Among the Sex Workers

Tom Bissell’s New Republic profile of William T. Vollmann, journalist, author of legendarily gargantuan novels, painter of nudes and vaginas, is supportive, not to say fawning (though, on second thought, yes, to say fawning). For readers, it will be disquieting.

Bissell writes, “When I asked about his infamous fascination with sex workers, Vollmann said, simply, ‘I love and admire them.’ In another interview, he’d gone so far as to describe sex workers as ‘almost like saints.’ Here, even the most liberal-minded will have their qualms. But Vollmann believes that, once one sheds any crypto-Christian assumption that sex must have a context deeper than pleasure, it becomes difficult to regard paying a consenting sex worker as all that different from paying a masseuse or psychotherapist. In the end, it’s intimate labor, professionally applied. ‘I’d say there are almost as many different kinds of sex workers as there are different kinds of women,’ Vollmann told me. ‘I think, Well, how different is that from what I do—just running around worrying about how to finish paying off my mortgage? I’ve never really answered that.’”

And then there’s the cross-dressing: “Vollmann admitted that, after he went public with Dolores, some of his friends ‘were really disgusted.’ This only underlined his point about what becoming Dolores meant. After a career of hanging out with neo-Nazis, pursuing sex workers, doing drugs, dropping thousand-page books the way Updike dropped short stories, and being suspected of being the Unabomber, Vollmann, without even meaning to, had managed to cross the last line of decorum. He had dared to abdicate his masculinity.”

And on not being the Unabomber, Vollmann says: “One reason that the FBI thought I might be the Unabomber is that I believe probably the thing most likely to save us, and save the planet, would be a massive epidemic. Because we can’t regulate ourselves. If fifty percent or ninety percent of the humans died, maybe the rest would be better off. Would I push the button to release the virus? Probably not.” Asked to clarify, he says he’d have to think about it. Those silly Feds, worried about a quiet cross-dresser in Sacramento who talks openly about his willingness to kill off 90% of the human race.

Consistent to a fault is Vollmann, consisted with the “assassin’s creed” by which he writes and lives: “Nothing is true; all is permissible.”