So What If I’m a Puta: Diaries of Transness, Sex Work, Desire

Moira invites readers behind the closed doors of her encounters as a sex worker in her evocative English-language debut, which was first published in Brazil in 2016. Shortly after coming out as trans and finding a new source of income in sex work, Moira began chronicling her experiences in a blog, entries of which she draws on here as she ruminates on her past self. “Not only would I become a puta, but I’d also tell everyone about it,” she writes amid the racy details of her early career. “I’d shout my profession, I’d write about the streets as I saw them, as they became mine, as they discovered my body alongside me, as I became free.” But as Moira’s relationship to her body evolved, she found less pleasure and more pain, including violence from clients and subtle scorn in her PhD program. Writing about sex work “started to become the reason I did it,” she admits. Moira’s stories vacillate between exhilarating moments of erotic passion, the bland tedium of making a quick buck, and the extreme risks she faced in intimate moments with power-hungry customers. She also offers canny reflections on the crucial but hidden role sex workers play in a society that stigmatizes bodily desires. Raunchy and uninhibited, this winsome account demystifies “the oldest profession.” (July)