Now A Headliner
Fired Chronicle reporter Sarah Tressler to strip across America on a unique booktour
The former Houston Chronicle society reporter is launching a twenty-city booktour of gentlemen's club across North America. Here is one of the promotionalshots her publicist supplied.
Soon to be released on Amazon, Sarah Tressler's Diary of an Angry Stripperoffers in a fresh take on the world of exotic dancing.Diary of an Angry Stripper
Little more than two months after The Houston Press outed her lucrative part-time stripping gig, former Houston Chronicle society reporter Sarah Tressler is gearing up for a 20-city stripping tour of the United States and Canada to promote her new book Diary of an Angry Stripper.
In recent weeks Tressler has been preparing fresh stage routines for a series of featured performances at erotic gentlemen's clubs in major cities across the continent . . . Yep, it's a new take on the traditional book tour. (See the newly-launched Angry Stripper site for tour dates and more details.)
After writing her popular Angry Stripper blog from 2009 until her sudden firing from the Chronicle, Tressler gathered almost three years of insights into the world of exotic dancing — ranging from sordid behind-the-scenes details to a rather helpful glossary of stripping terms.
Set to for a July 15 wide release, the forthcoming book compiles these stories into a sort of expose-slash-memoir that sheds light not only on the adult entertainment industry, but also the struggles of a well-credentialed journalist in a shaky Great Recession economy. Tressler talked to CultureMap on Wednesday about her writing and the stripping book tour, which begins next week.
Even before her public outing, Tressler says she felt the Angry Stripper project might be reaching its conclusion. Her publisher Sequoia Di Angelo recently noted that the two were in talks about a possible book deal well before Tressler's Chronicle firing.
"It's interesting. The blog was wrapping up very organically," Tressler says. "I've always maintained that angry stripper attitude online as a way to give the material a specific tone and focus. At some point, though, you don't want to end up beating a dead horse."
Clocking in at 200 pages, the book needed little additional writing aside from a new foreword and introduction, Tressler says.
"Right now, I feel like I'm ready to move onto other topics, although I haven't quite figured out which direction I'd like to take," she says.
Clocking in at 200 pages, the book needed little additional writing aside from a new foreword and introduction, Tressler says.
Most of Tressler's stripper coworkers have little idea about her writing career or about the highly-publicized firing, which is currently under investigation by the EEOC. Since she began stripping in 2004, however, Tressler has come across the occasional writer-dancer, including a student in a journalism class she was teaching at the University of Houston.
"I know it might sound weird, but as far as other stripper-writers go, there are a bunch of them in Portland," she laughs, referencing Portlandia skit in which Fred Armisen plays a newly-employed exotic dancer.
"I think the culture of the city fosters this atmosphere of tolerance and acceptance, where you can be a someone at an office and go off and be a stripper at night," Tressler says. "According to this one Portland blogger I follow, they even a name for them — stripsters."
