Let Us Survive: An oral history of sex worker movements before and after FOSTA-SESTA
by The Hacking//Hustling Collective
Episode 2: The Cassandras in the Coal Mine
Intro
MICKEY: Kate D’Adamo, of Reframe Health and Justice, remembers the emotions of 2017, during the era when FOSTA-SESTA the bill was on its way to becoming FOSTA-SESTA the law.
KATE: We knew from day one that SESTA would create the conditions to make that a national, just industry-wide pain. And we knew not only what people experienced after RentBoy and after MyRedBook. They were our friends, they were our peers, they were folks that we all hung out with, and we could talk to each other about that. And so we not only had that kind of understanding of how it was gonna affect us, we also knew what the response was like after RentBoy and how intense it was and how scary the whole thing was and how much it destabilized a lot of things. And so I think it was looking at just consistent damage and pain and recognizing that it was about to hit on a scale that we had never experienced before. And we still had those visceral memories of the other websites that had gone down.
TINA: I’m Tina Horn.
MICKEY: I’m Mickey Mod. We’re sex workers and media-makers. In collaboration with the Hacking//Hustling collective, Tina and I are here to present an oral history of a particular era of sex worker movements. We’re covering a ten year period: leading up to the introduction of FOSTA-SESTA, the passing of the bill into United States federal law, and the aftermath of that passing.
TINA: When Caty Simon of Whose Corner Is It Anyway first heard about FOSTA-SESTA, it seemed like just another bad law that didn’t take into account the people who would be most affected by it. Her people.
CATY: SESTA-FOSTA meant that these were no longer singular, discreet events. That this was going to become a trend in federal law that threatened our access to cheap low threshold advertising as independent workers. And so in the context of that, it was so hard to have any more faith. It was so hard to not see these constant you know, “How To’s” to be anything less than like the flailing of the few, small swaths of sex workers who are privileged enough to be able to survive the latest blow. And SESTA-FOSTA meant that the blows were never ending. They would never stop. I don’t mean to paint such a bleak picture, but that’s what it felt like to me at the time. I feel like we were always bracing ourselves for the next individual blow. And I feel like we were always watchful for the broad language in anti-trafficking legislation that wasn’t actually attuned to the needs of trafficking survivors that could possibly be used against us. But I don’t think we understood, or the sex worker on the street or even the common sex worker in the movement, understood that this would be the ultimate end of those two trends. Or maybe we understood in theory, but those of us who had been just privileged enough to be able to maneuver and keep our scant livelihoods, we thought well, I survived the last one, I can survive the next one. Like you, you can’t really imagine something like SESTA-FOSTA is coming up in the future because then you can’t keep going.
MICKEY: On April 3rd, 2017, the “Allow States and Victims to Fight Online Sex Trafficking Act” was introduced in the House of Representatives by Republican Ann Wagner. By 2018, it was a law, signed by then president Donald Trump.
TINA: But even before FOSTA-SESTA became federal law, sex worker movements were speaking out against it. In organizing rooms, on the streets, in the media. We weren’t just the canaries in the coal mine, we were like Cassandra, the Greek myth of the woman screaming prophecy, whose tragedy is that no one listened to her. Until it was too late.
MICKEY: Why did sex workers speak out against FOSTA-SESTA when it was just a bill? In episode one, we outlined all of the ways sex workers use the Internet. Let’s pause to unpack what this bill package changed about the Internet when it did became law. And what the reverberations have been.
TINA: FOSTA-SESTA, as it’s now widely known, changed the ways the Internet can be legally regulated by the United States federal government. Internet platforms, and the people who run them, are now liable for the content their users post. It’s highly likely that you, the listener, have been a user who has posted content to one of these platforms: we’re talking Facebook, Craigslist, YouTube.
MICKEY: Pre-FOSTA-SESTA, these tech companies weren’t liable for the content posted by users like you, because of something called the Communications Decency Act of 1996. Specifically Section 230 of that Act.
TINA: Section 230 protected Internet platforms from content posted by their third party users. Essentially the idea behind this, was that just because you provide a forum online doesn’t mean you’re responsible for whatever users post there.
MICKEY: Many people, including the ACLU, view Section 230 as a crucial free speech protection: especially in a civilization that has become way, way more online than anyone could have even imagined in the late 1990s.
TINA: Here’s Melissa Gira Grant, author of Playing the Whore: the Work of Sex Work, speaking on Section 230:
MELISSA: What that point is saying that you are the publisher, you are a website operator, you are a forum manager. If you’re running the space where people online are gathering and talking, you are not liable for things that they post. It essentially allowed user generated content to exist. So that each individual piece of content doesn’t have to be considered, whether or not that creates problems for the people who host it. If not for Section 230 there would be no comments on the internet, which sometimes is like, yeah, that would be great. The comments are generally terrible! But it would also mean you can’t post to social media. It would mean there would be no YouTube, there would be no podcasts, there would be no Hacking//Hustling website, many, many things. The internet would not be the internet without it. It’s not just something that benefits sex workers or people who post explicit content. It undergirds the way the internet functions for everyone, for all of these companies, which has made it really unpopular. It’s made chipping away at it, how important it is, especially to business, has made chipping away at it unattractive for most members of Congress. uUntil they were able to successfully do so with SESTA-FOSTA, opening the floodgates to where we are now, where it’s open season on Section 230.
MICKEY: FOSTA-SESTA creates criminal liability for the owners and operators of third party content websites for “knowingly facilitating sex trafficking” and promoting prostitution. It also makes it possible for people to to file civil suits against websites on the grounds that the websites allowed trafficking ads to be posted.
TINA: Like many laws before it, FOSTA-SESTA defines trafficking very broadly. Because of this, a lot of online communication between adults about sexuality, including consensual sex work, can get conflated with forced labor. Which leads to a lot of fear about who will be policed, and why.
MICKEY: Here’s zara raven of Hacking//Hustling, speaking about the things that people who trade sex really want.
zara: Let sex workers and sex trafficking survivors live. So this was a moment where we really started to talk more about the fact that trafficking survivors and people who trade sex, whether by choice, circumstance, or coercion, all needed the same thing. All needed resources, all needed housing, that’s what we all needed to be safe. And there isn’t this, oh, sex workers need Decrim, but survivors need more criminalization. There isn’t this dichotomy. Actually, we all just need resources to be able to be safe. And, you know, obviously more than that, but we can reimagine justice through abolitionist frameworks and we can move away from this idea. And I really feel like restorative and transformative justice, especially in the aftermath of FOSTA and SESTA, really became more popular. So much has happened. 2017 was when the MeToo movement was really picking up. And more and more people were coming forward and sharing their experiences of surviving sexual violence, surviving abuse, and also, a lot of people’s idea of justice at that time or the ways that I saw it being talked about a lot was; and we want convictions, we want lawsuits. And what I was doing in DC on a very small scale was community accountability work. Like how do we support people in being accountable for their behavior? How do we support survivors in accessing the resources they need to be safe, to heal? And how do we think about justice in a different way than the criminal legal system has taught us to think about it? So instead of, when harm happens saying: well, who’s gonna be punished and who are we gonna blame? Transformative justice frameworks and abolitionist frameworks teach us to ask: What do we need to be safe? What do we need to heal? And that puts the focus back on survivors. And that’s what I think criminalization really takes away from us. And I think we were better able to bridge the MeToo conversation and the conversation about Decrim in that moment with FOSTA and SESTA as, you know, the acronym stands for Fight Online Sex Trafficking Act and Stop Enabling Sex Trafficking Act. So they were really emphasizing that they were the ones trying to stop violence, stop sexual exploitation, and that all we cared about were privileged sex workers who were working by choice. And so for me, it felt very important to intervene in that narrative with saying: no, these are not two separate communities. We can all be safe, we all need the same things, we don’t have to pit the needs and the experiences of sex workers against the needs and the experiences of survivors. Many of us are both. And instead, we can come back to: what are the things that people need to be safe? Because criminalization makes the state the victim.
TINA: So trafficking. Forced labor. We want to stop it from happening in the future. We want to stop it when it’s already happening. But limiting online communication about sex in the hopes that those forums will no longer be available to traffickers? That is not the way to make people’s lives better. That is not the way to protect anyone from violence. That is not the way to ensure freedom of speech and self-expression for all. Not for trafficking victims, not for consensual sex workers, not for the general population of people who live in the United States. And by the way, this includes people who identify anywhere along the spectrum of choice-circumstance-coercion when it comes to trading sex.
MICKEY: Sex work activists recognized this right away. Sadly, nobody else seemed to.
TINA: Here’s Elizabeth Ricks, of the Trans Life Care Program at Chicago House. She was heartened to see sex workers organizing against FOSTA-SESTA. But also frustrated when other social justice movements didn’t see the connection between their interests.
ELIZABETH: I think there was a lot of rumblings about: this could happen. I think from an organizing and activist perspective, it was frustrating because it felt a little like people were shouting into the wind. The messaging was clear. But for some reason, folks just weren’t absorbing it. People didn’t understand that the effect would be broader than just the sex worker community. And it was hard to get people in other justice movements engaged. That’s the perpetual thing though, right? Sex worker rights touches so many other justice movements, but then when it’s time to show up for something specifically related to sex work, it’s, you know, dust bunnies. So it was like, bringing a fiber long fire and seeing the boulder coming and trying to get people engaged and taking the, what, 90 seconds it takes to call a legislator. And it just wasn’t sticking. Although I will say, it was pretty amazing; I wasn’t in DC, but I was seeing a lot of pictures and hearing feedback from people to see sex workers taking on lobbying and taking up space in DC. The outcome wasn’t what anybody wanted. But the fact that that happened, I think was really good.
MICKEY: Here’s Caty Simon again, remembering the early rumblings of resistance to FOSTA-SESTA in sex worker organizing.
CATY: I don’t remember when I first heard about it. I feel like it was this constant threat. I can’t remember when I first read the hashtag, LetUsSurvive. Tits and Sass [blog], and before that, $pread [magazine] and before that, so many different sex worker blogs and sex worker writings had been chronicling the seizures, the take down of various ad venues for us for so long. And I know I shouldn’t conflate the Backpage seizure and SESTA-FOSTA, but they happened so quickly in sequence with each other that it’s impossible to not conflate the two in my mind. And you know, SESTA-FOSTA was creating the conditions for the kind of blow that the Backpage seizure was, right? So long, MyRedBook, RentBoy, et cetera, et cetera.
TINA: Lakeesha Harris, of Chicago Volunteer Doulas, remembers this period, too. As we discussed in Episode One, sex working communities had already lost online resources like MyRedBook and RentBoy. Lakeesha observed a pervasive fear among her communities in Chicago and New Orleans: word was getting around that this new law could mean more websites coming down soon. That meant loss of safety resources, among many other things.
LAKEESHA: Oh yes, I do. I remember because a good sex worker friend of mine had come in from New Orleans and I was housing them and they had caught a case in New Orleans and they were doing work here in Chicago and was telling me about the work that they were doing behind some activism against FOSTA-SESTA. And I was like: FOSTA-SESTA, I had never heard of it. At that time, I was doing just individual work, like making sure that sex workers when they come into Chicago had the “Rah Rah Keisha.” Around sex worker advocacy that was not me [at the time]. Yeah, it was the mutual aid stuff, right? It was not the big campaign me. And so, they came in and they were like: oh, I caught this case and Craigslist may be about to go down. And it’s where I get most of my clients from. It is where I vet a lot of my clients. They were telling me as a gender non-conforming person, right, for them they feel safer doing it that way, especially in the South, because they don’t have as many connections there.
MICKEY: Desiree Collins of Colorado Entertainer Coalition remembers hearing about FOSTA-SESTA on Reddit: ironically, one of the message boards that would shut down in response to the eventual passing of the FOSTA-SESTA bill.
DESIREE: So Reddit was one of the places that I was getting information about staying safe in the sex work community. It was really where I was getting a lot of that initial information of not just how to do good business as a dancer, but also how to stay safe, how to make your boundaries, how to enforce your boundaries. All of that mentor-mentee pairing information, but in a forum format. I think there may have also been a little bit of YouTube videos at the time, like there’s a couple of YouTubers who are also strippers who would do like some comedy things, but occasionally bring this up: hey this is this is going to be relevant for us this is why. I think we were so inundated with so many wrongs that were being done all over the place. And it was so hard to sift through and get your voice heard in something as niche as sex worker rights, for the average person who had never heard that term at that time. And so trying to scream from the rooftops: this is so bad, this is going to be so bad in so many different ways, it was just like an echo chamber. Because maybe you reached a few other people, but they were probably also sex workers, and we should have been listened to.
TINA: Kate D’Adamo also remembers that she wasn’t really sure if she had the capacity to fight FOSTA SESTA. She’s about to refer to something called the Justice for Victims of Trafficking Act of 2015.
KATE: So JVTA added advertising to the criminal definition of trafficking. There’s the law that gets passed but then you still have to prosecute the law. And when that went to the Department of Justice, the Department of Justice basically analyzed that addition and said: no, this is still a person who puts up an ad for someone else, we’re not reading this to define it as the platform that’s put on. We’re not gonna change anything about our enforcement based on this. And that pissed a bunch of people off. So once it was clear that they weren’t gonna go after Backpage with this, they went back and created SESTA.
And the other thing I like to always connect this to is: that’s usually what happens in American law, is where they expand criminalization of the sex industry and then once it’s not enforced to satisfaction, expand civil liability and expand who can sue. This is a page out of the red light abatement laws in the 1920s that said that you could sue a brothel for taking down your property values. And so SESTA came out and I remember it was it was really scary as written. But we were still focused on a thousand other things. And all of the internet associations were super against it. And so, no one had the capacity to work on it. And we were working on a thousand other things, mostly at the state and local level still. And at the federal level, we were just sitting down with people and saying: sex work is an issue. And the tech industry has more money than God and they were against it. But I remember the first time [SESTA] was introduced, it was flagged for me. But no one had capacity to work on it.
MICKEY: Here’s Red, of Hacking//Hustling, on the scary and righteous early days of fighting FOSTA-SESTA:
red: I’m just like flooded with memories of panic and fear. I’m also flooded with really frustrating but understandable memories of like the fear mongering or rumor mill kind of stuff that happens, right? When especially oppressed, disenfranchised folks are losing access to any kind of affordable networking or platforms of labor or advertising and fearful that the entire internet was going to become closed off to all of us, right? And so in a landscape like that, you can imagine… you don’t have to imagine, you were there for it. It was really terrifying. And it was terrifying because of what was actually happening, what people thought might happen, right? Wild stuff that really wasn’t likely to happen, but because we are imagining all worst case scenarios, everything is being put out there. And so then the kind of damage control, care work, emotional support that was having to go into on top of the mutual aid networks, right? The immediate crisis management and outreach and all of these things, right? And of course that’s all the scary stuff. There was also a surge, a really bottom-up explosion of organizing protest, cultural resistance, art making, outreach, awareness-raising, toolkit-making, new collectives forming, coalitions coming together, right? Lobbying, electoral politicking and lobbying. So all of this stuff is rushing up around us and we’re all in it, right? You’re thick with it. I was seeing that and experiencing that. And my species being was just like, how do we deal with all of this fear and anxiety and terror and loss of work? And also this cascade of organizing and some very legitimate righteous fury and also joy that was like creeping in and we were allowing ourselves to feel a little bit powerful. Oh my gosh, it changed everything.
TINA: All that and more is coming up on this four part podcast: Let Us Survive.
MICKEY: This is Episode Two: “The Cassandras in the Coal Mine”
Part One
TINA: Shortly after the FOSTA-SESTA bill package was introduced, activists all over the United States started organizing to speak out against it.
MICKEY: Here’s Kate D’Adamo again:
KATE: It definitely came out of the fact that all of us were local organizers. Moving to a national scale. We did what we do, you know? There’s a threat, and you get your people together. And I think that that informed a lot of our decisions. Because we were all place-based organizers who also were like community organizers and labor organizers where it was like, our workplaces under threat. We just got to get our people into the same room and talk about what’s happening. And I don’t know what else to do. There there was a level of urgency. I think one of the things that makes and has made SESTA unique is that: this is not how law happens. A lot of criminal law is the banality of evil. And it happens in these tiny incremental shifts that don’t feel that big. And especially to folks that don’t feel criminalization. Still, it’s hard to wrap your head around. And the laws that we get are about lowering knowledge standards and creating mandatory minimums and collapsing and bifurcating charges. It is very abstract. It is very difficult to not only understand what it’s doing in the law, but also to then predict how things change. And FOSTA SESTA is unlike other anything else I’ve seen where it is a very clear apocrine change that is not in an omnibus bill where you’re talking about a thousand different things, where the people who are analyzing the law are straightforward about how they’re going to use it. Because we’re talking about shitty attorneys generals. The people who are going to be targeted, which were the platforms; yes, obviously your app is not experiencing pain in the same way that a human being is. But the platforms were honest about how bad this was going to be, and we believe them. And we have this pattern of evidence of what was going to happen after everyone was telling us every single step. And we were just using history to say we know what’s going to happen. And so I think having something that clear and that direct is so unique. And so even now that we’re talking about things like FOSTA and EARN-IT, those aren’t as direct. Yes, they’re problematic. And yes, they’re going to have ramifications, but they’re not going to be direct in the same way. But this was. And that, I think, made it unique, not just to bring people together where it was like, no, we’re very serious about what is going to happen. And people believed us. But on top of that, when shit went down, it was very easy to be like, there’s no mystery. The bill passed, it took 20 minutes. Websites went down, this went horrible over here, people are harmed, people are reporting this, people are looking for like, there’s no, it was an omnibus bill that did this, that was then interpreted by this organization who then put out grants that had this contract stipulation, and so you get to the ground and it’s like a pinball that you’ve just watched. FOSTA SESTA was not that, and I think that that does not happen for bills ever in my experience. It happens in reaction. It’s very hard to be proactive. And I think the opportunity to be proactive is something that a lot of people responded to and a lot of people who had felt safe beforehand.
TINA: On February 27, 2018, FOSTA-SESTA passed in the House of Representatives (388 to 25). On March 21, 2018, it passed the Senate (97 to 2). That means major bipartisan support.
MICKEY: A lot of people in congress likely thought they were doing something to rescue and protect victims of sex trafficking. A lot of them probably thought they were helping to build their version of a better world, one where sex workers don’t experience violence from clients and managers because there is no sex industry.
TINA: Still more probably felt put in a position: trafficking bad, FOSTA-SESTA fight trafficking, FOSTA-SESTA good. You don’t want to look like you’re voting in favor of sex traffickers. But that’s what happens when you don’t listen to the people that are actually affected by policies and laws. You can actually contribute to making things worse for the people who you may sincerely want to aid.
MICKEY: A major problem with FOSTA-SESTA is that its authors and supporters did not consult with sex workers and trafficking survivors. It’s also important to remember that many people are both consensual workers and trafficking survivors, and that the choice-circumstance-coercsion lines can be blurry. Congress didn’t actually know how the bill would affect the populations they claimed to be protecting. They also didn’t listen to us when we spoke up. Here’s Kate again.
KATE: And I think it’s also a Nordic model thinking of: I can do this work without having a fundamental understanding of how this industry and community operate.
TINA: Kate is referring here to the Nordic model of sex work criminalization. The Nordic Model, so called because it was developed in Sweden in the 1990s, is also called the End Demand Model. The Nordic or End Demand approach criminalizes clients and managers, not the people doing the actual sexual labor.
MICKEY: But the critics of this model point out that the effect of criminalizing these other parties stills reverberates to the workers themselves. It does not reduce violence and stigma, or improve public health or working conditions. All of which is to say, the data shows that End Demand doesn’t work. The End Demand Model is based on the same premise as FOSTA-SESTA, which is the understanding that if you treat sex work as inherently exploitative and create punitive measures and/or carceral consequences for anyone remotely involved in the buying and selling of sex, you’ll just abolish the sex industry. Which in practice, is just not the way to keep people safe.
TINA: Kate remembers Mary Mazzio, a documentary filmmaker and trafficking victim advocate, calling her with what Mary thought was good news about the development of FOSTA-SESTA. Kate had to break it to her: You just further criminalized me.
KATE: This has gone from: there’s no chance that this is moving, in minutes to: this is a disaster. Because the substitution amendment as it was planned said that instead of the civil liability for platforms, that’s when they replaced it with criminal liability for the sex industry. And the initial draft of it was that it covered, I think right now it says owners of these platforms, managers of these platforms, and people advertising on the platform. So the original language of the substitution amendment also would have criminalized every single person who advertised. And I remember Mary Mazzio calling me and saying: yes, the substitution amendment is going through, but don’t worry, I got the people advertising, we negotiated for that to come out. And I said: congratulations, I run a listserv where people share not just harm reduction information, but client referrals and find each other to work with. I’m a manager of one of those platforms, you just gave me a federal felony. And she paused and clearly didn’t know what to say.
MICKEY: A key example of an online safety tool used by sex workers is what’s known as a Bad Date list. This is a tool that workers use to share negative experiences they’ve had with clients, from timewasters to abusers. And it’s not just the bad stuff, either. There are also listserves — like the one Kate is referring to — where people share harm reduction information, and give referrals, so workers know which clients are good.
TINA: Chibundo Egwuatu, of harm reduction organization HIPS in DC wants to see more of those “good clients” speaking out as sex worker allies. Because everyone involved in the sex trade, from workers to managers to clients to your friend who gave you a ride to work, are implicated in criminalization.
CHIBUNDO: I’ve seen more people who are like: I’m a good client and I’m a sex worker ally, rather than: what does it mean to be a good client? Really the ethical idea of a good client, what would that mean about how I engage in the world and what things I’m responsible for, really pushing it. Because sex workers have been pushing it for some time about thinking deeper and wider about what it means for them to be free. Who else would need to be free? What other issues are they a part of? How this is a disability rights issue, this is a racial justice issue, this is a documentation issue, this is about borders. You know, plenty of sex workers are there. Not seeing the clients there.
MICKEY: Even though the authors and supporters of FOSTA-SESTA didn’t listen to us, we still organized to fight it, and make our voices heard.
TINA: One silver lining, if you can call it that, is that several organizations sprang up in response to the crisis we knew was coming. One of those organizations would become known as Survivors Against SESTA. Here’s Kate on the moment she and other organizers based in New York City knew they needed to start something.
KATE: I sent out a message to a couple other folks that I was organizing with: to Red, Melissa Gira, Nina. And I said, SESTA is moving. Let’s figure out what to do. Within 24 hours planned who was gonna build the website, who was gonna draft talking points, who was gonna start doing outreach, who was gonna put the call on the calendar. And we just started planning that night. And just worked nonstop. I remember sitting on my couch for three days building the website and I would put the laptop on the coffee table and then just lay down and sleep. And then I would get back up, put my laptop back on my lap and I would just keep working. So all of that ended up as Survivors Against SESTA. And that’s what we built that weekend. And started just bringing more people in, started doing outreach, started planning congressional calls to educate staffers alongside community. And also came up with the hashtag, Let Us Survive.
MICKEY: 2017 was a powerful time for social media based activism, the most well-known of which is likely “Hashtag MeToo”. Kate and the other organizers knew they needed a sharable, powerful hashtag.
KATE: I don’t know what it was supposed to be, but I remember we had a list and there was like the top three in the end, and there was one that was picked, and one of the other ones was Let Us Survive, but that was rejected because there were two S’s from two different words next to each other. And so someone said: it’s gonna be misspelled a lot easier if this is the hashtag. And in the flood of just everything we were doing, put up the first post. Fucked up the hashtag and put up let us survive. But it seemed to work out okay. That’s where we built Survivors Against SESTA. It was a website, it was community calls, it was developing talking points and policy analysis. It was outreach to congressional members, first in the Senate. Having individual calls with everyone we could on the judiciary just to beg them to say: stop, especially now that there was this substitution amendment. And so we wanted to pull people together into a physical space. Yeah, we bring our people together to inform, but also just to like not be alone in those moments. Sex Workers Project is in the Urban Justice Center, which has a lot of different projects to it, but we took over the main conference lunch area and just all kind of sat together in one room. I remember feeling anxiety. I remember feeling fear. I remember feeling: I don’t know what else to do. It actually reminded me in some ways of the first meeting we had after RentBoy [raid] where everyone who was advertising on there: we did a Know Your Rights, and it was similar where we just sat in a room and had different people talk and connect to each other and just try to figure out where to go from here.
TINA: I was there, at the Sex Workers Project meeting that day. The Urban Justice Center is in downtown Manhattan, in a big beautiful room with windows overlooking the Hudson River. A lot of very worried people showed up. We sat on a circle on the floor.
KATE: I remember it being a full room. There was a lot of people I didn’t recognize. And I’ve been organizing in New York for years at that point. And that was something I hadn’t experienced in a long time. We put out the call. I think enough people have been talking about it for a while. And this was the first thing that people felt like they could do. I remember that there was Indian food, because we had gotten someone else to do the catering. And they had emailed me that morning. And it was like: just kidding, we can’t do it. And so I had to emergency find a random place. It was an Indian place in lower Manhattan. Where I was like: would like $700 worth of food would be too hard for you in the last second. And they came through for us.
MICKEY: That was the beginning of Survivors Against SESTA and “Hashtag Let Us Survive”. Here’s Red on the community calls and so much more organized by that group:
RED: So Survivors Against SESTA was a small, a very small collective of folks, and folks with experiences in the sex trades, in the commercial sex industry, folks who had been working in the anti-trafficking movement for a very long time, queer, trans folks, disabled sex workers, organizers of color, et cetera, right? And so…Um, these community calls were the most, I think, important, um, both outreach, data collection, support, and like strategizing. Um, efforts that Survivors Against SESTA did, which there was a multi-prong approach. There was social media campaigning, there were campaign calls to elected officials, there were petitions, there were awareness raising campaigns in the forms of toolkits and those kinds of things being circulated. There were in-person meetings that were happening in local or regional ways, but these calls were national calls and they were publicized on our website. So anyone with the number and the access code could get on those calls. And so that meant there were, and there were some screening efforts. I’m not going to go into those details because those are things that keep us safer. And so we don’t want to divulge all of those things, but there were some screening protocols and There were also ways in which the call included certain programming and was like just being kind of like reported and then people could opt in to, you know, like press a button to state your name and like get in kind of a queue to speak. So there was like a lot of internal organizing on those calls themselves and they were attended by dozens and dozens and dozens of people (01:08:17.155) At one point, one of the calls, we had over 100 call participants. So we’re talking about like mass communication in real time on a telephone line.
TINA: Something you’ll hear over and over again from organizers is: feed people. Feed them real hot meals. Give them Metrocards and gas money. Give them cash stipends. Don’t give them Starbucks gift cards. Here’s Caty Simon talking about her experiences with needle exchange programs in Massachusetts, part of what inspired her to co-found Whose Corner Is It Anyway.
CATY: We have to pay people for attendance if you wanna do some sort of group, because people cannot afford the opportunity cost of time lost where they could be doing black market work, sorry, illegitimate market work. Otherwise, they simply cannot afford it, especially considering Fentanyl’s much smaller half-life. People are going into withdrawal much faster these days. You just can’t do it. And they were like, “Well, the state is only going to let us give out gift cards.” And so I was like, “You know, a gift card is insulting, you know, it is.” And this, this is something I would reincarnate to lecture researchers and drug use research about many, many times over: so they have the agency to participate in your programming, but they don’t have the agency to decide what to do with their own money? It’s actually another cost. Your respectability politics and the state’s respectability politics are another cost for people because then they have to go trade in those gift cards for cash for less than its actual market value.
MICKEY: Whose Corner is It Anyway was another organization that sprung up after FOSTA-SESTA was introduced as a bill. Harm reduction organizers in rural Massachusetts knew there was going to be an increase in the need for fundamentals like rent, food, utilities, and medicine, not to mention peer emotional support. A place for people outside the system to use a bathroom, get resources, get educated. The services people actually want. Not more criminalization like FOSTA-SESTA.
TINA: Here’s Caty again, talking about using the digital platform Go Fund Me to raise money for mutual aid:
CATY: So I was like, I’m just gonna start a GoFundMe. Ha ha ha, who knows? Maybe it’ll make like a few hundred dollars. Maybe I’ll make a thousand dollars and we could just pay a few people to come sit around and talk and we’ll provide harm reduction supplies and we’ll just start talking to sex workers working in the area and see what their concerns are and blah, blah. And I guess I kind of sold and traded on all the social capital I’d accumulated in two decades, because the fundraiser exploded and it did really well. It was October, 2017 when we first had our first meeting. Because we were funding it through crowdfunding, completely outside of tapestry, who didn’t want to do what we wanted to do anyways? Whose Corner Is It Anyway ran the only underground women’s and non-men only safe consumption sites in the area for two years until we heard some credible rumors that it was no longer safe to do so. It’s something we hope to do again at some point. That was all the things that we wanted to do, you know, pay unbanked people accessibly in cash in order for both their attendance and for doing mutual aid for each other in an accessible way. It was just not something that the syringe service provider was gonna follow us into. And so they quickly became actually so resentful of us that they made it such a hassle to get supplies from them that we had to start buying them ourselves. So within a few months, we had just kind of become our own organization. And then, we just started adding elements to what we wanted to do with it. Before COVID for two years, the main nucleus of Whose Corner was the weekly and biweekly meetings. People would be paid like 25 bucks for their attendance. And the meetings would be a place, you could go use a safer bathroom, use a safe consumption site, sit for presentations for national and local experts on sex work, harm reduction. You know, we did one for the local court watch, we did one with the nurse coming in to do stuff about wound care. The funniest thing is one of the most popular ones among our members was one where someone came in and did a presentation on facilitation for sex worker and drug user spaces, because facilitation and translation rotated through the meetings. So everyone had their own opinion about how to do it. It was some pretty shabby stuff. We were doing these presentations on this old projector. So everyone was sitting around, up to 80 people were sitting around this old projector straining to hear these presentations. But then yeah, they could get a cup of coffee. We contracted the services of a transformative justice expert. So they had office hours in the back of our meeting sites, and people would come to them and be like, “I hate that bitch.” And then the other person involved in the argument would come to the back and talk to the transformative justice expert and be like, “I hate that bitch too. She’s worse than I am. I hate her and she has no right to hate me.” And somehow conflicts would be resolved this way. I don’t know how. And then through a partnership with the Massachusetts Bail Fund, we started to do bail fund for our members directly from lockup, which reduced their overdose risk because it reduced the time they spent incarcerated. Of course, what you want to immediately do after you get out of lockup is you want to get fucking well. We’d meet people at the door with harm reduction supplies and [give them] the talk about, “Hey, your tolerance is a little lower now, blah, blah.” We had the bad date book. We were able to have group conversations with people, have group decision making. One of the most surprising revelations that came out of the first year or two was that people hated and feared hospitals even more than they hated cops. The area hospitals were so abusive, so stigmatizing. We had people like rip pick lines out of people and say things like, “You better just sign out against medical advice right now because I don’t have time for your junky bullshit.” And I don’t even want to repeat what they said about people’s sex work.
MICKEY: There are many wonderful health care providers in the world. But Caty’s story speaks to a reality faced by many marginalized folks. Doctors and therapists and legal offices, hospitals, clinics, and Congress: they’re run by people. Fallible human beings. And people have confirmation biases, prejudices, and judgements.
TINA: Sex workers are seen as vectors of disease, as people who have made shameful choices that make them less worthy of rights and care, as victims who don’t know what we really need. Meanwhile, the Medical Industrial Complex facilitates those biases on a systemic level.
MICKEY: The work that Whose Corner does speaks to the fact that sex workers help each other because we do know what we need.
TINA: Mutual aid has always been a crucial strategy in sex worker response to crisis. Here’s zara raven on how mutual aid has changed since FOSTA SESTA, and since the COVID-19 pandemic.
zara: Yeah, I think we got a lot more organized in 2020. We had some lessons learned, the decrim campaigns in New York and DC. Basically, it would be me finding some funding from somewhere and then CashApp-ing people. After the fifth person I’d get locked out of my CashApp and I’d be like, “Okay you all get paid tomorrow.” I think now with these bigger networks it’s like, “Okay I’m gonna pay this five, you’re gonna pay this five, we’re gonna we’re gonna find better ways to distribute these funds knowing we’re gonna get locked out of our CashApp accounts because it’s not like CashApp, PayPal, Venmo are not still policing us and shutting down our accounts and targeting our accounts. For me, it was a lot of Google Forms spreadsheets and being specific about our guidelines. Like, the Black Mutual Aid Initiative, we were like, this is for Black folks. Black means people of African descent. We had to be pretty specific, because we know that things get interpreted in different ways by different people. Not wanting barriers. You don’t have to prove that you’re poor, you don’t have to send your light bill in, you don’t have to tell me who your baby daddy is, we don’t want to be the state. Letting people just apply, not prove their need, we trust that if you’re applying for mutual aid it’s because you need it.
Part Two
MICKEY: Meanwhile, in other parts of the sex industry, federal law couldn’t have been further from workers’ minds.
TINA: In some cases, that was because they didn’t think it would affect them. Here’s M from the Adult Performer Advocacy Committee, on the porn performers who didn’t see themselves in solidarity with other parts of the industry. And why that was a mistake.
M: There are some folks, and they may come with some privilege: “I’ll survive, I’ll be fine, it’s not really my problem.” Lateral whorephobia. “Well, it’s not my problem because I’m not a full service worker, right? It’s not really my problem because I’m not doing XYZ.” I’m like, “But it is, it is everyone’s problem actually.”
MICKEY: So in some cases the disconnect between different parts of the industry had to do with having privilege. But in some cases it was the opposite. Some workers had more immediate problems to deal with than the looming threat of FOSTA-SESTA. Problems that — spoiler alert — this law, that was supposed to help them? Wasn’t going to help with at all.
TINA: Desiree Collins was dancing at a club in Tuscon Arizona, at the time FOSTA-SESTA was introduced as a bill. She was trying to organize her fellow workers, but finding it challenging.
DESIREE: I remember it coming from different angles of internet privacy laws, of internet sovereignty aspects coming into it, as well as the sex work coming into it. And I was like, maybe I should like talk to some people in the club here, like if anybody else knows anything about this. And there was one other person who is also a student. She was a communications major, and so she had heard about it as well. But we were the only ones. I think in my head, I was like, yeah, I’m gonna rally the troops around this idea, the thing that they should really be aware of. This could really affect a lot of our lives. And everyone was just like, “Girl, I’m just trying to make…stop politicizing this.” So it wasn’t very successful at first, at least in the in-person organizing sense, other than that one other dancer that I kind of commiserated with. And it was kind of meta for me at the moment, because I still saw myself as being part of the community, but at the time I was only dancing. And so I was like, how much can I really do from this place? No one around me is really interested. I’m only hearing about it online, and I don’t know how to connect to anyone else. It was a little isolating in a way, because I just didn’t have that community yet. I was kind of a newbie.
MICKEY: Marla Cruz, a sex worker and activist who frequently tweets about labor, cats, and baking to over 50 thousand Twitter followers, was working in a Dallas strip club around this time. Marla says that no one was talking about FOSTA-SESTA there, either. She and her fellow dancers were already dealing with so much. An abusive culture of predatory managers. Clients expecting full service.
MARLA: I had a handful of close friends that kept up with the politics of sex work in various ways. But Dallas is such a tough environment for radicalizing people and for pulling people towards the left and into political organizing.
TINA: Twitter offered Marla a platform to find and provide support with fellow workers, to make her voice heard with humor and humanity and political know-how. But when it came down to it, Twitter couldn’t protect her from the violence she experienced at the club. Violence from people enabled by the criminalization of her trade. And the stigmatization of strippers, too. Because technically dancing in a club is legal work; but all kinds of labor abuses thrive in stigmatized environments. Labor rights, not white knights, are what keep us all safe from what Marla was going through.
MARLA: Politicizing dancers wasn’t just about building worker power against management and building leverage in those interactions with customers. It was also navigating a handful of notoriously violent people. When I was dancing in Dallas for a couple of years, I knew at least two dancers who were shot by pimps. And so there was a level of violence there. It scared me off. It wasn’t just worrying about the managers because I was one of those girls doing extras. I wasn’t any different than my fellow coworkers who were selling sexual services and champagne rooms. I certainly wasn’t above that. Never have been, probably never will be. But I had to be concerned about whether the managers would suddenly decide to not look the other way. To suddenly decide that the tip-out that I would get my customer to hand over to the manager to knock on the side of the door before they actually enter the VIP room, maybe that kind of amicable exchange would not be so amicable. And suddenly I would be at risk of criminal charges for selling sexual services in that capacity. But in this environment, it was so unique in the factors that were coming together, that were pulling against the kind of politicalization, the kind of radicalization required to build that kind of worker power. I’m not going to pretend as though I was brave enough to push back against that kind of environment, because I had to be concerned about my safety. I had to be concerned about whether I could face criminal charges. I had to be concerned about the violence from the customers, which is a whole ‘nother beast in and of itself. It was very easy to get on Twitter and complain about it, and find that camaraderie with other dancers who were in my position of facing a really tough, unsafe working environment. And not really having any sort of political outlet for it, not really having any set organization to turn to build that kind of worker power, and just kind of trying to find that camaraderie amongst people who were having those same experiences, and just like me not really having anywhere to turn to. Absolutely. Twitter was such a saving grace for me in terms of dealing with that constant barrage of sexual violence. It’s tough to think about because if I tried to reflect on every single instance of sexual violence I faced in the club, I would never think about anything else. Like I literally would not have time to think about everything to think about anything else. If I tried to reflect on every single experience I had in that club. And like I said, it was a uniquely unsafe working environment. This club did not have bouncers. There were a handful of managers who would work the floor. But there was nobody making sure that dancers were safe in the champagne room, for example. Yeah, so getting on Twitter and not just learning that I wasn’t alone, but learning that people were interested in my perspective as a stripper, you know, non-sex workers who are interested in my perspective as a stripper who also did full service in and outside of the club was a little bit of a salve in working in that environment. It’s interesting being on Twitter, you know, I have a lot of followers and people really think that like means something. People put weight to that. And of course, I’m grateful to have that kind of platform.
MICKEY: Let’s be clear about something. Sex work can be dangerous. It’s dangerous in the club, it’s dangerous on the street, in the dungeon, on porn sets, in high end hotels. There are many explanations for the physical violence and mental abuses visited on all kinds of sex workers from the police, from clients, from managers, even from one another. As we figure out how to fight the root causes of that violence, we need tools to keep ourselves and one another safe. For a time, access to online platforms actually helped with that.
TINA: A lot of people hear stories like Marla’s, stories of violence, and think: we need to abolish the sex industry. But decriminalization, not increased regulation, is what would actually keep sex workers safe. Hear me now and believe me later: sex workers want rights, not rescue. Housing, not handcuffs. Respect, not police raids.
MICKEY: But during the 2017-2021 Trump administration, it seemed like the wider the spread of our online profiles, the bolder our protest signs, and the louder our chants in the streets calling for decriminalization, the more we were just dealing with new bad laws. And more brutal methods of enforcement.
TINA: By 2017, when FOSTA-SESTA was introduced as a bill, many of those safety tools and community resources were online. Sex worker activists knew that making web platforms liable for content related to sex work meant the platforms would disappear: either through law enforcement raids, or preemptive self-censorship by the tech companies themselves.
MICKEY: And despite all our fighting and screaming, sex worker movements didn’t have enough support. Chibundo has a theory as to why:
CHIBUNDO: I think that the comfort with sex workers being at the bottom means that as long as you’re not a sex worker, you are in a position of relative power. That’s a very simple way to be a powerful person. I think you see with a lot of different marginalized and stigmatized behaviors and activities and careers. Like not using drugs, all of a sudden you’re a fucking saint compared to someone who uses drugs. Not being homeless, all of a sudden you are a good person for being able to pay rent, you know? These are very easy moral plays of showing that you’re a proper citizen. And of course you don’t have power that matters, but you do have the power to put people lower, to make yourself at least relatively higher.
Outro
TINA: Despite the work of movement organizers, despite the media being more on our side than ever before, by early spring 2018, activists knew FOSTA-SESTA was going to become law. Here’s Marla.
MARLA: We’re talking specifically about SESTA-FOSTA today but…There’s just a relentless barrage of losses. When you’re a sex worker, it feels like loss after loss after loss. Whether it’s in policy, whether it’s in the economic recessions, whether it’s in our personal lives. It’s difficult to find the bright spots. It’s difficult to find the wins in all of this.
MICKEY: Here’s Caty, on a piece she wrote for Tits and Sass, a seminal media site by and for sex workers.
CATY: I think I wrote about this in my eulogy for Backpage on Tits and Sass. We had this routine as a community of dealing with these blows; okay, this has happened, how do we adapt? How do we modify our business practices and survive? Not thinking about the fact that a smaller and smaller margin of us will be able to survive. That the people who die from suicide, from poverty, from overdose, from whatever, are always going to be… Those of us who are intersectionally marginalized, the poorest, the most disabled, the most racially oppressed, et cetera, among us, right? But we immediately try to lift up each other’s spirits and say, “If you just do XYZ, then you too can weather this, we will keep fighting politically, et cetera, et cetera.” But every single time that pep talk rang less and less true.
TINA: In Episode Three, we’ll be discussing what happened when FOSTA-SESTA became law, and whether the screaming Cassandras in the coal mine were right. And yeah… pretty much everything we said was going to happen, did happen. Things got pretty grim. Here’s Kate:
KATE: I remember knowing it was going to pass. One of the hardest things about organizing is even if you know the bill is going to pass, you can’t do nothing. You still have to organize, and you still have to organize with hope. Not just for yourself, but you have to organize with enough hope to get other people to believe that it’s important to do the work. That is a really hard balance when you are also afraid that you’re going to set people up immediately to fail.
MICKEY: Here’s Chibundo:
CHIBUNDO: Because if you are able to dictate how people have sex, you’re dictating almost everything in their adult lives.
TINA: That’s what you can expect next time on Let Us Survive, an oral history project from the Hacking//Hustling collective.
MICKEY: To learn more about this project, other research by Hacking Hustling, and more about the past present and future of sex worker movements, please visit HackingHustling dot org.
TINA: These interviews were conducted in 2023. Some facts and perspectives may have evolved since then.
MICKEY: This podcast was hosted, produced, written, recorded, and edited by Tina Horn and Mickey Mod.