It always surprises me how little people can get away with knowing about sex workers. I had a client once who assumed I had children to support, and was scandalized when I confessed I didn’t. “You’re just one of these selfish women,” he told me, “these selfish women who want to move to a beach somewhere with a pair of massive fake tits and live off the interest.”
The walk from the subway to the Society of Illustrators isn’t long. So when I say that my apprehension grew with every step I took along Lexington Avenue, I mean that it expanded rapidly, like the chorus of a Pixies song.
It was early autumn, and just starting to get cold in Manhattan. I wore black sweatpants, a jean jacket, a purple scarf. Soon I wouldn’t be wearing anything at all.
1982Gina whispered, “Things are going to be okay now, they will take us away to a better home or maybe back to our parents!!” as we nodded our heads believing her. I was the youngest at age 10; then there was Patti, who was a year older; and Gina, who was the eldest and also our fearless leader, who tried so hard to keep us safe. Earlier that day, we’d…
There's been some good and thoughtful reporting over the Rentboy arrests over the last few days. From Graeme Reid at Human Rights Watch: Rentboy.com connects male escorts to clients in the same way that Uber does for transport, or Airbnb does for accommodation. There are no middlemen, thus affording users control and autonomy over the services brokered through the website. The website connects consenting adults. None of the government statements about the raid have…
Here is how I try to tell the story: drunk, haltingly, laughing hysterically in voicemail to my therapist. At the next session, we dance around it: “I think the word you used was ‘whore.’” I package it as neatly as I can: I was too young for a real job, I was on my own, I needed the money. She says she doesn’t blame me, but it sounds like forgiveness. That isn’t what I want.
Recently in Phoenix, Arizona, a woman was arrested for walking down the street, engaging other pedestrians in conversation. This was a blatant case of profiling, because police accused the woman, a transgender woman of color, of soliciting sex work. For those who don't know, transgender means a person's experienced gender identity and their assigned sex at birth are incongruous. I was assigned female at birth, but from a young age I felt that was
Last night, federal agents seized longtime Bay Area sex work advertising network MyRedBook, arresting the editors and disabling the site in the process as part of an ongoing sex work sting. Longtime Bay Area based escort/massage advertising website MyRedBook seized by FBI. http://t.co/OuTLq7y478pic.twitter.com/aPv03szoSe — Melissa Gira Grant (@melissagira) June 25, 2014…
“The hotels are always full here,” Mike tells me on a slow Tuesday night at Babe’s sports bar. He’s come for the hockey, a lone Bruins fan in a desert of pump jacks and roughnecks. Mike moved to this oil and natural gas boomtown in New Mexico from the northeast nine months earlier. He’s a chemical engineer for an oil company you’ve probably heard of, and he’s got stories about the hotel he lived in…
"Whore is maybe the original intersectional insult," writes journalist and former sex worker Melissa Gira Grant. In her new book Playing the Whore, part of a series by Jacobin writers published by Verso Press, she explores the sex industry from the perspective of the workers themselves. That includes strippers, porn performers, and prostitutes, whether they work on the street, in clubs, or even at home as independent porn performers. What she found was unnerving:…
If there's one things male singers love, it's asking fictional sex workers questions. What's your name? Where are you going? What are you doing later tonight? Did you know you don't have to put on the red light? Why do you do your job? Is it for money? Can I come over later? Am I different from all the other guys you know? Why are you wearing so much makeup? Why are you crying? Why…
He always wore pantyhose, sometimes more than one pair at the same time, and exclusively thick compression hose, the type made for nurses. They’re only available in the ugliest of colors, shades that approximate the tone of old bruises, but I wore them, too, because he asked me to. I still save my collection in one of the plastic containers full of other work supplies, though I haven’t seen him in over two years. It…
