Portia met Darius last Memorial Day at a show in Las Vegas. She was walking around the club, topless as usual, looking for volunteers for her fetish act. A few months later, Portia moved from Houston to New York City to be closer to Darius, a personal trainer. "It takes me being secure with myself," he says of his girlfriend's occupation.
Portia is about 5'8" and slim. The photos on her website make her look a little intimidating, but in person she's polite, even kind of goofy. Though coy about her age (she appears to be in her mid-20s), Portia will cop to a vinyl habit that started in 1996, around the same time she started working as a performer at fetish parties ("You have the freak show, and then you have the burlesque girls, and you have the models," she says, as if describing a deli tray). It was a natural coming of age for a girl whose mom used to dress her up for screenings of The Rocky Horror Picture Show in a Frank-N-Furter costume and a hat that proclaimed I'm a sweet transvestite. Summoning the nerve to rock the decks in public took a few more years, but DJ'ing half-naked eventually became her trademark, a way to stand out in a room full of people wearing rubber.
Tonight's show is a Monday party called S.I.N., which stands for "Service Industry Night" but seems to attract fewer off-duty waitresses than frat rats in baseball caps. When Portia's friend Disco D finishes his opening set, she drops a record and strikes a balletic pose on the riser. "Aw, yeah, here we go," says one dude a few feet in front of the stage.
Even in a city where women regularly show their breasts in exchange for cheap plastic beads, a naked lady draws a crowd. "Some people consider it a gimmick," Portia says, "but it is who I am. I love expressing myself in an erotic way." She's even planning to change her sobriquet to "the World's Premiere Erotic and Fetish DJ," which is partly a reaction to pigeonholing and partly to avoid friction with local codes. Penelope Tuesdae, a Hollywood DJ who often spins topless, was arrested in 2001 for exposing her breasts while playing in Melbourne, Florida. "I can't even tell you how many flyers we've had to change," says Portia. "It isn't about me being topless," she says. "It's about being erotic."
As the night drags on and the Kappa Sigs melt away, Portia is surrounded by a steady queue of young women who leap onstage to dance. She caresses one with her feathery riding crop; the girl takes the crop and play-flogs her back. But Portia soon retreats behind the decks for the rest of her set (electro, trance, some Tears for Fears), and by the time the lights come up, 90 minutes later, the crowd is down to a few patrons. Portia calls the next day to say she'd been having problems with the mixer and didn't want to stray far from it. Nudity might have gotten her the gig, but lose the beat and the last thing your audience will notice is that you're not wearing any clothes.
