I dont know a ton about strippers but if I was able to pick and choose them at will, Diablo Cody would definitely be the one for me. Cody is an intelligent, sexy and beautiful writer who went on a hilarious experiment a few years ago. A somewhat nice girl growing, Cody moved from Chicago to Minneapolis to be with a guy she met over the internet. After working some crappy jobs and being bored Cody decided to enter the world of sex work. Over the course of a year she was a stripper, a phone sex worker and a peep show girl. Now shes chronicled all that in her new book, Candy Girl: A Year in the Life of an Unlikely Stripper. The book has also led her to write the screenplay, Juno, for a major Hollywood director.
Buy Candy Girl: A Year in the Life of an Unlikely Stripper
Daniel Robert Epstein: How much have you changed since the whole experience of the book?
Diablo Cody: Ive always been eccentric.
DRE: You cant call yourself eccentric.
DC: Really? I never knew that. Thats kind of the primary adjective that people tend to pull out when referring to me, so Im just parodying it.
When I was stripping I dressed like a major ho.
DRE: Thats what you were going for though.
DC: Exactly. I was totally interested in the whole persona. I wasnt going to half ass it. If I was going to be a sex worker, Im going to dress crazy, Im going to smoke, Im going to flirt, grind dick and just have fun. Ive actually settled down quite a bit since then so aside from being saucily braless today, I think I look rather conservative.
DRE: You were engaged by the end of the book, did you get married?
DC: Yes I got married in October 2004. Its been delightful. My husband and I are still really nostalgic for the stripping.
DRE: Im sure he is.
DC: We went from two nerds hanging out in the basement watching Degrassi Junior High on DVD to Im a stripper and hes a strippers boyfriend. We felt like we were cool for the first time. We were finally edgy.
DRE: Is it easier to be edgy in Minnesota?
DC: Yeah, its just a small pond.
DRE: But you still live there.
DC: Yeah, Im still there. You do one outrageous thing and youll make the alt weekly. Its a good place for a person like me whos just chronically desperate for attention. In Chicago I was definitely a little more swallowed up so I dont think any of this wouldve happened there.
DRE: Did any of the strippers you worked with come to the wedding?
DC: I developed a few close acquaintances but I cant say I ever interacted with anybody outside of work. Just maybe once or twice. We would walk to the liquor store together to get our booze of our choice for that days shift or whatever. Certainly no strippers were at my wedding. In fact my family didnt even know there was one stripper at the wedding because at the time I was still keeping it all under wraps.
DRE: When did you tell them?
DC: When it got to the point where I had sold the book and was taking some meetings out in LA about other opportunities, I eventually had to share my sordid little secret with them, which was kind of crazy. They definitely werent expecting it. I had been telling that evergreen Im a waitress lie for a year. They are very understanding, supportive people, but at the same time they were like Holy shit. How did you work in a peep show? Theres a certain romanticism to stripping and exotic dance, but the peep show stuff is just really in your face sexual release. Theres just cum flying everywhere. I think that freaked them out a little. Its not the scenario that you envision your daughter in.
DRE: The book seems like it started as an article you might have written.
DC: I used to have my blog, the Pussy Ranch, which still exists but in a slightly diluted form. The inspirations were already there and I just built on them and fleshed them out to write the book. It used to be my place where I could come home from a shift and write about whatever extraordinary event had happened that day or whatever freaky customer had wanted to worship my shoes.
DRE: That happened?
DC: Yeah, I was a hit with foot fetishists. If theres anything I managed to corner in the stripping market it was the foot fetishists. I have really nasty feet. Theyre big, unattractive and stinky. There are a certain percentage of foot fetishists who really like foul feet and I was a big hit with them.
DRE: Did you pitch the book as a whole or did someone read the blog?
DC: What happened was this producer in Hollywood named Mason Novick emailed me after reading the blog. He said, Have you written anything that youd be interested in selling? He was primarily interested in a screenplay but I said I have a book which I had just been sitting on. I wanted the book to get published, but at the same time it had been a pet project for me. So I finished it as quickly as I could and I emailed it to him. He read it and said, Its entertaining. Maybe we can do something with this. Then he found me a literary agent. Hes like a benevolent archangel in my life who came out of nowhere and made things happen for me.
DRE: Its also being put out by a big publisher, Gotham Books, which is an imprint of Penguin.
DC: Yeah, it blew my mind. At the time I had quit stripping and was working as an insurance claims examiner. I had a very mundane lifestyle. I honestly didnt think that anything was going to come of the book. Then one day I get the call at work that Gotham was buying it. I soiled myself. It was very intense. I worked in the kind of place where if you express any emotion or carried on any personal conversations, you would get shit canned. So I just looked at the clock and waited until it was time for my 15-minute break and then I just crept down to the lobby, hid behind a plant and cried. I just couldnt believe it had happened. It was so amazing.
DRE: I didnt know that in the strip clubs champagne room the girls were supposed to grind against a guy until they cum like you did in the book.
DC: Thats probably the exception to the rule. In Minneapolis there are so many clubs there that the environment for the girls has become extremely competitive. There isnt a big enough population to sustain all these clubs so the girls are really trying to outdo each other. So there are a lot of extras and sex acts going on in clubs in Minneapolis just to make compete and make money. Just to go home with pittance, you had to be willing to grind. Thats just the way it went.
DRE: Is it legal?
DC: I dont think it is legal, but nobody ever stopped me.
DRE: At one point in the book you describe giving a guy many bed dances until he came in his jeans. Was that the first time you did that?
DC: That was probably the first time, yeah.
DRE: Were you trying to make that happen or was it like Oh my God?
DC: That time was a surprise. But I felt pleased with myself like theres a job well done. Its kind of like punching like the clock. You work on an assembly line and youve just completed your first widget. It felt pretty good.
DRE: Besides the two guys from the office where you worked at the time, did anyone from your day job know you were stripping?
DC: I had a really close friend that I told. The thing that I absolutely love about this woman is that she is super down to Earth and super cool. It didnt even shock her. To her it was just a fetish. She would just be like Thats cool. Thats cool. They give you health insurance? Not bad. She was casual about it. I actually never got a horrified response from any of my friends, but you never know. They might be holding out on me. I should eavesdrop on them sometime.
DRE: Sex work is so not a big deal nowadays.
DC: Sex work has become so mainstream that its surprising how few people have responded to me with any kind of moral outrage.
DRE: Peep shows seem a bit more taboo because like you said, theres cum flying everywhere.
DC: There were times when I was at Sex World where if I was doing a really sick show for somebody it would remind me of that final scene in Requiem for a Dream where Jennifer Connelly is doing the ass to ass with the dildo. I was like God. Im almost like the ass to ass woman. I cant believe Im at this place in my life. I remember watching that movie a couple years ago and thinking How horrible to be doing such a thing for money in front of old men. Now Im doing it for mad money because I want to go see David Byrne play next week. How did I get here?
DRE: Do you ever jump in now and do a show for extra money?
DC: I would love to but I dont think Im welcome back in any of those establishments just because I went in and played Nancy Drew with my investigative reporting. I dont think they take kindly to that because it is such an insular world. I would love to find a strip club that would embrace me because I would love to get back on that pole. If anybody would take my aging flesh.
DRE: But it isnt like you slam the clubs or the girls.
DC: Yeah, I felt I was pretty fair but the problem is that it is their job is to peddle straight fantasy. For anyone to expose the machination could destroy that fantasy like it did for me. I still like strip clubs, but while I was a stripper I would go to them once in awhile and have fun or I would stay late after a shift and get lap dances from the night shift girls or my husband would come in and wed fuck in the private room or whatever. Now when theres a girl soliciting me and shes being so sweet and sexy and vivacious I cant help but see right through the act. I think I know shes tired. I know her feet hurt. I know shes counting how many dances she needs to make her house fee. I dont feel as pampered by them as I used to because I know that its a complete act.
DRE: How much did it change your life afterwards?
DC: Its changed my life quite a bit. The money that I earned stripping enabled us to get our first house. Then I was finally able to get to a place where I said we dont really need the extra cash anymore. I could segue gracefully out of sex work as much as I missed it.
DRE: You never seemed to have any kind of ick factor about it. You were nervous, but you never were just like Eew. This is so gross.
DC: I love bodies. When I was an adolescent I was really awkward and boys wouldnt make out with me. I always wanted to be the girl who had the raunchy tale to tell after her date. So this way I was able to become that girl night after night. It wasnt ick for me. It was exciting. I would tell customers sometimes like Im enjoying this so much. Youre getting me off. Theyd always be like Right. I would be like Honestly. Im being sincere.
DRE: Theyll never believe you.
At what point did you start collecting the blogs for the book?
DC: It was really serendipitous because there was a bus strike in Minneapolis. At the time the bus was the only way I had to get to the strip club for my noon to eight shift. I love day shifts because thats when you get the real hardcore pervs. At night you get bachelor parties, regular guys and couples. I dont like those people. I like the fringes. I like the fetishists and the people that are coming in looking to satisfy a particularly weird fantasy. So because the bus was on strike, my husband had to give me a ride in every morning but his work started four hours before mine. I was sitting downtown every morning for months with nothing to do so I just started bringing my laptop with me and began writing this book. It was such a natural process. The blog inspired it but it isnt like I just cut and pasted it in. I was able to lift some passages, Ill admit to that, but most of the material I generated for the book is original.
DRE: Were there any girls that you met that you wanted to know more about like how they came to strip?
DC: Oh absolutely. There was one girl who really intrigued me because her commitment to stripping as a career was really admirable. She treated it like a serious job. She invested huge amounts of money in her appearance. Shed had multiple surgeries on her face and body. To her these were business expenses. I dont even think she did it for her own vanity. She was really that serious. She was probably 25 and she had been dancing for about seven years. She was so good. I was scrounging for every dance, which is often the case when you have 20 girls working a room with five customers. But these rich men would show up and they wouldnt want a dance from anyone but her. She had done such a good job at cultivating her client base that she was in a class of her own. She didnt even have to go out and hustle for dances. She would sit in the waiting room and wait for the next regular to show up and request her. I always thought This is a woman who if she had applied her skills to any other trade I think wouldve been a huge success. She was just an ambitious girl. There were all kinds of stories about how much money she had saved up over the years, like hundreds of thousands of dollars buried in her yard and crazy stories like that. I remember her telling us, Eight months from now, Ive got it calculated, I can retire. We said, Oh, from stripping? No. Im retiring for life.
DRE: How did stripping change your perception of how men see women?
DC: I would say theres a mainstream assumption that all men are looking for this Playboy ideal. I think maybe thats what they want in a girlfriend or a companion, but a lot of guys who are strip club connoisseurs are going in to fulfill a really specific image that stems from childhood or some other fetish. They have a thing for say a really short girl or a girl who doesnt shave her armpits or a girl who in looks like a teacher they had in fourth grade. Sometimes down to a really specific detail like red hair and brown eyes or whatever. I made a lot of money when I had really short hair. It surprised me how certain guys were really into an androgynous women.
DRE: When you say a certain guy, you mean like a guy in a suit?
DC: Exactly, like the guy you think would want the blonde Playboy bunny would actually be into the tall, gangly tattooed girl with the Annie Lennox hair. You wouldnt see that coming. Sometimes it would really piss off the more conventional strippers when they would see me making money because they would think to themselves How is she doing that? Shes a freak. But everyones got their flavor.
Most of the guys are looking for an alternative to what they have at home whether theyre happy in their marriage or not. The one thing that I thought was interesting were the happily married guys who would talk about their relationships in respectful, reverent terms. They would always create this division where their wife was a very moral, good, sweet, wholesome maternal type and the strippers were the exact opposite. We were just wildcats. It was always strange to me because I always felt compelled to explain to them that all women are complex. That there were things they didnt know about their wifes sexuality and that these strippers have maternal, moral, wholesome sides that they didnt know about either. Its not like were just one or the other. Its not the whole virgin/whore thing.
DRE: How did this change your perception of men?
DC: I felt pity towards a lot of the customers because you would see that the club was the one place where they actually had power over beautiful women. A lot of them were the type of guy who if they were out in the street, they couldnt get a girl to go out with them. But in the club, they suddenly had six different girls competing for their attention.
DRE: Thats the assumption a lot of people have of men who go to strip clubs.
I just read Veronica Monet's Sex Secrets of Escorts. She has been an escort for many years and she wrote that the main misconception of men is that men dont want to talk, they just want to get off. She found that to be completely untrue. But stripping is the opposite of what she says.
DC: There are certain kinds of strippers that are conversationalists and nurturers. In a sense they are almost more like geishas. I suck at that shit. Im bad at inflating mens egos. I was the girl who would come in and say Im horny. You want to hump? Certain guys would go for that kind of bait and those were my customers. But the ones that wanted to sit and talk about their golf game and their job and socialize and have champagne with you, forget about it. I couldnt stand them and they couldnt stand me.
DRE: How have people reacted to the book?
DC: Ive gotten a lot of positive feedback. Of all people, my parents enjoyed it. I think my friends have enjoyed it. Its been a positive response. People got out of it what I wanted them to get out of it. I wanted it to be lighthearted, funny and not get too mired in moral issues. I think I pulled that off based on the response Im getting.
DRE: How did you end up writing the screenplay for Juno?
DC: After the book sold, Mason asked me to write a screenplay and now it is being shot in May by Brad Silberling, whos an amazing A-list director.
DRE: Whats Juno about?
DC: Its a dark comedy about a teenage girl who gets pregnant and she promises the baby to this married couple. They are the brink of divorce and she develops a weird relationship with them.
DRE: Who would you like to see cast?
DC: I would rather see an unknown than anybody else in the lead because its so important to me that she be an authentic teenager and not some child star type.
DRE: Is it right for Evan Rachel Wood?
DC: I love Evan Rachel Wood. She would actually be very good in the part. I think the argument against her was that she had kind of played the part before.
DRE: Do you have any tattoos?
DC: Yes. I have quite a few and Im all pierced. I have nipple rings. I used to have my action pierced, but I had to take it out because of a boondoggle during sex.
DRE: Why didnt you use the name Diablo when you were stripping?
DC: Diablo wasnt even intended to be affiliated with the stripping. I just picked that name as a writer.
DRE: Diablo DC isnt your real name?
DC: No.
DRE: Thats the coolest name in the world.
DC: Thank you. Im glad you like it. I just made it up because I always wanted to have a crazy cowgirl name. I invented it while I was out west and it just stuck.
by Daniel Robert Epstein
SG Username: AndersWolleck
Buy Candy Girl: A Year in the Life of an Unlikely Stripper
Daniel Robert Epstein: How much have you changed since the whole experience of the book?
Diablo Cody: Ive always been eccentric.
DRE: You cant call yourself eccentric.
DC: Really? I never knew that. Thats kind of the primary adjective that people tend to pull out when referring to me, so Im just parodying it.
When I was stripping I dressed like a major ho.
DRE: Thats what you were going for though.
DC: Exactly. I was totally interested in the whole persona. I wasnt going to half ass it. If I was going to be a sex worker, Im going to dress crazy, Im going to smoke, Im going to flirt, grind dick and just have fun. Ive actually settled down quite a bit since then so aside from being saucily braless today, I think I look rather conservative.
DRE: You were engaged by the end of the book, did you get married?
DC: Yes I got married in October 2004. Its been delightful. My husband and I are still really nostalgic for the stripping.
DRE: Im sure he is.
DC: We went from two nerds hanging out in the basement watching Degrassi Junior High on DVD to Im a stripper and hes a strippers boyfriend. We felt like we were cool for the first time. We were finally edgy.
DRE: Is it easier to be edgy in Minnesota?
DC: Yeah, its just a small pond.
DRE: But you still live there.
DC: Yeah, Im still there. You do one outrageous thing and youll make the alt weekly. Its a good place for a person like me whos just chronically desperate for attention. In Chicago I was definitely a little more swallowed up so I dont think any of this wouldve happened there.
DRE: Did any of the strippers you worked with come to the wedding?
DC: I developed a few close acquaintances but I cant say I ever interacted with anybody outside of work. Just maybe once or twice. We would walk to the liquor store together to get our booze of our choice for that days shift or whatever. Certainly no strippers were at my wedding. In fact my family didnt even know there was one stripper at the wedding because at the time I was still keeping it all under wraps.
DRE: When did you tell them?
DC: When it got to the point where I had sold the book and was taking some meetings out in LA about other opportunities, I eventually had to share my sordid little secret with them, which was kind of crazy. They definitely werent expecting it. I had been telling that evergreen Im a waitress lie for a year. They are very understanding, supportive people, but at the same time they were like Holy shit. How did you work in a peep show? Theres a certain romanticism to stripping and exotic dance, but the peep show stuff is just really in your face sexual release. Theres just cum flying everywhere. I think that freaked them out a little. Its not the scenario that you envision your daughter in.
DRE: The book seems like it started as an article you might have written.
DC: I used to have my blog, the Pussy Ranch, which still exists but in a slightly diluted form. The inspirations were already there and I just built on them and fleshed them out to write the book. It used to be my place where I could come home from a shift and write about whatever extraordinary event had happened that day or whatever freaky customer had wanted to worship my shoes.
DRE: That happened?
DC: Yeah, I was a hit with foot fetishists. If theres anything I managed to corner in the stripping market it was the foot fetishists. I have really nasty feet. Theyre big, unattractive and stinky. There are a certain percentage of foot fetishists who really like foul feet and I was a big hit with them.
DRE: Did you pitch the book as a whole or did someone read the blog?
DC: What happened was this producer in Hollywood named Mason Novick emailed me after reading the blog. He said, Have you written anything that youd be interested in selling? He was primarily interested in a screenplay but I said I have a book which I had just been sitting on. I wanted the book to get published, but at the same time it had been a pet project for me. So I finished it as quickly as I could and I emailed it to him. He read it and said, Its entertaining. Maybe we can do something with this. Then he found me a literary agent. Hes like a benevolent archangel in my life who came out of nowhere and made things happen for me.
DRE: Its also being put out by a big publisher, Gotham Books, which is an imprint of Penguin.
DC: Yeah, it blew my mind. At the time I had quit stripping and was working as an insurance claims examiner. I had a very mundane lifestyle. I honestly didnt think that anything was going to come of the book. Then one day I get the call at work that Gotham was buying it. I soiled myself. It was very intense. I worked in the kind of place where if you express any emotion or carried on any personal conversations, you would get shit canned. So I just looked at the clock and waited until it was time for my 15-minute break and then I just crept down to the lobby, hid behind a plant and cried. I just couldnt believe it had happened. It was so amazing.
DRE: I didnt know that in the strip clubs champagne room the girls were supposed to grind against a guy until they cum like you did in the book.
DC: Thats probably the exception to the rule. In Minneapolis there are so many clubs there that the environment for the girls has become extremely competitive. There isnt a big enough population to sustain all these clubs so the girls are really trying to outdo each other. So there are a lot of extras and sex acts going on in clubs in Minneapolis just to make compete and make money. Just to go home with pittance, you had to be willing to grind. Thats just the way it went.
DRE: Is it legal?
DC: I dont think it is legal, but nobody ever stopped me.
DRE: At one point in the book you describe giving a guy many bed dances until he came in his jeans. Was that the first time you did that?
DC: That was probably the first time, yeah.
DRE: Were you trying to make that happen or was it like Oh my God?
DC: That time was a surprise. But I felt pleased with myself like theres a job well done. Its kind of like punching like the clock. You work on an assembly line and youve just completed your first widget. It felt pretty good.
DRE: Besides the two guys from the office where you worked at the time, did anyone from your day job know you were stripping?
DC: I had a really close friend that I told. The thing that I absolutely love about this woman is that she is super down to Earth and super cool. It didnt even shock her. To her it was just a fetish. She would just be like Thats cool. Thats cool. They give you health insurance? Not bad. She was casual about it. I actually never got a horrified response from any of my friends, but you never know. They might be holding out on me. I should eavesdrop on them sometime.
DRE: Sex work is so not a big deal nowadays.
DC: Sex work has become so mainstream that its surprising how few people have responded to me with any kind of moral outrage.
DRE: Peep shows seem a bit more taboo because like you said, theres cum flying everywhere.
DC: There were times when I was at Sex World where if I was doing a really sick show for somebody it would remind me of that final scene in Requiem for a Dream where Jennifer Connelly is doing the ass to ass with the dildo. I was like God. Im almost like the ass to ass woman. I cant believe Im at this place in my life. I remember watching that movie a couple years ago and thinking How horrible to be doing such a thing for money in front of old men. Now Im doing it for mad money because I want to go see David Byrne play next week. How did I get here?
DRE: Do you ever jump in now and do a show for extra money?
DC: I would love to but I dont think Im welcome back in any of those establishments just because I went in and played Nancy Drew with my investigative reporting. I dont think they take kindly to that because it is such an insular world. I would love to find a strip club that would embrace me because I would love to get back on that pole. If anybody would take my aging flesh.
DRE: But it isnt like you slam the clubs or the girls.
DC: Yeah, I felt I was pretty fair but the problem is that it is their job is to peddle straight fantasy. For anyone to expose the machination could destroy that fantasy like it did for me. I still like strip clubs, but while I was a stripper I would go to them once in awhile and have fun or I would stay late after a shift and get lap dances from the night shift girls or my husband would come in and wed fuck in the private room or whatever. Now when theres a girl soliciting me and shes being so sweet and sexy and vivacious I cant help but see right through the act. I think I know shes tired. I know her feet hurt. I know shes counting how many dances she needs to make her house fee. I dont feel as pampered by them as I used to because I know that its a complete act.
DRE: How much did it change your life afterwards?
DC: Its changed my life quite a bit. The money that I earned stripping enabled us to get our first house. Then I was finally able to get to a place where I said we dont really need the extra cash anymore. I could segue gracefully out of sex work as much as I missed it.
DRE: You never seemed to have any kind of ick factor about it. You were nervous, but you never were just like Eew. This is so gross.
DC: I love bodies. When I was an adolescent I was really awkward and boys wouldnt make out with me. I always wanted to be the girl who had the raunchy tale to tell after her date. So this way I was able to become that girl night after night. It wasnt ick for me. It was exciting. I would tell customers sometimes like Im enjoying this so much. Youre getting me off. Theyd always be like Right. I would be like Honestly. Im being sincere.
DRE: Theyll never believe you.
At what point did you start collecting the blogs for the book?
DC: It was really serendipitous because there was a bus strike in Minneapolis. At the time the bus was the only way I had to get to the strip club for my noon to eight shift. I love day shifts because thats when you get the real hardcore pervs. At night you get bachelor parties, regular guys and couples. I dont like those people. I like the fringes. I like the fetishists and the people that are coming in looking to satisfy a particularly weird fantasy. So because the bus was on strike, my husband had to give me a ride in every morning but his work started four hours before mine. I was sitting downtown every morning for months with nothing to do so I just started bringing my laptop with me and began writing this book. It was such a natural process. The blog inspired it but it isnt like I just cut and pasted it in. I was able to lift some passages, Ill admit to that, but most of the material I generated for the book is original.
DRE: Were there any girls that you met that you wanted to know more about like how they came to strip?
DC: Oh absolutely. There was one girl who really intrigued me because her commitment to stripping as a career was really admirable. She treated it like a serious job. She invested huge amounts of money in her appearance. Shed had multiple surgeries on her face and body. To her these were business expenses. I dont even think she did it for her own vanity. She was really that serious. She was probably 25 and she had been dancing for about seven years. She was so good. I was scrounging for every dance, which is often the case when you have 20 girls working a room with five customers. But these rich men would show up and they wouldnt want a dance from anyone but her. She had done such a good job at cultivating her client base that she was in a class of her own. She didnt even have to go out and hustle for dances. She would sit in the waiting room and wait for the next regular to show up and request her. I always thought This is a woman who if she had applied her skills to any other trade I think wouldve been a huge success. She was just an ambitious girl. There were all kinds of stories about how much money she had saved up over the years, like hundreds of thousands of dollars buried in her yard and crazy stories like that. I remember her telling us, Eight months from now, Ive got it calculated, I can retire. We said, Oh, from stripping? No. Im retiring for life.
DRE: How did stripping change your perception of how men see women?
DC: I would say theres a mainstream assumption that all men are looking for this Playboy ideal. I think maybe thats what they want in a girlfriend or a companion, but a lot of guys who are strip club connoisseurs are going in to fulfill a really specific image that stems from childhood or some other fetish. They have a thing for say a really short girl or a girl who doesnt shave her armpits or a girl who in looks like a teacher they had in fourth grade. Sometimes down to a really specific detail like red hair and brown eyes or whatever. I made a lot of money when I had really short hair. It surprised me how certain guys were really into an androgynous women.
DRE: When you say a certain guy, you mean like a guy in a suit?
DC: Exactly, like the guy you think would want the blonde Playboy bunny would actually be into the tall, gangly tattooed girl with the Annie Lennox hair. You wouldnt see that coming. Sometimes it would really piss off the more conventional strippers when they would see me making money because they would think to themselves How is she doing that? Shes a freak. But everyones got their flavor.
Most of the guys are looking for an alternative to what they have at home whether theyre happy in their marriage or not. The one thing that I thought was interesting were the happily married guys who would talk about their relationships in respectful, reverent terms. They would always create this division where their wife was a very moral, good, sweet, wholesome maternal type and the strippers were the exact opposite. We were just wildcats. It was always strange to me because I always felt compelled to explain to them that all women are complex. That there were things they didnt know about their wifes sexuality and that these strippers have maternal, moral, wholesome sides that they didnt know about either. Its not like were just one or the other. Its not the whole virgin/whore thing.
DRE: How did this change your perception of men?
DC: I felt pity towards a lot of the customers because you would see that the club was the one place where they actually had power over beautiful women. A lot of them were the type of guy who if they were out in the street, they couldnt get a girl to go out with them. But in the club, they suddenly had six different girls competing for their attention.
DRE: Thats the assumption a lot of people have of men who go to strip clubs.
I just read Veronica Monet's Sex Secrets of Escorts. She has been an escort for many years and she wrote that the main misconception of men is that men dont want to talk, they just want to get off. She found that to be completely untrue. But stripping is the opposite of what she says.
DC: There are certain kinds of strippers that are conversationalists and nurturers. In a sense they are almost more like geishas. I suck at that shit. Im bad at inflating mens egos. I was the girl who would come in and say Im horny. You want to hump? Certain guys would go for that kind of bait and those were my customers. But the ones that wanted to sit and talk about their golf game and their job and socialize and have champagne with you, forget about it. I couldnt stand them and they couldnt stand me.
DRE: How have people reacted to the book?
DC: Ive gotten a lot of positive feedback. Of all people, my parents enjoyed it. I think my friends have enjoyed it. Its been a positive response. People got out of it what I wanted them to get out of it. I wanted it to be lighthearted, funny and not get too mired in moral issues. I think I pulled that off based on the response Im getting.
DRE: How did you end up writing the screenplay for Juno?
DC: After the book sold, Mason asked me to write a screenplay and now it is being shot in May by Brad Silberling, whos an amazing A-list director.
DRE: Whats Juno about?
DC: Its a dark comedy about a teenage girl who gets pregnant and she promises the baby to this married couple. They are the brink of divorce and she develops a weird relationship with them.
DRE: Who would you like to see cast?
DC: I would rather see an unknown than anybody else in the lead because its so important to me that she be an authentic teenager and not some child star type.
DRE: Is it right for Evan Rachel Wood?
DC: I love Evan Rachel Wood. She would actually be very good in the part. I think the argument against her was that she had kind of played the part before.
DRE: Do you have any tattoos?
DC: Yes. I have quite a few and Im all pierced. I have nipple rings. I used to have my action pierced, but I had to take it out because of a boondoggle during sex.
DRE: Why didnt you use the name Diablo when you were stripping?
DC: Diablo wasnt even intended to be affiliated with the stripping. I just picked that name as a writer.
DRE: Diablo DC isnt your real name?
DC: No.
DRE: Thats the coolest name in the world.
DC: Thank you. Im glad you like it. I just made it up because I always wanted to have a crazy cowgirl name. I invented it while I was out west and it just stuck.
by Daniel Robert Epstein
SG Username: AndersWolleck
VIEW 9 of 9 COMMENTS
crimsonjupiter:
Great Interview ! Especially in retrospect, after the success of Juno. Diablo is definitely a suicide girl !! 
squee_:
Cool interview. Might have to pick up the book.