Boston-based bi-dyke performance artist and storyteller Cameryn Moore came by her tales of deviant desires and perverse pleasures honestly: she lived them, sort of.
In her day (and sometimes, night) job, Moore works as a phone sex operator, indulging her clients in their deepest and darkest fantasies by way of the vivid sexual scenarios she coos into her phone receiver.
In her latest show, Phone Whore, Moore guides us through a night on the job, her narration frequently interrupted by clients’ calls. While we hear only Moore’s side of the sex chats, the audience ultimately becomes voyeurs – or rather, auditors – to a series of sexual encounters that are by turns steamy, hilarious and in some cases, horrifying.
“If someone were to spend an hour with me on call, that’s what they’d get,” Moore says. “It’s a window into the sexual lives of men that the audience wouldn’t have thought about. The real spirit of the show is in the calls I take and what I talk to them about, and how the audience feels about those calls.”
The secret to Moore’s success as a sex chat operator is her commitment to indulging fantasy in an open and non-judgmental way. That can make hearing some of her clients’ darker fantasies more difficult.
Moore had some walk-outs during a particularly graphic retelling of a client’s incest fantasy when she performed the show in Winnipeg last summer.
“I understand that it’s uncomfortable,” Moore says. “It’s strange to be given that much of a view into someone else’s soul. Desires are at the core of our souls. They’re personal and idiosyncratic and unique, hard to understand for other people. If you stay to the end [the show] ties it together. To offer some watered-down version would not be true to my experience.”
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