Customer Reviews

Tricks and Treats: Sex Workers Write About Their Clients (Haworth Gay & Lesbian Studies)

5 star:		(6)
4 star:		(2)
3 star:		(0)
2 star:		(1)
1 star:		(1)

 

 

This is a very different book about sex workers. It's a very enlightening and sometimes very shocking collections of narratives from male, female (Gay & Heterosexual),and Transgendered sex workers. Matt Sycamore has done an excellent job as editor in bringing together all of these diverse stories. I really enjoyed "In Love With My Work" by Scott O'Hara, a well known porn star and author who died in 1998. "A Completed Business" by Tony Valenzuela is an engaging read in regards to his family history, his mother and fathers relationship, and how he became a high-price homosexual prostitute. A heartfelt and loving story.

All these testimonials by different, yet so alike, sex workers, will surely keep you reading right through to the end of the book, and wishing for more. I read it in one day. A book I highly recommend for anyone with an interest in this area or just if you're curious to learn what its like to be a sex worker from the sex worker's perspective.

Very real expose of what happens in the sex industry. No ten dollars words to describe the gritty world of prostitution. You will have a good grasp of what goes on in the business. Highly recommended.

Tricks and Treats is insightful, entertaining, and open about the sex business. We are grateful that an author finally tackled the business of sex with such frankness and candor. We highly recommend it to everyone that is working to gain a clearer understanding of this booming business.

Tricks and Treats is certainly an interesting set of essays. Having worked in the profession myself, I was surprised at how badly the clients were portrayed. Most of them were on drugs, and more than a few were... well, let's just say screwy at best.

This being said, many of the essays in the book were thought-provoking and insightful. Just don't read them expecting to find any sort of glamour in the profession. There are a lot of upsides to escorting, but this book fails to cover them.

This is one of those rare rare books that leaves you no choice but to resort to such overused superlatives as GROUNDBREAKING, SEMINAL, COMPELLING, VITAL. All the recent "My Life as a Hustler" books are so much stale beer, if you ask me (not that I dislike stale beer). But this book is the hard stuff. It will make you shudder, howl, nod your head excessively, ache. For anyone who has ever been on either side of sex work, or has ever thought about it. Or ever cared.

I thought the introduction was extremely well-written and insightful, the stories themselves- interesting and provocative. I would definitely like to read more by Mr. Sycamore.

This is a very realistic view of prostitution that was written by the people who actually know about the industry, the prostitutes themselves. No socio/psycho-babble or theories by academic types who can only begin to imagine the reality of prostitution, which makes for a very good, easy read.

I heard a reading of this book at Bluestockings Women's Books in New York. It was really funny, witty, and enlightening. I was glad for the opportunity to read more. Highly recommended!

Way too much male homosexual stuff. Maybe that means there are more men paying men for sex these days. I don't know the answer to that question. I like the frankness of the writing and the psychology of the book, but I think I spent too much money for this one.

Matt Bernstein Sycamore has edited here some of the most useless (and possibly dangerous) advice for sex workers ever put between pages. His attitude (as in his recent novel "Pully Taffy") is frighteningly superficial and shallow. He doesn't appear to have a thought in his head about anything besides sex and drugs, and he seems to behave as if he'd never heard of AIDS. Being a sex worker is NOT a liberating experience. It's an act of desperation, often born out of a lifetime of abuse. For Sycamore to pretend otherwise is disingenuous at best. And for a supposedly legit publisher to put this thing out is absolutely irresponsible. This book does a disservice not only to the gay community, but also to those out there who would like to see an alternative to the pablum thrust upon us by the mainstream.