Tina Horn

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Tina Horn is an American self-proclaimed “writer, teacher and media-maker” from Northern California. As Horn says in an interview with Leah Mandel, she has always been a freelance worker, beginning in her early twenties as a dominatrix and later as a pornographer.. Her work in the sex industry has informed her current work as the host of the popular kink podcast Why Are People Into That? and a writer and editor. As an author, Horn is known for her contributions to multiple anthologies, including We Too: Essays on Sex Work and Survival (2021), two books of non-fiction, Sexting (2016) and Love Not Given Lightly (2015), and most notably, her science fiction comic book series SfSx (Safe Sex)(2019).

Some use of "" in your query was not closed by a matching "". Horn has lectured at various North American universities and community centers, as well as contributed to film, television and theater as a consultant, including on the popular FX show Pose. Additionally, Horn has won two Feminist Porn Awards, has been nominated for an AVN as a porn director and is a LAMBDA Literary Fellow. She completed her MFA at Sarah Lawrence College in New York, where she graduated with a degree in Creative Nonfiction Writer. She currently resides in Los Angeles.

Works:

Why Are People Into That?

Horn began her popular kink podcast Why Are People Into That? in February of 2014. Featuring writers, sex workers, scientists, and more, Why Are People Into That? commits to an in-depth exploration of kinks and fetishes, such as cannibalism, enemas, and bondage. Horn has interviewed big-name internet celebrities and sex workers, for instance, infamous artist, cam-girl and cake sitter Lindsay Dye, Jacq the Stripper, and pro-domme Empress Wu. It currently has 166 episodes, with its last released in March of 2021.

SfSx (Safe Sex) Volume 1: Protection

SfSx Volume 1: Protection is written by Horn and illustrated by Michael Dowling and Jen Hickman. The story follows a group of queer, superhero sex workers through a dystopia in which sex has been criminalized. Together, they fight the totalitarian government that exiles sex in their underground community called The Dirty Mind. It has been called “A celebration of the way queer people, sex workers, and other sexual outsiders are always at the forefront of advancing our cultural ideas about sex and pleasure” by Teen Vogue, and “A powerful mix of satire, theory, and great storytelling” by Adventures in Poor Taste

SfSx Volume 2: Terms of Service

SfSx Volume 2: Terms of Service is written by Horn and illustrated by G. Romero Johnson. In the second volume, the story continues from where readers left off in SfSx Volume 1: Protect. In this volume, the protagonists must rescue one of their friends who are being held hostage at the government’s testing facility, The Pleasure Centre. SyFy Wire states that SfSx "is changing sex work representation in comics" and “effortlessly captures the feeling of this revolutionary and terrifying moment in time”.

From Vertigo Comics to Image Comics

In the Summer of 2017, a queer publisher at DC Comics reached out to Horn about creating her own comic series. However, in early 2019, following the creation of the first two issues, DC decided that they were no longer interested in publishing SfSx (Safe Sex). Image Comics, an indie comic producer, reached out to Horn with an offer to publish the issues that her and her team had written and illustrated until that point, and she continued making more.

As Horn describes in an interview, "It was awful to have been dropped by DC, but I was in an open-minded, liberatory space. Like after you get dumped! Like, “I could fuck anybody!”". She took the opportunity to reclaim control over the story both literally and creatively, winning back the rights to her work and changing illustrators to incorporate more queer art into the book, which she felt better represented the project as a queer comic. In doing this, she challenged queer norms that are acceptable under neoliberalist queer politics, for instance continuing to create raw, queer fiction, even after her work had been dismissed by a major publisher, but this time with heavier queer representation throughout the process. She references this in her work as well, highlighting the fact that some forms of queerness are granted acceptance by dominant heteronormative culture, but only if they aim to fit within homonormative standards with her character Dr. Powell, who she says is very similar to Pete Buttigieg, in that they're both white, cis, gay men who refuse to have difficult conversations.

Themes and Significance

Horn’s work primarily focuses on taboo themes that are often misunderstood and stigmatized outside of radical, niche queer and sex-positive communities. Some of these themes include queerness, sex work, kink, fetish, and BDSM. As Horn has experience in the sex industry as a dominatrix, she has first-hand experience with the intricacies and intersections of these themes, as well as the stigma and taboo associated with this content, and the detrimental impact this can have on communities.

These themes translate into Horn’s podcast and literature through demystification and destigmatization of kink, fetish, and BDSM practices. Through her work with SfSx Volumes 1 and 2, Horn recenters sex work as skilled and valued labour in contrast with conflicting contemporary narratives of sex work by contextualizing her protagonists as superheroes, harbouring the specific skills they need to escape, survive, and liberate others as a result of their experiences as sex workers. As Horn elaborates on in her interview with Leah Mandel of The Creative Independent, SfSx was an opportunity to “villainize” anti-sex work feminists and call attention to the hypocrisy of the narratives they’ve constructed for sex workers, that they’re “either good girls who have fallen on hard times that are in bad circumstances, or they’re just irredeemable bad sluts”. These narratives are further elaborated on by legal scholars and activists like Catherine Mackinnon and Andrea Dworkin, who have for years argued that sex work is "sexual exploitation… [and] the oldest oppression”. Many sex worker rights organizations assert that these narratives are harmful in reinforcing stigmatizing legislation towards sex work and worsening consequences for sex workers. As such, the content of SfSx is intended to make light of these inadequacies in scholarship.

Additionally, in portraying complex queer characters across the spectrum of sexuality and gender identity, Horn normalizes queer narratives and contributes to a canon of queer literature written for and by queer individuals. As Horn notes in an interview, "there’s something special about dykes writing dykes and we don’t have to be nice about it". By writing queer fiction as a queer person, Horn is able to better identify and represent characters than someone without her personal lived experiences, and this contributes to the authenticity of her characters and plotlines.

Finally, as mentioned previously, Horn challenges homonormativity, in the content of her work and through her sex worker characters physically fighting Professor Powell, the personification of homonormativity, as well as in her act of fighting to regain the rights of the project after it had been scrapped by DC, and reducing its censorship to queerness through this process by hiring a team that reflected the identities of those in her stories.

With 14,900 Instagram followers and 15,500 Twitter followers, Horn has built and maintained a wide following since the beginning of her writing career in the early 2010s, allowing her to reach a wide audience with her work and agenda. As such, Horn has been able to build a network of queer and sex working friends, advocates, allies, and partners, creating relevant and educational content, like that of her podcast and her comic.

References

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