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June 04, 2018

Adult Industry Workers Come Out For International Whores Day

HOLLYWOOD, Calif.—More than 300 sex workers—adult film stars, doms/subs, prostitutes whores—and their supporters crowded into the back patio of Boardner's Bar on Cherokee Ave. in Hollywood on Saturday afternoon, June 2. They were there to hear a handful of speakers talk about how sex workers continue to be (mis)treated in the "Land of the Free," and to prepare them for the local International Whores Day march in the heart of the city that was, in large part, built by sex workers of one sort or another, from early mainstream movie stars who "entertained" in their off-screen hours, to studio heads whose mistresses found on-screen fame, to the streetwalkers who used to (heavily) populate the boulevards nightly after sundown. The Boardner's show was MC'd by actress/sex-worker/activist Siouxsie Q, who'd been part of a group of sex worker lobbyists that had spent Friday in Sacramento talking to politicians—and reportedly getting a warm reception from Sen. Kamala Harris' staff. Q had the assistance of someone she identified as her cousin, but who's known better to porn fans as actress Charlotte Cross, who held the megaphone through which everyone addressed the standing-room-only crowd. "Happy International Whores Day!" Q began. "It is so amazing to see each and every one of you here. I am covered in goosebumps ... This is beyond my wildest dreams." Q described the sense of deflation sex workers felt after the passage of FOSTA and the closing of Backpage.com, the deletion of Craigslist personals and the like, but noted that those events had led to increased activism and networking. "We called our friends; we made family, 'cause that's what we do," she said. "We survived because of one another, we survived because of our allies and the people who say, 'Yes, you are safe here.' "Our movement is young," she added. "Do not despair. This is just the beginning. Our movement is young," noting that the first Whores Day took place on June 2, 1975, when 100 sex workers in Lyon, France occupied a church to protest the "abhorrent working conditions and the harassment from the police," which led to a groundswell of popular support. Q then introduced Gizelle Marie, a principal in New York's strippers' strike, describing her as a "fierce advocate, an important voice to this movement." Marie told how, although sex workers and sexual entertainers are so often depicted as "worthless," several strippers of her acquaintance were using their incomes to become musicians, surgeons, personal trainers, nurses, and even police officers. "I know a young lady who currently dances and is working her way towards becoming a mortician," she said. "These are individuals who make this country great... We use earnings obtained from sex work and the adult entertainment industry to achieve goals that eventually help us all as people. "These changes to internet neutrality don't impose imminent danger to just sex workers," she later added. "These changes impose internet dangers to the future; to the future politicians, musicians, morticians, scientist, botanists, optometrists—the list goes on. We are not just sex workers; we are every woman, whatever you want, whatever you need, anything you want done... Ask any woman," she began to sing. Next on the microphone was Sacramento-based SWOP member and trans activist Tara Cochina. "FOSTA, SESTA, the FBI seizure of Backpage and the shutdown of so many websites like Craigslist personals, the Erotic Review, have devastated people in the sex trade from Sacramento to LA and around this country," she began. "I am volunteering with SWOP [Sex Workers Outreach Project] Sacramento to do outreach and also to support people in the sex trade in our resource center," adding that many of those folks are trans sex workers of color. "They are struggling more than any other population in the sex trade because the few resources they had have just been taken away. The resources of being able to advertise safely, to screen clients, to be able to compare notes on bad dates—all of this now has been taken off the internet thanks to FOSTA and SESTA. There is now new legislation that goes after our bank accounts and our ability to have credit. This is going to make people homeless. This is very, very scary for people who have been struggling to survive, because the question now is, will we survive? And we are here to tell the world, 'Let us survive!'" Cochina warned against legislation now before the U.S. Senate, S. 952, the "End Banking for Human Traffickers Act," co-sponsored by Sens. Elizabeth Warren (!) and Marco Rubio, which would allow the government to seize sex workers' bank accounts." After Cochina left the stage, Q again took the mic to note, "We know better than anybody that sexploitation and abuse exists in this industry, and as much as it's empowering for me to stand up here as a happy hooker/college-educated girl/whatever, at the end of the day, our community is the most vulnerable to sex trafficking because we cannot access justice in the same way that other workers can. When we experience assault, rape, robbery, on-the-job or off, the likelihood that we're going to be served and protected doesn't happen." Q then introduced adult star/APAC Board member/sex educator/sex worker activist Jessica Drake with a "trigger warning" that Drake would be talking about "some depictions, verbally, of sexual assault of an underage worker." Turns out that "underage worker" was Drake herself, who read to the assemblage "a story that no one has ever heard before, in hopes that you understand where I'm coming from and why I fight so hard to make things better." "I first discovered bodily autonomy at 16 in a six-by-ten room with a love seat and a nightstand," she began. "I was working at a seedy club that has long been not only shut down by actually demolished." The club's main business was selling "alone time" with young lovelies, with the strippers-cum-saleswomen handing napkins and a condom to the gals as they went upstairs. Drake herself refused to fuck her "clients" as so many of the other women and girls did, and after her first experiences, she made that restriction clear to her clients before they mounted the stairs. "I went upstairs and had a serious conversation with the guy about how we would not be having sex," she recounted. "He looked at me dumbfounded. He walked out of the room, walked down the stairs and demanded his money back. She gave it to him and I was admonished—and I'm sure had I not been the latest underage lure at the club, I would have been fired, but guess what? They needed me." She went on to say that things went well for several weeks, and though plenty of guys requested her, she always made it clear that sex would not be involved, although she did do some "very close dancing" and masturbating as she whispered in the men's ears—until she accepted one guy's offer to go up, and though she'd gotten a bad vibe from him, she went. "The game begins again, only this time the playing field is not just uneven, it's upended by his youth and his looks and my slight attraction to him," she read. "I entered that room an underage stripper and I left that room a sex worker. Somewhere in-between our routine meaningless talk and me masturbating, he caught hold of me and I went along with it... Halfway through our allotted time, he was fucking me with no regard for me at all, not even looking at me, and instantly, I knew this was not what I wanted to be doing." She rebuffed his attempts at a second fuck, and thanks to the hostess sticking her head through the door, she was spared an ugly confrontation. "My heart and soul would be one thing, but my body, that became my business," she finished. "I realized I didn't have much to my name but I was the boss of my body, and I vowed that night that I would always have final control over it. "Fast-forward a number of years and that young girl who just needed to survive, who just needed a place to sleep and food to eat because an unapologetic, intersectional feminist with a hard head and soft heart, an advocate for sex workers around the world with a career in the adult industry that has spanned nearly 20 years with no regrets." Drake exhorted those who pay for sex work in one way or another—watching videos, being dommed, paying for prostitution, sexting—"If we make you cum or if we let you cum, the time is now to come out of the shadows and speak up for us in the daylight because when harmful legislation like SESTA/FOSTA is passed, we are not only concerned for our livelihood, we are afraid for our lives. Sex work is work. Let us survive!" But the hits just kept coming, as Q introduced the next speaker, adult star and APAC Board member Conor Habib. "I want to talk about how sex work has intersected with my sexuality," he began, noting that he'd grown up in a small rural town in Pennsylvania, where he faced discrimination both as a gay person and as an Arab. "The first positive depiction of gay sex that I ever saw was in gay porn," he said. "Someone gave me a VHS tape... and when I figured out how to work that old crazy device, I saw in it that there was a scene with a bunch of factory workers who were abused by their boss, so they took over the factory and fucked the boss—so my first positive depiction of gay sexuality was also Marxist class warfare." From that, he realized that gay sex was something people enjoyed doing, and who "made me feel better about being who I was... I just watched them and they saved me." "Porn shows us that most people interact with engage with sex workers in one way or another in their lives," he continued. "It's a totally normal thing that people are doing and yet people see sex workers as an aberration, as an 'other,' as a group of people that they never come in contact with, and yet most people are coming in contact with us in one way or another in our lives, and I think these bridges need to build in cultural consciousness, because we're not just some small group of people. I think Siouxsie said it: We're everywhere; we have been everywhere for a really long time... Politicians are literally in the worst position of anybody in the world to make decisions about sex and sex work because their entire livelihoods and careers depend upon pretending they've never had sex, never hired a sex worker, pretending they've never watched porn or tried to talk to Jessica Drake. You know that's not true now. These are the people with the least healthy sexualities in the world regulating what's supposed to happen with us in our lives, in everybody's lives. "So this is the myth we encounter all the time, and the only way to get past that is as so many of the speakers have said is to get people to hear sex workers' voices, to actually listen to sex workers," he continued. "So there are two parts here: One is the normalization of sex work. 'Look everybody; you interacted, you engage with sex workers all the time in one way or another, and the other is about making sure that the people in power hear sex workers' voices, so that's a big part of what we're doing today." He urged adult performers to embrace the fact that they are sex workers, and advocated, "There's a privilege of being visible, and in a legal profession in this state at least, that we should be using to help all sex workers as much as we can." One sex worker who couldn't attend Saturday's rally—because she was performing sex work—was veteran actress Nina Hartley, who texted some comments from her movie set, which Q read to the assemblage. "It is thrilling to see out, proud sex workers the world over organize an action of this magnitude and importance," she said in part. "You should be proud of what you've done today and gain strength from the community to go on for the struggle is surely not over. Our work is valuable, it is essential, it is life-giving, it is life-sustaining, it is life-affirming. We provide comfort, companionship, closeness, human contact in these times of alienation, and most transformative of all, simple physical pleasure. We save lives, and we do so with a smile. Those are not small things... The time is coming to hold politicians accountable regardless of party... for their retrogressive, anti-sex work policies and that time is November 6. Sex workers should demand to know where those running for office stand on our issues, and cast our ballots accordingly." Q then called to the stage one of her associates, who gave the crowd some tips on how best to behave during the sex worker march that would begin at about 5 p.m., and then, Q gave the stage over to Princess Pandora, who helped to unionize and eventually take over the ownership of the late, lamented Lusty Lady strip club in San Francisco, and who taught the crowd some of the pro-worker chants they could use while marching around Hollywood. (Our favorite was, "Two, four, six, eight, I get paid to masturbate!") At about this point, there was a bit of a ruckus near the door to the patio area as veteran adult star Ron Jeremy tried to enter, but he was firmly rebuffed by those nearest the door (including Jessica Drake), since Jeremy had been accused by many performers of having sexually assaulted them, and they made it clear that he was not welcome. The final speaker was SWOP Sacramento founder and filmmaker Kristen DiAngelo. "I am also a sex worker, and I identify as a survivor of human trafficking, or 'exploitation' as Vice used to call it—they used the words human trafficking," she began, "and today, I am here basically as family. "What I can add here today is history, history here in the state of California and why we can never forget what is happening to us, we can never forget where we have come from, and we can never forget that if we do not continue this fight, we will be here again in the future," she warned." "Our history has been deleted from the history books," she declared. "We no longer know what occurred in our lives here in the state of California, much less the United States or around the world. We have bits and pieces from people who are still alive." She noted that until 1912, sex work in California was legal, with brothels in nearly every town until Gov. C.K. McClatchy passed the "Red Light Abatement Act," which drove prostitutes into the streets by forcing the brothels to close. "The way they did it was the same way they are doing with SESTA and FOSTA: They attacked our support services. They attacked the people who helped us, so they had to step away and we fell to the streets," she recounted. "Nobody ever stops to question how the current forms of sex work occurred. The day the brothels closed up and down the state of California, that very day, those people working in the brothels had nowhere to go. They lived there; their families were there; their lives were there; their support was there; their work was there. And without thought for the well-being of those people in those brothels, they were instantly closed." She continued to trace the paths of the banished workers, who then found themselves becoming "streetwalkers" as passing cars stopped to hire them. "Our government effectively created street prostitution by the abatement of the brothels," she charged. "They migrated us from indoors to outdoors, much as what's happening today." New zoning laws prohibited the women from plying their trade indoors again, in part by prohibiting single women from renting rooms, though some counties allowed them to rent second-floor apartments—which led to the creation of pimps, who started out simply as businessmen who helped the women rent rooms. "We offered them a percentage of our pay to rent a place so we could go back indoors," she said. "Now, the unfortunate circumstance was, it didn't take them two seconds to figure out they didn't need to take a percentage of our pay; they could take as much as they fucking wanted because we had no voice and couldn't even tell anybody that we were indoors. So when I hear all this shit about, 'Oh, they're doing this to stop human trafficking,' I'm thinking, 'You motherfuckers created human trafficking!" DiAngelo went on to talk about massage parlors being used as brothels until cops targeted them as well. "I was a kid and I was dumped out onto the street and that's how I got caught by my first exploiter," she recounted. "So when they say they're doing this shit to help us, I don't want your help. So the thing I offer to you is, they will go away. Something will happen and they'll back off like they do every time. They'll draw enough blood, they'll have exacted enough from us, they'll decide okay, there's bigger political fish to fry, they will disappear. And what happens is, we think, oh, it's okay now... We can't forgive this. We can't go back this time. We have come too far. Even if they back off, we cannot. We cannot stop until all the sex work—and I mean all sex work; I don't care what form you do—all sex work is decriminalized! This is my body and this is my right... I was a part of the police taking us out in the fields and fuckin' raping us and leaving us there so we would have to hitchhike in with migrant farmworkers to try to get back in to work again, only to find my pimp was going to beat my ass because I didn't make the money. That's how they serve their help to me. "So when they say these bills are to stop human trafficking, I urge you to think critically," she concluded. "It isn't about that; it's about their own political objectives and riding our backs like they did in 1912 and in the 1970s and the 1980s and the 1990s; they repeat this loop over and over. Our government is stuck on stupid. They can't do anything different, so that means it's up to us. This is our time. We need to stop being defensive. We need to be the ones making the decisions and moving forward. We know what's right. Who wants to stop exploitation of sex workers more than sex workers? Nobody. And who knows more about it than us? No one. So we cannot stop... I am so hopeful, with the youth that's in the crowd and the people that are here, that this time, we can do it!" With that, Q announced that the attendees who wished to participate in the march should exit the back door and form lines on the sidewalk. The march, which went east on Hollywood Boulevard, down Vine Street, across Sunset Boulevard and up Highland Avenue, was led by Free Speech Coalition's Ian O'Brien, with more than 200 sex workers and supporters taking part. It was one hell of a day—and Hollywood wasn't the only place protests were taking place. Others have written about marches in Las Vegas, New York City and Oakland, but in fact, marches were taking place all over the world. Pictured, l-r: Conor Habib, Kristen DiAngelo, Jessica Drake, Gizelle Marie, Tara Cochina.

 
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