Queer people aren’t strangers to shame, or to reclaiming one of the darkest feelings a person can carry deep in their gut. Shame is distinct from guilt in that shame is about doing something nonnormative, whereas guilt implies a breach of morality. Still, the consequences of shame can be profound — isolation, stress, secrets. Shame is relative to our surroundings, to the people who have power over us or to the communities we try to find homes in. For this A+ personal essay series, writers wrote about things they can barely whisper to aloud, things they thought was once a blemish that they’ve turned into crown, things that make them feel like a “bad queer”, or the ways that other peoples’ shame has woven itself into their life and existence. Answers to nagging questions, positive conclusions from difficult times and happy endings are not necessary, and you might not find them in every essay in the SHAME series. But I do hope you fill find something that challenges some shame you might be feeling, that is too relatable, that leaves you questioning whether it is actually serving you to hide whatever it is you’re hiding. As always, thank you for the support that allows Autostraddle to publish the breadth of pieces that we do, whether we’re celebrating the bright spots or descending into the basements of our psyches — this is a space where queer people can pitch, write and publish work like nowhere else.

xoxo,

Nico

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I am no stranger to shame. I don’t think any of us are. It’s wielded as a powerful tool amongst the privileged and marginalized, alike. Shaming abuse of power pressurizes movement forward. (See how our shaming of politicians has been garnering more numbers for the call for a ceasefire in Palestine? Also see how the shaming of the police officers here in Seattle led to 25% of the force quitting from 2020-2021.) Shaming of vulnerability, however, leads to masking, silence, and even violence. Most of the world’s tools have double edges. In some ways, I see queerness, — or more personally — my queerness, especially in relation to my job as a sex worker, as double-edged, as well. Straddling the bold edges of queerness and sex work has shamed and emboldened me at the same time.

My mother called me “an abomination” and “an embarrassment” when she threw my 15-year-old ass out of the house. I promise you, it was a blessing in disguise. I could bore or excite you with the details of that time in my life, but I want to fast forward. For the last 17 years, as an out homosexual, I have fully entrenched myself in queerness — communally, politically, sexually. In every facet of gay, I am there in technicolor. Queerness saved my life, gave me love, community, education, grace, annoyance, and a lot of unforgettable memories. I’ve worked at gay bars, gogo danced many a queer night, volunteered and organized for years with queer organizations. Flaming homosexuality is my home.

Right before I turned 25, I started stripping here in Seattle, Washington. It was then that my home’s edges started to fray.

I have been deeply, madly, truly blessed to be surrounded for the last ten years by dommes, strippers, escorts, cam girls, addicts, hustlers, and many other holy and revolutionary identities that I am forgetting to name. There is a beautifully coated overlap of these identities with queerness. Even though I had moments of unconscious judgment here and there around the complexities of these identities of which I did and do share, I have always trusted myself and my community to actually hold strong to our idyllic radical politics — and work to live them out loud.

Many of my values and exploration of my identity as I’ve grown have also been influenced by the representations — even problematic as they may be — of queerness and sex work. For the vast majority of my life, I’ve eagerly absorbed all types of media, art, TV, events, and film. I stumbled upon Bound (1996) when I was 14. This lesbian film noir by the incredible Wachowski Sisters presented a blended and nuanced representation of queerness and sex work.

I recently revisited it this summer and I actually cried when Violet (sex worker and one of the leads) made her quick and firm speech to Corky (other lead and love interest) about her feelings about her work.

VIOLET
All my life, everyone has been telling
me that when I have sex, I’m not
really having sex. Not real sex.
But they’re wrong. I know what is
and isn’t sex and what you heard was
definitely not sex.

CORKY
What was it then?

VIOLET
Work.

That knocks Corky back.

VIOLET
You made certain choices in your
life that you paid for. You said
you made them because you were good
at something and it was easy. Do
you think you’re the only one that’s
good at something?

Violet’s stare pins Corky to the wall.

VIOLET
We make our own choices and we pay
our own prices. I think we’re more
alike than you want to admit.

I only wish that all I needed was a quick speech to help my non-sex worker partners understand my work and to have it never be misconceived again.

Queerness saved me and sex work cracked my mind and heart open. Both of these things have actively worked to de-program me from the current corrupt systems of Capitalist white supremacy. Both of these identities and living in them have taught me that community care and understanding are the most vital aspects of sustaining revolution, of joy and life. We keep the good and the bad. We throw no one out. That’s what the straight (all versions of this word) world does; it throws people out. That’s not to say we don’t have boundaries, but that we intrinsically know that we’re all worth care, and that someone here is going to care for you. Our annoyances with one another, our hurt, is blanketed and supported by knowing we’re working towards restoration, transformation, and liberation (this often looks pretty ugly, but that’s for a different essay that I am not qualified to write). These sentiments are what keep me moving when I feel discouraged around how communities sometimes flounder when asked to show up.

Before I launch into the thorns that have come with the roses of my queer loves since starting sex work, I want to take a moment to recognize all my civilian (a slang term used in the sex work community to refer to anyone outside of the trade) loved ones whose support of me never waivers. They take my pictures for ads, cheer me on at my fundraisers for my sex work labor organizing, let me lament about hard days at work and laugh at all my jokes, no matter how obscene they are.

My first couple years in sex work were hard ones. I spent them spiraling out of control and engaging in risky behavior, both in and out of work. I was escaping and self-medicating, not honoring myself, my relationships, or my work. I don’t think this made for a very good case when asking for unconditional support in my work from my partners. I was acting like a trope, which pains me to say for many reasons. I was self-medicating, unmotivated, and unpredictable.

One of the first people I dated when I began stripping was a former sex worker who worked in the brothels in Australia for many years. Its states have legalized or decriminalized the industry. (The vast majority of our community wants decriminalization not legalization!) I actually ended up working in a brothel when I came to visit my lover in Australia. Not only did I have sex with a cis man for the first time, but I paid off my plane ticket that night. I came back to her house at 5am. She tucked me in, held me close, and laughed while I recounted the memorable shift. We dated for six months. That’s no easy feat when you live across the globe. Unknowingly, I had been spoiled by her in the way she treated me, the way she cheered me on.

The other partners I had throughout much of my time in sex work were uncomfortable at best and shaming at worst. They were jealous and confused. “How can you interact with men like this?” I mean, I was gay, but for pay I could “act straight”? (Sex workers deserve Oscars, I swear.) I could appeal to the patriarchy’s desires of what clients want out of workers: “sex objects,” “Part Time Fantasy Girlfriend.”

My partners didn’t see me as powerful or in control of myself, and sometimes I wasn’t. They often viewed me as a victim trying to play the game. Concern around “safety” has often been used to camouflage their disapproval or disdain. Speaking about rough work experiences has been weaponized against me. “Why don’t you just quit?” “If you’re having a hard time, don’t you think maybe you’re just not cut out for it?” Even without using safety as a crutch for whorephobia, there’s still the reality of stigmatization.

It can’t actually be a sustainable career.

Is it even a real job in the first place?

I remember once that someone I was dating said they couldn’t see us dating long term because you can’t “turn a whore into a housewife.” Listen, I think everyone reading this can see that this sentence is degrading for many reasons, and I thank you for that. I had partners who would pick fights with me via text during a shift at the club. Others would become cold, distant, and act uninterested after I saw a client. These experiences are what led to me feeling like I had to hold not only their shame but also like their shame piled onto my own internalized shame around my work. It held and still occasionally holds me in a state of defeat, even as I organized with my radical sex worker loved ones. If I already have loved ones who don’t support me, how can I change the minds of those out there who are so vehemently focused on stigmatizing and criminalizing us?

I was lying about what I did because of the shame I had been made to feel about working with men, specifically. I felt like I had to continue to earn the love I was being pushed and pulled by, so I spent all my money on my partners. Dinners, events, bills, whatever I could to show that my terrible job was good for something. I would continue this bad boundary behavior for many years following. (I’m working on it, I just like to care for and spoil people!) But the truth is, nothing would truly change the whorephobia that became so consistent in the majority of my relationships for the last seven years. I practiced this fantasy with many of my civilian friends too, hoping that if my jokes about work were funny enough, that if I never really spoke about the hard stuff, and if I bought them drinks with my dick-sucking money, that I would be worthy of acceptance — but I know, now, you can’t buy love. (You can buy time with someone willing to co-create a container with you that honors and explores your desires, wants, and needs, however. Have you ever thought about hiring a sex worker? Great for threesomes too!)

Even though I have been so incredibly gay for so incredibly long, I have felt pings of insecurity around others seeing and validating my queerness due to often being read as straight because of my femmeness. I witness femmes of all stripes in our community sometimes experience devaluing or a lack of acknowledgement when it comes to our identity and presentation. I began to feel that insecurity prickle up in me again when I started sex work. I was afraid that, because I engaged with men in so many ways for money that suddenly maybe my fellow queers would no longer see me as an integral part of the fabric of our community. It, at times, cemented me in the loneliness I felt as a kid prior to cultivating community. It began to deepen the internalized shame around my identity as a queer person and also just a human of value. Sex workers are regularly dehumanized. I started wearing other people’s shame too. It weighed me down, and occasionally still does. I lost closeness with friends, silence would befall others when other queer sex workers or I would talk frankly about work, people would whisper about fluid bonding (do not get me started on this scientifically problematic phrase) and choose not to date or sleep with us because of their fear of risk. Of course everyone is entitled to their choices, but it doesn’t mean it doesn’t hurt, especially since all the sex workers I know are much more educated and diligent around sexual health and risk mitigation than anyone else I know. How often do you get tested? I won’t even get into the other side of the pendulum — that is — civilians dating us because they think it gives them “cool” points.

The more I started talking to elder sex workers — especially connecting to them through being raised working class and continuing to be in working class queer communities — I was reminded of how inextricable sex workers, especially Black and Brown Trans Femme sex workers, have been to every movement. We’ve always been here, and always will, in queer community and beyond. There’s Marsha P. Johnson and Sylvia Rivera who regularly turned tricks to care for themselves and their families, primarily consisting of youth who’d been disowned and ended up homeless. These two revolutionaries and their communities bankrolled, defended, preserved, and ceaselessly bolstered our movements — even when their cis gay and lesbian counterparts rejected them and revoked their “civilian” allyship.

There are countless femmes and others of revolutionary identities of all stripes who took up sex work because it was the only thing they had access to. Many of our elders held fast to this job, having been shunned from various occupations due to being outed and/or visibly queer. Flexibility and access are the main reasons many of us participate. Sex workers have started, sustained, and funded movements, events, spaces and outreach for as long as there is documented history (this is a whole other article on its own!). This makes me think fondly of Deborah Sundahl (mentioned in a past Autostraddle article) who funded the launch of On Our Backs — one of the first lesbian erotica magazines. It makes me think of Vanguard, founded in 1966 in San Francisco, that organized a newsletter, local marches, and actions to bring awareness to the criminalization of and conditions experienced by sex workers.

The more I’ve been talking about this with my community, the more I realize that whorephobia is actually a “newer” phenomenon in the queer community. I could attribute this to many things; the growing class divides of our communities, racism, transphobia — or, more specifically, transmisogyny. There are double edged swords of growing visibility, acceptance, and the ever-permeating destructive respectability politics in our communities. For a long time, much of the privileged class of queers were stuck in the closet because of the very real fear of loss of resources, and those that did come out or who were outed were then demoted in class because of it. This was not an exclusive experience to the privileged class of course. But the evolving queer communities over the last decades of our social movements were mostly made up of the lower classes and marginalized people sticking together. So many queers were and have been sex workers because, again, it’s extremely low barrier, so it was an identity that many carried and still do that was an inherent part of community, just like butch, fag, addict, kinkster, activist etc. We are still here. You probably know a sex worker, or someone who’s participated in the trade at some point in their life. Queers know how to survive, and sex work is a way many of us do just that. Our queer values have been shaped by our history. Our history shows us resistance, resilience, caring, and fighting for all of those who have been deemed unworthy. I challenge us to think about how we’ve strayed from our radical roots. Some of us are unwilling to acknowledge the explicit ties of all the vulnerable, queer identities in our communities in the hopes of mainstream acceptance, but it won’t solve the issue long term.

Not only do sex workers hold together movements, but we have often been indispensable parts of our cultural revolutions as well. Fishnets, stripper heels, outrageous performances of gender, creatrixes of radical values of care, consent language — the list of contributions goes on! The BDSM and kink communities’ language around consent evolved due in part to leather dykes. In many areas, the venn diagram of the kink community and the sex work community is almost a circle. The overlap of the BDSM and sex work communities has been consistent, and the allyship and comradery have been ceaseless. I’ve learned more about consent practice that authentically resonates with me through sex work more than in any other place. Sex work is constant negotiation, intimacy coordination, and container setting. It is analysis, care, and curiosity around desires, wants, needs — it can be sacred! And! It is also often just about getting someone off.

I feel it necessary to provide historical and cultural context because, in part, I feel I have to defend us, to give the lay person reasons to trust and humanize us, to show you that we’re worthy. We keep ourselves alive; our loved ones, our communities. We fight and care for each other. This includes you! I guess I shouldn’t have to. But, we’re often screaming at the top of our lungs to Pay Attention. What happens to us, eventually happens to you. Things like shadowbanning and censorship have been happening to us on every platform for many years. FOSTA SESTA make it even easier, now, to target other revolutionary identities, people, and actions. Our payment apps and even bank accounts get shut down,. oOur children are at risk of being taken. The list of systemic oppression against sex workers is long. Some of even some of the most radical orgs and communities won’t touch us — or worse — they even demonize us. Regardless of what is thrown our way, we’re still here. I share this quote from one of my very best friends and fellow whores to illustrate how I and many of us feel:

“The history of sex work is world history and our futures are demonstrably unstoppable.” — Vaughn Wolff

I have been a sex worker for over seven years. I am proud of the work I do and the services I provide. I am freaking good at it. I am proud to be fighting for sex worker rights with local organizations. I am deeply proud of the community I get to be a part of. Gay hookers are the most brilliant people I have ever met. I know in my full integrity we deserve nothing but respect. I know that my own personal acceptance of this can never be hinged upon what someone else may think of me or my work. I know I have to deflect any type of shame that may be sent my way from lovers or strangers. That is my own work.

I want us all to move through this shame together. That, for all us, workers and allies alike, there is pride in our humanity. No one has to be proud of their work, but I think we deserve pride in ourselves and comrades — for staying alive by doing what they need to do to survive, even when it’s stigmatized and criminalized. There is pride in caring for ourselves and each other in the process. There are a growing number of resources that address allyship to us. None are perfect. We are not monoliths, so I encourage individualizing attention and care so we grow stability in our interpersonal relationships.

Still, I would be remiss if I didn’t include a very nonextensive list of resources for you all!

• “Are You Dating a Sex Worker? Here’s How to be a Better Partner” written by a sex worker for partners of sex workers,
• “Ho Lover” an out-of-print-but-still-circulating-amongst-radical-communities zine. A few disclaimers about the piece: “Ho//hoe” is a term that should be used exclusively amongst Black sex workers So if you are not one please do refrain from using this word! I love so much of what this person writes. He is a white trans man who’s dated sex workers. Some folks understandably aren’t a fan of a non-sex worker broaching this topic but I actually don’t think it’s a bad thing that a partner ally speaks to other civilians about what he’s learned in this sphere. Personally, it’s really nice to share the load of this work with y’all,
• And “How to Be An Ally to Sex Workers,” written by a fellow prostitute (self-identifying — I like using the term, too, occasionally because I like the salaciousness of it). There are 85 ways, big and small, to show support. I don’t necessarily think all of them need to be strictly adhered to but that’s why not being afraid to ask questions and potentially get things “wrong” and receive feedback is important.

***
That being said, I like being a resource to my community around my experiences. Those are my feelings, with boundaries, and I encourage my community to tap into the resources I offer. Not all of us are interested in doing that, and that is alright because no one of us can represent this vastly diverse community.Queer sex workers straddle our communities with tension and care. We are venerated and vilified. We’re adored, but are often at arms length and often only accepted with stipulations. We hold the secrets of our intersections and we’ll pick up the tab. I find pain and freedom in this life, and I am so grateful to be able to share it with you.

If I can leave you with anything, it’s that liberation comes through various revolutions. To me, revolution is relationship. Relationship requires curiosity. Curiosity kills shame. We heal and grow by holding and teaching ourselves and each other how to move through the shame that is so easily pressed upon us via all the oppressive systems at play. The more curious, loving, and expansive we show up to our relationships, the more powerful our revolutions become.