This is a critical conversation we need to be having with people who are concerned with juvenile involvement with the sex trades, especially the involvement of young people of colour and youth Aboriginal people.

xxx
Lusty

The Native Youth Sexual Health Network is proud to be a member and contributor of the Collective that has just put out this statement (stay tuned for more statements and work coming from our Collective soon!)

As a collective of radical women and queer people of color and Indigenous people who identify as sex workers, people in the sex trades, people doing what we have to do to survive, and people who have been trafficked into sex work and other forms of labor, we wanted to respond to Rinku Sen’s recent Colorlines blog post The Complexities of Sex Trafficking, and Some Simple Solutions because, for us, there are no simple solutions to the complex circumstances that inform our lives. Simplified responses do not do justice to our lived realities, or to the systemic conditions that inform them. While we appreciate Sen’s distinction between trade and trafficking, unfortunately this distinction is not made within the laws currently being promoted to respond to harms experienced by people in the sex trades. In fact we believe that in all too many cases these laws increase harm to the very people they  intend to help

As young people and adults with experience in the sex trades who are directly impacted by current responses to prostitution and trafficking, we recently came together as an affiliate of INCITE! Women of Color Against Violence to think more deeply about how to respond to the wave of legislation, funding, and conversation about sex work and trafficking in a way that represents our truths and realities. We are deeply rooted in INCITE!’s analysis of state violence as integrally connected to interpersonal violence, and its commitment to community-based solutions to violence that do not rely on law enforcement, which is in and of itself a source of systemic and widespread violence against women and transgender people of color. Indeed, a ground-breaking youth-led participatory research project conducted by the Young Women’s Empowerment Project, to which Sen refers in a comment addressing responses to her piece, found police and social services to be the primary sources of harm experienced by young people with experience in the sex trades.

Like Sen, we oppose and resist any and all forms of violence, including but not limited to: coercion, extortion, violence by police and other law enforcement agents, structural economic, gender- and sexuality-based violence, and racial violence against all people, including people in the sex trades. Such violence also includes the denial of affordable housing, health care, and access to living wage employment. We also challenge those in both the anti-trafficking and sex workers’ rights movements who claim to speak on our behalf, and those who use our lives and experiences to advance their own agendas without recognizing our leadership.

We know that each of our experiences of the sex trades are unique, and there are no one-size fits all solutions. We are members of families and communities struggling to survive and make the best possible choices given the options available to us. For many of us, the truth about the sex trade is somewhere between a completely empowered experience of the sex trade, which requires only decriminalization to eliminate harms, and a completely harmful experience of the sex trade which negatively presumes all of us to be victims in need of “rescue.”

The Safe Harbor Act, along with initiatives like it that Lloyd and others are promoting across the country, are NOT simple or solutions for most of us. First, they don’t stop arrests of young people for prostitution-related offenses, or the police abuses of young people in the sex trades that, including police trading sex in exchange for promises of dropping charges. They also don’t stop arrests of young people in the sex trades that involve “charging up,” i.e. charging young people with weapons or drug-related offenses which may be easier to prove. Second, while they may stop criminal prosecutions of young people for prostitution-related offenses, these laws do not eliminate detention and punishment of young people involved in the sex trades, they just shift young people from the jurisdiction of the criminal courts to family court systems, where they can remain entangled until the age of 21. And, in the end, only a very narrow group of people can benefit from these laws.

For example, in order for the Safe Harbor Act to benefit a young person, they must be under 16 and arrested for the first time and must never have been in family court before.  Young people between the ages of 16-18 continue to be charged in adult court. Even those under 16 who can meet the Act’s criteria must still convince a judge that they are a “victim” of a “severe form of trafficking” – a hurdle that both Sen and Lloyd acknowledge is almost impossible for young girls of color.  This is also a problem because most young people’s stories do not fit into a neat box.  A National Institutes of Justice funded study by researchers at John Jay College in New York City found that only 8% of young people involved in the sex trades in New York City had been forced into prostitution by a “pimp,” and only 10% currently worked with one. The same study found that 16% of girls and 6% of boys trading sex were coerced, but the vast majority of girls (84%) engaged in the sex trades in New York City had never come into contact with a “pimp.” When young people can’t respond to police and prosecutors’ pressure to give up a “pimp” they never had  they get punished  by law enforcement and service providers alike, and find themselves back on the delinquency and detention track.  Even when the Safe Harbor Act (and other laws like it) is found to apply to a young person, they must still follow the rules a family court judge sees fit, which can involve attending a court-mandated program like GEMS, many of which enforce Christianity on participants. Additionally, for young people for whom no such services are available, including LGBTQQ young people and young men in the sex trades, such legislation offers little or no relief whatsoever.

In fact, current ways of thinking about trafficking and the sex trade make LGBTQ youth invisible. The 2007 study Lesbian, Gay, and Transgender Youth: An Epidemic of Homelessness found that, of the estimated 1.6 million homeless young people in the United States, between 20 and 40%, or approximately half a million, identify as LGB or T.  Research also reveals that LGBTQ teens are more likely to remain homeless because they also experience homophobia and transphobia in foster care, shelters, and from service providers. A recent study, Hidden Injustice documented the systemic homophobia and transphobia LGBTQ youth experience in family and juvenile courts and in service provision, and the increased rates and lengths of detention they experience as a result. For these reasons, many LGBTQ homeless youth stay on the streets because they feel safer there.  Once homeless, LGBTQ youth, and particularly LGBTQ youth of color are also at increased risk of profiling and police abuse in the context of “qualify of life” enforcement. They are also likely to become involved in the sex trades and street economies as a means of survival. Yet young men and transgender women, including those who are coerced into the sex trades,  are denied access to programs such as GEMS, remain invisible as “victims” in the eyes of law enforcement, judges, and service providers.   Additionally demands for increased penalties for prostitution-related offenses expose young people, including LGBTQ youth, who work in non-exploitative peer networks, to significant jail time for sharing resources and engaging in practices aimed at increasing safety and survival.  They also drive the entire industry further underground, and the young people we reach further away from help.

As we work to develop a comprehensive statement that centers the voices of Indigenous people, people in the sex trades, and radical women and queer people of color, we call on movements for racial justice, civil rights, reproductive justice, LGBTQQ rights, immigrant justice, and those struggling against racial profiling, police brutality and abuse, criminalization and mass incarceration to develop responses that reflect the complexities of our lives and experiences. Most importantly, there are no simple answers.

- an INCITE! affiliate and collective of radical women  of color, queer people of color, and Indigenous people who identify as people in the sex trades

 

Of course, my powerhouse friend Jessica Yee seems to always go straight to the punch, and in this recent note, she has articulated some of what I have been feeling lately, and much more. I am reposting her letter here, hopefully mine will come soon too.

My open letter to the sex work movement – and our relationship that’s become unhealthy

It did all feel a bit weird, though, to have everyone in my community mobilizing to send complaints to Facebook. Usually I am getting angry messages about the way that Facebook is censoring breast feeding photos, or gender pronoun options, or sex positive groups, or queer performances, etc. I guess that’s the old chestnut of freedom of speech. How do we want that right served up? Well, the learning and work I have been doing recently about advocating for decriminalization over legalization and regulation, as well as the reading and thinking I have been doing about the Prison Industrial Complex, including the inefficacy of police and state responses to violence in my community is directing me to question, more and more, the amount of time and energy I spend convincing the capitalist and governmental powers that be to hear me, or represent me, or provide services to me. All those things are important, no doubt. But I’m dreaming about other responses that build the sex worker community, that fortify us and that speak to our differences across race, class, gender, and ability, that make it possible for us to confront and transform violence in our lives.

So on that note, I want to make a little list here (I adore making lists of ten) that takes note of some of the ways that people I know, including myself, are building our community in rad ways, and that go beyond Facebook-type stuff:

1. Sharing biz skills and organizing at the upcoming Desiree Alliance conference in July 2010! I’m working on a proposal for a workshop, and I hope to be part of a network of white anti-racist whores who will gather there. It’s in VEGAS people! They have scholarships, too!

2. Mentoring people who are new to the business. I was in Melbourne a few weeks back and hung around with a few friends who are new to the industry. It was amazing to hear their excitement and stories about all they were learning, and in particular, how they were processing and healing from sexual violence by engaging in sex work. I can’t really emphasize enough how just having coffee with another whore feels like organizing, feels like community building. I would never be doing what I’m doing today if generous sex workers didn’t share their knowledge and expertise with me. Thanks, lovelies. I’ll never forget my first ho-down on the Criminal Code of Canada’s bullshit…

3. Remembering Missing and Murdered Women, especially from Vancouver’s Downtown East Side, but also from the Highway of Tears and the deaths especially of Aboriginal women and/or sex workers, on February 14 in Canada. We are building steam and power to demand accountability for this tragedy. We are thousands strong!

4. Supporting sex workers’ rights to work during the Olympics in Vancouver and also the upcoming FIFA World Cup in South Africa. Big sporting events are a time when many workers are really busy working and they likely need an extra hug or cooked meals while working their bodies so much. Also, they are under increased surveillance by anti-traffickers and media (always to ensure our “safety”, yeah right, have a look at this group Buying Sex is Not A Sport to see what I mean), so love your hooker an extra bit during these times!

5. Marching in the Mardi Gras parade this coming weekend in Sydney, Australia. A whole bunch of hos I know are busy making costumes, their creativity endlessly inspires me. I’m sure that so much glitter has been spilled for the theme “Transsexual Empire Strikes Back” in connection with the group A Gender Agenda. I’m not able to march this year, but I’m giving the group a donation – not surprising to see sex workers and transpeople working together! Last year I marched with Touching Base, another sex worker organization that works with clients with disabilities. Yay for coalition building!

6. Working on my zine Whorelicious, the Classy Issue. As a middle-class person and increasingly financially successful hooker, I am working on understanding my class privilege right now and moving past the guilt and shame of it. I do think that guilt and shame are fairly unproductive emotions, and their relationship to my identity issues sometimes really immobilize me in thinking through the structural conditions of poverty. But I am also seeing how they form a part of my learning about oppression; I can see how I moved through those feelings when I worked to become an anti-racist ally and also as an ally of transpeople. I have been reading this book Without a Net: The Female Experience of Growing Up Working Class edited by Michelle Tea (but don’t buy it from Amazon.com, get it from the Toronto Women’s Bookstore if you want to buy it) and also this website Class Matters. Please send me more suggestions of resources if you have them. I am particularly looking for class-privileged people who want to talk about their experiences. I am also interested in creating “community banks” of funds pooled by sex workers for group members to draw on in times of emergency and for professional and creative development. If we have money, let’s use it well!

7. I have a little sex-worker self-care kit of essential oils, sexual health resources, emergency contraception, and sacred items that is always evolving and growing with me. I hope to share its contents with you all soon – so powerful to have my care in hand.

8. Speaking of self-care, I am also excited about the ways that sex workers are protecting our health! Some sex worker health clinics here in Sydney are working with us to provide self-administered PAP tests and vaginal and anal and throat swabs, isn’t that amazing! Although I recently had an experience with a doctor that was judgemental and less than empowering, I also see instances of peer-to-peer health approaches that are really inspiring. I can tell you that when I get my feet up in those damn stirrups I feel so much less empowering and more vulnerable allowing a doctor into my cunt than any client. I feel the weight of the power of the medical establishment to determine the health and risks of my body, to medicalize my mental health, to judge my self-care and harm-reduction approaches, and also to withhold options to my gender transgressive friends. That’s how I feel about doctors. The more we mobilize to understand and share information between us, the more powerful we are.

9. I’ve been learning to walk in heels that are a full inch higher than my last highest pair. Legs! legs! legs! Femmes, I forever and ever salute you for your kick-ass femininity. Preferably, this salute happens from a kneeling position. Also recently expanded my deep throat skills an extra inch. Skills development, oh yeah! I am thinking I would like to learn pole-dancing next.

10. Being mega impressed lately by the way a trans hooker friend of mine uses humour and sarcasm as survival. I sometimes get a bit deep into the earnestness and honesty, spilling my guts out and being all emo, but shit damn, this friend knows how to perform her way out of a messy and potentially violent situation. I used to think that all the high glam and dragesque was a bit of a mask because of my nerdy judgements about how to “be real” (in recovery from bad feminism, I still seem to be), but wow, this friend is totally brave, skilled, and having fun too. (I guess it’s a mad crush, too. I love playing out crushes on other hookers by suggesting we “work together”! Desire = community-building too, you know!)

I am glad to see that sex workers are alive and well and mobilizing using Facebook and other social media sites, making them safer and more useful to us in our work and community organizing. I hope the outcome will be increased mobilization and networking beyond the domain of Facebook. I have to say that every time someone shared the nasty item with me, especially someone who wasn’t a sex worker but an ally, I felt really validated to see that they took this expression of violence against us quite seriously. Just the week before I had been visiting a friend in Melbourne and his housemate had a friend over who made a joke about killing a hooker totally out of the blue. My friend was cooking us some lamb steaks and he asked how I wanted it cooked – I said the bloodier the better and then out of nowhere this guy says “Well I’ve got a prostitute for you to deal with then!” He didn’t know I was a sex worker. I was so stunned, I couldn’t even speak. Then he starts spouting off that he needs some serious coin and he should do a few tricks but we had to promise “not to tell anyone” if he tried it. Damn. I am seeing more and more how important it is to be out as a sex worker, I am trying to do that with more and more people, not only so people can see and know my humanity as a sex worker, but so that more hos can choose this work without shame or fear, including that little dickhead. And I was really happy to see that the friend that I was visiting that day ended up being one of the people who shared his outrage with his online community – thanks for hearing me that day, friend, when I couldn’t speak up right away.

Whew, that felt really good to talk about my community’s survival and resistance and to remember that we aren’t just all Facebooking our way to freedom. Onwards and upwards, hos!

xxx
LustyDay

Whore Lover

Juliet and I are walking down Illawarra Road in Sydney, Australia. I am lagging slightly behind her. She is wearing her red striped dress and white flats. She is going out on a date after she drops me off at the brothel. I see a red thread trailing from the hem of her dress. I don’t stoop to grab it and fix it for her. The whole hem could unravel. And I don’t think she would really care about the thread anyways. Her clothes are always well-chosen, but not necessarily well-made.

We are walking towards Amore after the sun has set, it’s 9pm and I’m about to start my career as a brothel whore. She knows the way because she has already worked there. She is taking me there because she wants me to know the way, too.

“So one more time, what should I say to the clients in the intro?” I ask her. I am nervous. I have hooked before, but never in a brothel. Competing with other women, especially straight women, is terrifyingly about to become reality. I don’t think of myself as competitive. Or straight.

“Just remind yourself that the only thing you want to do in the world is fuck them,” she repeats. “Touch them at any moment you can – on the leg, on the shoulder, whatever. Call them handsome.”

Juliet has already lent me her knockout pink baby doll negligee from the Sally Ann. She thought it would go well with my sky-high red patent leather heels. I wouldn’t really know. I don’t know much about femme fashion other than fresh-faced admiration. My style is more clean-faced boyish gurl-nerd with sensible walking shoes. We have gone over the intro scenario before, the moment when I emerge from the girls’ room and lay my charm on the client for 30 seconds to convince him to book me. But I need reassurance, I need a wise whore to tell me I will be successful. (I haven’t learned yet that for every kind of ho, there is a client who will readily see her sex appeal.) I have barely arrived in Australia. But Juliet has already been working for nine months in brothels all over Sydney. She has encouraged me to come from Canada to have an adventure and pay off my school debts. After three grinding years in graduate school, I am ready for it.

But I’m still nervous. I can’t pace my steps right, I want to walk faster, but Juliet has stopped to examine a pile of abandoned clothes and things in the gutter. “Look!” she exclaims. “I love this shade!” She has found a half-used tube of Ruby Rose lipstick. Before tossing it into the blue milk crate strapped to her bike, she satisfactorily rolls the shiny tube closed. She tries on some shoes too. She is always picking things out of the gutter. Hardly someone you’d think was a pimp. But she is. Juliet is my pimp. Or, should I say, she got me in the biz. Isn’t that what a pimp is?
We are almost at the brothel. I want to get there and start working already! But I also want Juliet to slow down. I want her to look at me, tell me all over again how I will be admired and paid well by men. I want her to admire me, adore me. I want her to be a million things to me – and she is. She takes me in the buzzing front door, introduces me to the receptionist, and checks in on me via text message all night. And I’m fine. She knew I would be. I knew I would be. But that’s not the point. The point is to feel my apprehension is acknowledged, that no matter if I have a lucrative night or a bad one, I am not judged on my whoring skills. Basically, that I am loved no matter what happens.

Way back when, Juliet introduced me to the outcall biz back in Toronto, Canada. It started one day when I was visiting her at her day job. She worked at a sex shop. As usual, I was rushing home from the university to have dinner, wondering all the time if the degree was worth the poverty it created.

Juliet was answering emails as I came in the door. She gestured for me to close the small office door behind me. “I need to tell you something,” she said quietly. Juliet almost never hushed her voice. “I started doing sex work.” Her glance burned with excitement.

“Humph.” I said in response. I wasn’t much shocked. I’d seen her host dildo races, organize feminist porn awards, and convince art crowds to sharpen their pencils with a toothy vagina. In fact, when she said it, it felt strange that this conversation hadn’t already happened. “Are you enjoying it?” I asked.

“Damn straight,” she said. “And I think you could do it too. Why be poor?”

Why indeed? For Juliet, poverty had never been noble. She knew it well – it clawed at her, choking her in all she did growing up.

Juliet thought I’d be good at it. She said I had the right attitude towards sex: I practised sexual connection outside of love, I enjoyed sexual exploration, and was motivated to learn about others through their sexuality. Basically, she saw that I was an entrepreneurial slut capable of looking after myself.

So we made a plan to talk shop. In Queen’s Park a few days later, we scrounged for a clean park bench. There was no place to sit that wasn’t smothered by the sound of city workers’ chainsaws. I was grateful for the cover. Sex working is mostly criminal in Canada. I didn’t want anyone to overhear us.

Juliet gave me my legal education on two glossy sheets of reused paper from the sex shop. One side was plastered with images of Buck Angel’s transman pussy. I was sure no one had yet printed Sections 210–213 of the Criminal Code of Canada on the other side of such precious porno.

“So here’s a quick rundown,” she explained. “You can’t have a workplace, that’s violating the bawdy house law. You can’t work for anyone, or they get charged with procuring. Don’t employ anyone like a driver or a security person, or they get charged with living off the avails of prostitution. You can’t negotiate price in public, that’s against the communication law…” she began to rattle off.

“So you can’t do anything legally?” I interrupted. “Not really,” she answered. “But you can get smart about not getting caught.”

I looked around the park, feeling suddenly exposed, and liking it. Again, glad for the sound of fallen tree limbs getting fed into the wood shredder. This was survival knowledge. I felt honored to receive. And glad that Juliet had no shame about thriving and sharing the spoils.

At that time, we were friends, lovers, and allies. We were about to become hustlers, partners, and comrades.

Ask me how I got into the industry, and I’ll tell you: “Juliet made me do it!” Not only did she pimp me, she also trafficked me across international borders for her own nefarious purposes – ie she wanted a travel buddy, a confidante, a close friend from home to share in. Really, she could go to jail for this camaraderie. If we weren’t both white women, that is. Because the world only sees victims in sex work, and those victims are usually imagined to be Thai women workers, not ever women who choose this life, and are fulfilled by it. The truth is, most internationally traveling whores choose this work, no matter their race – the world just can’t imagine it that way.

“My only regret about sex work,” Juliet confesses to me one night, “is that I didn’t know how to start doing this ten years ago when I was 24.”

“Fuck that, I wish I’d known at 14!” I answer. For once I shock her. I already knew at 14 that I had something valuable to boys. But the exchange was never profitable enough for me. I always wanted more out of it. Now I see what I want, and how to get it, without shame.

“Yes, can you imagine? I could have sold my virginity for $1000!” she fantasizes.

“Are you kidding? That’s worth way more. Dream bigger,” I dare her. We are whores, we are whores who dare to want more. Greedy cunts!

To be continued…