#juniper fitzgerald

Although I started working at the age of fourteen—seven, actually, if I include uncompensated childcare and the emotional labor of protecting my newborn brother from our parents’ drunken brawls—I never amassed enough cash for an apartment deposit. As such, I was perennially suspended between here and there.

The threat of disownment and subsequent fears about self-sustainability are omnipresent even now as an adult, and the sex industry remains the careful arms into which I fall. This is my contradiction—the thing that most alienates me is also my reprieve from alienation.

The strip club manager was nothing more than a sentient patina of slime, a thick moss grown from years in the moist shade of greed and entitlement. A cloud of cigarette smoke hung over him with a darkness in his eyes that I would later see in myself. He took my baby fat and fake ID as an invitation to humiliate. “What are your favorite sex toys?” he asked. “What’s your favorite sex position? You spit or swallow, baby?”

I was a virgin.

Leaving smaller than when I had entered, I decided to get a job washing dishes instead. I showed up to my first dishwashing shift in a floor-length pink dress from Goodwill, which was the source of even more humiliation. Somewhere along the line, I was told that one must look sophisticated at work, and the pink dress was the most sophisticated thing that I owned.

As I attempted to carve out space for myself in the workplace, I quickly learned that it didn’t matter if the workplace commodified femininity or devalued it; either way, men orchestrated the work.

I wouldn’t be brave enough to set foot in another strip club for a few years. But when I did, I found home: women—lots of women. It wasn’t that this home was unproblematic. The women had scars. It was patriarchal and abusive in all the ways that my childhood home had been. But at least in my chosen home, the women were brave enough to name things: bad dates, time wasters, undercovers, sleazebags, dirty managers … thieves.

I learned how to hustle. More importantly, I learned how to take what has always been rightfully mine—what has always been rightfully ours. I took it and apologized to no one. I learned how to break a man’s nose in one fell swoop. I was Dotty on stage and Jenny in the sheets. I was Juniper on paper and Jennifer in lineups, and somehow all of that felt unbending and unwavering. I was a wide-eyed midwestern girl, eager to learn. I was a multiplicity, but not yet bifurcated. I wasn’t yet a mother.”]

Of course, patriarchal values do not just penetrate masculinity. People of all genders are susceptible to its charms. But for those of us who straddle identities of Mother and Whore simultaneously, the demand to bifurcate one’s consciousness is even more profound. Over the years, eagerness turned to resentment. A pregnancy turned into a botched abortion and a lover turned into an abuser. So I ran away to the desert. I ran until I was pregnant, again.

The Mojave had suffered a spasm of blossom, which was preter-naturally beautiful even as it signaled grave environmental decay in the desert. I was blossoming too, and decaying somehow.

The sunrise in Las Vegas is bookended by replicas of replicas, what sociologist Jean Baudrillard identified as simulacra, a culture of infinite regress where the world rests on the back of a turtle who is herself atop another turtle. Turtles all the way down. On speedy nights saturated in booze and cigarettes and the kind of loop-deloop rooftop monologues that accompany such dreamy conditions, I wondered aloud if the sunrise was, in fact, real. “In the future, they will knock down mountains to build casinos that look like mountains,” I told my lover.

There was a particular sunrise, though, that swam in with the silence of stilted mornings and I knew at that moment I was pregnant. It had become intolerable to swing around a stripper pole. It felt like gravity was swallowing my swollen breasts. I’d convinced myself up until this point that my body was simply gearing up for an epic period or perhaps just tired from all the drugs. My lover was strung out beside me.

I can say with unwavering certainty that until this particular moment, the series of events I called “living” were merely loose ends, tied together with prurient, fleeting, and bodily interests. They suddenly seemed meaningless when measured against the pulsating anticipation of my child. And then, the emergent question—Mother or Whore? Was I a collection of seedy underbelly stories? Or an angelic mother, reborn with purpose?

I could no longer strip on a stage, so I marketed my pregnant body. I advertised my breast milk as a fetish but quickly recoiled from the enterprise upon meeting a man who wanted to make me his “submissive pregnant slave.” He detailed his fantasy: as his slave, I would offer up my engorged tits whenever he pleased, from which he’d take his fill. I would bear his children and we—our children and me—would be his property.

My maternal body was still whorish to this man, still property. Sliced down the center of my personhood, I was to become singularly owned like a Madonna but publicly available like a Whore. It is this cultural inability to see sex working mothers as committed to our children first and foremost—this cultural desire that instead sees Whores as Whores first—that causes so much pain and aggression against our bodies and being.”]

I am infinitely unknowable like the dark and scarred crevasses of my body.

I have been harmed by men; I have loved them.

My body has been a space of both creation and destruction, sometimes at the exact same time.

I endure the threat of violence, even as some feminists claim that I am immune to pain.

I endure.

I am Mother and Whore.”]