I got a Harley Davidson soft tail for my 50th birthday.  A deluxe custom with the two twin headlights on either side and the big headlight in the middle. is silver and white, two tone.  It has a soft rumble that is very pleasing, it goes right through your balls, up your spine, down your legs, in your heart and settling in your pleasure center.  It’s not too loud.  I don’t like to be intrusive.  But everywhere I go on that bike, people admire it.  And they admire me.  Tourists, drug dealers, corporate business tycoons, sex workers,rock ‘n roll stars, farmers from the countryside, and everything in between.

The bike I had when I was in chicken was a Yamaha 350, a bike my father bought me, it was cheap but it was well made, and I left Hollywood and the life of being in the sex for money world, on a Yamaha 350.  I rode it up to Portland,and then I used it to get around as a student up there.  In Portland it rains all the time, and one day sadly, my cheap but sweet Yamaha 350 passed away, died, and I didn’t have the money to bring her back to life.

I tried to estimate one time how many women I’ve had sex with.  Because I was also a sex addict for many years.  So I used to have sexual bingeswhere I would have sex withmany many civilians and professionals alike in the course of four or five days.  So I cannot give you an exact number.  I think probably I have had sex with a thousand women, depending on how you define sex.  As you know, here in America, we have a lot of difficulty defining sex.  Our former president said that oral sex wasn’t really sex.  I happen to think that it is.

the weirdest thing a customer asked me to do was get dressed in the clothes of her dead son and have sex with her.  This did not end well for either of us.  She got violently sick and my brain was infected with images of her which have re-occurred in nightmares, both sleeping and waking, for over 30 years now.

When I was 17 years old I was too young to be a good gigolo.  I was too damaged because I had been raped just before I got in the business.  My whole personality was broken.  I think this might be difficult to translate.  I’m sorry.  But I didn’t have any money, I didn’t have any sense of my own personality, who I was, because when I was assaulted like that, I ceased to be who I was.  I became someone who was so often consumed with rage and blackness, who had never ending hunger, I could never be fulfilled are satisfied.  I always felt like the worst things were going to happen to me, and that when I walked in the room, no one liked me.  It took me many years to learn how to talk about what was going on inside of myself and to become a reasonable person, who wasn’t consumed by self-destructive passions.  recentlyI have had an offer to go back into the sex business, and I was very tempted.  I think I would make a very good gigolo now.  Because now I understand much more how to make a woman satisfied, how to listen to her body and her soul.  And I also know how to say no.  This was my problem I was 17.  There’s so many people in the business who are acting out sexual trauma, some of them are dangerous people, some are just so damaged and toxic that you can’t help but digest some of that.  In fact I was going to go back into the business, but when I asked my wife, she was not comfortable with the idea.  I told her, Honey, it’s just money, it’s just sex, it’s not love, is just a business transaction.  But she doesn’t see it that way, I don’t think it would be right to go have sex for money and hide that from my wife.  I don’t know, what would an Italian man do?

Of course it is truth about beating up the old man, the Walrus, at the end of chicken.  Everything in that book is truth.  It’s a memoir.  In America, if you wright a book and you say it’s a memoir, it turns out not to be true, they crucify, nail your palms to the cross and put the crown of thorns around your head.  My publisher hired a private detective to try to prove that my story was false.  He couldn’t do it.  Because everything in that book happened to me.  A lot of people ask me this question.  a lot of people have said they don’t believe things that happen in his book.  Like these things couldn’t have happened.  I used to take it personally.  But then I realized, it’s more about them and their imaginations, their limitations, their restrictions as human beings, their brains probably actually can’t imagine these things.  Once you start studying human sexuality, you realize that almost anything can happen between two people sexually at the right moment.  But yes, I was paid $500 to verbally and physically rough up this old man.  I’d done so before with a judge.  In diapers.  He was in diapers, not me.  In fact my pimp, my employment counselor, very carefully orchestrated my career, having me appear in an orgy having sadomasochistic sex in public with a young woman, dressed as Tinkerbell, sometimes she looked 13, sometimes she looked 30.  $500 at that time in history was so much money.  That would be like $1500, maybe even $2000, I don’t know.  But that’s why did it.  Because I wanted the money.  and the power. And I wanted the acceptance, I didn’t want to let Sunny, my pimp/father confessor/fairy godmother/employment counselor, down.  I told this old man, the walrus, that I didn’t want to have sex with them.  But when he put my  hair into his mouth while he was masturbating, it seemed like sex to me.  Again this is the question I asked before.  How do you define sex?  While I was 17 and having sex for money, what he was doing seemed like sex.  And I just freaked out.  I didn’t want to be doing that work anymore.  But I did know how to say no, as I said.  So my whole being, my body and my soul and my mind, just shut down and I became enraged.  And it tore the whole place up.  and punched him, and beat him.  Took out all the rage that was burning inside of me and sprayed all over him, another link in the chain of abuse. I think somewhere deep inside me I knew that once I did that I could no longer work for these people at the Hollywood employment agency.  It was a terribly dangerous thing for me to do.  These were very serious man, who ran this organization, men who will make you suffer if you cost them money.  I was scared to death after I beat the old man, that there would be suddenly a gun at my head.  Luckily, this did not happen.  But it was my way of getting out of the business once and for all.  And in fact about three weeks later, I left Hollywood on that Yamaha 350.

When I left Hollywood when I was 17 years old, I never wanted to see it again.  I moved up to Oregon, and finished college.  My mother lived close by, and she took me back even though I did many many bad bad bad things.  And when I got out of college, I decided I would try to become a professional football player.  A soccer player.  So I moved to England and trained their  for a year, then I was offered a contract in United States.  The day after I received the offer, I had a very very severe knee injury, and that was the end of that.  And I decided to become a standup comedian, so I moved to San Francisco, which was a hotbed of comedy, having just launched Robin Williams.  I made my living as a standup comedian for several years there, but I decided I wanted to be an actor instead.  When you’re an actor on stage, no one in the audience is drunk and yelling rude things at you.  They sit and listen.  At least they do in America. there just wasn’t enough money to make a living as an actor in San Francisco, so I decided to move.  It would either be Los Angeles, or New York.  At the time I wanted to act on Broadway, and not on television.  So I moved to New York to pursue my dream of acting on Broadway.  and I got hired to be the master of ceremonies at chippendales, the greatest male stripping empire the world has ever known. and who says the gods and goddesses don’t have a sense of humor? That’s the subject of my new book, the one that I’ve been working so hard promoting.  It just came out here in the states.

I have loved girls and women in many many cities and in all decades since I was about 13 years old.  There are beautiful amazing women everywhere.

My boss at chippendales, Nick denoia, the visionary genius who created chippendales, was a charming, charismatic, attractive, stylish, lovely human being.  He was also a cruel brutal tyrant who loved nothing more than to publicly humiliate beautiful naked men.  He got into a bitter dispute with his money partner, Stephen Banerjee and immigrant from Pakistan.  Mr. Banerjee decided the best way to resolve this conflict with Nick was to assassinate him, so he hired a hitman who blew Nick’s brains all over the wall of his Manhattan office.

In America we call it a memoir, the French word, a book of memory.  When I was in my 30s, I was a screenplay writer in Hollywood, and I had a three picture deal with Disney.  But I was also having a nervous breakdown.  So I try to find somebody to help me.  Because I knew if I didn’t, I would be a dead man.  Finally I found a woman who was a very good hypnotherapist.  She helped me immensely.  She taught me how to deal with my addictions and my burning rage.  At a certain point she suggested, that since I was making a living as a writer, perhaps I should write about these strange and unusual experiences of my own life.  So I did.  I wrote a novel.  A piece of fiction.  Something I made up.  Something that is so far removed from what really happened to me, that I was able to hide the fact that it had been a sex worker and raped.  I still didn’t want telling anyone publicly.  actually, I didn’t want telling anyone privately either.  It took me a long time to be able to do that.  to say out loud, to admit that I have been a sex worker and I was raped.  A prostitute.  A gigolo, a rent boy, a hustler, whatever. An even longer time to be able to do it easily and casually.  And people react in such a horrible way sometimes.  So I wrote this novel, a piece of fiction.  I worked very hard on it.  I gave it to absolutely everybody I knew.  And my former acting agent, she was probably the best agent I ever had, we made a lot of money together, she agreed to read my book.  When she was through reading it, she asked me if I would mind if she gave it to her god daughter, who was a literary agent.  Of course, I said please give my book to your god daughter who is a literary agent.  It took her nine months to read the book that I had written.  We could have had a baby in the time it took for her to read that book.  but finally she did.  And she liked it.  the book that is. She became my agent. but I was also interested in her.  And she was interested in me.  So we went on a date.  And the date ended up going very well.  So well in fact that I ended up in her apartment at four o’clock in the morning.  And she asked me about my sexual past.  For the first time in my whole life, I was able to tell the truth, casually and easily, about being a sex worker, and being raped.  Instead of being terrified, or freaked out, or judgmental, she was very open and curious.  So I told her my whole life story, at least the part about being a gigolo, a sex worker, when I was 17.  And she said, well that’s the book you should write.  Write the true story.  That changed my entire life.  Because once I was able to write the true story, I was able to be free of the burden of having to carry this All-consuming dark secret inside of me.  I could admit finally who I was, and I could become the person I wanted to be.  And once I was able to write something from the heart, something that was important, Hollywood came calling to me.  and Chicken is now being made into a television series by one of the best companies here, Showtime.

as I said, my new book, Master of Ceremonies: a True Story of Love, Murder, Roller Skates and Chippendales has just come out here in the United States.  So I am embarking on an 18 event tour.  I am also a performer, I made a one-man show a chicken, and I have been trying to figure out a way to bring it to Italy for a long time, but I hadn’t been able to yet.  So I’m going on this tour to all these great bookstores here in America, and I’ve made seven short movies of me performing excerpts from master of ceremonies, with 80s music and ridiculous pictures of large naked men which I’m just about to release on the World Wide Web.  I’m also almost finished with a new novel, it’s a ghost story set in a boarding school, and in a Shaker Village.  The Shakers were a religious cult in America in the 1800s that didn’t believe in sex.  I’ve done 10 drafts of that book, I think there will probably be two more.  I’ve also just sold a book to a fantastic press here in America, called soft skull.  The book is called sex worker literati:Hos, Hookers, Rentboys and Callgirls writing on Love, Life, money, and sex.  It is an anthology of writings by people who have had sex for money.  I’ve been working on this book for a long time.  There are all kinds of people in this book.  Women, men, transgendered, upper class, lower class, homeless to college professor.  The book will come out in America in June of 2009, and I will do a series of sex worker literati events, where sex workers will read their writing publicly.  I’m also working on a project called 100 greatest poems for kids to say out loud, all the great classic poetry,  this is something that has been lost in America, kids can’t say poetry out loud any more.  I think it’s very important thing in life, to be able to say a poem out loud.I also have a parody of a children’s book than I am working on, it’s called Delores has lost her clitoris.  but my greatest project is my daughter, she is almost 1 year old, and she just started walking.  She’s so much smarter, prettier, and happier than I am.  I suppose that is as it should be.

Thanks, David Henry Sterry