Academic and former sex worker Chris Belcher’s memoir explores how she went from being the winner of a regional ‘pretty baby’ contest as a child to becoming a highly paid professional dominatrix in Los Angeles, able to support herself through an expensive postgraduate humanities education. Billing herself as ‘LA’s Renowned Lesbian Dominatrix’, she finds that her second, secret profession conveys more rewards than she expected: ‘The dominatrix is the id of American femininity. She says the words that we all wish we could say when we find ourselves frozen in the presence of men. No is principal among them.’ We follow Belcher as she forges her version of stable adulthood and intellectual freedom, all the while keenly aware of both the value of her sexuality and men’s tendency to reduce her to it.

From the prologue, in which she describes herself floating in a client’s saltwater pool above the LA skyline, Belcher takes us back to her childhood and adolescence in West Virginia, where she quickly learned the treacherous power of sexuality. Scheming with her friends to shed their virginities over the summer break, she finds that the real lure of sex lies for her in feminine camaraderie rather than the bodies of boys. However, there is a second lesson: ‘Once you fucked, the fucking was no longer about you and your power. It became about boys and theirs.’ Such insights are a staple of queer girlhood, when one is learning to distinguish between a desire for men’s power and desire for men themselves. Belcher soon graduates from trysts with boys to meeting her first girlfriend online in the early days of the internet and choosing to reinvent herself as a rebel in a spiked dog-collar, incurring distrust from the townsfolk and violence at the hands of her father. This was an era when queer visibility could still be a death sentence – the case of Matthew Shepard, the gay student who was beaten to death in Wyoming in 1998, was all over the television when she was in eighth grade – and the curious were forced to rely upon whatever caches of counterculture they could sniff out. The enraged mother of one of her girlfriends chases Belcher down a highway in her truck. ‘I wasn’t sure if it took a lover or a fighter to survive being gay in the country, if you needed to take shit or give it to make it out alive,’ she concludes. ‘I did know that whatever it took to stay, I didn’t have it.’

Moving to Los Angeles to do a PhD opens up a new world for Belcher, but her academic stipend is pitiful, her teeth are rotting and she seriously considers selling her eggs. She gets into a relationship with Catherine, a glamorous, confident woman who confides early on that she enjoys