Image credit: 'Hello Sir' by Jet Moon.

I've been making pay-per-view porn clips for about a decade now, my approach to being a Webcam Dominatrix has been fairly low tech but I've learned the skills. As a chronically ill person, sex work has given me a measure of independence and a working environment that fits my needs.

My collection of porn clips mostly features me talking to camera about ‘Homo conversion therapy’: forcing my clients to be gay, or ‘Sissyfication’: forcing them to cross-dress. The irony being I'm a genderqueer Dyke who’s often read as straight in the mainstream world. One of my most visibly queer spaces has been online with my clients, who often address me as 'Sir'. On the Internet you can be whoever you want to be, as the saying goes. Titling myself as a Lesbian Dominatrix has attracted those who want to play out fantasies while exploring their gender and sexuality.

I'm currently undertaking an online artists residency supported by the Live Art Development Agency. My project: 'Hello Sir' is a collaboration to make a short film between myself and a long term client I’ve formed a friendship with. The film features my porn footage inter cut with video of myself in Drag, making a commentary on the apparent dichotomy between the world of online sex work and the world of queerness.


Image credit: 'Jock' by Jet Moon.

Drag is something I've done ever since I started getting on stage, performing myself as a caricature that gradually became louder and bolder, with more makeup. In the midst of lockdown when I started to lose track of time and myself, I decided to shoot a piece of drag performance to inter cut with the porno clips. I'm always tired. Getting up in drag takes a lot of energy, clearing a space, finding makeup and costumes. Setting up lights, so I can see what I am doing. I've never been one of those pristine queens; this is broad brush drag, clownish and aggressive. What I love about standing alone in front of the mirror, is that as I apply pan stick, draw on features, extend eyes lines, decide where brows might begin, as I disappear underneath the layers of makeup, a new person begins to emerge. As I put together a look, don a highly teased, hair sprayed half to death wig, finally I feel I'm 'Me'.

In many ways Lockdown improved my social life and the amount of support I had. Meetings and events I'm normally too exhausted to travel to moved online. For the first time in years I've ‘gone out dancing' via zoom. Help I’ve always needed with shopping and errands suddenly materialised. On the flip side the online market is flooded with sex workers excluded from government help. More clients are online, but so too are amateurs because everyone is figuring out how to have sex online.

I wonder about the last years of governments attempts to control the Internet through anti-porn laws, first ATVOD in the UK, then the effects of SESTA/FOSTA in the States. Legislation's which seriously affected the livelihoods and safety of sex workers. Pitched under the guise of 'anti trafficking' legislation the pieces of law making did a lot to control how money can move and who can have a bank account. Now more non-sex workers are using the Internet for all manner of things will more people think about how that use is policed?


Image credit: 'Money' by Jet Moon.

My collaborator and I meet online, normally we see each other for a few paid hours a month. Now we  spend time together watching clips, collating material and editing. Throughout the process they bring a lot of cheerleading, that the work is good and goals can be attained. They do a lot of the boring, arduous tasks which means I can focus on creativity. Our collaboration raises many issues: about work, paid or unpaid, of economies, class, persona's and visibility, of financial security, housing and health disparities. Many of the common divides in society are things that Covid has amplified. A situation that continues to shift as more people lose their job security or income.

As our project really starts to get underway, the easing of lockdown begins. What was conceived of as a project taking place amidst mass lockdown becomes us continuing to collaborate online, and for various reasons continuing lockdown, while observing with a growing unease how many people treat the pandemic lightly. I've been blogging about the collaboration process and the various issues it raises here, pondering a bitter mouthed entry titled 'Now it's all over'. In Autumn as infection rates rise and London is close to another lockdown, I wonder how winter will be, now it's all beginning again.

'Hello Sir' by Jet Moon and her client ‘Giani’ is supported by the Live Art Development Agency as one of the recipients of LADA’s online collaborative residencies responding to the conditions of the Covid-19 pandemic.

Jet Moon is multi disciplinary artist who creates intimate spaces of visibility and sharing, usually within marginalised communities they belong to, most often working outside of traditional art spaces.

Project website: hellosir.blog

Jet Moon official website: jetmoon.org