Interview: Sonia Harcourt, Activist, Businesswoman, and Adult Entertainer

Sex work is having a moment. For centuries, nay millennia, society has hypocritically craved the services of sex workers while shunning them from their so-called "polite" or "respectable" society. But these attitudes are changing, as sex workers in New York, America, and across the world are demanding to be recognized and treated with dignity, respect, and access to the benefits and rights that all workers should enjoy. 

One person at the forefront of this change is Sonia Harcourt. Based in NYC, she has a background in LGBTQ+ activism, and is also a popular AVN and Inked Awards-nominated adult performer. You can find out more about her and links to her work and websites on Twitter (NSFW).

In this interview with Mr NYC, Sonia tells us a little bit about her experiences in sex work and activism, about fighting and overcoming hypocritical attitudes towards sexuality, the differences between sex education and adult entertainment, and, of course, what she loves about NYC.

Tell us a little bit about your background, and what lead you into sex worker activism and the adult business.

I'm a theatre major and music minor, so performing has always been my passion. A good friend of mine works for a non-profit LGBTQ+ organization, and one night over drinks, she gave me the idea...she said 'You're one of the few people I know that doesn't shy away from sex, ever thought about being an activist for sex workers?' I absolutely loved the idea, and opened an Etsy store with sex positive and pro sex work merchandise. Over the coming weeks I made a lot of the same friends in the industry, and was approached by an agent...I had thought about it when I was younger, but I was so insecure. Now, at 30, I thought it was too late, but that agent reaching out made me think it was worth a shot, and here I am.

What are the challenges of being a sex worker, activist, entertainer, and businesswoman all at once?

Oooof, how much time do you have? America is still such a puritanical country, and because of that, we are second class citizens. Extreme violence in almost every aspect of our lives is fine, but God forbid you see a nipple, right? So, on top of being dehumanized on a daily basis, you then also have the "activists" who claim they want to "rescue" us, like we're all just brainwashed little girls...it's insulting. Society wants women to be sexual, but only when it's convenient for them. As soon as we own our sexuality, as soon as we enjoy it, as soon as we're not ashamed of it, then we're "whores/dirty/sluts/etc. etc. etc." From a business standpoint, you constantly have people telling you "get a real job/it's easy work/you suck dick for a living/you just lay on your back all day", but what they are completely missing is that it is quite an accomplishment to make a living selling a product most people think should be free. 

What are the best and worst experiences you've had in this business? What's the wildest thing you've done or seen?

I honestly don't like even answering the "worst/bad/etc" question because that narrative is so overdone- that's what makes people want to "rescue" us...are there shitty people in this industry? Sure, but there's shitty people in every industry. Have my boundaries been disrespected before? Yes, but they were in my many years of retail work too. I prefer to talk about the good experiences- there's not any one particular, it's more the good people in this industry. I have met some of the most generous, loving, genuine people here; people who would give you the shirt off their back if it was all they had, to help you. Maybe it's because we're all shit on by the rest of society, but there is truly an incredible love between performers. 

Have you seen Boogie Nights or watched The Deuce? Do you think you would have enjoyed working during the "Golden Age" vs. today's industry -- or would it have scared you?

I have seen Boogie Nights, but not The Deuce yet. I think part of me would have enjoyed working during the Golden Age, because people still lived like paying for porn was standard. You didn't have to have a laundry list of side hustles just to make ends meet, you didn't have to deal with social media...but on the other hand, it was much harder to get into the industry and stay in. There is more control in performers hands than ever before, thanks to clip sites, fan sites, camping, etc. I probably wouldn't have a career if it wasn't for clip stores and content, being on the East Coast without an agent. So, 6-in-one, half-a-dozen in the other? 

In your opinion, how does our society's thinking and attitudes about sex work need to change or mature? 

People need to get over the fact that some people enjoy sex and are not ashamed of it. Live and let live. As long as everyone involved is a consenting adult and no one is being hurt, it's no one else business. People also need to take some responsibility for themselves and their children; it is NOT my job to teach your child about sex. Pornography is called Adult ENTERTAINMENT for a reason- it is not education. Would you let your kid drive after watching The Fast and the Furious? Of course not, but people are too chicken shit to talk about sex, so they make it our responsibility, and then scapegoat us. There is so much that happens off screen; showing STD tests, discussing do's and don'ts, cutting to add more lube, fixing makeup....it's not meant to be 'real'. 

What are your hopes for your career in 2019 and beyond? What do you think the future holds? 

I would love to be challenged more as a performer, to do some heavy scripts and more parodies. I am also extremely excited to see that bisexual porn is finally getting it's day, and I would love to continue to be a big player in that genre. Without an agent and being on the East Coast, the career is moving in the right direction, just a little slower than I would like, so I have to remind myself to be patient. 

Finally, you're a New Yorker: why do you live in NYC and what do you love most about it? 

I grew up in central NY, but have lived in the city for about 14 years...it's a bit of a love/hate relationship, as it can be an incredibly stressful and fast paced, but the city is so alive. There's always something to do/see/explore....you can do anything and be anything you want here. 

Thanks Sonia! Best of luck to you!

Water Main Break - March 26, 2019, 4:25 PM

Mr NYC is 12 Years Old Today

Today is not my real birthday but its Mr NYC's birthday, and so I/him is officially twelve years old.

Happy birthday to me/him!

Mr NYC is officially old enough to be in junior high, which means that me/him is at peak annoying (just kidding, me/him has always been extremely annoying).

Now I/him enter my sullen, misunderstood, soon-to-be sexually active (okay, let's be honest, incel) teenage ages. 

In five years, me/him will be applying to college and fully plans on cheating to gain admission.

By the way, on this birthday celebration day, there's a new NYC-centric show about to premiere on TV called What We Do in the Shadows. It certainly is one of the most original-sounding NYC shows to come along recently -- it's about neurotic vampires living boring lives in Staten Island. Sounds great! Or boring.

Anyway, please wish me/him a happy birthday. It'll greatly improve my/his fragile ego.

"Quantum Leap" @ 30: The Golden Age of TV and NYC

We live, now and forever, in the "Golden Age of Television." TV shows are better than ever, thanks to cable and streaming. Television is no longer the "boob tube" of yore, the poor relation of movies, but a proud artistic medium in its own right. The Wire, Mad Men, Breaking Bad, Game of Thrones, Orange is the New Black, The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel are just a few of the great "golden age" shows, featuring superior storytelling, acting, and cinematic qualities that capture our imagination and enrich our culture.

So when did the Golden Age of TV start?

Opinions differs, but the general "consensus" (if there can be such a thing) is that it began with two shows from the 1990s: Twin Peaks in 1990 and The Sopranos in 1999. Both shows broke normative TV boundaries, were daring, unsentimental, and nontraditional in their narratives, forcing viewers to watch people and things other shows shied away from -- and were hailed as masterpieces. I mostly agree but, pour moi, the Golden Age of TV started on March 26, 1989 -- thirty years ago today!

That's when Quantum Leap premiered -- a show about a brilliant scientist named Sam Becket from the (then) future of 1995, who invented a time travel project called "Quantum Leap" where his mind and soul "leapt" into the bodies of people in the past. His time travels were limited to the past of his own lifetime (roughly the early 1950s to the 1980s). Once Sam became someone else, his mission was to "change history for the better", "to make right what once went wrong." He was regularly visited from the future by his friend Al, who "appeared in the form of a hologram that only Sam can see and here." Al would give Sam the info about his missions, tell him about the "wrongs" he needed to "right", give him information from the future about the fate of the people Sam saved, and then after Sam accomplished his mission -- and only then -- would Sam leap into another life and point in time i.e. another episode.

I was obsessed with this show as a kid. I love time travel stories and history so this show was made for me. All my friends were fans too, and we talked about it practically every day. Quantum Leap was also, as a piece of pure TV art, stunningly good -- great writing, acting, and very original storytelling. So much of TV drama in the late 1980s/early 1990s was crime shows, lawyer shows, soap operas -- and here was this inventive, completely original show that exploded the hour-long drama narrative and did it amazingly well. There wasn't another show like it on TV then and there hasn't been a show quite like it since. 

Sam didn't just leap into lives but touched history, and the show was about the (then) recent past that America in the late 1980s/early 1990s was still grappling with. At times the show could be serious, at time it could be heart-wrenching, and at other times it could be hilariously funny. It tackled everything -- Vietnam, civil rights, Watergate, the women's movement, pop culture, you name it – Quantum Leap was a history lesson and drama wrapped into science fiction. Brilliant.

Quantum Leap starred Scott Bakula as Sam and Dean Stockwell as Al. Their chemistry, their repartee, their banter, the ups and downs of their buddy-dom is the stuff of legend, fascinating to behold -- they were funny, emotional, witty, and compulsively watchable together. They were and remain one of the great duos in TV history.

And each week there was a huge new cast of guest stars, including some actors who went on to have brilliant careers: Jennifer Aniston, Joseph Gorden-Levitt, Teri Hatcher, Diedrich Baeder, Michael Madsen, Bruce McGill, Jason Priestley, Patricia Richardson, Carla Gugino, and others. They all did memorable work. One thing that was so much fun about this show was that each week Sam not only leapt into another time (one week it was the mid-1950s, another it was the late 1970s, then the '60s, the '80s, and so forth) but also different places including the South, the Midwest, California -- and, naturally, NYC. 

There were many great NYC Quantum Leap episodes -- Sam became a cab driver, an actor, a butler, a fashion photographer, a gangster, amongst others. However, my favorite NYC Quantum Leap episode was when he leapt into the life of a Chip'N'Dale's dancer named "Rod the Bod" in 1979. The episode begins with Sam leaping into Rod's life while he is literally dancing in mid-air, crashing to the ground in front a bunch of horny and screeching women, Cool and the Gang's "Ladies Night" blaring. It's one of the funniest things I've ever seen and was the kind of comedy (and drama) that only Quantum Leap could provide.

You can find old episodes of Quantum Leap on Amazon and behold the birth of the Golden Age of TV, and see NYC portrayed in a way that's never been done before or since.

The NYPD Made a Porno

Years ago I worked briefly at an academic publisher and was instructed to clean out some old files. I found, buried within a stack of abandoned book projects, one entitled "Black Cop." Yes, it was going to be a book about the challenges of being an African-American police officer.

This project was, at some point in its development, deemed offensive and killed. My job was to expel it from the publisher's memory bank. I remember thinking: "This was a bad idea that was also a good idea but that most people aren't mature enough to appreciate or understand as a good idea and that's the only reason why this good idea became a bad idea." If you catch my drift.

When it comes to race, sex, and religion, emotions override logic, and the dialogue around them breaks down into controversy and shouting.

In 1976, the NYPD had a problem: porno movies were big business in NYC and the mafia controlled it. The NYPD figured the best way to end their control was to disrupt their distribution system. The best way to do this, the cops figured, was to go undercover and infiltrate the business. In order to do this they had to have something to sell the mobbed-distributors i.e a porn movie. So the NYPD made one, obviously, in secret. It was three scenes, shot at a hotel near Kennedy airport. The idea was that two undercover detectives would then go around to mob-controlled distributors, get into "business" with these guys, record their conversations/uncover their secrets, etc. and eventually arrest them. But it never happened. In the middle of this undercover operation, the existence of this movie was leaked to the press and the operation was blown. 

Controversy, outrage, and media prurience exploded.

The movie, previously a valuable tool to fight crime, became a worthless scandal. So the movie was buried in an NYPD vault, the cops who made it got reprimanded, the actors who appeared in it got their 15 minutes ... 

... and the bad guys got away. All because the press and public cared more about -- and couldn't get past -- the sex part, the porn part, and not, you know, the fighting crime part. The fact that the mob controlled a big business in NYC was less important than the fact that some people knocked boots on film. Never mind that it was done to make the city a better place!

We see this kind of misplaced idiocy in our media and public sphere today -- the obession with dumb celebrities instead of important social issues, with the President's dumb Tweets instead of his outrageous policies, etc. etc. ad infinitum. The biggest problem we face in humanity is nothing more, really, than our own collective immaturity.

So when you read the headline the "NYPD made a Porno" and are shocked, remember, the really shocking thing is how dumb and shortsighted so much of the world is -- and why things so rarely change for the better.

The Malls of NYC

When the new Hudson Yards development opened last week, NYC didn't just get a new neighborhood, it also got a new mall.

Even though this city probably has more individual stores and shops than any other place in the United States, NYC is replete with malls -- every borough has at least one big stand-alone mall but there are many more housed in big developments like the Time-Warner Center, the new World Trade Center, South Street Seaport, Times Square, Atlantic Terminal in Brooklyn, Flushing, even the South Bronx. 

The malls vary. 

Some are big traditional malls with a mixture of different kinds of businesses. Some are mostly food courts and big grocery stores. Some are based around clothes or discount shopping. Others are not technically malls at all but "shopping centers" that are more neighborhood based.

Go to this Google Map and drag your browser around the map of NYC and you'll be started at the number of mall in this town (or maybe you won't, how the hell would I know?).

But safe to say, the next time a big development or building opens, "dollars to donuts", it'll probably add another mall to NYC. 

Review: "King Lear" on Broadway

Shakespeare plays are always challenging to consume -- they are both thrilling for their gorgeous language and wonderful characters, and sometimes frustrating because the plots can be hard to follow. Not for nothing you watch or read these plays and say to yourself, "This is amazing! I have no idea what's going on!"

This is certainly true for Shakespeare's King Lear.

Unlike the history plays, King Lear is based on a mythical pre-Roman King named Leir i.e. it's basically fiction. The plot revolves around an aging King Lear deciding to divide his kingdom amongst this three daughters -- Goneril, Regan, and Cordelia. He demands that they tell him how much they love him and, based on their answers, he will give them what he thinks they deserve of his kingdom. Goneril and Regan go overboard in telling the old man how much they love him but Cordelia says she cannot describe her love to him in mere words. Enraged, the King banishes her from the kingdom and divides the kingdom amongst her sisters. 

Political intrigue ensues. Goneril and Regan's husbands scheme to oust Lear from the throne, other Dukes get in on the act, the king descends into madness accompanied only by his Fool, there is a French invasion and war, there's eye-gouging, suicide, lots of death and betrayal, all sorts of mean nasty stuff -- honestly, the plot is so exhausting you reach the "I have no idea what's going on!" stage pretty soon. Safe to say, this play is as complete a tragedy as Shakespeare ever wrote. 

King Lear is one of his most challenging plays -- the complicated plot, the numerous characters, as well as its length make it a slog (with intermission, it lasts 3 1/2 hours). That's why, if a production is going to be mounted of this, it needs to be first rate.

The version currently in previews on Broadway mostly is first rate -- you don't get more first-rater than Glenda Jackson playing Lear. She is such a volcanic force, such a massive presences on stage that you almost wish King Lear was a one man (or one woman) show. Her near-equal is Ruth Wilson who alternates as Cordelia and the Fool. Wilson was great on that show The Affair but, in this play, you see that she's an actress of tremendous range. Also good is Pedro Pascal as a scheming Duke -- he's like the character he played on Game of Thrones, a sort of noble playboy, but he has better lines. Finally, Elizabeth Marvel from Homeland plays one of the daughters and, while she's good, it's clear that she's not quite 100% doing Shakespeare. 

This production has, in my opinion, two main weaknesses:

1) The supporting cast, many of whom are making their Broadway debuts, is not that strong. Many of the actors almost seem like they're in another play, you get the sense that they're consciously underplaying their parts, and this is not a play that rewards underplaying. 

2) The production itself is a bit off. Instead making it historical, the set and costumes make it appear that this play is not taking place in pre-Roman Britain or even Shakespearean Britain but in some kind of neo-Fascist future. The set is a garish tinted gold and looks like something between a Scientology Center or Trump Tower. The costumes look like something that might be worn by characters in either The Hunger Games movies or aliens from episodes of Star Trek. I'm sure that the intention is to make the production look as nightmarish as the plot (like the times we're living in) but it just seemed like a distraction. 

Still, if you love Shakespeare and Glenda Jackson, you should go see this production of King Lear -- it's a once in a lifetime experience to see a great actor and cast in one of the great plays. 

S*%*%T New Yorkers Say

"I told her if you gonna talk to me like a man, I'm gonna beat you like a man. That's what I told the cops. Then I smoke crack in the bathroom."

Message to all Fellow NYC Parents

There's an outbreak of measles in Brooklyn right now and this is scary -- it's the worst outbreak in this city in decades.

Can you believe this? Measles! A disease that we once thought was totally eradicated has made a comeback in 2019!

Specifically, it's hitting the ultra-Orthodox Jewish community where, if the reports are true, "anti-vax" ideology is taking hold. The MMR (measles, mumps, rubella) vaccine is one of the great life saving medicines of all time and now the "anti-vax" are targeting its usage.

Let's be clear: the anti-vax "movement" goes far beyond NYC and the Orthodox community, it crosses geographic, gender, racial, and socioeconomic lines. Fortunately, at least in Brooklyn, other leaders of the Jewish community are doing their best to educate the Orthodox community about the benefits of MMR. Thank God for that!

The "anti-vax" thing is one of the scariest, most awful retrograde things to come along recently -- along with Trumpism, white nationalism, Brexit, etc. It's an attempt to annihilate progress, to wreck the future, to make the world a scarier, more dangerous place. 

Why is this insanity going on? Why are people actively trying to hurt other people and their communities?

Part of it is racism, part of it is understandable if ill-informed fear of the future, and part of it is a desire to sow chaos in service of established power -- if we can keep people poor, sick, uneducated (or mis-educated), and divided, they won't challenge our authority. It's hard to believe but social as well as economic regression are the same thing -- they're all about keeping the underclass in their place.

After my first kid was born, we got all her vaccinations done. I casually asked her doctor if he had encountered any parents who refused to vaccinate their kids. I was horrified when he said, "Oh yes, this happens all the time." He said that he had "fired" some parents as patients the day before because they refused to vaccinate their baby and he refused to commit malpractice. I was glad that we had such a good doctor -- and scared that this kind of thing is going on.

So please, please, I beg my fellow NYC parents -- vaccinate your kids!  

Transformation

When 9/11 happened, thousands tragically died and the world changed forever. 

And so, physically, did NYC.

The mighty Twin Towers had commanded the city's skyline for nearly 30 years and now -- suddenly, horribly, unthinkably -- they were completely gone. Yet the story of the Twin Towers is a case study of how NYC transforms itself. Certainly, the way they were extinguished is well-known and tragic but what is much less well-known is the scandalous, corrupt, bizarre way that they were built back in the early 1970s. By 9/11/2001, the Twin Towers were of symbols American financial power and nearly beloved icons of NYC. But when they first emerged from the concrete canyons of Lower Manhattan, they were viewed as egregious interlopers, totally out of character with the neighborhood, and monuments to the egos of the Rockefellers who spearheaded their constructions (Governor Nelson Rockefeller and his brother, the banker David). 

How NYC transforms is forever complex and unending.

And massive projects continue change the face of NYC -- and it's not just big buildings like the new Hudson Yards but there are proposals and projects underway that will literally be built into the East and Hudson Rivers. NYC is expanding! Literally! That's one way to transform NYC -- make more of it!  

But the transformation is not just literal, it's also political. NYC used to be a bastion of Irish-American power in the United States but that's changing rapidly. Last year, three prominent Irish American politicians lost their seats to non-Irish challengers (including Joe Crowley to AOC). The city is becoming less Irish, more diverse, and the political establishment is reflecting that. As the city transforms, so does the power elite.

And one final transformation is the death of NYC street photographer Vivian Cherry at age 98. She took photos of NYC life starting back in the 1940s and through the 1950s. She captured a city coming out of the doldrums of the Great Depression and World War II, transforming into the financial and cultural capital of the world. The NYC she photographer is long gone but remains in our memory. Her work is a reminder of what NYC was and of what it's become -- and the transformation of NYC is never complete.