Despite that high level of confidence, only one local SG interviewed for this article has told her parents she’s naked on the Internet. It wasn’t Kera. “I was raised in the feminist movement — taught about sexuality and taught to never feel ashamed about who I am,” the poet-in-training says, citing her feminine role models as painter Frida Kahlo and Bettie Page. Still, Kera thinks her mother wouldn’t be pleased with her choice. “My mom’s very liberal and she’s a feminist, but I think she’d be upset because she would think that I’m demeaning myself. She also wants me to go into politics. I have no interest in going into politics, but she thinks I would make a good politician.”

Nor was it Sid. “My mom is an ultraconservative Catholic woman, so I didn’t want her to think that I’m committing some kind of sin,” says Sid. Nonetheless, Sid self-shot her first set during Christmas break in her Rhode Island bedroom while her unsuspecting mother was home. If her mother finds out, Sid figures, “I’ll just look at her and tell her that I’m old enough to make my own decisions. None of the stuff that I’m doing is more pornographic than artistic: I’m not the girl with the spread-eagle vibrator shots.”

It’s Bailey whose mom knows. And she found out by accident. “She asked me if I wasn’t loved enough as a child,” remembers Bailey. “And then she didn’t want to talk about it anymore.”

The old-school
Bailey Maxwell is SGBoston’s badass doyenne. A Miranda July–type with a tiny shamrock tattooed on her lower neck, the Dorchester resident was one of only 30-some SuicideGirls in 2002 and Boston’s debut nude model. She was also the first local SG with a journal, the first to interact with the site’s members, and the first local girl with enough history to refuse to take “Suicide” as her SG last name.

“I take a lot of pride in being the first Boston girl,” Bailey says one Sunday evening over a beer and nachos at Redbones, the Davis Square barbeque joint listed as a “vice” in her SG profile. “I kinda started it. That makes me sound so pretentious, but I have a lot of pride in being from Boston.” She does have the townie phrase WICKED PISSAH inked across her sternum. “I want people to remember.”

Bailey’s first photo set, a slide show of thematically related striptease images, went live on May 20, 2002. The series was a 30-part sequence of her crawling around on a couch “when sets on couches weren’t boring,” getting nude except for a red tie and pulling Guns N’ Roses’s Appetite for Destruction on vinyl out of a crate. “It was a weird experience. I just remember being really cold.” A second set, titled “Thief,” got posted the following November. In that one, Bailey, in pink eye shadow and dressed in black (like a lady cat burglar), prowled around an empty apartment, rolled around in a bed, and wiped a bracelet she swiped from her roommate across her nether regions. For the shoot, Bailey and her photographer friend actually did bust into a vacationing neighbor’s place. “If you want to do a set called ‘Thief,’ you’ve definitely got to break in somewhere,” Bailey reasons, adding that they had still never confessed to the occupant that she’d “rubbed her ass all over her pillowcases.”

Tales like this are what’s made Bailey Maxwell a punk-porn mythical creature among her Boston heirs — that and her legendary habit of biting people. “I would leave welts on people. I’m not exactly sure what that was about, but it was something I did.” Or her tough-girl reputation earned by getting kicked out of ManRay (that only happened once) and pounding a greedy dude in the face. The latter occurred when the first “SuicideGirls Live” burlesque tour hit the Middle East Downstairs and an audience member tried to grab money out of the tip jar in her hands. “It was just my instinct: I jumped off the stage and punched him in the face and choked him. And he was like, ‘Here, have your money back.’ ” She eventually got so popular on the site that people started asking her to autograph the SuicideGirlscoffee-table book, even though she turned down the opportunity to be included in it because she was a preschool teacher at the time. But instead of scribbling her Jane Hancock for fans, she’d rip out a random page and run away. “I’m like, ‘Why do you want my autograph? I don’t do anything. I stand there and take my clothes off and smile.’ ”