One such group is SGBoston, which has 220 registered users (both SGs and members), but only about 50 who actively post. Two Fridays ago, Palo invited all of SGBoston to her residence hall to shoot “kitschy ‘family’ portraits,” which is why she was photographing Lexie. By 9:30, eight people had showed up. Plopped on the floor by the fireplace was SGBoston moderator Dan Wherren, a 28-year-old theater-service technician who’s Lexie’s roommate. Over in the corner is Palo’s boyfriend, Jordan, a sketchbook-doodling artist grumbling that he’d rather be sleeping. Finch, a SuicideGirl who moved from Boston to Pennsylvania, was also in town for the night. After the informal photo session ended, everyone headed over to the Sunset Cantina on Comm Ave for the quasi-monthly “Burgers and Beers,” an SGBoston eating-and-drinking ritual often held at Charlie’s Kitchen, in Harvard Square.
SGBoston — whom Wherren describes as predominantly a mix of “antisocial intellectuals and goths” — convenes regularly for things like this: horror-movie sleepovers, PBR-drenched parties, and music-video film shoots. Some SGs have become really close, like Lexie and Palo, who’ll be roommates this summer, or Kera and Alexsandria. Lexie and Dan met through the site and now they’re roommates; Palo first met her boyfriend, Jordan, at an SGBoston-organized dinner at Pizzeria Uno’s. Others are merely acquaintances.
Gaining an automatic community is one of the reasons many of the more recent local SGs applied. “I’ve always been a shy girl,” says Sid, a 21-year-old from Rhode Island with 22 piercings and 12 tattoos. “I probably would still be sitting in a dorm room somewhere going out of my mind if I didn’t have SG.” While Palo admits that she got “jealous” when she saw the SuicideGirls book and decided to apply, the site also rescued her from yah-dude party hell. “My first two years in college, I went to the typical frat parties in a basement with a keg and a leaky roof — that kind of thing. It was just not my thing at all.” SG led her to actual thinking people. “I ended up meeting quite a few of my best friends [in Boston] on the site.”
Bowie, a 22-year-old who recently moved to Cambridge from San Francisco, had always fantasized about being a Playboy centerfold. “I’ve always been someone who’s been into pinup girls,” says Bowie, who has a tattoo of a pistol-firing dame in a garter belt stamped on her right deltoid. “I always thought it’d be cool to be what I admire.” But the site has also helped her make friends in her new home. “Without the site, I wouldn’t be here talking to you. I’d be at home watching TV.”
SuicideGirls earn $300 for every nude photo set posted. But the exposure can lead to more cash flow. Palo, who studies graphic design and is teaching herself photography, has gotten other modeling jobs and camera-work connections through the site, as well as a free place to crash in Portland, Oregon.
