Queer Whore Collective: $tripped! A Review
Readers should be forewarned that this review can ultimately be summarised by the following: Sexquisite: $tripped! is fucking phenomenal, 5/5 stars and you should absolutely make time to go see it, especially if you’re new to revolutionary hooker politics.
Fortunately for me, the editors have given me a generous word count in which to gush. Whether or not you’re into cabaret, and whether or not you’re a sex worker, there will be a moment in $tripped! that will stick in your mind, making you laugh, cry, and puzzle. The show is as layered as the experiences of sex workers themselves tend to be, and precise in its commentary. You’ll walk away with new questions that will contest your preconceptions about sex work, no matter how long you’ve been in the game, and you’ll probably still be laughing on your way home.
$tripped! is a briskly paced, fantastical collage of stand-up, sketches, and hilarious musical numbers, all loosely centred around the experiences of four workers in a strip club. April (Carmen Ali), Violet (Megan Prescott) and Bella (Bella Quinn) are on shift, and the show opens with the introduction of new arrival Maia (Maedb Joy), a friend of April’s and a baby stripper with a naivete that seems to inspire both derision and protectiveness in the others. Hilda (Melina Gary), the house mum, presides over the club via voiceover.
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From the jump, we’re confronted with each character’s personal – and political – struggle. Maia is saddled with a declining financial situation and a boyfriend who is constantly berating her for being a stripper, even as her work is helping with the bills. April is as talented a comedian and performer as she is a stripper, but has found it impossible to make ends meet as a creative. As a former child actress, Violet has to keep her job a secret or risk tabloid reporters trying to ambush her. Bella is a survivor of childhood sexual abuse, and struggles to feel connected with others at the club, all while fielding the stigma of full service sex work, as April also does. And all this without even considering the struggles of stripping: cheapskates, physically abusive customers, long hours, exhaustion, house fees, friction burns from grinding on trouser zips, injuries, etcetera, etcetera, etcetera.
“$tripped! is for anyone with even the remotest curiosity about sex work.”
Most whores will probably already have given up on enjoying any media about sex work that hasn’t had at least some input from sex workers. The dictum “nothing about us without us” – as applicable to storytelling as it is to legislation – has appeared on protest signs worldwide. Briefly, stories about sex workers – from tired Pretty Woman save-a-whore screeds to the oft-fabricated stories of victimisation peddled by SWERFs – pretty much universally suck. Inevitably, there is a third player – a well-meaning gentleman-client, a kindly neo-Suffragette liberal feminist – who must intervene and rescue the hooker from her life of sad dissipation. $tripped! mounts an extremely effective riposte to all of these worn-out narratives, delivering zingers that will make workers belly-laugh and civilians (non-workers) jump a little – and, hopefully, reappraise their sense of what it means to tell a story about a sex worker.
I’ll try not to spoil the show’s best jokes, but its funniest moments are in its musical numbers and stand-up interludes. April, in her hilarious solo, zeroes in on the weaknesses of the “exploitation” argument against sex work: “Some people say that sex work is exploitative… OK, I guess it can be – this guy went down on me for ages once and I charged him! … But isn’t all work exploitative?” Indeed, what are workers meant to do amid a pandemic, when other forms of work mean that you live in your overdraft and struggle with housing? When hospitality, care work, and service industry jobs – often most accessible for people of marginalized genders and without hereditary wealth, as most sex workers are – are barely paying enough to live paycheque to paycheque? April on the matter: “[Mum] thinks I’m waitressing, which is technically not a lie, it’s just that sometimes the vessel that I bring my clients to drink from is my vagina.” The show does a wonderful job of making the harsh reality of survival something that audiences just can’t ignore. Fundamentally, if you’re broke in a broken society, how dare anyone demonise you for doing work that suits you? The characters’ defiance and cutthroat humour is a joy to watch.
But $tripped! also zeroes in on the fractures and hierarchies in sex work that might be less familiar to non-whores. The show addresses the whorearchy, a term used to describe how a split emerges among sex workers between work that is considered somehow more respectable, and work that isn’t. Frequently, sex work that involves minimal sexual contact – stripping, types of pro-domme work – are considered more acceptable, as it does not per se involve sex for money. Work that involves penetrative sex is often relegated to the bottom of the pyramid, while workers who provide bareback sex or other services that are seen as distasteful receive very little solidarity, protection, or inclusion in sex work discourse.
$tripped! addresses the whorearchy deftly. One of its best sketches, a game of Wheel of Whoretune!, demonstrates just how the game is rigged (every round’s refrain) for anyone with a marginalized identity – but for some experiences of marginalization are more than others, as ever. April attends the wheel: contestant number 1! 2! 3! For each, she announces: “Look at that – another slim white woman!” The show is extremely aware of how the whorearchy intersects with racism: Black and Brown sex workers experience amplified stigma and violence, and the majority-white cast is appropriately aware that their voices are the ones appearing in a public forum for a reason. The most crucial line in the show is also its last, when the cast invites the audience to consider why the voices they’ve heard tonight are those of mostly white workers. Who has the access and resources to put on a performance like $tripped? Who doesn’t, and why? The voices of sex workers of colour, and particularly of trans women sex workers of colour, are notably underrepresented in public-facing narratives of sex work, and $tripped! puts this fact front and centre, involving the whole room.
$tripped! also acknowledges other marginalisations. Bella steps up to spin the Wheel of Whoretune. At first she seems to be on top in the 12-dimensional chess game of race, class, education that determines sex worker survival: she’s slim, white, has multiple degrees, and is acknowledged to be sugar-daddy bait for all these reasons. The catch? She’s dealing with CPTSD from an extremely abusive childhood, and multiple disabilities that make full-time employment impossible. Truly, the game is rigged in so many ways that it seems its own, crowning cosmic joke: the humour here is bittersweet and true. $tripped! also cleverly introduces the fact that sex work is inextricable from class struggle. Violet pulls no punches in drawing connections between her old nannying job and her stripping: “…You’d be surprised how similar middle-class children are to coked-up bankers. Both children and bankers are much more irritating when exposed to certain substances… both cannot grasp the ‘DON’T FUCKING TOUCH THAT’ rule.” And indeed, something that unites most labour that is accessible without a university degree is this: the rich will treat anyone providing a service like shit. What sweetens the deal is getting more than a pittance for it.
$tripped! is so, so funny, but it’s also gut-wrenching. Nothing I could possibly write in this review could express the pain and complexity of sex workers’ experiences of stigma, violence and poverty as vividly as Maia’s and Bella’s solos do. They share stories that make debates around the validity of sex work seem petty and superfluous, and their performances present a chiaroscuro of sex work experiences. The work, as workers know, traces a path in and out of pain and trauma, providing escape from some of it, sometimes more of it, but often an array of improved options for survival, and sometimes moments of euphoria, victory, and comfort. Maia's solo opens a window into this: “It's all so performative / But I just crack on and cope with it / Staying in this relationship / Instead of claiming housing benefit / I've been putting in the practice / To truly call myself an actress / Playing real housewives of stagnant / Cause loving him is performance / Surviving in a pandemic / It’s either housework or whoring.” How can one climb out of this? Bella shares stories from her survivorhood in her solo. “Getting groomed means you never find out what’s really in your soul… there’s so much sexism in stock already, carving its way through any industry like a chainsaw to a tree, so much patriarchy I’ve swallowed its whole inventory of brutality, so much that could I really bear to shift this shit for free? Not anymore. I don’t wanna be its mule. / I’d rather be its whore.”
A standing ovation is also due the show’s production and sound design. Melina Gary, a non-binary composer, actor and sound designer from Texas, created $tripped!’s remarkably expressive soundscapes. Strip club scenes featured the pre-recorded, disembodied voices of customers, creating dialogue with the workers that had the audience cackling (April: "So how did you get into property management?" Customer: "Well after Uni my dad's friend got me a job…"). They also wrote and re-worked the evening’s brilliant musical numbers, including a rendition of “Hey Small Spender” and the original “I Did It Anyway”, which features the pithy background refrain “Money! Rent! Bills! Consent!”.
$tripped! is for anyone with even the remotest curiosity about sex work, and should be required viewing for those who consider their politics left or progressive – for people who are part of a discussion which, too often, sex workers are left out of or drawn into as curiosities to be featured on podcasts. For fellow strippers and hookers, it’ll put a happy tear in your eye and a spring in your step. Go see $tripped!, and make sure you bring tips.
Writer: L Christie is a hooker, mental health support worker and writer based in London. She can be found on Instagram and Twitter.
Instagram: @sexquisite.events | Twitter: @sexqusitevents | Website: https://www.sexquisiteevents.com
Donate to the $tripped! crowdfunder to help the cast develop their show and enable future productions: https://www.crowdfunder.co.uk/p/help-us-develop-sexquisite-stripped
