All Hookers Go to Heaven is the debut novel of Canadian writer Angel B.H. The novel is a twist on the classic coming of age genre, exploring it through sex work. The protagonist, aptly named Magdalena, or Mag for short, was raised in a strict Christian home in the Maritimes, and moves to Montreal to pursue her studies, runs out of money, and begins dancing at the now closed infamous Club Supersexe. She later transitions to full-service sex work and takes the readers along while she tours (the sex work equivalent to a business trip) across the world.
The prologue of the book enthralled me; it is a magical realism-filled meditation on what happens to strippers when a club closes. The author employs this literary technique and imbues strippers with magic so that they are able to change rigid societal structures. Otherwise social change can feel inconceivable. I remember the surprise I felt when Supersexe closed down: According to stripper lore, the club was being audited, which the owners refused, and then the club mysteriously burned down. The author of this new style coming of age also addresses the magic of strippers, in the prologue and what she refers to as “the Hustler’s Curse”.
“Strippers aren’t witches, nor is hustling a curse. But there were times when it certainly felt like it” —this sentence from the book moved me to tears. Strippers metamorphize in the changing room from a girl next door, to a glamazon that enthralls and enchants men, and what is a witch if not a badass woman in charge of her own fate, a woman who turns her desire, in this case the desire for cold hard cash, into existence?
As for the Hustler’s Curse, in a way, the curse is that with the beginning of every shift, there is a chance for magic, a chance that your life will be better than before you walked in, a chance that maybe today is finally the day that a wealthy and generous client will bestow upon you the money that you need to escape the socioeconomic circumstances that brought you to the club in the first place. If that mythical client doesn’t materialize, the Hustler’s Curse compels one to keep hustling with the promise that bit by bit, you’ll be able to escape your circumstances.
After a year working at the Supersexe, Mag decides to try her luck in New Orleans. But she lacks a work visa, and is unable to get hired by any of the local clubs, turning instead to sugar dating. She meets Tim, who pays her to go to a swinger’s club called Colette with him, and pays her based on the number of people they manage to swing with that given night. While this is initially lucrative, Tim is increasingly problematic with more and more demands on her time. Their outings also make Mag question what it means to do sex work as a queer woman. B.H. writes:
“More and more, it felt as if I was engaging in some kind of public porn theatre. It came to irritate me that, inside Colette, lesbian action existed as a fantasy of, and not a threat to, the heterosexual norm. I found my sexuality there both exploited and trivialised—especially because, unsurprisingly, there was little to no sexual contact between the men.”
Things with Tim come to an end when he convinces Mag to join him for a weekend at a swinger’s club in Jamaica, and when she returns, she’s caught with the cash she made at the US border. Unable to explain her income, she gets deported back to Canada and banned from entering the US for five years.
From there, Mag follows the money based on a trail of whispered recommendations from other sex workers. Their advice in a way reiterates the Hustler’s curse—the whispers compel her into action as she travels to Berlin, Australia, Singapore, Thailand. In the course of her (mis)adventures, Mag does full-service sex work under different legal approaches to sex work: From the fully legalized brothels in Australia, to picking up men in fancy hotel bars in Singapore, where sex work is heavily criminalized. She’s in Berlin when the escort site Backpage closes down, and feels the chilling effect of FOSTA-SESTA legislation, which instead of preventing human trafficking like intended, actually pushed sex workers further underground and made it harder to screen clients for safety.
Her whirlwind tour, often filled with sex, drugs and problematic clients ends with her booking a vacation with a friend she just finished touring with, where they share their hopes and dreams for the upcoming New Year. This bittersweet ending reminded me of a vacation that I took to Panama with a colleague when she was fresh off a break up, and I was burnt out from working and going to university full time.
Like Mag, we hung out on the beach, did a little ritual, set our intentions and let the ocean do its magic and help make our dreams come true. Because in the end, it’s really us girls who have each other’s backs, and the sex worker friendships and community forged along the way in this book, like in life, are the best part!
I highly recommend this book, it’s a meditation of self, of queerness, friendship and chasing money in a capitalist system. B.H. writes: “Possessed by the spirit of capitalism, we create our own Mythologies.”
All Hookers Go To Heaven does exactly that—it shows how sex work turned a regular, small town Christian girl into a woman who forged her own path and wrote her own story.
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