Source: Letters to the Editor
By: David Henry Sterry
Hello. I am David Henry Sterry, author of the upcoming memoir, Chicken (Harper-Collins, Feb. 2002), about my life as a sexual abuse survivor and a 17 year old sex worker. I‘m looking for a young former sex worker to appear with me on Oprah, 20/20, Dateline, etc. This person must be articulate, and genuine. I am also looking for writings by sex-workers, especially those who worked under-age, for publication in an anthology.
Underage prostitution continues to be a huge problem in America. On Sept. 10, 2001, USA Today reported that 325,000 children age 17 or under are sex workers, and I believe, that estimate is woefully short. In the article they break kids down into three groups: 1) Run-aways, 2) Throw-aways, and 3) Kids being used by their family to make money.
Here are: 1) An excerpt from my book; 2) My press blurb; 3) A quote from writer Jerry Stahl. 4) A brief bio.
I walk all the way up Hollywood Boulevard to Grumman’s Chinese Theater: past turistas snapping shots; wanna-be starlets sparkling by in mini-skirts with head shots in hands their and moondust in their eyes; rowdy cowboys drinking with drunken Indians; black businessmen bustling by briskly in crisp suits; ladies who do not lunch with nylons rolled up below the knee pushing shopping carts full of everything they own; Mustangs rubbing up against muscular Mercedes and Hell’s Angels hogs.
It’s a sick twisted Wonderland, and I am Alice.
Chicken is the dark, savage, funny journey of David Sterry from sweet, polite, wide-eyed son of the Seventies Suburbia, to a $500-an-hour sadorageaholic sexually compulsive sex worker. In answering the question: how did a nice boy like this end up in the dark seed-filled underbelly of Hollywood, Chicken takes the reader on a walk along the razor-sharp line between painful innocence and the allure of the abyss.
"Alternately sexy and terrifying, hysterical and weird, David Henry Sterry’s Chicken is a hot walk on the wild side of Hollywood’s fleshy underbelly. With lush prose and a flawless ear for the rhythms of the street, Sterry lays out a life lived on the edge in a coming-of-age classic that’s colorful, riveting, and strangely beautiful. David Henry Sterry is the real thing." – Jerry Stahl
Since I left the sex business at 17, I graduated from Reed College, worked as a migrant fruit picker, a stand-up comic, a soda jerk, a human guinea pig, an athlete, an actor – (I worked with everyone from Will Smith to Michael Caine to Zippy the Chimp); the emcee at Chippendale’s male strip club; a writer (stand-up comedy, scripts for Disney, Fox, and Jerry Bruckheimer, published poet); a TV spokesman (AT&T, Crest, Isuzu, McDonald, etc.); and a marriage counselor.
I am available to perform my 1-man show Chicken, read from it, or discuss it.
Thanks. I can be reached at sterryhead@earthlink.net or [phone number redacted].
