Hot People Read Poetry

A night celebrating poetry, sex work, and queerness 

Madame X is bright red eye candy between LaGuardia Place and Thompson Street, established in 1997 by 3 women. On a frigid winter night, I descend into the building's warmth and am met with iconic dim crimson lighting that matches the exterior. Everyone, including myself, just got 20% hotter. 

As I arrive, I run into Natalie Gilda, the founder and host of Hot People Read Poetry (HPRP). Tonight’s event, Make It Work (MIW), is a paid featured readers set consisting exclusively of writing from sex workers that is completely sold out. 

Make It Work’s first performance was last month and was hosted at Fortune World, HPRP’s first-ever venue. Natalie explains that tonight she’s most excited about her house mom, Kat, giving a speech. She said of Kat, “Without even knowing it, she has inspired this entire event. She’s honestly inspired my entire body of work, because to me, she represents sex work, and she represents community.”

What makes tonight special is that it’s Make It Work’s first-ever reading in which they are able to pay their artists. And for Natalie, this progress makes her excited about the prospect of more poetry shows in the future. 

The performance space is behind a velvet curtain, a lovely room of couches upholstered from all different decades and a singular disco ball confettiing the walls. The cozy lounge quickly swells with a variety of LGBTQ+ folks. Hot People Read Poetry is known for the variety of poetry read by some of the hottest queer people in the city, it's in the name after all. 

As the night begins, people naturally shed their coats like snakes shed skin, and the backs of couches are replaced by puffers, scarves, and trench coats. Soon, the audience is forced to carpeted floor seats, crammed into the spaces between coffee tables and upholstery. The light is blood red, and it makes everyone indistinguishable. I only recognize Zury, who performed in the previous Make It Work event, and also generously provided the photos for this article. 

“I am a documentarian by trade, but so often that means coming to projects from the outside and learning what the story is. But this is my world. These are my people - my families,” Zury said. “We are finally getting to tell our stories, in our own words, and people are listening. They are seeing the faces of the invisible, and if I can be one tiny part of helping that process unfold, it would be one of the most meaningful impacts I could imagine having on the world."

Natalie kicks off the night with her poem, 'A Private Room Is 60 Minutes.' Her work is equally hilarious as it is brilliantly devastating. With that, the night begins, as Natalie reminds the audience, “We have an all-sex-worker lineup for you tonight.” 

Natalie performing

Valium Housewife is the first to read. She rises like a pink mermaid from one of the couches. She immediately launches into her first poem, 'I Am Your Sexy Meteorologist.’ As she reads, her voice becomes more seductive, and she begins to sway, making the room drunk. She introduces her second poem somewhat hesitantly, "I’m really excited that I actually get to say these two words… Because um… New shit?" The audience erupts in applause and yells the words “NEW SHIT” back to her. Valium reads her final two poems topless, shedding her own snake-skin dress and letting it fall to the floor. 

Valium later explained more about her experiences, “When getting my master's, my focus was on queer art and queer space. So something I had to grapple with while writing papers and essays and whatever was, what is queer? What I gathered and built upon was, queer can be defined as existing in direct opposition to the norm. Often that involves gender. Often that involves sexual practices. Often that involves the way one dresses. It has a lot of layers.” 

Next up is Lyn AKA Poetry N Tingz, who is from Oakland, California. She explains to the audience, “I flew here just for this! Because sex work is amazing and also really difficult, and we don’t get a lot of spaces where we get to have our voices featured in this way.” 

The audience explodes with applause as she introduces her first poem, an NYC love poem. For Lyn, finding a space where sex work and poetry overlap has been a dream come true. “There are poems I have that are not for every room because I don’t know if the audience will connect with them. Tonight, it felt freeing to share my lens as a sex worker,” Lyn said. 

Lyn announces the title of her second poem, 'First Sapphic Breakup,' and the entire room gasps and groans. 

Before her final two poems, Lyn mentions Diane Di Prima’s ‘Revolutionary Letters.’“She wrote these letters over a 50-year span, beginning in 1968. And I really started thinking about what it means for a poet to have a life’s work,” Lyn explained. For Diane di Prima, the ‘letters’ are poems that she began writing in 1968 and  are a “blend of utopian imagination, radical politics, and ecological awareness.”

For all the poets here, their life’s work encapsulates sex, sexuality, sex work, gender, and so much more that is all on display tonight. 

After a brief intermission, Natalie once again shares her work, reading her poem, 'Conversations With House Mom.' She can barely say the title without tearing up. The poem is an anthem for the woman in the corner, dressed in an all-white pantsuit, holding a cane. You can feel the pride radiating off of her as Natalie reads on. It’s the final lines of the poem that strike me the hardest, "There is something to be said about who becomes a stripper, and what it takes. Why we are able to. There is something to be said about those who need a mom." 

With that heart-touching introduction, Kat rises from the performer's couch, giving Natalie a hug. The first thing she says into the mic is, “The cane is real, but I’m trying to give pimp.” Kat proceeds to bless us with a speech that holds the entire room in a warm, but stern embrace. Sex work is the oldest profession in history. I look at House Mom and see a monument of a woman throughout the ages, a sisterhood. Kat proudly tells the audience, “Sex work changed my life, sex work saved my life.”

Her speech receives a standing ovation, and Natalie proudly announces, “That’s our first standing ovation at Hot People Read Poetry.” 

Kitty Bailey is introduced next, and she tells the audience she’s been doing sex work for seven years. She begins a new piece that features moments of singing ‘Dancing Queen’ interspersed with poetry. She tells the crowd, “The same thing that has nearly killed me has brought me back to life and healed me in ways I can’t describe…So here I am now. On a different stage, telling you how things could be different. Justice sounds a lot like decriminalization, sounds like my body and my labor not being policed."

Kitty during her reading

Kitty dedicates her second poem to trans sex workers, and before her final poem, she remarks how she came dancing here at Madame X the night before, and how it’s so nice to be here for a second night in a row. 

The final performer of the night is Delicious Demii. It isn’t easy to be the last performer, but she walks to the mic with total confidence. She announces that last year was her first time writing erotic poetry and begins her first poem. 

Delicious Demi at Make It Work

Later, she explained to me, "The poetry community provides safe spaces for words, whereas the sex worker community provides safe spaces for bodies, and I think those are both beautiful things.”

As Demii finishes her final poem, the powerful night of poetry, community, and connection comes to an end. 

Hot People Read Poetry’s next open mic is February 6th at Nook, and is hosted there on the first Friday of every month.   

Photos by: Zury