A Canadian radio station recently contacted me through myspace. They wanted to book me to talk about my drawing class on their arts program. When I asked them about their unorthodox means of getting in touch, they told me that my website is blocked at the station offices.
Same thing with my agent. When your work deals with tits and cocks (even cartoon tits and cocks), you enter a limited- yet fascinating- world that my friend Lux Nightmare describes as the Pink Ghetto. Lux is a smart, sexy Jewish girl and retired alt-porn entrepreneur- and you’ll be hearing more about her later. Says Lux, on her sexuality mega-blog Sexerati…
Even when it’s not porn, it’s sex: and sex alone is enough to earn the label NSFW. Sex, even academic sex, is something we can’t always discuss in polite company. Trying to build your life, your career, around a discussion of sex means accepting that you will always have a fringe identity. That no matter how academic, how smart, how clean you keep it, you will always be on the edges of polite society. You will always be in the Pink Ghetto, and you will never be able to escape it.
See more fascinating Pink Ghetto discussion here. Which was why I was made particularly happy reading Putting Your Passion Into Print. This exhaustively researched publishing guide is responsible for making my first book a success. One of its authors, David Sterry, keeps mentioning his first book, Chicken, as a publishing example. He never says what its about. Sterry is grey-haired and wholesome, like a literary Dave Barry, and I imagined his book was whimsical history of poultry. Only when I looked online did I see the full title: Chicken: Portrait of a Young Man for Rent. To which I say, congratulations, Dave Sterry, for breaking out of the Pink Ghetto. To hell with narrow classifications. Now, if only we could fix the internet filters at a certain Vancouver radio station.