Last week I watched My Own Private Idaho. When I was a girl I loved River Phoenix. I bought tons of teeny-bopper magazines and plastered my bedroom walls with his photos. I even taped pictures of him to my ceiling so I could look up at him while lying in bed. Eventually my infatuation faded and I took the posters down.

While I had obsessively watched most of his movies over and over I had never seen My Own Private Idaho. It came out in 1991 so most likely my girlhood crush had faded by then. If you haven’t heard of the movie IMBd describes it this way-”Two best friends living on the streets of Portland as hustlers embark on a journey of self discovery and find their relationship stumbling along the way.”

I vaguely knew the movie was about hustling but my teenage self never really thought about it. Watching it now I was struck by how different my adult reaction was to how my teenage reaction would have been. I watched it from a sex worker perspective. My teenage self would have watched it from the perspective of a swooning fangirl.

The campfire confession scene was the most powerful moment of the movie. But I was particularly struck by two other moments. First, there was the scene was Phoenix’s characters is picked up a woman. He goes into the living and finds two other male sex workers already there. That was a realistic moment-the quick conversation about the client and the ease that the characters had together. The second scene was one in a diner where it showed several sex workers talking about work. The characters all talked about bad experiences but I still felt it was realistic. I’ve certainly hung out with fellow sex workers in a diner and bitched about work.

What would my teenage self had noticed? Probably how cute Phoenix was in every scene-he certainly was.

Posted by Vixen in Reviews, Sex Workers