British Sex Worker of The Year looking for psychologist & clients for Channel 5

(A version of this piece was also published on the Indian news site WSN)

Charlotte Rose & T-shirt on Skype this week

Charlotte Rose recently won a British Erotic Award as Sex Worker of the Year.

She had just come back from Cuba when I talked to her two days ago via Skype.

“I’ve got a busy morning,” she told me. “I’ve been able to squeeze my dog into the vet’s at 9 o’clock; somebody’s coming to fix my washing machine; and then Channel 5 TV are giving me a call.”

“How was Cuba?” I asked.

“It was fantastic, but I did slice my knee and I sliced the tip of my toe off in the swimming pool.”

“A shark attack in the swimming pool?” I asked.

“There must be something there with massively over-sized teeth,” laughed Charlotte Rose, “because it really did take a chunk out of my toe. I can’t recall what happened but a lot of things apparently happen in that pool.”

“Were you in Cuba on holiday or for professional reasons?” I asked.

Charlotte in Havana with Che Guevara hat and Cuban cigar

“Holiday,” she replied “I went with a colleague that I work with. Havana is fantastic and the people are fantastic. I’ve got about nine new husbands. The old-fashioned Cadillacs – all the cars – are fantastic. And the Che Guevara Museum was amazing. But what was really interesting was the red light district. There are hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of girls there… and lady boys and gay boys.”

“I’m amazed,” I said. “I’ve never been to Cuba, but I wouldn’t have thought the regime would allow a red light district.”

“They tolerate it,” explained Charlotte Rose. “It’s policed. If you get caught, then you’re arrested. You’ve got cameras on every corner, but there are no cameras on the red light road itself. Over there, the women are quite reserved. There’s no sex before marriage. It’s very Catholic. But, because they’re an equal society, a taxi driver will earn 25 pesos a month and a teacher will earn 25 pesos a month. Our £ is worth about 1.50 pesos and those people are getting 25 pesos a month to live on. A prostitute over there will get 25 pesos for the hour. So, in my opinion, 90% of the women over there will do it with a tourist just to top up their wages.”

“Someone like the Daily Mail ,” I suggested, “would say Oh, prostitutes. Terrible people. But you would say…?”

“I love what I do,” said Charlotte Rose. “People have their own definition of what the word stands for. But it’s how somebody does it. It’s how somebody conducts themselves.

“At the end of the day, what I do is I give the opportunity for people to feel passion and pleasure and intimacy in their lives for a certain amount of time. The bonus I get out of it is knowing I have left that person with such a huge smile on their face and I’m the reason behind that smile. But, like any industry, you get the good and the bad.”

“The Daily Mail,” I said, “would go on about girls being kidnapped in Romania, brought here and forced into prostitution… or prostitutes are all drug addicts… No girl would do it of her own volition…”

“They should come and visit me,” suggested Charlotte Rose, “and I will give them Devon’s finest GFE and I will show them my arms. Yes, we do have the bad side of the industry. Young children, drug addicts, yes, unfortunately, yes. But, if you look at the banking industry, there are nice bankers who enjoy their job and we’ve got bankers who are wankers.

Charlotte Rose tries her hand as rock guitarist Cuban style

“The stories that come out in the papers are always A prostitute was killed in Surrey. Twenty young Cuban girls… You don’t see in the paper Oh, there’s Charlotte Rose, Sex Worker of the Year Award. Fantastic the amount of work she’s doing within the sex industry. Why not?

“I’ve got a Bachelor in Science degree. I moved to Exeter to become a teacher. I realised I don’t like kids – 15-year-old kids don’t want to learn – I did my PGCE, the basic teaching qualification. My degree’s in Hospitality. I’m trained to run a 7-star, 500-bedroom hotel.”

“Why did you become an escort?” I asked.

“I’m very highly-sexed. I detest the idea of picking someone up in a bar. I think it’s dirty. I think it’s seedy. So why not join an agency and get paid for it? I absolutely loved it. I was funding my businesses and I was doing something I enjoyed. I stayed with an agency for a year and then got an apartment and went into escorting independently and never looked back.

“I have a certain minimum that I see each day. I’ve built-up fantastic rapports with lots of my clients. I do a lot of sexual training and relationship coaching. I have clients who see me for troubles in their own relationships. They’ve got me on a retainer. If they have an argument at home, they can phone me and I can coach them. I have clients who come and see me for social skills, because they’re too afraid to do basic chit-chat with people.

“Every fantasy and fetish gets thrown at me and, if it’s something that I can accommodate, I will. It all boils down to If I can make somebody happy, then I will.”

“So,” I said, “you recently won this Erotic Award as Sex Worker of the Year. Why did you get that?”

Charlotte & Erotic Award as Sex Worker of the Year

“Because I’m awesome!” laughed Charlotte Rose. “I really love my job and it shows. I’m very passionate about people. I work a lot with disabled people. I work with anybody that wants and needs intimacy and passion in their lives. That’s one of the things I push my business towards. I’m not an escort for a quick fuck for fifteen minutes. My minimum term is an hour. We have a cup of tea together, sit down and talk, get to know each other, relax, then shower and enjoy each other’s company. If I can give somebody the opportunity to feel intimacy, pleasure and passion in their lives, then that’s me happy. I say I work with the three Ps – I work with passion, professionalism and people.”

“Have you reaped any benefits from your Erotic Award?”

“Well, all the regular people I work with think it’s fantastic and I should be working with Channel 5 in the up-and-coming months with regards to the sexual training I offer. So everything’s getting there. Exciting stuff. I was supposed to have worked with Channel 4 on the Sex On Wheels programme, but I pulled out at the last minute because I do have a family and the things that I do… It just wasn’t ready at that point in my life able to go nationally public. But the way things are going now…

“I’m hopefully working with the National Ugly Mugs scheme in regards to my time wasters website.

“The National Ugly Mugs scheme sends out information about dangerous clients to people, but it doesn’t record people who waste your time and having that information is just as valuable. If a client genuinely messes me about, I can upload his phone number onto the website. If he then tries to book with someone else, she can look up his number on the website and it won’t show his number but it will say whether he’s been entered as a time waster. It also has a star system on it to tell you how many times the man has been entered.

“I’ve also got my English Courtesan website and I’ve got a new Sexual Training website which will be online soon and that’s what I’ll be pushing in the Channel 5 programme.”

“What’s the idea behind the Sexual Training website?” I asked.

“To give sexual training,” laughed Charlotte Rose.

“In what way?” I persisted.

“It’s more to do with sexual surrogacy,” she explained. “I’ve been working with ICASA (the Centre for Intuition, Consciousness And Self Awareness) in regards to erectile dysfunction and premature ejaculation. There was a client of mine who suffered with premature ejaculation. Just a simple stroke of the arm could make him explode. But, using different therapy techniques, we’ve gone from 3 seconds to 17 minutes.

“I’m not trained in psychology but I am, at the moment, looking for a psychologist I could possibly work with in the future.”

“The Channel 5 show should get you a bit of publicity,” I said.

“We are looking for people to be on the show,” said Charlotte Rose, “but I don’t want it to damage the discretion I have. We are looking for a man in his 40s who has never had sex; a couple; and a disabled client.”

“I don’t think I count for any of those,” I said.

“You could mention in your blog that there’s going to be a TV show on sexual surrogacy and Channel 5 is looking for those three types of people…

“I just think it’s absolutely fantastic that I’ve got an award for what I do. You get all these achievements for the Best Teacher of the Year, the Best Accountant of the Year and people in my profession go un-noticed. It’s only the bad that gets noticed. The message I want to get out is that I’m proud of what I do.”

“And you’ve a busy life,” I said.

“Yes,” said Charlotte Rose, “I’m going to have to put a note on my door to the guy who’s fixing my washing machine to say I’m on an emergency run to the vet.”

Edinburgh Fringe… Sex workers, naked men, a Twitter sensation and Alan Carr

One fan of Chris Dangerfield’s act has expert views on shows

Enterprising Edinburgh Fringe act Chris Dangerfield, whose show Sex Tourist is sponsored by a local escort agency, e-mailed me this morning:

“A sex worker with a blog likes my show,” he said. “How nice. She’s also asked me out for a coffee.”

Headed Hooker-tainment at Edinburgh Fringe, it is an interesting blog and no doubt hopes to ape the success of Belle de Jour.

But, as the lady’s fees start at £190 per hour or £1,000 for the night, I am not plugging the blog’s address except for hard cash.

Interestingly, though, she says this:

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Assaulted with jokes about sex workers from the very first show I saw at this year’s Edinburgh Fringe festival, I’m trying to understand why we’re supposedly the edgiest, funniest material on everyone’s lips right now…

Now that racism, sexism, homophobia and transphobia are less acceptable in main-stream entertainment, it seems like sex workers are really the only ‘other’ people to pick on. Because that’s the real reason that this kind of comedy works; it used to be OK to laugh at people of colour or gays because it used to be OK to think they actually *were* different.

It’s OK to make jokes at sex workers because they in no way could be sitting next to you in the audience, oh no. Sex workers all walk around with red flashing lights over their heads, everyone knows that… Transphobia particularly is still fairly prevalent in entertainment, and anyone saying that the acceptance of drag or ladyboy shows is good for trans rights is fairly misguided…

The unspoken issue here is that, of course, many performers at Edinburgh must also themselves be sex workers or have had sex work experience. Supporting a creative career is very hard to do around a 9-5 job although, of course, other kinds of self-employed or freelance work are probably possible.

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Now, from naked women to naked men…

Two thirds of the Greatest Show on Legs arrive in Edinburgh tomorrow. Famed for their Naked Balloon Dance, they are the reason why it was widely said the late Malcolm Hardee literally had “the biggest bollocks in showbusiness”.

They have not performed at the Edinburgh Fringe this century and, with Malcolm Hardee dead and Steve Bowditch banned by the Peter Buckley Hill Free Fringe from performing at the rival Alternative Fringe’s Hive venue on pain of excommunication, the line-up is original members (I use the term innocently) Martin Soan and Martin Clarke plus the shy performing wallflower that is Bob Slayer.

They are billed as performing their hour-long show – Aaaaaaaaaaaaarghh! It’s the Greatest Show on Legs – from this Wednesday to Sunday but are now adding what they call a public dress rehearsal (without dresses) tomorrow night at 9.15pm. Well, I’ll be there for sure.

Janey Godley’s viral sensation – on stage tonight in Edinburgh

And I will also be at the other big unbilled gig of the Fringe week tonight – Janey Godley’s one-performance-one-night-only play #timandfreya based on the extraordinary viral Twitter success of her live blow-by-blow tweets about an overheard argument in a train between the titular Tim and Freya.

The half-hour stage version was dramatised by Janey’s daughter Ashley Storrie, who also appears in it tonight.

“It was an amazing conversation between Tim and Freya,” Janey tells me, “Everybody loved it. But it’s no really a play because there’s gaps. I was Tweeting between Glasgow, Carlisle and Oxenhome. So Ashley had to adapt it and introduce new characters to drive the story forward.”

Ashley herself plays the new character Laura and Philip Larkin (no, not that one – he’s dead) is Alec.

“Do you know why they’re called Laura and Alec?” Janey asked me.

“No,” I said.

“Because they were the characters in Brief Encounter,” said Janey.

“And you’re in it?” I asked.

“I play the ticket collector,” Janey replied. “Rick Wilson, the lead singer from the Kaiser Chiefs, called me and wanted to play Tim because he was fascinated by the story when he read the original Tweets. And I got an e-mail from an actress in Los Angeles who wanted to come over and play Freya. This is true! I said, No. It’s for one night and there’s no money! I’m no letting people do that. That’s insanity.

“One really weird thing is that lots of people have been Tweeting me and e-mailing me saying they do a wee Tim & Freya sketch themselves in their office. They’ve been ‘acting’ the Tweets out loud to each other.

“Rick from the Kaiser Chiefs told me he and his girlfriend did that and everybody read it out and an actor Jack Klaff, who was in Star Wars – he played Red something (Red Four) – Ashley recognised his voice on the phone as a man who was in Star Wars… Jack Klaff called me and gave me ideas about what to do with the story, so everybody’s been calling me and wanting to be involved.”

“Rick Wilson really wanted to do it, didn’t he?” I said.

“Yes, he phoned to apologise when the band schedule eventually came through: I can’t do it. I’m really sorry.”

“And the comedian Alan Carr,” I said.

“Yes,” said Janey, “Alan Carr was desperate but he has a Channel 4 pilot tonight. He wanted to push a trolley saying Teas! Coffees! Teas! Coffees! which would have been good.”

Whatever happens tonight, like the original train journey, it should be an interesting trip. And as the real Tim – the man on the train – contacted Janey after he read the Tweets, even he might be there in the audience…