According to Teresa, adult films are shot every day in Portland. Telephone sex services thrive. Local live web-cams transmit on the Internet. The city's fetish specialists run the gamut from the dungeon dominatrix to the Dairy Queens, lactating women who collect and sell their breast milk. Sex workers range from the "career" women, who stay blond and thin in spinning classes and augment their breasts, to the "survival" or "trade" workers, who work a "track" on the street, trading sex for money or shelter or food or drugs.
Teresa says—irony aside—the best place to find street action is in any of the city's "prostitution-free zones." These include Burnside Street, between the McDonald's at the west end of the track, and Sandy Boulevard at the east end. Also check out Killingsworth Street, Interstate Avenue, and Sandy Boulevard—especially through the Hollywood District.
For escort service, she says, check out the free magazines offered in most nude dance bars. The standard tip to a dancer is a dollar bill but don't be afraid to pay more.
In order to dance nude in a bar, the performers must pay the bar a "stage fee." The dancer also pays an "agency fee" to a booking agency that finds her venues and schedules her appearances. Between the two types of fees, a performer can go home with little or no profit. A situation that Teresa says drives many performers to arrange private dances in hotels or homes after work or between shows.
Started by Teresa in 1995, the magazine Danzine collects this professional wisdom that sex workers won't find anywhere else. It teaches workers before they have to learn—and maybe die—from their mistakes. Danzine is here to tell you—no, you can't tax deduct your tampons, even if you cut the string and wear them while performing. And yes, always wipe down the brass pole before riding it with your newly shaved coochie. One drop of even dried menstrual blood is enough to transmit hepatitis C or possibly HIV
Danzine and Teresa also run the "Bad Date Hotline," where sex workers post the details of their shitty "dates" and describe the customers for others to look out for. Bad dates range from the bald driver of the silver Porsche who's HIV positive and demands unprotected vaginal sex to the Honda driver who wears a tie and zaps women with his stun gun.
And the magazine's damn funny. In one feature called "You Know You've Been Stripping Too Long When..." Item Number Seven says you're banned from the playground after you teach the local kids how to work the pole. Item Number Ten says you go to the drugstore and automatically pick up your change with your teeth.
Danzine is published twice a year. To buy back issues, write to Danzine, P.O. Box 40207, Portland, OR 97240-0207. Or look for it in small-press bookstores and Tower Records and Magazines in the United States, Great Britain, and Canada. Also check out the website, www.danzine.org.
At 628 E Burnside Street, Teresa runs Miss Mona's Rack, a store that sells secondhand shoes, clothes, and jewelry, plus razors, condoms, and tampons. It also offers a staggering variety of lubricants, with all profits going to support community job training and risk-reduction programs that teach HIV and other STD prevention.
To date, Teresa says the city continues to increase the size of the prostitution-free zones, in order to arrest more sex workers for trespassing—a worse crime than prostitution. And the city recently tried to impose a raft of licensing regulations on everyone in the sex industry. According to Teresa, the city's effort is first to make money but ultimately to eliminate sex workers. Another irony, since the city also supports growing the local hotel industry and attracting large conventions while denying that conventioneers create and support much of the local sex industry.
It's not realistic to expect every tourist to attend the symphony or the opera at night. Teresa says, "And there are a lot of guys who do go to the symphony, but want a blow job afterward."
In reaction to the new regulations, local sex workers rallied by forming a political action group they called Scarlet Letter. They contacted some seventy escorts through the ads in adult monthly magazines such as SFX and lobbied door-to-door in City Hall to convince the government the new law would drive sex workers even further underground, where they'd seek less protection from violence and disease.
On March 8, 2000, after a court battle, Portlands sex workers won an injunction that stops the city from enforcing the law. Now, all the years of organizing fetish parties and magazines have paid off by creating an effective political machine. It's the envy of sex workers nationwide who now want Danzine's help to fight similar laws in their own cities.
With her classic Mona Lisa eyes half lidded, her smokers deep, sultry voice, Teresa Dulce is another example of writer Katherine Dunn's rule about every Portlander living at least three lives.
"Someday, I want to have a child," Teresa says. "I want to live by my own schedule. And I want to change some laws."
Here's a list of places to get lucky in Portland.
The ACE of Hearts
The ACE of Hearts at 3533 SE Thirty-ninth Avenue is Portland's premier club for swingers. Downstairs, you'll find two dance floors, a fifteen-person hot tub, showers, and a. snack bar. Upstairs, you'll have two pool tables, large and small "socializing" rooms, two more hot tubs, and a huge projection TV showing the kind of movies you'd expect. It's open only on Friday and Saturday nights, with single men allowed only on Fridays. Couples and single women are welcome anytime.
Call it an open marriage, a polyamorous lifestyle, or a play party, you'll still need to buy a membership and attend a short orientation meeting before you can fulfill your pool table, multiple-partner, romantic fantasy.
For more information, check out www.aceofhearts.org or call the following numbers: If you're a single male, call 503-321-5027; if you're a single woman or a couple, call 503-727-3580.
Bear Hunting
For you fans of big men with hairy backs, aka Bears, the Dirty Duck Pub is the stomping ground for men addicted to hairy men. Hunting season peaks on Saturday nights at 439 NW Third Avenue, at the west end of the Steel Bridge.
Close Encounters
Check out Close Encounters, a free social club for "Big Beautiful Women and Big Lovable Teddies"—and the folks who can't help but love them. Talking about weight loss is frowned on here. With about a hundred members in the club, you can expect to meet maybe half of them at the average weekly meeting.
Close Encounters meets every Saturday at 7:00 p.m., at the New Old Lompoc Restaurant and Tavern, 1616 NW Twenty-third Avenue. Phone: 503-225-1855.
Club Portland
Portland's last gay bathhouse is the Club Portland, officially called the Continental Hotel Club and Baths, four floors of sticky fun at SW Twelfth Avenue and W Burnside Street. Formerly called the Majestic Hotel, the club features a wide-screen theater for Hollywood feature films on the second floor. The third floor has a murky, dark sex maze full of crotch-high "glory holes." And the fourth floor has a porn theater showing continuous man-on-man smut, plus a stage and sex sling for live performances. Membership is about $20, with lockers and rooms available, starting from $12. Larger hotel-style rooms, with private bathrooms, are also available. So is Internet access and a dry sauna. Hours: always open. Phone: 503-227-9992.
Admission to the Club Portland also gets you into the basement jack-off club, Zippers Down.