Peep Show Story

Pagan Moss isn't the real name of the small, striking woman sitting in front of me, but it's the name she's become infamous for. A 31-year-old Seattle native, Moss made the abrupt switch in her mid-20s from filing insurance claims to sex work, when she began dancing at the Lusty Lady downtown and contributing to Sensual Liberation Army (www.sensuallib.com). Two years later, Moss moved jobs a few blocks north to Fantasy Unlimited and began Peep Show Stories (www.peepshowstories.com), on which she blogs frank, often funny dispatches about her work and life, as well as photos and links to other online erotica.

Moss no longer does sex work (she's currently employed in a doctor's office), but her profile is about to expand thanks to her inclusion in the forthcoming March anthology, The Mammoth Book of Sex Diaries: Online Confessions and Call-Girl Adventures—The Best of the Sex Blogs (Carrol & Graf, $12.95), edited by Maxim Jakubowski. I sat down with Moss at a Capitol Hill cafe, where she opened up about her work, her real and online lives, and the crossover (or lack thereof) between them.

Seattle Weekly: Was going into sex work rebellious on your part, or was it more of a moneymaking thing?

Pagan Moss: I made the switch to the sex industry kind of by chance. I worked in the corporate world and had a normal job until about five years ago. I'd been with my paramour, and we were downtown having a drink. On our way home, we happened to stumble upon the Lusty Lady, and we decided to go to the show. He went in one booth; I went in the one where I could see the girl and she can't see me, because I'm rather shy. I was amazed at what I saw. It was very titillating, and I wanted to know more about the girls and about the [people] who go there. I'm not sure where that came from. It was just a real curiosity. I think growing up in suburbia, where you're very sheltered, maybe it is kind of rebellious—I guess that you want to kind of break out of that and see what the world's about.

I think it came as a shock to [Dr. Menlo, a pseudonym for her paramour] that I would even consider working in a place like that. In a way, it was kind of a dare to myself to see if I would do it, because I was very shy—I'm still very shy. The company I worked for was not that far from the Lusty Lady, so during a lunch hour I went down and got an application. I was planning on maybe filling it out and dropping it by, thinking that I really wasn't going to go through with it. But I kept taking each step until I actually did the audition.

Did you keep your day job while you were doing this?

For a while, yeah. At the Lusty Lady, you only work part time, so you kind of have to have another job to [support] some kind of lifestyle, or even the basics. I did that for a while, and I liked it so much that I decided to quit the [insurance] job. It did turn out to be enough to live on, even though at the Lusty you're working for an hourly wage without tips.

What prompted you to begin blogging?

Sensual Liberation Army is something that Dr. Menlo came up with. We do it together, but it's definitely his brainchild. As far as picking out pictures and links, it definitely has a political edge to it. We don't put up pictures of girls with boob jobs. We try to make it girls of all different colors and sizes, and more artistic pictures. Basically it's about trying to get people in to see the images, but also having politics in a lot of different links.

With Peep Show Stories, were you looking for a writing outlet, or did you just have a lot of stories from working?

Probably both of those things. Part of it is because at the Lusty, they run it like a ballet studio. There's none of the seedy stuff going on—I mean, I guess men are masturbating. There's a wall there. But it's just different at Fantasy—you're not an employee and it's just a lot easier to do things like bringing guys into the dressing room. It doesn't happen very often, but it's very different; it's not as tightly run as the Lusty. At Fantasy, there's three private rooms, versus the Lusty, where there's just the one private pleasures booth. So you have a lot more opportunity for outlandishness.

Did people at Fantasy know about the blog?

I'm not sure if management knew—they might know now. But we were trying to keep it secretive; there were a couple stories where I talked about some of our dealings with management. But the girls all knew I was doing it; I put their pictures on it. I tried to be discreet and respect their privacy.