Guest Post: The Promise of No Promise (Lux ATL, aka Dr. Lindsay Byron), on "Hookergate"

Guest Post by Lux ATL, aka Dr. Lindsay Byron

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*Doing something a little different today. This is a guest post by “Lux ATL,” also known as Dr. Lindsay Byron. Here is her bio (which is fascinating and impressive):

Lux ATL is a former university instructor and lifelong exotic dancer turned founder of Stripcraft, a playground of sensual movement and sexy travel providing good times for bad girls worldwide since 2014. 

She is also a published scholar in the field of women’s studies under the name of Dr. Lindsay Byron. Her short documentary CONJURED and Southern Cultures Magazine’s article REWRITING ELIZABETH reconstruct the lives of women wrongfully institutionalized at an infamous Southern mental hospital in the mid-twentieth century.

She was named Best Stripper in Atlanta in 2015, and competed in the elite Miss Pole Dance America competition in 2016. 

In 2021 she released her memoir titled Too Pretty To Be Good, and is the host of the podcast HOOKERGATE: Criminals and Libertines in the South, which focuses on a high profile Southern prostitution ring during the early 1970's.  

She was also featured on the Epixdocumentary series SEX LIFE in Season 1, Episode 3:ROPE, TITS AND TEARS. 

Find Lux/Byron’s stack HERE at TUMULTUOUS TRUE STORIES

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Listen to Hookergate at any of the links below…

Spotify

Apple Podcasts

iHeart

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The Promise of No Promise

Work hard for a long time with no guarantee that it will ever pay off. 

I had dreams, big ones. Of course I wanted eyes on my art. Of course I wanted my lifetime of writing to someday generate money. 

As I child, I fancied myself so talented as to assume fame would be my fate. I wrote prolifically in my bedroom while my parents chain-smoked downstairs. I kept diaries, volumes of them, in the belief that one day they would be published for an adoring public hungry for the inner history of this Great American Artist!  

Somehow that happened to Taylor Swift, but not to me.

I made the art anyway. 

Throughout my teens, my twenties, my thirties: I made the art anyway.

I published a podcast about my life. I wrote a memoir. 

The audience I’d painstakingly built over a decade online tuned in, listened, read, purchased, loved, reviewed. I now had fans. 

Gratifying, yes, though never fully satisfying.

My success only fueled the desire for bigger success. Greater art. Better writing. 

And so, I kept writing. 

In 2021, at my grandmother’s funeral, a family friend presented me with a massive notebook of crumbling news clippings chronicling a scandal of sex, power, and corruption that rocked our small Southern hometown fifty years ago. Local reporters called that scandal “Hookergate.” My friend had found the originals locked in a trunk among her dead mother’s belongings. 

Truck stop brothels run by a web of ex-cons…a Commonwealth attorney wasted on whiskey and power…protection exchanged for cash and flesh…a brash local reporter exposing it all…. 

The raw material was utter gold. I knew that immediately. 

I took those news clippings to the beach and sat on the deck and poured through them for two weeks. 

“All they had to offer was coffee and pussy–and right now, they were all out of coffee.”

THIS WAS THE RAW MATERIAL SITTING IN MY FUCKING LAP. 

Welp, imma write a book, I thought, at first. 

Until one day early in my research, I stumbled across the “Next Great Podcast” competition, hosted by iHeartRadio and Tongal. 

Once I saw this contest, I knew: 

I’d write a book–

But first, I’d write a podcast.

Indeed, this order of events had worked well for my memoir, Too Pretty To Be Good, which I published first as a podcast, Stripcast: True Stories from a Stripper with a PhD.

The due date for entry was mere weeks away, and the materials required for entry were extensive. I contacted my homeboy Guy Kelly, with whom I’ve made lots of art. I told him my concept and asked him to score the trailer. He agreed. 

Although I had a massive professional engagement on my horizon and could absolutely not afford to take the time away from work–I took the time away from work, and devoted myself to producing the trailer and the pitch deck for this competition.

I always knew we were going to win. 

The night I received the congratulatory email, I conceived my second son at the age of forty in a fit of perimenopausal-induced ovulatory mind-control. 

This pregnancy–was not in the plans. 

In the meantime, I started hunting down individuals. Pimps. Working girls. Politicians, lawyers, jilted wives, journalists. Many of these people are now in their golden years or dead. I figured most of ‘em wouldn’t want to talk. 

Nonetheless, some Facebook detective work enabled me to find Rodney Smith, editor and journalist largely responsible for bringing this case to light. We scheduled a phone interview for the coming Wednesday.  

By that Tuesday, I pissed positive on a pregnancy test, turned my family’s world upside down, and the next day, interviewed Rodney Smith.

Great interview. Delightful man. 

As I began this “vomiting a dozen times a day” phase of my pregnancy, other Hookergate-connected people started coming out of the woodwork.

Very few of them were pleased with me. 

I got one early morning call from a former working girl who was slurring by 8 a.m. She alternated between crying, telling me to fuck off, and saying “you seem like a real nice lady.”  

I engaged in an all-nighter in a hotel room in backwoods so rural that the only competition for entertainment with the Liquor Barn were the pain management centers. 

I kicked it super hard with a good ol boy excited to describe his youthful sexual exploits. 

I talked with a gentleman at the history center in my hometown who was practically aggressive in his questioning of me. I arrived at this center to conduct an interview. Instead, I got grilled. 

Won’t none of these engagements comfortable. 

I called every court clerk this side of the Mississippi on a hunt for the Federal trial transcripts of the Hookergate RICO trial.  

I finally found those transcripts at the National Archives in Philadelphia, where I copied page-by-page into a flatbed scanner FOUR THOUSAND SIX HUNDRED PAGES. 

I got sick on that trip with a cough that introduced me to the new world of peeing my pants, a world which I have sadly not entirely left postpartum. 

My flight home was canceled one hour before take-off so I drove the thousand miles home, only to have my rental car smashed and my belongings stolen outside of the Atlanta airport.

This, after peeing my pants!

Now, re-read all of the above endeavors, and remember: I was pregnant the whole time. Just big and pregnant as a motherfucker. 

Big and pregnant, driving up and down the South to ask strangers uncomfortably personal questions. Big and pregnant, scanning those thousands of pages, hour after hour, day after day. Getting robbed. Crying in a gas station parking lot, broken glass and crushed chicken wings at my feet. Reading four thousand six hundred pages not once, not twice, but thrice, a baby kicking, all of our lives about to change.

Incidentally, I was also running a business in the meantime–and by “business” I don’t mean a side-hustle Etsy craft shop; I mean a complex corporation that pays my mortgage and fills my fridge. 

I promised myself I’d finish this podcast before the baby came.

I was busy, stretched thin in every way. 

Also: kept having nosebleeds.

The nosebleeds, of course, were a symptom of preeclampsia, which is what they call it when yo’ big pregnant ass is ‘bout to stroke out ‘cause your BP is in the 200s. I went to a routine appointment at 39 weeks, and to my horror, they induced labor, pumping me full of misery-potions with names like “pitocin” and “magnesium,” and thus threw me into the greatest vortex of pain that man or beast has ever experienced (I know this for a fact; don’t argue). I could have sawed my own leg off and it would’ve hurt less. 

To add insult to injury– 

by the time I finally spit that baby out–

damn it, the podcast wasn’t done!

I promised myself I’d have Hookergate written and recorded by the time I gave birth. Instead, I had worked like a dog on research, but still hadn’t written the first episode.

And so I strapped a weeks-old infant to my chest and paced my front yard so he would sleep. In one hand, I held my notebook, filled with research. In the other hand, my phone. 

I freestyled scenes into my voice recorder for my first drafts. Just talking on-the-spot the creative writing that normally I’d sit and quietly type and delete, type and delete. Waiting for inspiration to strike? Setting up the perfect writing environment? These weren’t options for me. 

So I strapped the baby on, and I rapped a fucking docudrama into voice notes.

Generally, my creative process was this:

Determine which wild-ass scene described in court or the news that I wanted to depict that day, and go pace around my yard to make the baby sleep while I freestyled on the spot dramatic depictions of said scene. 

I then sent those recordings to a transcription service so I could edit these verbal drafts. Those transcripts are often marked with an aside:

“Sounds of a baby in the background.”

That might just be the title of my second memoir. 

Through my research, I created an elaborate timeline on a white board, with an ensemble of real-life characters whose lives variously intertwined in truck stops, courtrooms, and bedrooms. The volume of data was overwhelming.  

Now, setting aside my researcher hat and putting on my creative writing one, I determined a handful of perspectives I wanted to highlight, and created narrative threads for each. 

I used Joseph Campbell’s “Hero’s Journey” structure to help me map factual events into a compelling narrative form. 

And day by day, I created scenes for each of these narrative threads–

in the span of nap times, pacing in a yard.

My baby is now one-and-half years old.

I am now able to sit and write with peace and quiet from time to time.

And it took me every bit of that pregnancy and the first eighteen months of his life, but– 

The podcast just dropped last week.

Today, it landed as the top hit on the “New and Noteworthy” section on Apple Podcasts–if only for a cocktease of two hours (grits teeth and practices gratitude anyway).

This New and Noteworthy list is curated by editors at Apple. Actual humans choose which podcasts to highlight. Making it to the New and Noteworthy list is not only a big honor, but great publicity. Even though we were only briefly featured, I’m gonna GRIT THOSE TEETH and PRACTICE GRATITUDE anyway for the influx of new listeners that resulted. 

Was it all worth it? 

I don’t know what “success” means. I don’t ever feel satisfied. Ambition stalks me like Iago, whispering bullshit in my ear.  

I do know, however, that according to many metrics:

Getting a publication deal with a major media outlet (shout out again to the folks at iHeart), getting paid a fairly-substantial sum for a work of art (certainly the most I had ever been compensated financially for my storytelling), having people on every continent except Antarctica tuning in, thousands of people, enjoying art I painstakingly crafted:

Well damn, bitch, you oughta feel satisfied. You’re living many of your dreams. 

Were I took peer into the future from that shattered car window, from that birthing room of horror, from those hours pacing and dictating into a phone, and ask myself–

Will it all be worth it?  

I’d answer:

Yeah, dude, thanks to you.   

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Listen to Hookergate at any of the links below…

Spotify

Apple Podcasts

iHeart