Fear and Loathing in Norf Cackalacky

by Huck Reyes

“Oh no! I meant to put that on a different card…”

The cashier restarted the transaction, I opened Affirm on my phone, and secured my fuel via loan app. I have no money, see. But it was too late for that to matter. On my way back from Charlotte the truck cab started running real warm. I reached down for the half-smoked joint in the ash tray and felt a gust of heat blowing up from the floor of the gear shifter. The temperature gauge is unreliable, but I always figured I’d feel the signs of an overheating—there’s basically no insulation in this ‘99 Nissan. And then, for the first time, I felt it. Distinctly more than “regular warm.”

“Whew!” I exclaimed looking at the cashier, and she understood. The gold hoops swayed behind gray locks when she laughed at me, shaking her head. I pulled into the QT to top off the gas and pop the hood. Was the fan working? Was there a tumbleweed stuck in the air intake? (That happened once in Taos.) Was the coolant reservoir low? No! It wasn’t. It was quite full and boiling. Yes, boiling.

The night before, I didn’t sleep except for three hours at 8am. I was still in disbelief that I actually drove from Atlanta to Charlotte. Not because it’s particularly far (it’s only about four hours), but because after originally planning to make the trip, I had already canceled once. Then I re-found inspiration and decided again to go. No biggie. Naturally the truck overheats when I’m running back home, so I learn my lesson. Don’t you ever try to walk your ho ass into a feminist academic conference alone.

I was alone. Alone at a gas station with a hot truck is one thing. But alone as a sex worker activist at a WGS gathering…I choked.

I bailed, at first, for multiple legitimate reasons: no money, the work I decided to present was different than the proposal I submitted, and my husband had just been verbally harassed at work for being Jewish. I wanted to stay with him and not get into more debt. O, but the temptation of that open road beckoned, it did. I pushed through in a whirl! Throwing together my overnight bag while the printer sputtered out double-sided “conversation guides” for my 75-minute presentation at the conference. The erudite sex worker answers the call to adventure, creates money out of thin air, and plunges through the forested highways to visit…“Feminist Futurities: 50 More Years of Feminist Scholarship and Activism in the South.” Babe said he was just going to take a klonopin and sleep most of his day off anyway, so as far as he was concerned, I had his blessing.

Out of habit, I packed my truck with a few “wares” to peddle once in Cackalacky. Perhaps new friends and acquaintances would be interested in acquiring some cute bralettes that no longer fit the newly renovated tit-free zone on my chest. Or if someone happened to mention mushrooms (they did), I could maybe trade some dirty photographs for a couple grams (I couldn’t). Madeleine Blair hooked me up with a place to stay and $20 for a pile of clothes she said she would later donate to the unhoused neighbors near her apartment. And so the Earth turns; hookers clothe the poor, and we pass around the same few dollars, and I succumb to Madeleine buying me a glass of wine…

My knowledge of the muscadine grape was very little before I moved to The South. Quickly it became my favorite grape ever. (You’ve got one of those, right?) Muscadines have the most exaggerated features; thick skin that snaps, bright jade-green flesh that slides enthusiastically out of the skins, huge seeds, and flavor that tastes like real purple drink. If you walk around Atlanta with an open case of muscadines, lesbian couples will approach you and ask you for some. It’s considered bad luck to say no.

Because I’m a huge snob (see my cider-drinking in “Mendocino Girl”), I have certain requests if I visit a wine bar. That night I asked about anything naturally sparkling, since where I met the gals had a bit of a hipster feel. Madeleine’s face lit up from behind the bar,

“Like a Pét-Nat? Oh yes, yes; just you wait. I’ve got something. This one’s local.”

“You know I’m a sucker for the local stuff!”

“No, wait—try them both. They’re very different,” a bartender insists and one listens.

Whatever the other one was I’ll never remember. There was no competition. The triple-variety muscadine pét-nat from DéFi Wines is the low-ABV drinker’s tasty, effervescent companion. I’m a bit partial to boozy kombucha, and a natural wine that has a similar vinegary-funk paired with subtle fruitiness is always such a treat. The distinct candy-like muscadine flavor was at the center, but there were also some notes of watermelon against a “strong backbone” of minerality. After drinking a glass, I got the same prickly feeling in my mouth that I get when I eat muscadines off the neighbors’ vines in East Atlanta. I could have easily downed a bottle, but my commitment to the feminist conference meant I would be waking up at five o’clock in the morning to drive from Charlotte to Winston-Salem. A single glass of pét-nat would be the extent of my libations for the evening.

The cat Margo St.James welcomed me into Madeleine’s apartment with her particular little whistling meows. Four hours should be enough to rest before a 5am reveille, right? Who knows. Lying in bed, I perused my emails from the conference organizers to make sure I knew where to park, what buildings to look for, etc. In the inconspicuous middle part of the email, typed with regular small-size font, I stumbled upon a detail so irritating that I couldn’t even imagine sleeping after I read it. The line stated:

Paper Panels: Presenters will have 10–12 minutes to share their work, followed by approximately 15–20 minutes of Q&A.

Ten to twelve minutes?? I also pieced together that the format was designed to have multiple presentations in the same room within a single 75-minute session block. The other three presenters in my session block were sharing papers unrelated to sex work activism which, in effect, means that the audience would be almost all hecklers viciously committed to my downfall. The icing on this “feminist” conference was a $200 registration fee, apparently just to engage for thirty minutes with the handful in the room who attended specifically for me. Now, I’m not an academic, I’ve never been to any type of conference that organizes in this way, but this is some of the dumbest behavior from smart people that I’ve read about in a while.

My armpits leaked cold sweat. I stirred impatiently under the covers, fluctuating too hot and too cold. Could I go through with this? Could I walk into this conference alone, without having slept, looking disheveled, and only minimally prepared for a completely different mode of engagement…and just wing it? I made an effort to poll my community members on what they would ask a room full of feminist academics if they had the chance, and I compiled all those voices into an organized conversation guide. Did I have a duty to deliver these voices into the halls of academia? Into a feminist conference that has not scheduled any sex worker voices in their program for at least three years? Would I be a good representative of my community? Or would I just come off as another cracked-out delinquent weaseling my way into a forum that was never built to include my people in the first place?

My husband didn’t pick up when I called him at 3am. Keke was on a plane going back to Honolulu from Japan. Gaby was at work in Madrid. All of my lifelines in moments of crisis seemed to be lightyears out of reach. Finally, Gideon returned my call around four o’clock.

“Babe I don’t know what to do I’m really freaking out I have to get up in one hour and I haven’t slept at all and I just realized that I didn’t read the email and I’ll only have ten minutes to talk and I just can’t take this, I shouldn’t have even come here, I’m so fucking dumb…”

“Sweetie..? What’s going on? Where are you right now?” Gidj also didn’t sleep, but his voice calmed me.

“I’m in Madeleine’s room in Charlotte.”

I explained everything. He helped me. But we also argued. When I finally accepted my decision to not go, a decision that ultimately was made days ago, a burst of tears broke through me and I collapsed with relief. I was so tired. My eyes closed at 8am and three hours later the smoke alarm began to scream in ninety-second intervals for new batteries. It was time to go home.

“Will There Be Sex Workers in The Feminist Future?”

This question was the title of my paper presentation. I know there will be, but maybe not caught alone at these conferences. I realized that was the sticking point—I’m too vulnerable if I’m alone. My anxieties about not being the right kind of sex worker to speak on a podium consumed me. I am not the poised, credentialed haute monde escort in wing-tips and red bottoms, who does her whoring from the more defensible position of needing to pay a tuition. No, I am worse than that. I am trans, tattooed, masculine. I lick buttholes to pay for my shitty truck’s radiator repair. My chosen outfit for the conference was a Free Tibet t-shirt because I’m also old. Perhaps it was naïve to think I would be comfortable in my own skin running around unescorted among the WGS-ers (pun intended). As a sex worker, as a bi queer masc, as a community college drop-out—I said nope, not walking in there alone.

Why should one feel this way? Wouldn’t a reasonable onlooker expect that our communities are welcoming to each other? From 2023 to 2025 there were no sex work topics in the conference program—do feminists not think sex workers are relevant to WGS? Or is it that a $200 registration fee for presenters is the exact inverse of a major sex worker cultural ethic? My colleagues were actually shocked that the conference wasn’t at least paying for my transportation costs. (The organizers waived the fee when I inquired, so I’ll give them that.)

As sex workers we do have cultural values—strongly held ones at that. We place a high value on time, especially our own time. We also place a high value on our intellectual property. (You can NOT copy another Domme’s ad photos too closely when working in the same house, unless you want to lose an eye.) So I’d understand that, even if sex workers’ paper proposals are accepted, the question of paying an organization for giving our time, presence, and ideas to them…is basically a non-starter.

In the religion of sex workers, the God we worship is ourselves. Feminist pop culture appropriates this ethic in its pole fitness studios and raunchy top-chart hits, yet its epistemic origin is not named outright. The style of the academy is more “old money” though; they’re smart enough to know how important sex worker voices are in feminism, but they won’t risk appearances. Add an upfront class-based gatekeeping registration requirement and the room is effectively sealed from the great unwashed. Emily Lacey reminds us in Harlots when she introduces herself as from “the gutter” on her first day in an upscale house, “They’ve, er, polished me up, but I’m still exceeding dirty.” Any reason is a reason to worship us. Feminists, in general, are still scrambling to tap into that ethic without defining themselves against their slutty cousin—the Ho.

Here are some of those questions:

“What’s the highest goal of feminism in this moment when everything seems to be reversing?”

“What will it take to finally address the intersections between gender violence, migration, racialized policing, and prison abolition vis-a-vis sex work?”

“How would sex work and sex at large exist in an ideal matriarchal structure?”

“Who benefits from feminist theories that demean and stigmatize other women/femmes/non-binary folk?”

“Is it possible to decenter the male gaze without shaming those who enjoy it?”

I thought a lot about these questions in the bathroom at Love’s where a woman drying her hands did a double take as I slipped into the stall in a very trans-manly fashion. (Hey, it’s the legally permitted place for me, ok? Write your congresswoman I guess.)

Driving past the giant peach-shaped water tower on I-85—detailed with labia, clit and all—I pondered still. How can we keep the dialogue going? What might a proper hour-long engagement with an intentional group have produced? What feminist in the audience would like to answer first?

Who’s going to pay for my radiator?