WORDS by ANNIE LOU MARTIN
Our lives are influenced by religion, whether directly or indirectly. Sex work, though less frequently discussed, is just as influential. If religion has informed the moral codes that regulate our personal and collective lives, even if we don’t actively participate in it, sex work is often portrayed as the antithesis of this morality. But as many of the writers in The Holy Hour: An Anthology on Sex Work, Magic, and the Divine point out, to extricate the body from the spiritual is not just counterintuitive, but symptomatic of a sick culture, one that profits off of shame and it’s concordant myths.
Today, the work of reintegrating the erotic and the divine is seen as inherently subversive, though prostitution is as old as religion, and was once considered as sacred. What the expansive multimedia collection of stories and images in The Holy Hour strips bare is an ancient fact, contemporarily rendered: sex workers belong in the pantheon of healing, tending to some of our deepest wounds and infections. If we want to work towards a future rooted in interpersonal and collective liberation, we’d be wise to look to the whores, who have and continue to provide blueprints.
The Holy Hour is the first release from Working Girls Press, a publishing initiative founded by co-editors Emily Marie Pasos-Duffy and Molly B. Simmons. A completely crowdfunded project, broad in its scope both stylistically and formally, this exciting debut provides a model for what traditional academic and publishing spaces inherently fail to achieve, as an art object birthed from the margins and resistant to stable categorization. What the form of an anthology can and should offer is a kind of gathering, a refusal of hierarchizing modes that instead promotes exchange through its multiplicity of voices, perspectives, and creative approaches. Gathering with the intention of connection is the work of both sex workers and the spiritually seeking. “What is God,” writes Passos-Duffy in the introductory Editor’s Note, “if not the ways in which we belong to one another?”
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