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!

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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