical orchestra dance team. he is an aquarius.

“my daddy’s hands” is a narrative piece that weaves together tales of father vs. daddy; father of birth vs. daddy who paid. It is about first times. It is about hands, and class, and work, and secrets, and connection.