The Honest Courtesan

I’m planning to keep sounding the alarm…until either death or the Establishment stops me.  –  “Twelfth Anniversary”

Those who have been reading his blog for a long, long time (by internet reckoning) have undoubtedly noticed that I don’t write as many full essays as I used to.  When I first started I wrote an entire full-length essay every single day, and now it’s only once or twice a week; as of this week, I’m stepping it down one more notch to about once a week.  Two days a week are news columns (which are far more labor-intensive than you might think, due to the cross-indexing and tagging), one a links column, one a diary, one a construction update, and now I’m adding a “Throwback Thursday”.  Plus of course the monthly features like my “Back Issue” and selections of tweets.  Two years ago, for the eleventh anniversary of this blog, I explained the reason for the shrinking:

…First…I’m doing a lot of other things (both personal and professional) which take up increasing amounts of my time; second, because in the time I’ve been publishing The Honest Courtesan I’ve aged from “still able to see 40 in the rear-view mirror” to “just able to make out 60 on the horizon”; third, because censorship keeps increasing with no end in sight, and I’d rather not be going full speed when the Establishment drops a wall in front of me; and finally, because I’ve already published over 4000 posts and I feel as though I’m starting to repeat myself a little too often.  Furthermore, I’m no longer one of a very few voices crying out in the wilderness; there are now lots of sex workers publishing a lot of powerful content in more mainstream venues than I ever had the patience and humility to approach, and our message finally appears to be penetrating the thick skulls of politicians, the soft ones of reporters, and even the empty ones of the American public.  In short, my work is no longer as vital as it once was, and since I was one of the loudmouthed harlots who helped create the social climate which made all this possible, I think I’ve earned at least a little rest.

All that is, unsurprisingly, even more true than it was two years ago, especially the bits about aging and increasing censorship; even if thirteen years isn’t that much in the big scheme of things, every year counts double when you’re burning your candle at both ends.  And even though older folks like me tend to think of 13 years as not an especially long stretch, consider the difference between 1910 and 1923 (or between 1933 and 1946, or 1953 to 1966, or 1990 to 2003); the world and the culture have changed quite a bit since I started this project, and in a world of YouTube and TikTok blogs are beginning to look as quaint as radio shows did in 1959.  So even though I intend to keep the promise in today’s epigram (because, as most of you can probably guess, it would be nearly impossible for me to do otherwise), I’m sure y’all will understand if I let myself coast more often rather than frantically pedaling all the time.