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.

They published a little story I wrote about a strange request I once had from a client.

Here’s a teaser:

Hank was a regular at Midnight, the brothel where I worked in Sydney, Australia. The first time a receptionist walked into the girls’ room and announced that Hank the cop had arrived, I freaked out and grabbed a bathrobe to cover my skimpily-dressed self. A cop!! Then I remembered: police were just ordinary clients here, since sex work is decriminalized in the state of New South Wales. Hank was off-duty and came in twice a week. He would always take his time deciding, hanging around and talking to the receptionist for hours. All the girls knew him but me. Once he chose a girl, she would bustle around looking for full brief panties (affectionately known in Australia as “nana knickers”) and the pointiest heels she could find. Everyone would laugh, since everyone (except me) knew what Hank wanted. All I knew was that Hank was a bellybutton man…

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…

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!

I wish I could be there with all of you today to celebrate the life and wildness of the best client a hooker could ever have: Aaron S, and of course, his constant companion, little Aaron. Together, they were VERY badly behaved – just the way I liked it!

My name is Lusty Day and for the past two years I had the great privilege of sharing intimacy, friendship, and hot sex with Aaron. I was really nervous when we first met about learning about how to communicate with and please Aaron, but he was the most gentle, patient, appreciative and dirty-minded lover and client I could ask for. I first started working for him when I was still quite new to being a sex worker. At the time, I was really struggling with telling my friends, my family and my community about the work I was doing. Aaron taught me that there was nothing shameful or wrong about buying and selling sexual services. Plus, that guy was so persuasive he was paying me half the rate I charge other clients and we were having twice the fun! We had some great times together rocking his wheel chair around the living room. He taught me so very much about the power of eye contact and a great laugh – both instrumental to having great sex.

More than client and sex worker, Aaron and I also became great friends and allies. He always offered me a place to sleep if I was feeling down, and even though I suspected that he had an ulterior motive in asking me to sleep over, Aaron likewise cared deeply about me and all his friends and was always looking out for us. He was a fierce fighter for people’s freedom. Despite numerous difficulties that the ableist world threw at him, Aaron was always out attending and leading community events and rallies. His legacy will live on in the struggle for rights and respect for people with disabilities, for queer people, and for sex workers, to name but a few.

In honour of Aaron today, I’m wearing the purple lovely g-string panties he once gave me and telling everyone his most important advice: have sex! It meant so much to him and little Aaron that people felt pleasure and happiness. I am sad to miss the gathering but I’m sure that all the love and light you raise will shine for Aaron all the way over to Indonesia where I am sitting here loving him still.

Big love and whorelicious hugs to all of you,

Lusty Day

My workshop proposal for the business development track was recently accepted. Here is the description, please email me with any comments or ideas you might have to make it even better:

Working It Down Under: How to Escort Successfully in Australia

Interested in working and holidaying in Australia? In some parts of Australia, sex work is decriminalized. Come to this workshop to learn from a fellow traveler how to take advantage of the rare opportunity to escort legally and safely in this beautiful and friendly country. Topics include: how to apply for visas to Australia; best practice tips for maximizing your fun and funds in brothels, including how to score clients, charge for extras, and keep drama to a minimum; how to work within the law; how to access health care for sex workers; managing your income between countries, including income tax restrictions; dealing with advertising guidelines in print and online publications; analysis of racism and transphobia in the Australian sex industry and what it means for your business; negotiating big-money clients; how to turn your perhaps ordinary accent into $$$; introduction to Australian sex worker organizations and cultural groups; doing self-care and dealing with homesickness when traveling especially while working in the industry. The workshop will focus on full service work in brothels as well as independent GFE escorting. Your questions and experience welcome!

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!

Dear advertisers,

I’ve edited my text from “lips” to “L1PS”, suggested explosions and release instead of orgasms, and implied I offer “erotic services” instead of plain ol’ sex. I have done all this, and more, to meet your needs, the needs of online websites and newspaper companies who gladly take my money to run my sex work advertisements (and who often charge me heaps more than any other category of advertisement) but who don’t respond to my needs for responsible and accurate representation of what I offer and what I don’t offer to prospective clients. Partly this is about following the law, but partly it is about you making a buck. “This is not large commercial brothels, this is individual sex workers being charged several times more than other advertisers. There seems to be no reason for this difference.” says Janelle Fawkes, CEO, Scarlet Alliance, Australian Sex Workers Association. It is discrimination because we are sex workers. Plain and simple.

This is about my safety, people. And that has me hopping mad today. You will hear from me again.

Love,
Lusty Day

Does any other businessperson have the difficulty in reaching appropriate clients that sex workers do? I spend a great deal of time crafting my advertisments, researching escort websites, taking accurate photos and ensuring that my business takes place in a discreet manner to protect my clients, minors, and my business (i.e. in areas of the Internet safeguarded by parental controls, and with appropriate adult content warnings, and accessible via iPhones and other mobile devices so clients can access my photos more discreetly). And yet! All forces seem against me when I attempt to reach clients responsibly.

My newest obstacle are the advertising restrictions in the state of Victoria, Australia. On most of the sites I have considered advertising, like Australian Babe and Sensual Down Under, sex workers deliberately obscure their faces to protect their identity. (There is a larger conversation there about the merits and dangers of being out and proud, politically and emotionally speaking, which I will save for another post.) Many sex workers do not want to be identified so easily by their friends, family and community, and for good reason. Whether sex work is illegal, decriminalized or legalized, sex workers still deal with whore stigma. From a business perspective, anyone who has posted images on the world wide web knows that the images can only proliferate. Many internet cruisers are “pic collectors” and simply grab photos for their own personal hard drive or mobile phone collection, and the sex worker never sees a penny for all the getting off that gets done to their photos. I’m sure many more sex workers exchange face pics once a rapport is established with a client, but I guess I’m saying that sex workers have good reason to obscure their faces if that option is open to them. (For many street workers, trans workers, porn actors, or in small communities, anonymity is a inaccessible privilege.)

So you can imagine my surprise when planning a working tour to the state of Victoria where you can only advertise sex work with pictures of your FACE. Imagine that. They use images of women in bikinis and underwear to sell cars, beach resort holidays, nightclubs, and, of course, bikinis and underwear, but nope! You can’t use an image of your whole body to sell sex in Victoria, Australia. WTF!?! Scarlet Alliance has made a submission to review this law and others here. I just can’t get over the fact that you can post alluring photos of yourself all over the www place but not for a business transaction where your clients need to see what you look like to decide if they want to buy your services. Basically it means that I have to spend extra time communicating with clients by sending them additional photos privately or describing myself on the phone. I wouldn’t care so much if the very same style of photos weren’t immediately accessible to every other businessperson trying to sell their product on billboards, or bus shelters, in newspapers… and yet I am actually SELLING SEX and I can’t get access to these advertising methods.

For a hard and painful laugh, try to place an ad in any newspaper and get their list of prohibited words. In the state of Queensland, here is a list of things you can’t say in your ad according to the Prostitution Licensing Authority:

• Be published through radio or television or by film or video recording
• Describe the services offered. Words that do not directly describe the services offered are permissible
• Describe or refer to body fluids or waste
• Describe genitals, except for whether or not a penis has been circumcised
• Refer to drugs or drug use
• Imply that sex workers are under the age of 18 years
• Imply that unsafe sex is available
• Intend or induce a person to seek employment as a prostitute
• State directly, or indirectly, that a licensed brothel or sex worker is connected with or provides massage service
• In respect of brothels, state directly or indirectly that the brothel is associated with escort services
• In respect of sole operator advertisements, imply that more than one sex worker is available
• Contain an image of the sexual organs or anus of a person or frontal nudity of the genital region and mons veneris/mons pubis region

So in Queensland I can’t say directly what I offer, I can’t mention whether or not my pussy is clean shaven (but I can talk about circumcision?), I can’t suggest that I love my work and that it is a good way to make some money and meet cool people, I can’t offer a lesbian double experience, etc etc. Again, from Scarlett Alliance: “In many cases whether a word is allowed or disallowed has very little to do with logic. From State to State the conditions vary dramatically and in many cases the same words are used blatantly in other advertisements within the same paper.”

The newly formed group Nothing About Us Without Us in New South Wales has been organizing around advertising discrimination in recent months. Their campaigns focus on the lack of consultation with sex workers by all levels of governments in Australia. I want to close with their words:

Sex workers must be consulted and be included at EVERY meeting, panel, taskforce or roundtable that is formed to discuss the sex industry. No implementation of policy, procedure, legal reform or directives should occur without detailed and in depth consultation with sex workers at all stages.