Audacia Ray's Blog, page 64

timeanddate.com

timeanddate.com:

I've been using this site a lot in the past few days, making sure I've got my timing right for my early morning skype calls with folks in India, Scotland, and Spain.

Sex Work Trauma Porn

One of the things that puts me on edge about the framing of the sex worker experience is that its very polarized: empowered sex-positive people who self-identify as sex workers who chose to work in the business vs. degraded exploited people who are forced into transactional sex ("forced" can cover everything from kidnapping and rape to highly restricted economic options, depending on who is talking).

At my monthly sex worker storytelling event, the Red Umbrella Diaries, I have been working to expand the kinds of stories that get told. It would be easy for me to host an endless array of performers with stories to tell about empowerment and celebration of sexual exploration. But sex work isn't always empowering. And for most people who engage in it, sex is a means to an end (sex work is work!) and the economic activity of sex work is not at all about their sexuality or freedom of expression. More importantly than the "its not that, its this" argument is the fact that what sex work is/does/means for an individual changes over the course of his/her/their experiences in the industry. It's not a constant.

I don't want to only promote an empowered spin on sex work experiences, its not honest. I like the messy stuff, the fucked up but also funny stuff… there's a lot happening under the surface that is more than worth digging into. With regards to these, the upcoming event on April 7 includes stories from sex workers in Kenya and Uganda (as read by an activist from Kenya), drug addiction and sex work, as well as a story about getting arrested.

BUT.

Suggesting that empowered experiences aren't real or don't happen, that people who have positive experiences of the industry are very limited, and that the only authentic stories of the sex industry are the ones with maximum pain and suffering is fucked up exploitative trauma porn. Often the desire for deeply ugly stories is looped in with the notion that the only sex workers who are worthy of this concern porn are cis women and girls (the younger, the more worthy!)  

And so, a message from my inbox:

 I was interested in attending the "Boom and Bust" session on April 7th as from my initial impression, it seemed like this is being held as a method to educate people about the lives of those who have worked in the sex industry in an attempt to gain awareness and promote justice as well as discourage the view that women are sex objects. This initial impression became confusing as I read the bio of one of the people speaking at this event, as attached below:

 Jincey Lumpkin, Esq. is the founder and Chief Sexy Officer of Juicy Pink Box, a brand that is glamorizing lesbian sex by showing real lesbians in a chic way. The Daily Beast called her the "Lesbian Hugh Hefner", Out Magazine recognized her one of the most influential gay people of 2010, and Time Out New York named her a "New York City Sex Icon".   She chronicles her life as a pornographer in her column, "Naked Ambition" for The Advocate. Jincey is a former lawyer, a diva and a lover of breasts.

From this bio it seems to be glamorizing her role in the sex industry, and therefore this bio appears to be contradictory to what I believed the aim of "Red Umbrella Diaries" is. Maybe I am misunderstanding its aim, or else am misunderstanding this bio. I would like to gain some information about the purpose of Red Umbrella Diaries as I am not understanding this very well. 

My response: The aim of the Red Umbrella Diaries is to create space for individuals who have experiences in the sex industry to tell their personal stories. There is a lot of diversity of experience in the industry, and we don't claim to encapsulate all experiences in every event. Many people have bad and exploitative experiences, but some do not (or do not frame their stories that way). Some of the storytellers actively strive to discourage the view that women (or people in general) are inherently sex objects or only deserve to be treated as such. Others don't address that issue (or care about it), and still others, like Jincey, are excited about the idea that people can be sexual objects. Above all, its important that the storytellers themselves present their experiences as they see themselves. Sometimes these visions conflict with other storytellers, other sex workers, and the way that the audience sees and receives each performer. The mission is to create space for sex workers to self-define their experiences and reframe public conversations with their input, not to present a unified and unchangeable vision of what the sex industry is and does.

"We agree that no one should face violence or discrimination in access to public services based on..."

""We agree that no one should face violence or discrimination in access to public services based on sexual orientation or their status as a person in prostitution, as this recommendation suggests."

http://www.state.gov/g/drl/upr/157986.htm"

-

State Department Takes Action

Last week, the U.S. accepted recommendation 86 from the Universal Periodic Review - a human rights review process at the United Nations.

It's not legally binding, but it is a useful bit of language for sex worker rights activists to use.

Unorganized crime

I've been working with a few other $preadsters on the manuscript for an anthology of the best of $pread magazine - it's painful to whittle it down, but I think it will be great when we get there. The project has given us a lot of cause to reflect on the illustrious (read: chaotic) history of the magazine.

A small story:

When the magazine first launched in 2005 we drew the ire of many radical feminists who were in fierce opposition to the sex industry and sex workers. One of the rumors hurled around was that $pread was funded by Larry Flynt and/or organized crime rings. Which is hilarious, if you know anything about the budget of $pread and our all-volunteer staff.

It became something of a joke among us that we were funded by unorganized crime, since much of the magazine's work was sustained by contributions from sex workers who worked in both legal and illegal parts of the industry.

Support Speak Up! and (Safer) Sex Worker Visibility

If you've read Waking Vixen or interacted with my other work for any amount of time, you know that I focus a lot of my energies on creating space for sex workers to use their voices, and trying to support sex workers to do this in a way that best suits their circumstances and goals, while hopefully also destigmatizing the lives of people in the sex trade.

For me, this work started to take shape at $pread magazine when I first started showing up to meetings in the fall of 2004, and then became an editor in 2005 after the release of the first issue of the magazine. $pread rapidly became – or really, always was – bigger than the 80 or so pages between each issue's covers. It was a community-building project. It was a storytelling project. It was an exercise in learning how to interact with mainstream media and the world as a sex worker with opinions. At the first Desiree Alliance conference in 2006 Eliyanna Kaiser, with whom I shared the title of executive editor at $pread, and I taught a "Journalism for Sex Workers" session – and it was something of a lightbulb moment. We began to understand that making a magazine and teaching media and advocacy skills were different pieces of a similar project. When I and several other $pread staffers left the magazine in 2008, Sex Work Awareness and what is now our Speak Up! media training began to take shape.

We are now entering our third year of offering the Speak Up! training for sex workers who want to engage with the media on April 8-10 (link goes to full info and the application – deadline is February 17). These trainings are possible financially because of the fundraising efforts of Tess Danesi and Dee Dennis (Debauched Domestic Diva) and their Tied Up Events. Without them, we couldn't offer a free training, food, and stipends for the ten current and former sex workers who come to New York to learn. This Friday, February 4 they are throwing a fundraising party for Speak Up! at Madame X in NYC. Tickets are $15, and if you're not able to join us in New York, you should consider buying a ticket anyway, since the funds will make the training program possible this year. We are also lucky to have a donor who will match funds up to $1500.

This week is also a Red Umbrella Diaries week: Thursday, February 2rd is our Price of Love event, featuring the Screw Smart team (Rebecca Alvarez, Kira Manser, and J.D. Ackerman), Aimee Herman, Matthew Lawrence, and Billy Pelt. Though Red Umbrella Diaries is free to get into, I do get 15% of the bar tab, plus pass a boot – and this will help make Speak Up! possible, too.

These projects are growing, and its pretty exciting to see that happening – or rather, to have it sneak up on me a bit so that I realize I need to figure out how to make things better and grow in a logical way. The big thing that will be happening this year is that a decision has been reached to merge Sex Work Awareness (SWA) with the Red Umbrella Project. The Red Umbrella Project is currently taking steps to becoming a nonprofit, and I am excited about the process of enmeshing all my program ideas (there are so many! all the time!) within an organizational structure. After a few years of working with SWA and entering the nonprofit world via the International Women's Health Coalition, I've begun to understand the value of being strategic and having boundaries that give a shape to projects. This is the year that I really make that happen, and give that professional polish to the work I'm obsessed with. All that work will also benefit the community more broadly, as I figure out how to offer better programming and support for people in the sex industry who want to tell their stories to each other, to live audiences, in the media, and in public forums.

But in the short term: check out the info about Speak Up! and encourage sex workers who want to engage with media to apply, and if you want to support this effort, check out Tied Up Events plan for Friday night.

Looking Back / Looking Forward

I know I'm not at the outer limits of the acceptable time frame for 2010 wrap-ups, but what can I say? I've been busy. I'm not going to belabor the point. Here's a look at my last year.

I spent my last week of 2010 quietly in Brooklyn, planning and thinking about what I want to get done and make happen in 2011. Last year was good to me. I worked hard, traveled a lot (some of it even for fun!), and improved the quality of my life with stuff like starting to cohabitate with my boyfriend, the aforementioned travel for fun, plus getting in on Kensington/Windsor Terrace community supported agriculture, cooking a lot more, and spending more quality time wandering Brooklyn. I celebrated 11 years in New York and 6 years of writing this blog. My work here on Waking Vixen was rewarded with the Best Sex Blogger award from the Village Voice, which was racked up beside another Best of 2010 Award for my storytelling series the Red Umbrella Diaries.

Workwise, I completed my second year of full time employment at the International Women's Health Coalition as Program Officer for Online Communications and Campaigns, plus I consulted on communications for the Global Network of Sex Work Projects (culminating in the launch of a gorgeous new website), and I reconceptualized the monthly sex worker storytelling event I'd been collaborating on since August 2009 and turned it into the Red Umbrella Diaries.

In my world of media producing, I did a lot but also got a lot more strategic about how I do my projects. At IWHC, I led the redevelopment of the Young Visionaries program, a contest which drew 71 applicants from 27 countries; I oversaw the grant for the winner, Sunita Basnet of Nepal. I also produced some videos in collaboration with other media makers. The Dutch magazine LOVER held an event in Utrecht that served as a discussion forum on prostitution law in the Netherlands. I was asked to create a keynote framing things with the international rights-based perspective. The result is this video, my most-viewed video of 2010. At IWHC, the video I'm most pleased with is Abortion in India: Legal But Not Always Safe. And for the second year in a row, I collaborated with the Speak Up! media training class to produce a public service announcement. In 2010 we went for a much more narrow audience, harm reduction organizations. Nothing About Us Without Us: The Shared Goals of the Harm Reduction and Sex Worker Rights Movements is not just a video, but also a packet of materials that can help facilitate conversations between sex worker organizers and harm reduction groups.

In 2010 I also branched out from blogging and video and started producing a weekly audio podcast: the Red Umbrella Diaries. The show is a way to document the stories told at the Red Umbrella Diaries monthly live events, and there's a new episode every Sunday. During 2010, with the help of my editor David Beasley, there were 26 episodes of the show, and we've now reached almost 10,000 listens, a big growth in just the last few weeks. I was really excited to hit 5000 listens with our twentieth episode, but now that's doubled over the course of the last eight episodes.

While a lot of my projects grew and evolved during the year, $pread magazine evolved in a sad way: in August, a group of past and present $preadsters came to my apartment for brunch, and we decided that it is time to end the magazine's run. Five years is a pretty awesome run for a quarterly, independent magazine run entirely by volunteers – but it's still sad to see it go. The final issue (perhaps two of them) is in production right now. Here's a post I wrote about the decision to shut down the magazine.

Though this was a pretty slow year for blogging here on Waking Vixen (as admittedly, most of my years have been since going pro as a blogger), I did write a few pieces that I'm really proud of, both here on the site and elsewhere in the world. Here on Waking Vixen, I wrote about the ways in which sex worker activism is broken, an analysis of the news coverage of the Melissa Petro scandal – she was removed from her teaching job after her online writing about sex work was discovered, and dominant narratives in sex worker storytelling. Elsewhere online, I wrote a piece for the Guardian about institutional violence against sex workers in Uganda, an advice piece for Scarleteen about sexual pleasure after genital cutting, and a feature for RH Reality Check about sex worker rights struggles in India. I also had one piece of writing appear in a bound book – a personal essay, "The Johns," in Melissa Gira Grant and Megan O'Connell's anthology Coming & Crying.

I consented to more major network television appearances than ever before, with a very shouty appearance on Fox News and two appearances on NBC. All were really intense in their own ways, but I enjoyed them and felt like I brought something useful to the conversations. Hopefully in 2011 I'll do some more of that, plus bring some other sex workers into the fold and get them to do more media.

Speaking of which… in 2010 I produced some trainings I'm pretty proud of. In April, I did the second annual Speak Up media training for sex workers with Sex Work Awareness, and this time around it was a full weekend, with participants from seven cities. SWA also did a training on Sex Work Issues and the New York State Legislative Process. I also created a Personal Storytelling for Social Change training, which I taught for the first time at HIPS in DC in early December. I also attended a training run by the OpEd Project and joined the PROS Committee on Community Education.

Running a monthly storytelling series meant that I had plenty of events in 2010. From January through June, I collaborated with David Henry Sterry on Sex Worker Literati, but then we decided to go our separate ways. He moved SWL to the Bower Poetry Club and brought Zoe Hansen on board as a co-host, while I stayed at Happy Ending and began solo hosting the Red Umbrella Diaries. I participated in a few panels and discussions over the course of the year as well: a Feminism and Sex Work panel hosted by Paradigm Shift in March, a Sex Work and Feminism Dialogue with the Sex Workers Project in May, an event on Art, Sex, and Difficult subjects with Laurenn McCubbinn in San Francisco in July, a symposium on Projects for a Revolution in New York at the New Museum in July, and in a panel on Talking About the Taboo at the Center for Sexual Pleasure and Health in Rhode Island, plus the huge International Day to End Violence Against Sex Workers event at the Metropolitan Community Church on December 17. I stuck to my resolution of not attending any conferences, which I think improved the quality of my life a bit. As an introvert, conferences are tough for me, plus I end up interacting with the same folks at every event. In 2010 I pushed myself to really listen to different people's perspectives. Stepping away from the conferences I usually present at gave me the opportunity to listen more deeply instead of just keep talking.

I did a fair amount of travel throughout the year, and a surprising number of the trips were for "vacation" (which is pretty fun, actually) instead of work. For fun, I went to Niagara Falls, Toronto, Minneapolis (twice), San Francisco, Amsterdam (twice, though one was for work), Berlin, and Richmond. For work I ventured up and down the eastern seaboard to Rhode Island, Maryland, and Washington, DC.

I've got (as always) big plans for the next year, many of which involve getting my projects more solidified, more strategic, and just more awesome. I'll be producing the Speak Up! media training again the weekend of April 9-10, expanding the Red Umbrella Project, and planning to write more. I'm also trying to get better about evaluating projects and saying no when I should – which is hard, because there is just so much stuff that needs to be done in the world.

Red Umbrella Diaries: The Price of Love – February 3

Hosted by Audacia Ray

Happy Ending , 302 Broome Street between Forsyth and Eldridge, in New York City

Doors at 7 pm, reading from 8-10

21 and up – FREE

15% of the bar tab supports Speak Up! Media Training for Sex Workers

Starring The Screw Smart team (Rebecca Alvarez, Kira Manser, and J.D. Ackerman), Aimee Herman, and Billy Pelt:

Billy Pelt is the lead singer of Billy Pelt and The Plaid Panthers, a cuntry and cabaret band based in the East Village and is the founder of the Grendel Socialist Music Theatre. He's 5'10", 160, 6.5c, versatile, bisexual and great in groups. He can be found on Men4RentNow.com #220965.

Aimee Herman, a performance poet, has been featured on radio, at various poetry festivals, and erotic salons. She currently works as sections editor of erotica for Oysters & Chocolate. Aimee has facilitated numerous erotica writing classes and writing workshops that reconfigure the language of the body. She has been published by Cliterature Journal, InStereo Press, and can also be read in the anthologies, Oysters & Chocolate Erotic Stories of Every Flavor (NAL), Best Lesbian Love Stories (Alyson Books), and Best Women's Erotica 2010 (Cleis Press). She is turned on by Canadians, women with curly hair, and peanut butter.

Rebecca Alvarez is a Brooklyn-to-Philadelphia transplant who totes around a panache for BDSM, a devotion to kindness, and a seat at her table for all sweaty freaks. She emerged as a fledgling sex educator in 2004 with the women owned-and-run sex shop Babeland in New York City. She went on to write a sex column for the Indypendent newspaper and the Sex Herald. Her love/disdain for the written word was tested during her tenure as a bookmaker/letterpresser with Booklyn and as the host of the NYC-based small-press reading series Cup and Pen. Currently, she works as one-third of the pleasure-based sex education collaborative ScrewSmart and a gynecological teaching associate while earning her dual masters degree in Social Work and Education in Human Sexuality at Widener University.

Kira Manser traces her sex education roots from Miko, a feminist run sex shop in Providence, to her current position as an educator at The Velvet Lily, a sex-positive shop in Philly. Besides being a retail goddess, she's worked as a high school peer sex educator and in legal sex-work. Currently, she can be found working on a dual masters program in social work and education in human sexuality at Widener University. She brings home the bacon working as a Gynecological Teaching Associate (GTA) and is always excited to chat about her current labor of love, the sex education collaborative ScrewSmart.

J.D. Ackerman J.D. is a new media sex educator and sexuality writer with a Masters of Education in Human Sexuality. Not only is she a co-creator of ScrewSmart, Philly's own pleasure-based sex education collective, she works online, creating a sex-positive community with HotMoviesForHer.com, a video-on-demand adult movie site specifically for women. With a focus on pleasure education and queer sexuality, J.D. spends her days making sure that every person is experiencing the most pleasure they can, as well as baking, sewing, crafting and pretty much doing anything else that involves her hands.

International Day to End Violence Against Sex Workers 2010: NBC Coverage and My Speech

Below is my speech for the International Day to End Violence Against Sex Workers event in New York.

The night had an amazing turn out, and NBC followed up on a story they did on Thursday (which features me as a former prostitute talking about violence) about the discovery of bodies in Long Island and a potential serial killer. Video clip below of probably the best television coverage our community has gotten.

View more news videos at: http://www.nbcnewyork.com/video.

Thank you for joining us. I'm Audacia Ray, and as a former sex worker who is very devoted to this movement, I'm very glad to see all of you here tonight.

I consider everyone in this room to be a stakeholder in ending violence in our communities. Thank you for being present and standing together against the violence that people in the sex trade experience on a daily – really, hourly – basis.

So let's talk a little bit about violence, even though it's hard to hear and hard to bear.

This day – the International Day to End Violence Against Sex Workers – was created seven years ago after the conviction of serial killer Gary Ridgway, who was sent to prison for 48 counts of murder. He later admitted to killing more than 90 women over a twenty-year period. The vast majority of these women were sex workers.

Ridgway famously said, "I picked prostitutes as victims because they were easy to pick up without being noticed. I thought I could kill as many of them as I wanted without getting caught." On Thursday, Joel Rifkin – who killed 17 Long Island sex workers over a 4 year span – laughed when he gave the Daily News the reason serial killers target sex workers: "No family – they can be gone six or eight months, and no one is looking."

Although these are the assumptions that are made about sex workers again and again – we are here together tonight to prove that sex workers do have family, we do have people who care when we don't come home. Our families are made by blood, by choice, and by love. The idea that no one cares when we go missing comes from people who don't care. We care and we are the experts on our own lives and experiences.

The violence that makes the news is violence done by serial killers, but that kind of violence is a symptom of greater ills. It is horrifying, and I feel cold and alone when I think about the sex workers who have met their end at the hands of these men. But the violence that sex workers experience is a deeper and more complex thing than mentally ill men killing vulnerable women.

Because prostitution is illegal in New York and all kinds of sex work – like professional domination, stripping, and others – are stigmatized, sex workers are vulnerable to violent acts that they can't report. A study conducted among street-based sex workers in New York reported that 80% of sex workers interviewed had experienced violence on the job, and 27% experienced this violence at the hands of police. In a study in Europe that was conducted in eleven countries, it was discovered that 74% of the sex workers interviewed said that they did not feel it was safe or effective to report instances of violence to the police.

The legal and cultural forces that make it very difficult for sex workers to avoid violence and nearly impossible for sex workers to get help are forms of institutional violence. All sex workers are subject to institutional violence, but we are especially when we are transgender or young or people of color or queer or HIV positive or mentally ill or drug users.

I want to tell you a bit about the experiences that sex workers in Uganda have with institutional violence.

Public health clinics that offer HIV testing and treatment services in Uganda regularly deny sex workers access to care and withhold anti-retroviral medications on the grounds that there are other people, whose jobs are legal and who aren't engaged in immoral activities, who are more deserving of treatment. Some health care workers regard time and HIV/AIDS resources spent on sex workers as a waste.

Last month a Sex Workers Leadership Institute in Kampala, organized by an African feminist group, was shut down by Uganda's Minister of Ethics and Integrity. A letter to the hotel hosting the conference stated that "prostitution is a criminal offence in Uganda" and as a result "the hotel is an accomplice in an illegality." The Ugandan Constitution affirms the right to freedom of expression, peaceful assembly and association – but not for sex workers, apparently.

Just days later, a police commander in Western Uganda ordered his police force to raid bars and streets where sex workers congregate. On this night, the police delivered beatings to everyone whom they perceived to be a sex worker. About twenty women spent the night in jail and the women who were not detained were forced to pay fines to the police. There were no charges made against the women – which means that they were unlawfully detained.

This is what institutional violence looks like.

And the reason I'm telling you about someplace far away is not because this isn't happening here, but because sometimes it is easier to see these things in a culture that you are not immersed in. The same kinds of things are happening right here, and we are connected to sex workers in Uganda and other places around the world by this struggle for our human rights.

So let's talk about violence.

Violence is being called a whore by an intimate partner who is ashamed of what you do. Violence is when the media ungenders you and uses your birth name because you are a woman and trans. Violence is when your client demands sex without a condom, and you comply because you're afraid what he'll do if you don't. Violence is when you don't want to be a sex worker at all, but it is the highest paying work you can find. Violence is when you are denied access to public housing because you have a prostitution conviction. Violence is when child services deems you an unfit parent because you are a sex worker. Violence is when an entire country – this one – denies you entry because you have been a sex worker or a drug user. Violence is when you are a minor and are treated as a victim, no matter what you say about your experience. Violence is when you are "rescued," forced into a rehabilitation program, and given a sewing machine so you can lead a more honorable life working in a sweat shop. Violence is when the country you live in doesn't treat you like a full citizen, but instead regards you as a criminal – and all because you are trying to make a living.

Tonight we are going to hear from sex worker rights advocates who care about stopping all of these kinds of violence that exist in our communities. Together, we have many ideas, and many solutions. And together, we must support each other – not just in doing the work to create a better world for people in the sex trade; but in the hardness of the world against us, we must support each other emotionally through these struggles.

International Day to End Violence Against Sex Workers 2010

Below is my speech for the International Day to End Violence Against Sex Workers event in New York.

Thank you for joining us. I'm Audacia Ray, and as a former sex worker who is very devoted to this movement, I'm very glad to see all of you here tonight.

I consider everyone in this room to be a stakeholder in ending violence in our communities. Thank you for being present and standing together against the violence that people in the sex trade experience on a daily – really, hourly – basis.

So let's talk a little bit about violence, even though it's hard to hear and hard to bare.

This day – the International Day to End Violence Against Sex Workers – was created seven years ago after the conviction of serial killer Gary Ridgway, who was sent to prison for 48 counts of murder. He later admitted to killing more than 90 women over a twenty-year period. The vast majority of these women were sex workers.

Ridgway famously said, "I picked prostitutes as victims because they were easy to pick up without being noticed. I thought I could kill as many of them as I wanted without getting caught." On Thursday, Joel Rifkin – who killed 17 Long Island sex workers over a 4 year span – laughed when he gave the Daily News the reason serial killers target sex workers: "No family – they can be gone six or eight months, and no one is looking."

Although these are the assumptions that are made about sex workers again and again – we are here together tonight to prove that sex workers do have family, we do have people who care when we don't come home. Our families are made by blood, by choice, and by love. The idea that no one cares when we go missing comes from people who don't care. We care and we are the experts on our own lives and experiences.

The violence that makes the news is violence done by serial killers, but that kind of violence is a symptom of greater ills. It is horrifying, and I feel cold and alone when I think about the sex workers who have met their end at the hands of these men. But the violence that sex workers experience is a deeper and more complex thing than mentally ill men killing vulnerable women.

Because prostitution is illegal in New York and all kinds of sex work – like professional domination, stripping, and others – are stigmatized, sex workers are vulnerable to violent acts that they can't report. A study conducted among street-based sex workers in New York reported that 80% of sex workers interviewed had experienced violence on the job, and 27% experienced this violence at the hands of police. In a study in Europe that was conducted in eleven countries, it was discovered that 74% of the sex workers interviewed said that they did not feel it was safe or effective to report instances of violence to the police.

The legal and cultural forces that make it very difficult for sex workers to avoid violence and nearly impossible for sex workers to get help are forms of institutional violence. All sex workers are subject to institutional violence, but we are especially when we are transgender or young or people of color or queer or HIV positive or mentally ill or drug users.

I want to tell you a bit about the experiences that sex workers in Uganda have with institutional violence.

Public health clinics that offer HIV testing and treatment services in Uganda regularly deny sex workers access to care and withhold anti-retroviral medications on the grounds that there are other people, whose jobs are legal and who aren't engaged in immoral activities, who are more deserving of treatment. Some health care workers regard time and HIV/AIDS resources spent on sex workers as a waste.

Last month a Sex Workers Leadership Institute in Kampala, organized by an African feminist group, was shut down by Uganda's Minister of Ethics and Integrity. A letter to the hotel hosting the conference stated that "prostitution is a criminal offence in Uganda" and as a result "the hotel is an accomplice in an illegality." The Ugandan Constitution affirms the right to freedom of expression, peaceful assembly and association – but not for sex workers, apparently.

Just days later, a police commander in Western Uganda ordered his police force to raid bars and streets where sex workers congregate. On this night, the police delivered beatings to everyone whom they perceived to be a sex worker. About twenty women spent the night in jail and the women who were not detained were forced to pay fines to the police. There were no charges made against the women – which means that they were unlawfully detained.

This is what institutional violence looks like.

And the reason I'm telling you about someplace far away is not because this isn't happening here, but because sometimes it is easier to see these things in a culture that you are not immersed in. The same kinds of things are happening right here, and we are connected to sex workers in Uganda and other places around the world by this struggle for our human rights.

So let's talk about violence.

Violence is being called a whore by an intimate partner who is ashamed of what you do. Violence is when the media ungenders you and uses your birth name because you are a woman and trans. Violence is when your client demands sex without a condom, and you comply because you're afraid what he'll do if you don't. Violence is when you don't want to be a sex worker at all, but it is the highest paying work you can find. Violence is when you are denied access to public housing because you have a prostitution conviction. Violence is when child services deems you an unfit parent because you are a sex worker. Violence is when an entire country – this one – denies you entry because you have been a sex worker or a drug user. Violence is when you are a minor and are treated as a victim, no matter what you say about your experience. Violence is when you are "rescued," forced into a rehabilitation program, and given a sewing machine so you can lead a more honorable life working in a sweat shop. Violence is when the country you live in doesn't treat you like a full citizen, but instead regards you as a criminal – and all because you are trying to make a living.

Tonight we are going to hear from sex worker rights advocates who care about stopping all of these kinds of violence that exist in our communities. Together, we have many ideas, and many solutions. And together, we must support each other – not just in doing the work to create a better world for people in the sex trade; but in the hardness of the world against us, we must support each other emotionally through these struggles.

Dear December: Let's Do This, with Plenty of Activism and Events

This year will be going out with a bang, with a flurry of events and launches. A summary:

December 2 is the Red Umbrella Diaries Family Affairs event in NYC, to ring in the holiday season. Featured storytellers include Lily Burana, the author of the memoirs Strip City and I Love a Man in Uniform: A Memoir of Love, War, and Other Battles, Tré Xavier, a predominantly gay bisexual porn performer, and Sydney Seifert will relate what it was like to grow up the daughter of a single mom who put food on their table by doing sex work. Also starring Katelan Foisy and Fiona Helmsley. Join us at Happy Ending, 302 Broome Street (between Eldridge and Forsyth) from 8PM-10PM. It's free, but 15% of the bar tab will help cover expenses for the International Day to End Violence Against Sex Workers event on December 17.

Last spring, when I decided to branch out on my own and try my hand at curating a sex worker storytelling event by myself, I wanted to also create something that would have life beyond a monthly event. I just published the 21st episode of the weekly podcast this past Sunday (it features Joanna Angel). And on Monday, December 6th at 7 pm in Washington, DC, I'm launching the next piece of the project: storytelling workshops. I'm doing one exclusively for HIPS clients in the afternoon, but the evening one is open. Join me for Personal Storytelling for Social Change: A Workshop for Sex Worker Activists. Personal stories are powerful and essential elements of campaigns for social change and initiatives supporting the human rights of sex workers. Sharing personal experiences of the sex industry is key to connecting with people, both those who understand where we're coming from and those who don't. In this workshop, we will look at examples of effective storytelling in social change movements, identify campaigns that could benefit from storytelling, and do some basic storybuilding exercises to help us think how we can use personal stories to move people to action using independent and mainstream media. Monday, December 6th from 7 – 9 pm. $15 per person, at HIPS 1309 Rhode Island Ave, NE #2B. Washington, DC 20018. call 202.232.8150 for more info.

The little Kickstarter anthology that could, Coming & Crying, is having its selling out party on Thursday, December 9th at McNally Jackson at 52 Prince Street, 7 pm. Join editors Melissa Gira Grant and Meaghan O'Connell, with contributors Matthew Gallaway (The Metropolis Case), Audacia Ray (Naked on the Internet) and Diana Vilibert for highlights from the book and a moderated group discussion on writing about sex when the people you are writing about are real, including yourself. You can listen to the podcast of me reading my C&C piece, "The Johns" at the Demand Side edition of the Red Umbrella Diaries here.

December 17 is International Day to End Violence Against Sex Workers – join us in NYC for a vigil and community speak out. There are also events happening around the country and around the world, learn more here. NYC event takes place at the Metropolitan Community Church of New York, Sanctuary (2nd floor), 446 West 36th Street, New York, NY 10018 btw 9th & 10th Aves from 7:30PM – 9:30PM. I'm the master of ceremonies and will be giving a speech. The event is co-sponsored by Sex Work Awareness and the Red Umbrella Project.

Also – on December 17th I'll be launching the brand new website for the Global Network of Sex Work Projects along with the annual journal Research for Sex Work. This year the focus is on sex work and violence, and it is published in English and Russian. More on all that when I'm ready to link to it!