We all hope to live long enough to grow old. But Charla Hathaway, a 77-year-old Portland-based doctor of clinical sexology, hopes that we don’t wait until then to really start living. At age 55, she made a career change from violinist to sex worker and stayed in the industry for 15 years — during which she earned a Ph.D. With her expertise, she educates (in numerous ways) about the importance of pleasure — giving, and more significantly, receiving — to encourage everyone to live life to the fullest.
Hathaway is no longer a sex worker in the traditional sense, but she’s not done educating. Along with authoring multiple self-help books about pleasure and founding BodyJoy Intimacy School in Austin, Texas, she has also written, produced and starred in multiple plays about her life. Last year, she brought her show Naked at My Age, which opened in 2023, to The Hybrid Gallery, where she chronicled her nontraditional mid-life change of pace. She returns to the venue August 22 to perform her latest one-woman project, More Naked than Ever. The show is a double bill with clown comedian Nicole Medema’s play The Domme, where she interactively dominates audience members with their consent.
When Hathaway was 45 years old, she and her husband embarked on separate solo vacations. The practice wasn’t new to the couple, and through their travels, they agreed to never ask questions about what went on while they were apart.
While on a train in Europe, she sat next to a French soldier 20 years her junior. From the encounter grew a passionate weeklong affair, where she took the reins. “It was my first time really claiming that I would own — even within a marriage — my own sexuality,” Hathaway says. For the first time ever, she directed her own intimate encounters, and learned that her needs matter just as much as her partner’s.
She returned to her husband unable to regain the sexual agency she found in her affair. Not long after, her marriage ended and she uprooted to Texas, where she fell in love with her neighbor. “We would tell each other our sexual fears, fantasies, peak experiences,” she says. “The different exercises that just build a deep connection.”
With these discoveries about her body and desires, she looked for ways to further explore her newfound sexual freedom. One day, at age 55, she saw a classified ad in the newspaper for someone in need of an escort. She knew she had to make the call. “If I didn’t pick up the phone, I would regret it the rest of my life. And there, I picked up the phone, and it changed the rest of my life.”
She quit her decade-long violin teaching job and started seeing clients. As she began working, she prioritized teaching them “how to feel their own bodies and be aware of their sensations.” In her experience, she says, men are often so concerned with their own performance, and “seeming like the greatest lover she’s ever had or doing a good job, that they’re not even present.” She slowed down with her clients, and taught them “how to receive pleasure instead of how to give it, because if he can’t receive it, he sure as heck can’t give it.”
It wasn’t long, she says, until her work drove her back to school. She earned her doctorate in sexology from Institute for the Advanced Studies of Human Sexuality and also became a certified sexological bodyworker (which allows her to use erotic touch for healing). Sexology is the study of human sexuality, encompassing behavior, relationships and biology.
When it comes to intimacy, Hathaway says many factors must be taken into consideration before the act even starts. “The whole body, breathing, paying attention and being present to their sensations,” she says. “Most people haven’t learned them and they’re real simple, easy tools to learn.” In sex work and education, she says, “I found my life’s purpose surprisingly and joyfully.”
Also surprising to her was how the demand for her work grew as she got older. Hathaway only expected to be a sex worker until she turned 60. Instead, “I became more and more sought after and valuable all the way through my 70s, because there’s always people that need this kind of knowledge.”
Her show More Naked than Ever is “about my amazing clients,” she says. It is a collection of five short stories about unique client encounters that span the course of her career. They illustrate why people might choose to see a sex worker, and how they “get unstuck, find new choices and turn longing into loving. They are tender and they’re real stories,” she says, adding that they are more sensual than sexual. “They’re not to shock you. But there’s a gem in every one because in a way, each one of us is in each story.”
More Naked than Ever and The Domme are 7:30 pm Saturday, August 22 at The Hybrid Gallery, 941 West 3rd Avenue. Tickets are $20 to $30 sliding scale and are available at TheHybridEugene.com.