“If you've ever wanted to ask a porn star a question, this will be your chance.”
The previous invitation for tonight's event comes not from a strip club, adult book store or Kennedy Family picnic.
It comes from an area church.
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City Church in Long Beach, to be more specific.
“Come join us in a discussion about sex,” reads the City Church Facebook page. “This is a forum for any and all people interested in asking porn stars, strippers and escorts why they do what they do.”
The church, whose motto is “Serve the city while filling God's city,” is moderating the forum that includes a panelist from the sex industry, one who used to work there and an individual who has chosen abstinence.
Goals of the event include humanizing those who work in the adult industry, redeeming sex and sexuality and helping parents steer their children clear of careers on the stripper's pole or in front of a porn camera.
This can only be done if a dialogue is opened between friends, spouses, sex partners and those making gold by doin' the dirty, according to the church (and not in those words).
It brings to mind–in a less in-your-face manner–the pioneering work of the anti-porn XXXChurch.
The forum is scheduled from 7:30 to 9 tonight at the Art Theatre, 2025 E. Fourth St., Long Beach. The Facebook page has more event info, and you can learn more about the church there or here: www.lbcitychurch.org.
OC Weekly Editor-in-Chief Matt Coker has been engaging, enraging and entertaining readers of newspapers, magazines and websites for decades. He spent the first 13 years of his career in journalism at daily newspapers before “graduating” to OC Weekly in 1995 as the alternative newsweekly’s first calendar editor.