CALLOUT for SEX WORKER PARTICIPATION: Every Ho I Know Says So

Hello sex workers, we are looking for your participation in a video project:
EVERY HO I KNOW SAYS SO: A VIDEO FOR LOVERS AND PARTNERS OF SEX WORKERS

What is this project?
EVERY HO I KNOW SAYS SO is a video project documenting the advice that we sex workers want to give to our lovers, partners and dates on how to be supportive to us. This video will be a resource for partners/lovers of sex workers who struggle to understand and accept sex work.

Who is making this video?
This video is being made by two sex workers, Jackson and Lusty Day. Lusty Day is a white, middle-class genderqueer kinky independent escort hailing from Toronto, where whorephobia was a major reason for her breakup of a four-year relationship. Jackson is an australian, white, class privileged queer trans boy who works it as a lady hooker and dancer with a rainbow of experiences including dating fellow sex workers, dating workers while not a worker, and also dating non-sex workers. We are making this video with no budget, just our own labour. And we will distribute it at no cost to the viewer.

How can I participate?
Contact us! We will do a super short interview with you where you speak as if you were speaking to your lover from your own experience. An example:

“I want you to understand that my work is sometimes sexually fulfilling but that that doesn’t threaten our relationship, it’s just a positive aspect of my work.”

We realize that many sex workers are not out about their work to lovers, family, friends, immigration officials, police, etc because of criminalization and reasons of personal safety. If you don’t want to be identified, we can video you without showing your face (ie focus on your hands) and also change your voice. We can also accept written statements. We are open and willing to negotiate the best way for you to participate. AND you can change your mind about being in the video at any point. Talk to us!

While you might want to vent (and we’ve all got a crappy story of a lover who just didn’t get it), this video is trying to build a gently challenging space. Anger is powerful to express, but please also remember our goal of creating a resource for partners and lovers that helps them listen and grow.

Why are we making this video?
EVERY HO I KNOW SAYS SO is a response to the lack of resources for people looking for advice on how to be a good support person to a sex worker. In turn, we want to support our lovers to fight stigma against sex workers, especially in intimate relationships. Sex workers themselves have valuable advice and direction to give our partners. With this video, we are saying “We support you in becoming a sex worker-positive and supportive lover and person in the community!!! By continuing to work on your attitudes about our work and educating yourself, you are showing us that you care. We love you!”

This video is a platform for sex workers to share their voices, including at the forefront sex workers of colour, Aboriginal sex workers, trans* sex workers, queer sex workers, disAbled sex workers, sex workers of all ages, working class sex workers, and migrant sex workers, too. As two relatively privileged sex workers, we are committed to using strategies that centre the people most affected by whore stigma and oppression.

How will the video be distributed?
We intend to distribute the video on YouTube and we hope you will blog and distribute it online for us, too. We hope to complete the video by October 2010.

Can I pass this callout to a friend who is a sex worker?
Yes, absolutely. Please share it as we are hoping to connect with many different sex workers.

To participate or to answer your questions, please email jacksonisforcutting@gmail.com and lustyday@gmail.com.

Edited: July 25th, 2010

New zine available! FANG IT: My Melbourne Sexcapade

Freshly baked, my new queer sex zine Fang It: My Melbourne Sexcapade. Contact me at lustyday@gmail.com with your address if you want one. $2 to pay for the printing, blood, sweat and tears!

The lovely Sarah Pinder has already published a review on her blog bits of string press.

Here’s an excerpt from the story “Being The Best I Can Be” to entice you:

What are you training for? a guy at this squat in Brunswick asks me. I fumble and bullshit some answer. If pressed again, maybe I’ll say I’m training for the revolution. That may be true. But mostly I’m training because I’m a submissive masochist and a hott butchy curly-haired meanie told me she already bought me a whistle. Let’s call her Coach. She knocked my shoulder gently at the spanking workshop last week as she left and said you have my number.

So effortless. I’m hooked.

Over text we make plans to meet at the track at the uni, 4pm Sunday. On the day of I keep wanting to chicken out, my stomach twisting, I’ve never played with her before nor have I ever done more than joke about having a fitness top. I have been building her up as a big meanie in my mind all week. I go over all possible excuses. None are solid. Hell. Shape up, pussy-ass. It’s time to represent. I pull on some little nylon running shorts and a pale blue cotton shirt with some sporty-looking numbers on the front. I jump on the Family Star, and pedal hard down Rathdowne, repeating to myself: I can take it. I can do it.

By the time I reach the uni it’s raining. I half-hope we’ll call it off. I start a text and blam, she appears behind me out of nowhere. Damn, she is riding her bike too, and she’s got the best green old-skool track pants and a hoodie on, its strings swinging in the wind. All dressed up! Some guy asked me when I left my house if I was a personal trainer, she tells me. We laugh. I’m loving that we are dressed up for a scene wearing sportwear. I feel so nerdy-good in this bike helmet, too.

We decide to do it indoors and I follow her up Lygon Street. We race the clouds, and I can’t hardly keep up to her because the back wheel on the Family Star is slipping on some rain. We settle into my friend’s empty bedroom, I tell her some of my likes and limits and she does the same. We’re all awkward until we discover this skipping rope hanging on the back of the door. Start with that, Coach says, sitting on the bed.

I wind the rope around each of my wrists once and jump. Sweat pours off me after only a minute and my calves are already seizing up. This might be the shortest scene ever. After a bit she says I can stop and I get right down on the floor in front of her, putting my head on her lap, playing up my heaving breath to get xxx-tra attention. She falls for it, stroking my head. What a good job you did, she says. I beam. Now push-ups…

Edited: July 12th, 2010

Working women chase cops away!

I just love this clip of trans* sex workers in Lima, Peru chasing away the cops.

Edited: June 7th, 2010

Building Sexual Consent from the Ground Up: workshop in Toronto June 12

Co-conspirator Juliet November and I will be co-facilitating a workshop called Building Sexual Consent From the Ground Up on Saturday June 12, 2-4 pm as part of the Trigger Festival in Toronto. You should come! It’s free, accessible and childcare is provided all day. Rad! (More info on Trigger and the day-long workshops being offered.)

Juliet and I are doing this workshop for a couple of reasons. First because both of us have been really affected by violence within the queer community. I am sure you have too, either as a survivor as the friend of one. From times we’ve listened to our friends work through the shame and self-hatred of a drunken encounter that wasn’t entirely consensual, to not feeling like we could say No to sex with a partner indefinitely, to having nowhere to turn to get protection from a violent partner because they’d risk deportation. Don’t we love each other enough to do something about this?

Second because we believe in developing non-state community responses to this violence. We believe in taking care of each other, reducing violence and holding people who’ve caused harm accountable–without inviting in the racist, homophobic, capitalist, sexist, ableist police or social services, for example. Our foundational vision is one where queers and trans people rely on each other–not state systems of control, containment and exploitation–to develop solutions to the problem of violence, understanding that violence as part of, and intimately connected to state and international violence.

Third, we are sex workers and know that our skills and strategies around establishing consent (individually, collectively, verbally, non-verbally) are diverse and fierce. We want to share them with our community!
Building Sexual Consent from the Ground Up

Learn from skilled sex workers how to better negotiate sexual consent and make great sex happen. This no-touch workshop will provide an opportunity for participants to gain practical skills in negotiating sex and help us uncover our individual and collective strengths and styles around sexual negotiation. We will talk about how to get the love, sex and intimacy we want, resist stigmas against sex and whores and how to end partner/date violence in our communities! All are welcome!

Saturday June 12, 2010 / 2-4 PM / The Raging Spoon, 761 Queen st West (near Bathurst) / Free!

Edited: June 7th, 2010