Audacia Ray's Blog, page 34

Advocates for Sex Workers, Elected Officials, and Public Health...

Advocates for Sex Workers, Elected Officials, and Public Health Experts to Call for Law Barring Use of Condoms as Evidence of Prostitution

Report to Reveal Public Health Crisis Caused by NYPD’s Confiscation of Condoms

On Tuesday, April 17 people with experience in the sex trade, elected officials, public health experts, and human rights advocates will hold a press conference calling on the New York State Assembly to pass legislation barring the use of condoms as evidence of prostitution. Supporters of Bill S323/A1008, known as the No Condoms as Evidence Bill, say that allowing condoms to be confiscated by police and used as evidence in criminal cases discourages sex workers and other vulnerable New Yorkers from carrying condoms, undermining efforts to combat sexually transmitted diseases and educate the public about safer sex.

At Tuesday’s press conference, The Sex Workers Project at the Urban Justice Center and the PROS Network (Providers and Resources Offering Services to Sex Workers) will release a report, entitled “Public Health Crisis: The Impact of Using Condoms as Evidence of Prostitution in New York City.” The report reveals findings from two separate surveys of NYC sex workers, including a survey conducted in 2010 by the Department of Health and Mental Hygiene (DOHMH) that is only now being released.

WHAT: Elected Officials, Public Health Experts, and Human Rights Advocates Hold Press Conference Calling for Legislation Banning the Use of Condoms as Evidence of Prostitution, Release Report on Public Health Crisis in NYC

WHO: Senator Velmanette Montgomery, Audacia Ray of Red Umbrella Project, Sienna Baskin of The Sex Workers Project at the Urban Justice Center, Chris Bilal from Streetwise and Safe (all members of the PROS Network), and Kathryn Todrys of Human Rights Watch.

WHEN: Tuesday, April 17that 1:00pm

WHERE: Room 130, Legislative Office Building

harmreduction:Street Wise: Cyndee Clay constantly walks the...

harmreduction:

Street Wise: Cyndee Clay constantly walks the intersection of society and sex, survival and discrimination in an effort to uncover the humanity hidden by stigma - Interview by Will O'Bryan, Photography by Todd Franson

One of the things HIPS is trying to do is take a step back and change people's thinking from the knee-jerk reaction – "Let's get the prostitutes off the streets. Let's get more law enforcement to tackle this problem." – to the unintended consequences of those positions and those laws. Let's address some root causes. Residents are concerned about things like trash and traffic. These are issues we can deal with. And we can deal with them without putting people in jail.

We're really there to protect people's health and not to make judgments about whether theyshould or shouldn't be there, because that's the first step in gaining people's respect and starting the conversation about changes they want to make in their lives.

- Great interview with our friend Cyndee Clay from the wonderful HIPS! I had the privilege of being a volunteer with Cyndee back in her early HIPS days…it's so cool to see how far she's brought that program…lots of love to Cyndee and the whole HIPS crew!!

Meet Ceyenne Doroshow. I was introduced to Ceyenne in February...

Meet Ceyenne Doroshow. 

I was introduced to Ceyenne in February 2011 by the women at the Sex Workers Project - her lawyers and colleagues in the fight for the rights of people in the sex trades. Ceyenne, they told me, is an amazing, funny woman who was piecing her life back together after a stint in prison on a prostitution conviction. And she had this idea - she wanted to write the first cookbook by a sex working transgender woman, a cookbook that would bring people together and make it ok to talk about these tough issues.

I had to meet her. 

After more than a year of collaboration on her book, which she's calling Cooking in Heels, we launched a Kickstarter campaign Monday to raise the funds for Red Umbrella Project to publish it.

The response so far has been amazing - we are 85% of the way to the $6000 minimum we need to make the book a reality. Ceyenne and I have been blown away by the support and have started scheming about the ways we can make the book even more amazing than what we had planned. To be honest, we thought the combined forces of racism and transmisogyny (let's face it, Kickstarter campaigns aren't the most diverse of pursuits) would mean that we would be hustling hard to raise that six grand by our deadline, May 9.

Watch the video of her making paella on Kickstarter because me talking about her just isn't anywhere near as awesome as watching Ceyenne in action. If you can spare a few dollars, please support the project and help us make this book bigger and better. $1 gets you access to backer-only updates, $10 gets you a personalized postcard from Ceyenne, $30 gets you a hard copy of the book when its available in August. If its within your means to donate more, there are rewards above and beyond what I've listed here. The more we raise, the more amazing this book is going to be.

Since February 2011 I have been collaborating with Ceyenne...

Since February 2011 I have been collaborating with Ceyenne Doroshow, a black transgender woman from Brooklyn who while she was incarcerated on a prostitution conviction a few years ago, got inspired to write a memoir cookbook. We've made significant progress on the book: we have more than 50 recipes, plus an oral history about her life, and now we're ready to start producing the book itself. We need $6000 to get it copyedited, pay for the cover photography, and have it designed and printed. This morning I hit the launch button on our Kickstarter campaign to raise that money.

Our rewards include signed postcards, copies of the book, baked goods, cooking lessons, and private dinners - all depending on the level you donate at. We need your support to make this book come to fruition. And really, any amount helps - the minimum donation is $1. If you don't have cash to spare, please check out the video anyway - it really captures who Ceyenne is and why she's amazing. Also, there's paella and it is mouthwatering - we ate it at the shoot and wow.

If you think the project is cool, as I hope you will - please spread the word!

Why the Sex Positive Movement is Bad for Sex Workers' Rights

This essay originally appeared in the 2012 Momentum conference anthology ebook.  I know this is a bit long for Tumblr, but this is the full text of the article, and I wanted to make it available online for people who aren't at the conference for my presentation of the same title and/or want to mull it over in text format.

If the pursuit of pleasure is good, how can it be bad for sex workers, people who are professionally steeped in sexuality? Well, it's complicated. Over the past several decades, a contingent of feminist, sex positive sex workers have emerged, and they have claimed their right to experience the pleasures of sex and share those pleasures with others, including paying clients. Sex positive sex workers have moved to the forefront of conversations about the sex industry, and today are prevalent in online discussions of sex work, especially when it comes to first person accounts. Offline, too, sex positive sex workers have been making their mark on the discourse around sex work, and many have appeared on academic panels and at other public events to offer their perspectives on sexuality and sex work.

However, the promotion of pleasure and sex positivity within the sex industry and as an element of sex worker rights activism, is proprietary to a small but very vocal group of people, namely: white, cisgender women who are conventionally attractive, able-bodied, and have some degree of class and educational privilege. People like this – people like me – are central figures in the American sex worker rights movement, and often claim sex positivity as a key vehicle for claiming rights and making progress. Arguably, some progress has been made, especially in the area of cultural engagement and public awareness about the struggles and humanity of people in the sex industry. The fact that the phrase "sex worker" appears regularly in news outlets when the subject is covered is a testament to this progress. Though offensive slang still publicly brands people in the sex industry, the awareness of the preferred terminology has certainly grown. But despite the progress, there are many barriers to justice. One of these barriers, the one that this essay explores, is sex positivity. 

Before we dig in, let's talk for a minute about unintentional consequences. Surely, you might argue, sex positive feminists, including people who work in the sex industry and those who do not but respect the rights of sex workers, see sex positivity as a means to achieving social good, with a few great orgasms along the way. Why would sex positive feminists want to halt the progress toward human rights for sex workers? I believe that the answer is that sex positive feminists do not intend to create barriers for the achievement of sex workers' rights, but that there are ways in which this happens anyway. And though it is frustrating to have something that you thought was good, that has your best intentions behind it, pointed out as being potentially or actually harmful, it is crucial to think about the ways we can make our umbrellas bigger and not smaller. Even if sometimes this may come at the personal cost of rerouting your values.

On a Personal Note

I am a former sex worker. My several years of work experience in the business included escorting, sensual massage, porn, fetish work, and working as a phone girl at a dungeon. During much of the time I was working, I also engaged in activism in support of sex workers' rights. In particular, I was an editor at $pread magazine for three years, and I organized art shows, performances, and other public events to raise funds for the magazine. Over the last few years, as I have dug deeper into providing peer support and trainings in media, storytelling, and legislative advocacy for people in the sex industry via my work at the Red Umbrella Project, I have been critically examining the ways that the sex worker rights community talks about what we do and what we want to see change. I have been looking hard and close at who this "we" of the sex worker rights community is, and I have been listening hard to people who feel excluded by that "we." Some of the points I make in this essay might be a bitter pill to swallow, or may make you feel defensive, or like I am pointing fingers. But it's important for you to know that I am very much culpable in this, too.

Once upon a time, not so long ago, I was a fierce defender of sex positive feminism. When I was working in the sex industry, sex positivity was an important value of mine, one that in some ways gave me the skills to cope with a physically and emotionally demanding job. However, the more I step back from that time in my life, and the more I am willing to look critically at things I have held dear, the more obvious it is to me that my experience of sex positivity and the sex industry are not anywhere near universal, they are just the most visible to me, because I fit the mold as described above. The audience for this essay is very much my peers, people who have had experiences and privileges similar to mine. Beyond our circles, most of what I'll write here is glaringly obvious, and in communities of color, for people with disabilities, as well as among trans women and men, and other groups we aspire to but do not actively include, this is not news.

Sex Positive Feminism and Sex Work: A Quick Overview

The sex worker rights movements in the United States, Canada, Europe, Australia, and New Zealand have been, for the last forty years, very entangled with feminist movements. Though there is, certainly, a history of disagreement between feminists and supporters of sex workers' rights, there are also many feminists who support the rights of sex workers. The phrase "sex work" first came into use in the late 1970s, has made its way into official channels, and today is used by the United Nations. The feminist value of bodily autonomy, or the ability to choose what to do with one's body, figures most prominently in feminist support for sex workers' rights. The link with feminism in these geographic contexts aligns sex workers' rights with the rights of usually white, cisgender women and often links it to reproductive rights and health.

This, however, creates a chain of denial – many feminists who focus on reproductive rights do not value the contributions of sex workers to their movement, and many sex worker rights advocates who focus on bodily autonomy do not value the particular issues faced by people who do sex work because of coercion or dire economic circumstances. Or, perhaps a fairer way to put this is not that these things are not "valued," but that there isn't an active effort made to make space for a multitude of concerns. In action, this looks the same. And so, while sex positive sex workers focus on trying to get a seat at the table of reproductive rights, they simultaneously deny other people in sex work a space at their table.

Certainly, there are other global movements based around the rights of sex workers, though their cultural and activist histories are different and less rooted in feminism. The Latin American sex worker rights movement is large and powerful, especially in places like Brazil and Argentina, and it is a working class movement that has been developed largely by street based workers and uses aggressive tactics to ensure that their members' voices are heard. In India, there are sex worker rights groups that count thousands in their memberships, and for whom the process of collectivization is key to getting a response from state and national governments, particularly on the issue of access to unbiased health care. In other places in Asia, sex workers have organized alongside garment factory workers to ensure that their rights as workers are protected. Of course, a paragraph devoted to the global movement does it no justice, except to make the point that there are different ways of organizing sex worker movements, beyond feminism.

The Dominion of SEX over work

In the 1997 anthology Whores and Other Feminists, edited by Jill Nagle, Carol Queen's essay "Sex Radical Politics, Sex-Positive Feminist Thought, and Whore Stigma," set the stage for the feminist sex positive perspective on sex work that has been so prevalent over the past decade and a half. In Queen's essay, the sex positive feminist perspective on sex work is very much a reactive one that was generated in opposition to what she refers to as the "'poor abused whores' lobby." Queen argues that sex workers who enjoy their work and "live well, with no loss of self-esteem" have "sufficient sex information and are sex-positive [sic]" (p. 129). But as big a part of the job as it is, sex work is not all about sex for many people who do it. The emphasis on sexuality unfairly erases the other half of the equation: work.  Queen asserts that:

No one should ever, by economic constraint or any kind of interpersonal force, have to do sex work who does not like sex, who is not cut out for a life of sexual generosity (however attractively high the fee charged for it). (p. 134)

But the reality is that people who don't like sex, or don't like having sex with strangers, or aren't sexually oriented toward the gender of the clients they see, or don't like doing sexualized performances, work in the sex industry every day. And it is just that parenthetical "attractively high [fee]" that is the reason for their actions. For the majority of people who work in the sex industry, money, not sex, is the driving factor. Until a day comes when jobs are available that have wages that are competitive with the sex industry, particularly for cis and trans women, people of color, and young people who need to get out of unstable or violent housing situations, many people will sell or trade sex.

Emphasizing sex and pleasure harms the sex workers who aren't firmly in the self-defined population of being sex positive and sexually educated, by unintentionally shaming them for not being enthusiastic participants in the sex they have at work. When engaging in the trade or sale of sex is helping an individual to meet their basic physiological needs, they often do not have the personal resources to channel energy into making the experience of transactional sex perfectly pleasurable for either themselves or their client. Not every sexual experience, whether paid or not, has to be perfectly erotic. This is an unreasonable expectation, and one that makes it more difficult for people who have negative experiences to speak openly about their truths with sex work or sexuality more generally.

The "'poor abused whores' lobby" spews plenty of toxic garbage about the experiences of people coerced into the sex industry and their preferred (unattainable, abolitionist) solutions, often without letting people with those experiences speak for themselves. However, if feminist sex positive sex workers also silence these voices, we are not contributing as positively to the cause of sex workers' rights as we want to believe.

"Happy Hooker" vs "Exploited Victim": Defeating the Dichotomy

In the media trainings I do, I ask the participants to come up with a main message that, if they had two minutes, they want their audience to receive. They then need to back up this message with two or three talking points, one sentence statements that can be evidence-based, use logic or other rhetorical devices to give the audience a different perspective. Every time I have done the training, someone is eager to express the message that sex workers are average people with many dimensions: we are mothers, brothers, taxpayers, neighbors, pet enthusiasts, gourmet cooks, etc. Inevitably, one of the supporting talking points they come up with is, "You wouldn't be able to distinguish me from anyone else you walk by; I'm not a street worker or a junkie." But some sex workers – maybe not sex workers in your immediate circle – are street workers and junkies, and we cannot throw them under the bus as we have been doing. To define oneself as essentially normal, in opposition to drug-using, street based workers, is to imply that they are not as worthy as rights as those of us who fit better into society. Furthermore, when we define ourselves in opposition to what we view as negative portrayals of sex work, we silence people who have had these experiences, and we communicate to them that they are not welcome in our community.

During the sexual revolution of the 1960s and 1970s and the sex wars of the 1980s and 1990s, the struggle to define sex positivity with respect to sex work served a purpose. To say that not all people have a horrendous experience of the sex industry, and that many sex workers value sexuality and see themselves as complex sexual beings as well as sex educators was an important statement to make, and one that had not been spoken before. However, it is essential to put this statement in historical context. To continue making the statement that many sex workers have a good experience of the sex industry without also including those whose experiences are negative and making space for them to speak up reveals a deep doubt about the validity of the sex positive argument. If we believe in the positive power of sexuality, we must also examine what happens when people's lives are infused with sex negativity, and we must listen and support people with this experience in sharing their personal truths.

If we put aside our attachment to the sex positive construction of sex work, we will certainly hear things that will be hard to sit with. But for sex positivity to be a useful framework, one that encourages the pursuit of social justice, it must also engage with the ugly pieces of sexuality, and not in a simplistically reactive way. Otherwise, the concept of being a sex positive sex worker is a self-serving marketing practice, in which the enjoyment of sexuality is being sold as a product to both workers and our clients.

I haven't given up on the radical potential of sex and pleasure, but now I see these pursuits as being very different from the task of promoting and protecting the rights of people who are in the sex industry by choice, circumstance, or coercion. For me, it is no longer acceptable to maintain a barrier between conversations about the positive potential of the choice to do transactional sex and the injustices many people face when they do sex work because of circumstance or coercion. To do so is to maintain a class divide that is wide and deep. The sex industry is extremely complex, and attempting to make tidy arguments about the positive and negative sides of the business discredits both sides of the argument. It's time to find a new paradigm, one that will allow for a more authentic pursuit of the human rights of sex workers and will be more inclusive of the broad spectrum of experiences of people in the sex industry.

State of the Sexual Union: Momentum Conference opening panel talk

I've been active in the sex positive and sex worker rights communities for a decade now. Spaces like this one are where I found my voice and began to stake my claim as a sex positive feminist. But things have changed a lot for me in the past several years, and I no longer consider myself a sex positive feminist.

To be clear, it's not that I think there's no need for feminist or sex positive ideals. However, I believe that there is quite a large gap between these ideals and the way they have played out in the world. Intent is not enough - it is vital that we examine impact.

For example, I know that sex positive feminists value inclusivity. And yet, this panel that we're sitting on is, to my knowledge, made up entirely of white, cisgender women and men with advanced degrees.

It is not enough to say that all are welcome and all voices are respected. The reality of this community does not reflect that intent, and we must examine how we each contribute to that.

I no longer consider myself a sex positive feminist largely because people in my life, my collaborators and friends, have told me about the ways sex positive feminism doesn't service - or worse - actively harms and excludes them. And though i have spent plenty of breath derailing conversations and being in denial about that while arguing the value of sex positive feminism, I think ultimately it is important to listen to the critiques of people who do not benefit from the sex positive feminist framework.

Now, of course, dropping a label isn't the same thing as shifting ones worldview, and I still have plenty of work to do to make sure that I do not contribute to and uphold oppressive but well-meaning frameworks. I have fucked up plenty, and it pains me to admit that I probably have plenty of future fucking up to do. But to me it is vital that I find ways to question a sex positive feminism that is cis supremacist, white, and able bodied, with class and educational privilege. these are all privileges I have benefited from, which initially made them hard to see. But now I consider it my mission to challenge this framework and see how we can do better.

So let me share a bit about my current state of the sexual union and some things that represent the realities I'm working within and the people im working alongside. These days I am much less concerned about the pursuit of pleasure and more focused on the pursuit of rights, and promoting and protecting health and safety through awareness raising, advocacy, and policy change.

In my hometown of NYC at my org RedUP, I work to amplify the voices of people in the sex industry. This work includes media and advocacy training, a monthly storytelling event, a podcast, and support and collaboration with individuals in the sex trade who wish to tell their personal stories. For the last year, I've been working with a woman named ceyenne, who is writing a memoir/cookbook that we hope, with the help of a kick starter campaign we'll launch in April, will be published this summer. Ceyenne is a black woman of transgender experience who scribbled down her recipes on scraps of paper while she was in solitary in a mens prison on a prostitution conviction. Her story, her resilience, and her sense of humor are just amazing, and her perspective is woefully underrepresented.

On the advocacy front, RedUP has been working in collaboration with harm reduction and health service groups in new York state to get our legislature to pass a bill that would make it illegal for condoms to be used as evidence of prostitution. This bill has been reintroduced annually over the past eight years, and hopefully we are getting close to getting it passed. It has stagnated largely because we need to energize people in the sex worker community to participate in our democracy, which unfortunately can mean outing ourselves. In April RedUP is doing advocacy trainings for sex workers and allies who havent previously had the chance and encouragement to speak to their elected officials. then we and our trainees will be getting on a bus -actually two buses, since so many people have showed interest in going- to Albany to lobby our elected reps, which is a pretty historic thing. Even if the bill doesn't pass this year, this work is setting the precedent for bills that may be introduced in other states, as this is a widespread problem, and a human rights violation that defies logic and runs counter to public health initiatives.

And last but not least, to offer an international perspective. over the last four years I've been working with iwhc for sexual and reproductive rights and health of cisgender women in the global south. This week i returned home from two weeks in the central west african country of Cameroon, where I was providing support to our partner Swaac. Since 2003 they've been distributing FCs to rural women in Cameroon with great success. In particular, the women in rural areas insert FCs to protect themselves against pregnancy and STis when, not if, they get raped in the course of their days. Their conversations around this issue often don't even use the word rape, instead they talk about being "messed with".

In all of these situations, sex positive feminism does not quite resonate. This is not to say that pleasure and sex positivity should be an after thought, or that it is a final frontier reserved for people of privilege. However, to live up to the ideals of sex positivity, we must face the challenges of staring down ugly things and figuring out ways to support people whose experiences of sexuality run the gamut.

I've been quiet on the internet for the last week because...

I've been quiet on the internet for the last week because I'm in Cameroon. I'm traveling with my job at the International Women's Health Coalition, and we're helping our partner the Society for Women and AIDS in Africa to document their female condom program.

The trip started in Yaounde, then over the weekend we were in Bamenda. Last night we arrived in Douala, and then on Thursday we're headed to Maroua. It's been really exhausting, but mostly in a good way. It's probably going to take me a while to wrap my head around all of it.

I ran to Coney Island and back this morning. Then I went home...

I ran to Coney Island and back this morning. Then I went home and sat in a bathtub full of ice. Longest run to date. Feeling very ready for my half marathon next month. Now just need to get a little faster.

The Top 5 Facts About [Cis] Women in Our Criminal Justice System

The Top 5 Facts About [Cis] Women in Our Criminal Justice System:

Ugly stuff, but doesn't even touch on the experiences of transgender women in the prison industrial complex.

Here's the Red Umbrella Project (RedUP) team with a crew...

Here's the Red Umbrella Project (RedUP) team with a crew of young people from Streetwise and Safe and the Hetrick Martin Institute, plus New York City Council Member Daniel Dromm (D - district 25) at our advocacy training on February 24, 2012.

Though there's a lot of focus on national politics, especially in a presidential election year, for people in the sex trades, the laws that really impact our lives are made on the city and state levels. Criminal codes are state laws, and most states have lots of them, with little lines of legalese that make the lives of people in the sex trades, or people profiled as such, much more difficult. In the RedUP advocacy training we walk participants through things like the convoluted process of how bills become law, where ideas for bills come from, and how individuals and grassroots groups can make an impact on this process.

This year, our advocacy trainings are focused on getting New York State Bill A1008/S323 passed, which will make it illegal for condoms to be used as evidence of prostitution. In the training with the young people from SAS and HMI, we talked a lot about their concerns around profiling. They are especially concerned with the ways that the use of condoms as evidence intersects with the NYPD's abusive stop and frisk tactics, and how the combinations of these two things creates harm for people of color, trans women, gender non-conforming people, and street involved youth. Their perspective on this bill is much needed, and a bunch of the members of the group will be lobbying in Albany in April. New York State elected reps really need to hear these voices.

And speaking of reps listening up - we were really excited to be joined for an hour by NYC Council Member Daniel Dromm, whose district 25 is in Jackson Heights in Queens. I met Dromm for the first time at the council hearing I testified at in December, and he's a great ally who actually seems to get and care about our issues. I'm looking forward to working with him further, and I'm really excited that we're starting to be able to get the ears and time of elected officials. He gave some really great advice, and really encouraged folks to speak their personal truths to legislators. Though we also emphasized the value of statistics and reports in making our arguments, he told us that connecting on a personal level with legislators is really important. He said that especially in cases in which the representative might not be on our side, the only way through is to appeal to their humanity and their empathy.

The RedUP advocacy trainings are part of our Speak Up! workshop program, which also includes our media training, which was our flagship program. The trainings are geared toward people who have had experience in the sex trades and who want to learn the skills to speak up for themselves in policy contexts, in public forums, and in both community and mainstream media.

All Red Umbrella Project programs are led by people who themselves have experience in the sex trades. This is a really important aspect of our work, because there are many service oriented agencies that provide support to sex workers, and its less common -but vital- for a group to be run and led by the population. This year, we're doing three  advocacy trainings, and then we're collaborating with other organizations to do a lobby day in Albany on April 17th. We have a short training on April 4 at the Gay Men's Health Crisis that will just focus on talking points for the lobby day, and then on Sunday, April 15 at the Urban Justice Center, we have a full day training that will teach both content and strategy (more info here). I'm really excited that our work is growing in this way, and we're becoming able to support more and more people in being awesome and learning the skills to speak up and fight back.