ESTEEMED NOBLEMEN of Portland: You do me a deep honor with this forum. I recall the swiftness with which my heart soared on receiving your invitation to provide this keynote speech for the opening ceremonies of the Sex by Sex Workers Film Festival, an event I presume to be the very summit of a busy cultural calendar for the city's intelligentsia. And now...allow me forthwith to pontificate on the topic of...SEX.

Sex--and by Sex, I refer not to the banal, quasi-erotic, procreative fumblings of the enslaved and the matrimonied, but rather the joyous, smutty abandon of the perverse, the ravening, and the academic--is a fragile commodity in dangerously short supply in our civic sector. The life-giving energies of smut, pornography, and wanton sexual frolic have passed dangerously from our fair city, and we find ourselves now adrift in a salty sea of sanitized moral righteousness. The bygone proud displays of non-procreative coitus, once so common on our cobbled streets, have now become woefully rare; the cheerful practice of inserting one's fingers into the passing anus or the adjacent vagina--once upon a time, a local tradition as common as a handshake!--have vanished entirely. Indeed, our forlorn city has seen fit to decree the spectacular visions of sex--the erect penises sheathed in condoms; the moist vaginas winking and smiling; the semen-daubed torsos; the anal surprise--to be vulgar and unwarranted. And by doing so, our city--take heed, misanthropes!--has cut off its nose to spite its very face.

Humanity's backwards traverse across the bog of time has led us dangerously astray from the noble, orgiastic teachings of the great apes, to the point that we now stand, sanitary and timid, in a world shamefully devoid of the filth-arts. The evidence of our disconnect surrounds us, an army, ravenous for an asexual Armageddon. Our society is saturated with stabbings, embezzlement, drive-by shootings, and corporate greed, even as its reservoir of pornographic literature and filthy social customs have dried up. Virgin bodies litter our streets; Starbucks outlets discourage coitus and send land values plummeting, while malls and other hotbeds of terrorist, asexual activity (i.e., Dairy Queen) proliferate. And throughout the urban environment, the high-minded practitioners of sex and fucking have vanished, replaced by homophobic juveniles reciting Britney Spears songs, or sexless ciphers such as Vera Katz.

We must return to the teachings of the Bonobos, the great chimpanzee family to which we owe our very humanity. The Bonobos--serene, bisexual, smut-loving apes--practice a life of great carnal enlightenment, wisely thrusting their filthy couplings out into the public sphere, rather then allowing them to languish in the dim corridors of the private one. The effect of their placid wisdom is one of almost universal social peace. These smut-loving monkeys know nothing of murder, jealousy, greed, or hostility. One need only to witness these sweet apes, sunning themselves lazily on a rock, one hand drifting in and out of a vagina, the other gently guiding a penis into a smiling anal opening, to see paradise regained.

So, I must laud the participants, the subjects and creators of this high-minded Sex by Sex Workers Film Festival. These slutty, filth-loving, utopian dreamers have braved the withering light of our backwards civic leaders to bring this vaunted, age-old vision of fucking and sucking again into the parched center of the public sector. I daresay these artists are our own human Bonobos, their vaginas crucibles of social peace, their erect phalluses flagpoles of civic freedom. I salute them, and encourage their continued fight: Indeed, one day, the semen and other juices that pour forth from their genitals will be nothing if not tears of joy.

Culture is borne forward on the gyrating hips of the erotic dancer. Each thrust of the rabid homosexual, each jab of the pornographic artist, is a blow against the iron door of the status quo. Indeed, genitals are the filament through which the civilizing electricity of sensual abandon courses, to light our world brightly against the darkness.

Thank you, and please, enjoy the festival.