TOP TEN REASONS WE LOVE DORI MIDNIGHT
With a name like Dori Midnight, you’d better be able to deliver the sexy late-night goods—and this schoolteacher-cum-porn star certainly does. Here’s why we love the spunky, lusty lady behind the phenomenal Dirty Tarot Cards.
By Beth Schwartzapfel
February 2006
1. She’s a visual and performance artist. Midnight recently performed with San Francisco’s Circo Zero, doing raps and “dirty gay limericks.” She draws and paints and studied visual art at Metáfora, an international art program in Barcelona.2. She’s a lesbian porn star. Midnight played Bita Honey in the 2001 lesbian porn flick Sugar High Glitter City. In 2003, she portrayed Brooklyn Bloomberg in the steamy 5-minute Matzo Maidels, which features rare 1920s footage of nice Jewish girls doing naughty things to each other.
3. She’s a schoolteacher. Midnight teaches kindergarten through fifth graders at San Francisco’s Rooftop Elementary School. The kids draw, paint, and sculpt, but Midnight also mixes it up a little. “I do little witch classes with them. I had one kid come up to me yesterday and tell me my aura was pink and red. He’s in second grade. They’re imaginations are just, like, huge.”
4. She’s studying to be an interfaith minister. In her second year at the New York City-based New Seminary, Midnight has a new vision for old tent revivals. “Some sort of queer, two-spirit, traveling spiritual cabaret where people can come and get what they need.”
5. She created Dirty Tarot. This deck of divination incorporates the lust and faith and earthy grit that make Midnight who she is. Reproduced from 40 of Midnight’s original watercolor paintings, these cards celebrate the magic of everyday objects. Traditional tarot decks might contain chalices or pentacles, but a reading from this deck can deliver Revolution, Kitchen Table, or Cheese Puffs. “I just wish these were made of marzipan,” said sex activist and author Susie Bright of Dirty Tarot. “I would eat the card deck.”
6. She’s spunky, colorful, and wide open. Midnight stands under five feet tall, but you’d never know it. Her kooky demeanor, generous personality, and expansive ideas radiate enough love for five people.
7. There’s no such thing as a bad reading. “The deck has no negative cards,” says Midnight. “I wanted to make the deck foolproof in the sense that you couldn’t get a card which means ‘I’m fucking up.’ I want to help you look upon your quirks with love, turn them upside down, celebrate them – like sluttiness, toughness – and never hate on yourself.”
8. Midnight is a family name. She wasn’t born with it, but it’s a part of her history. Her grandmother “was really wild. She talked to animals. She bought herself a taxicab and drove across the country.” Dori found some old pictures of her grandmother and asked her uncle who the other people were. “Oh, those are the Midnights,” said her uncle. Dori’s grandmother was an orphan, and the Midnights were one family that took care of her in her childhood. “I had never thought about changing my last name before,” says Midnight “but I said, ‘that’s my last name!’”
9. Pluto is in her first house. This is what Midnight was told when she had her astrological chart read. Pluto is the symbol of sex, death, and rock and roll. “And when you have it in your first house,” says Midnight, “that’s your identity, that’s your life.”
10. Somehow it all fits together. “Reading tarot, teaching art, making dirty movies, becoming a minister – I do all these things and they all make sense to me, because they’re me,” she says. Activism, art, healing, and sex are all part of the equation. “I can’t commit to any one of those things unless all of those things are present.”
