Today our collective is celebrating 8 YEARS of shared organizing, survival, care work and friendship! We’re so grateful for all our comrades and co-strugglers who we’ve learned from and grown alongside all these years (and beyond)! Thank y’all for being in community with us. We’re celebrating all we’ve held down together and with the love and care of so many comrades. Today we give thanks for small, feisty formations who prioritize each other.
In late March of 2016, we organized our first demonstration in solidarity with Alisha Walker and all criminalized/incarcerated sex workers who had survived violence. It was our first formal action as a collective.
Since then, we’ve fundraised, visited, developed friendships and organized alongside Alisha, protested retaliation, found pro bono legal aid for her, launched a grassroots campaign for clemency, and of course, WELCOMED OUR DEAR FRIEND HOME!
We compiled a “syllabus” for political education reading groups for our sex working comrades and accomplices in adjacent queer communities—drawing upon our initial meetings, viewings and discussion groups.
We’ve taken public space, held teach-ins, trainings, knowledge shares, hosted letter writing events, Know Your Rights events, curated community gallery spaces, and hosted crafts workshops to demand rights, respect and protection of sex working people.
We’ve created art and print resources like zines, posters, banners and more to artistically intervene with sex workers’ resistance in visual culture. We’ve created toolkits for Letter Writing to incarcerated folx, as well as for Academic, Media and Health & Wellness professionals to become sex work competent and create ethical conditions for working and learning alongside sex workers.
We’ve published book chapters, articles, created numerous educational zines and participated in popular, community led and academic conferences to talk gender politics, abolition, and our radical whore agenda.
Through Alisha’s inside organizing, we’ve built many comradeships with others inside at Decatur and Logan Correctional Centers/Prisons and continue to maintain comradeships of support. Through another beloved comrade, Ty, we’ve been supporting queer and trans women and femmes currently jailed at Cook County Jail with commissary aid and letters of solidarity. We’ve also joined other sex workers and radicals who are supporting Rene G., an activist, writer and sex worker who’s been criminalized for her politics and participation in racial justice uprisings. You can read more about her case here, and support her commissary fund here. She’s a beloved comrade, pen pal and fellow worker of ours.
We saw the release of one of our comrades, Judy, who we’ve co-authored a book chapter with. We’ve engaged in mutual aid efforts to help Judy and her partner establish their new life together.
We also saw the release of another of our comrades, Lorena*, who after fighting immigration/deportation charges and more, is back with her family and building a new life outside.
During this time, we saw a move to New York for 3 of our comrades, and held down organizing work in NYC, and helped to build radical community amongst current and former sex working people and co-conspirators for over 4 years. We’ve been humbled and thankful to forge bonds with Survived & Punished NY, Hacking//Hustling, Red Canary Song, Kink Out, Bluestockings Cooperative, and other renegade comrades who we learn from everyday! We’ve now got several comrades in Austin, Tx–expanding our crew across the political landscapes of the Midwest, Northeast, and the South.
We’ve embarked on so many personal and political journeys and we’re excited for what’s next by moving slower, with intention and always putting each other first.
We can do a lot more as a community and need to. We’ve got to keep lifting up our incarcerated sex worker family and work to get them free. Especially amidst an ongoing global health crisis and pandemic. More people are learning about and deepening their mutual aid/care practices and it’s so hopeful to see. It’s going to take all of us to resist the death blows of capitalism and the racist whorephobia of carcerality.
Thank y’all for all your support along the way. Our works are only possible in collaboration and learning with y’all.
We’ve got a long fight ahead of us, but having these years behind us, we’ve learned a hell of a lot. We are a small, extremely small, formation, and yet we feel committed and focused. We’ve learned hard lessons, and have fortified bonds of trust and love. You can be small and make shit happen.
We know folx are giving a lot right now. If you have the means, please consider snagging one of our zines to support us, our work and DIY sex worker knowledge sharing, or by visiting our Donate page to find a method of support that feels best for you!
