We’re so grateful to everyone who showed up in love, solidarity and grief this past week to honor International Day to End Violence Against Sex Workers. You were part of countless sex working and trading people around the world who organized, gathered, raised their voices and demands for a better world for whores. Thank you; the work continues!
Our collective wrote the following statement to commemorate the day:
Dearest comrades, fellow whores,
Support Ho(s)e is sending you and yours big love and rage tonight. However you need to feel or be, we’ve got you.
There are so many names, too many names again this year: people, workers, hustlers, friends, family. Whether you sign, whisper, speak or shout their names, please know you’re heard, loved, and that they are uplifted tonight and always.
Much of the violence people experience while selling or trading sex is at the hands of the carceral state; the sexual and physical violence experienced at the hands of clients, abusive intimate partners and neighborhood vigilantes is a direct result of the state’s permissiveness of all forms of violence toward those stigmatized, marginalized and criminalized in society. The criminal codes, the cops and the courts (all of which are manifestations of white supremacy) sanction gender and sexual violence every day. Even our loved one’s decisions to no longer share this earthly plane often have direct ties to the exhaustion and anguish from surviving systemic violence and chronic pain.
Truly this world makes it hard, and often impossible, for whores to keep living. And yet, we are here. Right now. We are alive, and breathing, sharing space and remembering. We are still here. Even though the state and its violent agents have done their best to see otherwise. What do we do with this time? These memories? The horrors? This grief? Can we sit them alongside the joys, the resistance, the hope too? This night is a night to mourn, and our collective also believes it’s a night to recommit ourselves to the struggle for a world that loves and protects whores. A world where we may even dare to eradicate all work, and live, fully, unapologetically, realizing all of our wild hopes and dreams.
When you feel alone on your stroll, at your in-call, on that (fucking) date, remember, we’re with you in struggle.
[Collective moment of rage outside to close out, on three we scream.]
Chicago D17, photo by L.
From one of the Chicago organizers, “The Chicago event was heavy and beautiful. So many people uplifted [Mistress] Velvet. Lots of tears cried. Snacks had. Laughs laughed. Haymarket [House] was a great venue and the allies showed the fuck up with helping facilitate the event. So many workers felt seen and got to share what they needed to say.”
Our comrade, Red, was invited to be the guest writer for Buttons of the Left‘s December 17th post which uplifted COYOTE! You can follow that amazing project here, and read the post here!
COYOTE button, c. 1980s, photo by BOTL
Upcoming Austin, Tx events for SWers we want to amplify:
Please join us for Dinner, Movement practice (with Kayla) and Authentic Relating (T-group with Diana Prince).
🗓 Saturday, December 27th | 1:45 – 5PM 📍 Where: Private residence near 183 & MLK RSVP for exact address here.
In NYC, our former political organizing home, Bluestockings Cooperative, is having a sunset blowout sale TODAY (and next Saturday 12/27), please go show them some love and help them settle tremendous debts the worker-owners are left with! The sale will be from 12 – 5 PM at 116 Suffolk St (see flyer for details), and feature furniture, books, merchandise, art, appliances and more! The worker-owners are also working with a dear comrade to split proceeds amongst a few prisoner support and abolitionist organizations. Even amidst the tumult, Raquel and Merlin are showing up for community. We send them love and respect!
A few comrade organizations in the U.S. we want to highlight during this giving season:
December 17th is swiftly approaching. D17 or International Day to End Violence Against Sex Workers, is the sex working community’s annual day of remembrance and rage, where many of us gather to mourn our dead and recommit ourselves to the struggle for decriminalization and destigmatization of the sex trades. We need more people to recognize this day, and our fights for justice, alongside us.
You can speak the names of sex workers lost to violence this, and last year, here. SWOP Behind Bars and SWOP USA compile and share the list of community members killed each year by police, violent clients, intimate partners, and prisons. During our protest vigils we also often uplift those comrades no longer with us because of illness and suicide. Whoever’s name you speak or sign on December 17th, know that there are a chorus of voices with you also saying: Not. One. More.
In Chicago, Support Ho(s)e along with other trusted comrades, are hosting an indoor community grief gathering on the north side:
Join us at 6:30 PM on December 17th at Haymarket House for our annual night of grief and rage in honor of International Day to End Violence Against Sex Workers. We will gather, read the names of our sex worker siblings who have died this year, honor all the workers we’ve lost with a temporary alter, and share community. Light refreshments and warm beverages will be served. Bring a friend, a poem, an offering for the altar, or just yourself. This event is open to current/former sex workers and our accomplices who stand in mourning with us. There will be a mental health professional on site to assist with any de-escalation needs, or should anyone wish to speak with her.
This is a masks required event, and there will be a HEPA air filter running at all times. A mask will be provided if you don’t have one. Haymarket House is wheelchair accessible through ramp, which is located around the back of the building accessible through the parking lot. To get to the parking lot, you enter through the gates on Clarendon and folks are welcome to park there if they have mobility needs.
If you would like to donate food, flowers, or volunteering with event coordination, please DM or email tidalpoolgrief@protonmail.com for more info.
In Austin, Support Ho(s)e is organizing an outdoor protest vigil on Wednesday, December 17th, from 7:30 – 8:30 PM at Republic Square Park. Republic Square Park is one of the last remaining landmarks of Austin’s red-light district, Guy Town, which flourished from 1870 to 1913, and was an inner-Austin, eight-block area bordered by present day Congress Avenue, the Colorado River, Guadalupe Street, and Fourth Street.
We’ll gather, light candles, read, speak and sign the names of fallen comrades and hold a collective moment of rage.
We ask that you dress warmly, and bring signs with loved ones names. We’ll provide candles and blankets.
We’re always fundraising to move resources to our loved ones who’ve experienced violence while working, who are currently and formerly incarcerated, and who need to take time away from hustling to heal. Please consider sending something our way this giving season.
Dearest comrades and fellow hustlers, we’re sending immense care and strength to all y’all. Everyday there are new horrors, but there are also new visions of resistance and love. We’re here, we’re with you in struggle.
Here’s what we’ve been up to [at least what we *can* put out there on the internet] during the Fall, and what’s on the whoreizon for us this Winter.
Since August, we’ve been fundraising for our beloved comrade, Cam, to be able to settle past rent and start over. You can show up for them by sharing and giving to this fundraiser. As the holidays roll around, it would be great if we could get this fundraiser unstuck!
Back in early October, Alisha attended the national convening for Survived & Punished, on our collective’s behalf out in Oakland, CA. Here’s some excerpts from her talking notes thinking through the role and importance of Survivor Defense Campaigns in abolitionist feminist organizing:
“For us, in Support Ho(s)e, over these past ten years, it’s been a mixture of survivor defense campaigns–from my case, we launched the Justice for Alisha Walker campaign, and participated in several other campaigns as well. We spoke extensively with bail/bond fund comrades about the importance of supporting Chrystul Kizer, we worked on the Free All Dykes campaign to get our comrades home from federal lockup, and of course signed onto other clemency campaigns and grassroots efforts.”
She continued, “Personally I think the role and importance of survivor defense campaigns can’t be overstated. This is both how we build trust and connection AND help our comrades get free. It humanizes people inside prisons AND it does that practical work of challenging systems that invisibilizes folks.“
Later in October, Red joined Mariame Kaba on Kelly Hayes’ podcast Movement Memos to talk collectively about zines, making things together, anti-fascism and survival. You can listen to their conversation here.
In early November, our comrades Donna Dante and Kaia, attended a convening gathered by Community Justice Exchange in Chicago to talk about the insidious of care-washing and how to build across movements.
Then, Donna Dante and Kaia repped us at MadMade Print Fair! MadMade was a one-day, community-centered event on November 15th, held at Access Living, designed to celebrate, support, and showcase the creative work of artists living with psychiatric disabilities and mental health challenges. This is not just another craft fair—it’s a space built on inclusion, care, and cultural empowerment. MadMade was open to individuals and collectives with a focus on first person experience. They distributed zines, narcan, and other print resources.
This fair is a mad-positive, disability-affirming event focusing on individuals themselves, rather than their involvement in diagnosis or treatment, highlighting first-person experience regardless of formal diagnosis. It offers a counter-narrative to both the clinical and romanticized depictions of mental illness. Instead, it centers real people making real work that is beautiful, messy, joyful, angry, thoughtful work that opens conversation and creates community experience.
Over the past two weekends, our comrades Red & AH traveled to San Juan, Puerto Rico to attend and present at the National Women’s Studies Association and the American Studies Association annual conferences. Red participated in the panel Whore Excess (at NWSA) with their talk, “Whores: The Outside/rs Outsider” alongside Kassandra Sparks, Lena Chen, Dr. Ayanna Dozier, and Dr. Lauren Levitt as well as the panel Surveillance Sex: Carcerality and Representation in Sex Worker Archives (at ASA) alongside Dr. Elena Shih, Dr. Ayanna Dozier, and Kassandra Sparks. AH participated in the Trans/Gender-Variant Caucus sponsored panel, Emergent Genealogies of Trans Identities, with their talk: “Must Trans Be Eternal? Against Prehistory as Prerequisite for Trans Persistence,” alongside Peter Cava, Porkorny Frankie, and C. Libby. Being able to connect our research, thought-work and art with other comrade-academics and worker-artists was really inspiring.
Join organizers (& besties) Red Schulte & Jenny Espino in conversation with organizer-editor Kelly Hayes to talk grief, hope & how to navigate the woes of justice work. Copies of Read This When Things Fall Apart: Letters for Activists in Crisiswill be available! Masks required & provided! You can read an excerpt from Red’s essay at Truthout here.
We can’t believe that summer is already drawing to a close. Our outside crew based in Austin, Akron, Chicago, and NYC, our inside crew incarcerated in Cook County, downstate Illinois and Upstate New York currently, has been busy building AND resting. Over this summer, we’ve held political and social gatherings for fellow workers and co-conspirators alike, we launched an emergency relief fund for sex workers impacted by the Hill Country floods in Texas, we’ve tabled at two awesome zine fests in Chicago, debuted new zines and print resources, we’ve got new and ongoing projects to plug and most importantly we’re trying to find our penpal, Nona.
Read on for the latest on what we’re up to, and how you can plug into our corner of the sex worker organizing movement.
URGENT! Chicago! Help Us Find Nona! Nona Daniels is a penpal and (formerly) inside comrade-contact of ours who had come home to Chicago. We’re so devastated to hear that she’s now missing, as of Sunday, 7/13. She’s 24 years young, full of life and humor, and was last seen near the 2000 block of E. 93rd St. Please help us find our comrade, and get her some community love and support. If she wants to stay gone and/or lay low, we totally understand. But if something has happened, we want to act swiftly to make sure she’s safe. If you hear anything please reach out to us via our contact form. (Yes, a missing person’s report has been officially filed. The official language of the report (see below image) says she “suffers” from Bipolar Disorder, and we firmly reject that framing and characterization of this loved one’s diagnosis.)
Help Cam Settle Rent & Start Over!
From our dear comrade Cam aka Collage, “I’m unfortunately behind on shared bills, rent and expenses for the collective house I was living in for the past five years, and I want to ensure I’m able to make my transition on to a new chapter without leaving my housemates holding the bag. I’m hoping to sustain living in a new space, pay off some of my car debt, and get back on my feet. This fundraiser would directly contribute to my financial needs, but also it would mean my former housemates–which include queer, trans, and formerly incarcerated community members– would be able to pay all our house bills, but more importantly be safe and taken care of.” Donate to and share their fundraiser,here.
Beach Day Recap! Our annual Combabes Beach Day was such a balm! Co-workers and our co-conspirators gathered to vent, splash around, sunbathe, and connect with each other. We can’t stress enough how important intentional days of rest and community connection can be, especially in these times. Do you want to co-host an event with us, or need help organizing your own community rest-n-connect day? Reach out to us via our contact form, we’re here to offer grassroots organizing experiences for social, political, restful gatherings and beyond!
Welcome To Chicago! Our Chicago fam is growing! Two comrade-dancers are relocating from Austin, Tx to Chicago in late August–so let’s show them a big Midwest welcome while they get settled in, find work, and build community! They’ve marched for justice and worked poles all over this country, and we’re blessed to have them heading our way. Kai is especially wanting to connect with queer and trans community, radical dancer community and the Lebanese community. They recently graduated and obtained their license as an esthetician @angelface.esthetix, and want to provide care for SWer fam. Hire them! Izz wants to connect with queer and trans community, film nerds, radical dancer community, and photography-heads! They have a background in dance and theater, as well as extensive experience as a model. Check out their amazing work here. Hire them!
Project Updates:
We’re opening up a few spots in our “Parent & Care-giver Support” crew, if you or someone you know is a sex working parent or care-giver who is currently or formerly incarcerated and in need of urgent support funds, please direct applications to our funding circle here.
We’re trying (real hard) to get a cohort of organizers in the trade across Chicago together to talk shop and strategize. Our goal with this is to launch a Chicago Whores Caucus, that brings different organizations, collectives, and workers together to dream big about our labor and solidarity. It’s lofty af, and has been very slow going. If you are a radical with experience in the trades and part of a formation, please give us a holler (using this encrypted link).
Our Emergency Flood Relief mutual aid efforts got funds to 3 sex workers displaced after the Central Texas Hill Country Floods. Thank you to everyone who snapped into action around this work with us! If someone you know is still experiencing hardship due to the floods, direct them here (we’ll consider requests on a case by case basis through August).
Donna | Dante is organizing an upcoming RAGEHER fundraiser Basketball Game, at the Chicago Athletic Association’s Stagg Court on Monday, August 25th from 6:30 – 10 PM. It’s a feel good pick up game, featuring live music during halftime, with $15 donation entry. RSVPhere.
“Lemme tell you a quick story to give you some behind the scenes on my next event. Amongst other news the silent killer in the United States is stress, primarily for femmes carrying the weight of family, workplace and education especially first gen elder sibs. Stress kills. The cortisol, the escapist behaviors, the self sabotage, the isolation from focusing on income to survive, it’s hurtful to the body and the mind. I found this out after years fighting infections and changing my diet, exercise but not experiencing relief. I had a hot body, a great style, a cool job but I was not managing my stress, not removing harmful lovers, friends, and working way too much. It took my first black female doc to really school me and bless me and say the lifestyle you have and the man you are seeing is killing you by stressing you (surveillance, judgements, accusations, false productivity beliefs, no rest). I thought wow food, water, exercise isn’t enough, my peace is the path back to my health. Often times stress manifests as irritability, snappiness, impulsive behavior, rushing, and more. Taking the time to express just anger at the harm in your life, the horrors going on worldwide from that helpless feeling to the guilty feelings, taking the time to rage whether that be through a pillow, breaking or throwing items like ice or water balloons, twisting, ripping or shredding paper, these are the things that can bring you back to life. Don’t let the anger eat at you, your anger is valid, let it out before it escalates, escapes or sabotages someone or something you love. This is how the RAGEher event was born. Donations support paying healers to support regrounding, compensating our lovely DJ, and of course providing as many materials and goodies for femmes who come through. It’s time to release without a fear we are mean or rude. You are not too much, you just need to practice releasing your rage as much as you practice filling the cup of your loved ones.” -DDMGM
Okay, but this summer has flown by in a flurry of activity, rapid response, reconnection, and zines! We launched an emergency relief fund for sex workers impacted by the Hill Country floods in Texas, we’ve tabled at two awesome zine fests in Chicago, we’ve got new and ongoing projects to plug and most importantly we’re trying to find our penpal, Nona. Read on for the latest on what we’re up to, and how you can plug into sex worker organizing movement.
URGENT! Chicago! Help Us Find Nona!
Nona Daniels is a penpal and (formerly) inside comrade-contact of ours who had come home to Chicago. We’re so devastated to hear that she’s now missing, as of Sunday, 7/13. She’s 24 years young, full of life and humor, and was last seen near the 2000 block of E. 93rd St. Please help us find our comrade, and get her some community love and support. If she wants to stay gone and/or lay low, we totally understand. But if something has happened, we want to act swiftly to make sure she’s safe. If you hear anything please reach out to us via our contact form. (Yes, a missing person’s report has been officially filed. The official language of the report (see below image) says she “suffers” from Bipolar Disorder, and we firmly reject that framing and characterization of this loved one’s diagnosis.)
Chicago Zine Fest Recap!
What a whirlwind of a day! We tabled all day in the Harold Washington Library’s Winter Garden on Saturday, the 19th! Our table neighbors and all of the attendees were so warm and welcoming—we had many great conversations throughout the day about decrim, solidarity, building whore power, and community care for our loved ones who come home from prison! To everyone who snagged some zines, we are now able to meet all of our comrade’s commissary and outreach stipend needs for the next 3 months! Y’all made that happen! We distributed 20 doses of narcan, 200+ condoms, and 50+ drug testing strips! Plus we got to catch up with loads of zine pals and sex working comrades!
South Side Zine Fest Recap!
South Side Zine Fest was so damn lovely! We tabled all day this past Saturday, the 26th, down in Bridgeport at the Richard J. Daley Branch. Thanks to everyone who came through and showed us love—it means the world to us! We had great table neighbors from Midwest Books to Prisoners and Midwest Perzine Fest! We also distributed over 50 condoms, 40 drug testing strips and 10 doses of narcan! Much respect to the amazing Zine Club Chicago organizers who put on such a great fest! This fest felt like a long time coming, we have South Side roots and it felt good to be back and plugged into such a beautiful library space. This library branch has a real commitment to harm reduction that goes above and beyond city library policy. They’re really showing up for our people!
Rest & Recharge With Us!
Our annual Combabes Beach Day in upcoming, on Sunday, August 3rd, from 2 – 6 PM! Ask a local sex worker pal for the location (or if you’re new in town, send us a message via our contact form). Come lay out, rest, swim and talk shop with the Support Ho(s)e Crew! BYOB and we’ll have a little tent and some snacks to share! FREE harm reduction supplies and print resources will be available too!
New Projects!
We’re opening up a few spots in our “Parent & Care-giver Support” crew, if you or someone you know is a sex working parent or care-giver who is currently or formerly incarcerated and in need of urgent support funds, please direct applications to our funding circle here.
We’re trying (real hard) to get a cohort of organizers in the trade across Chicago together to talk shop and strategize. Our goal with this is to launch a Chicago Whores Caucus, that brings different organizations, collectives, and workers together to dream big about our labor and solidarity. It’s lofty af, and has been very slow going. If you are a radical with experience in the trades and part of a formation, please give us a holler (using this encrypted link).
Our Emergency Flood Relief mutual aid efforts got funds to 3 sex workers displaced after the Central Texas Hill Country Floods. Thank you to everyone who snapped into action around this work with us! If someone you know is still experiencing hardship due to the floods, direct them here (we’ll consider requests on a case by case basis through August).
Red recently created a zine version of Mariame and Kelly’s Chapter 6 from Let This Radicalize You–you can download it for free here or read it online. There are also a ton of other resources linked through the Interrupting Criminalization website. This resource is *especially great* if you have folx in your life who are new to organizing / plugging in to movement work.
Donna | Dante is organizing an upcoming RAGEHER fundraising event, MASC Basketball, at the Chicago Athletic Association’s Stagg Court on Monday, August 25th from 6:30 – 10 PM. It’s a feel good pick up game, featuring live music during halftime, with $15 donation entry. RSVP here.
Welcome To Chicago!
Our Chicago fam is growing! Two comrade-dancers are relocating from Austin, Tx to Chicago in August–so let’s show them a big Midwest welcome while they get settled in, find work, and build community! They’ve marched for justice and worked poles all over this country, and we’re blessed to have them heading our way.
Kai is especially wanting to connect with queer and trans community, radical dancer community and the Lebanese community.They recently graduated and obtained their license as an esthetician ✨ @angelface.esthetix ✨, and want to provide care for SWer fam. Hire them!
Izz wants to connect with queer and trans community, film nerds, radical dancer community, and photography-heads! They have a background in dance and theater, as well as extensive experience as a model. Check out their amazing work here. Hire them!
We are grieving, again. We’re absolutely devastated to see and experience the latest climate catastrophe here in Texas Hill Country and South Central Texas. Our love, solidarity and rage goes out to all those impacted by the disastrous floods still surging.
We’re launching a relief fund for sex workers who are directly impacted by the floods, the jotform is password protected and encrypted.
Applications open today, Monday, July 7th and will remain open until Friday, July 11th.
We are a tiny formation. We have limited funds. If you want to help us distribute emergency funds, please send gifts via Venmo or CashApp (@SxHxCollective & $SxHxCollective). If you need to send money via PayPal or Zelle, please use our contact form and let us know!
This tragedy was ABSOLUTELY PREVENTABLE and the direct result of organized abandonment and climate catastrophe. We’ve seen government officials ignore and neglect our waterways researchers, Indigenous communities, disaster preparedness experts and infrastructure advocates for decades–the recent cuts at the state and federal level are only the most recent acts of violence against rural and hyper-vulnerable peoples. They blame everyone but themselves when disaster strikes. We know who keeps us safe–it’s our neighbors, and often those who are also living in precarity who show up and rise to our aid.
Are you looking to offer general and/or non-monetary support? Check out these efforts:
(^^^Local businesses who are donating / matching donations.)
FAJR Scientific is assembling a response team to help out the flood victims in Kerr County and surrounding areas. Please apply if you’re interested: tinyurl.com/2bb3f5m4
(^^^For mobility aids, wheelchairs and other access donations)
Kerrville
Cleaning Supplies, Nonperishable foods and Clean Clothes, drop off at 855 Hays St, Kerrville, TX
Vehicles, Gas, Housing support, and Clearing supplies like chainsaws / rakes / shovels / wheelbarrows are urgently needed, email president@handsoffcentraltx.org
Austin
Austin, Dallas , and Houston
If you’re in the area, please drop off the following essential items:
* Mops * Buckets * Cleaning Detergents * Non perishable Food * Water Bottles * Paper towels and toilet paper
📍Austin 📍 Drop of location is at this Austin address: 8204 N Lamar, Suit B14 Austin, TX 78753 Sunday 3pm to 6pm Today Mon 10AM to 5PM Tomorrow Tues 9A to 1P day after tomorrow
📍Houston 📍 Drop off for Houston area residents: From Noon to 4pm Monday, July 7th 2025 100 Sharpstown Center Suite S5, Houston, TX 77036
📍Dallas 📍 Drop off for Dallas area for residents: From Noon to 4PM Monday, July 7th 2025 10874 Plano Road #A Dallas, TX 75238
For more info, call Br Amr Nasrat 214-813 – 6166 Or, please make a charitable donation here: https://icnarelief.org/donate/
Call/text Br. Zafar at 512-913-1811
San Antonio
Have updates or stories you want to share about how you’re organizing in response to this crisis? Write to us: sxhxcollective@gmail.com
When we formalized our Chicago collective, back in 2015, we had a series of informal, messy, crucial, debate-filled, action-based experiences to build from. We were tired of so-called Leftist spaces ignoring whores and side-eyeing us. We were tired of sex worker specific spaces only talking about self-care and jailing bad johns. We wanted more. We still do. But how do we get that?
Over these past ten years we’ve seen sex worker formations come and go–and usually they dissolve because of experiences of violence, burn out, incarceration, lack of broader movement support, or even becoming jaded with fellow workers’ perceived or legit lack of commitment to organizing. Systemic racism, classism, whorephobia, whorestigma, transmisogny, coupled with police violence, incarceration, overdose, and yeah lateral in-fighting and inter-community harm has taken so many comrades from us. We don’t say all of this to wallow in despair though, we name it to (re)ignite a fire. Ten years and change on, we still believe that a small, radical, built-in-trust, group can get shit done. We believe that because we’ve modeled it.
We encourage anyone reading this to get your people together, find an existing small formation you want to support or plug into and/or gather your own. Never compromise your principles for the sake of a “big group”, never sell out your own, never apologize for being a whore, never leave the most vulnerable amongst you behind. Be bold, build. It doesn’t have to look or be perfect (because duh nothing is). It can look like a reading group, a wheat-pasting crew, a mutual aid distro, neighborhood group chat for preparedness, community meals and discussions, etc. It can/should be what is needed by you, your community.
What we’ve been up to…
Back in March, we partnered with our beloveds (and mentors) in Just Practice Collaborative for their Building Coordinated Crisis Response virtual session about sex worker learned / practiced life saving tactics. We’ve mentioned their beautiful work before, but we had to share these gorgeous graphic notes again.
We’ll be debuting (at least) two new zines in time for the upcoming Chicago Zine Fest (on July 19th) and South Side Zine Fest (July 26th)! Here’s a sneak peak at those covers! We hope to see y’all IRL at those fests. Our zines are the primary way we speak our politics, history, and raise crucial cash funds to do all the creative mutual aid work we hold down. Are you a sex working zinester? We’re always up for trades!
We’ve been working to form a Cross Chicago Solidarity exchange for reps from existing sex worker formations and other organizations that (actually) serve our communities. This formation seeks to serve as a knowledge hub and place to talk shop, strategize, and create a more connected sex working city.
*This is exclusively for experienced organizers and those who are permitted to represent on behalf of the organizations/collectives/groups they’re members of.*
If this is you, and you want to get connected to this knowledge-sharing work, reach out here.
Our dear comrade, Aïcha Camara, has been conducting research (for years) into the impacts of Ordinance § 8-04-016 in Chicago.
“This site contains an analysis of the 2001 to 2023 Chicago Data Portal Data filtered for Illinois Uniform Crime Reporting or IUCR codes related to ‘PROSTITUTION’ and a dataset of arrests related to sex work from the Chicago Police Department obtained through the Freedom of Information Act on December 19, 2023.”
Screen grab from the data portal. Credit Aïcha Camara.
The portal resource that they’ve developed features interactive maps illustrating the ordinance’s impact our sex working and trans communities (primarily of color). You can review their findings, here.
Do you know and love a sex worker (who is also a parent or care-giver) currently incarcerated in Cook County Jail or in an Illinois Prison who needs some commissary support? Please reach out to us here.
Artwork by Alisha Walker
Other Chi Updates…
SWOP Chicago has recently put out an urgent call for volunteers/organizers to help with day-to-day tasks, application reviews, general operations, and more. FYI they’re more active on their Instagram than website, so follow them there!
Email media@swopchi.org *and* fill out this form if you want to volunteer.
See the screen shots below to plug in and/or check out their upcoming IRL events:
Decrim IL is actively recruiting community members in the fight to win state-wide decriminalization for all people in the sex trades. They have upcoming IRL events for those that are signed up to join. Plug in to get involved here.
Yesterday was the 50th anniversary of the Church of St. Nizier occupation in Lyon, France. In 1975, a couple hundred radicalized sex working mothers, queer cis and trans women, migrants, and survivors of police rape forcibly took political sanctuary for 8 days to demand an end to the punitive laws and practices of the police and government that closed their safer work spaces, stigmatized their labor, extorted them, stole their children, repeatedly assaulted them, and in some cases led to their deaths. Their occupation, which led an immediate decrease in client and police violence, public support campaigns and a media narrative shift, marked the first International Whores’ Day. Since then, radical sex workers have been honoring the day by engaging in protests, sex strikes, community events and more.
Our Chicago crew organized a community picnic and resource distro–full of food, laughs, hugs, and shop talk. We passed around a copy of Prostitutes Our Life and read passages from it to each other, bringing the voices of the whores of Lyon into our space.
We’re sending love, rage, respect and care to all of the sex working, trading, hustling, surviving comrades of the world. We’re with you in struggle! We hope yesterday was restorative and invigorating–50 years on, and whores around the world are still showing what collective power looks like!
Stay tuned for more Chicago SWer community events that are centered around harm reduction trainings, political education, zine making, social gatherings and current events! Want to get involved? Send us a message via our Contact Form!
Chicago / Where to find us next?
Chicago Zine Fest: Saturday, July 19th from 11AM to 4PM at the Harold Washington Library’s Winter Garden on the 9th Floor
Monkeywrench Books mutual aid / resource drive: This is a call to action during a moment of both discrete disaster due to climate change and the continuous disaster that is capitalism and fascism, which affect millions of our most marginalized neighbors with rapid intensification every day. Mutual aid should extend beyond these discrete moments of disaster and reactivity to create lasting and continuous networks of collective resource that can sustain us as circumstances unfold. All donations will be shared with Street Forum ATX– an abolitionist group whose efforts focus on the unmet needs of our unhoused neighbors through building relationships and centering the most marginalized folks in their community. Their work is invaluable to us and to many communities around Austin. And don’t forget that we have mutual aid shelves that are open all year long!
SWEET ATX: MELT is back on Thursday, June 13 — and it’s movie night! For this Pride edition of MELT, we’re screening five short films by and about queer and trans sex workers. We’ll open the evening with a peer support circle on resilience to share strategies for staying grounded when times are tough. Then we’ll serve dinner from Peace Bakery and settle in for a lineup of stunning short films made by and for our community. Pride wouldn’t exist without trans sex workers — and we’ll never forget it! Sex workers only. RSVP required.
NYC / What are we up to?
Have you read Red Canary Song’s latest digi-zine? Bodies Not Borders: On the Social Cleansing Crises in Queens, NY is a zine collaboration by Centro Corona & Red Canary Song. You can read it here.
Decrim NY is calling on ALL New Yorkers to support #CeciliasAct — which would decriminalize consensual sex work in New York and help protect our people from violence, arrest, and stigma. But we need more co-sponsors before the session ends on June 12. Call and email your reps. Tell them to support S2513 / A3251!
We can’t stress enough how crucial it is to find your people in this moment. Whether that looks like organizing your building, block or workplace, connecting with friends and family to make strategic plans about y’all’s future well-being, and/or finding an political formation to link up with…we know we’ll only survive this onslaught together. Sex Workers know and practice this all the time, learn from us: get organized, find safer methods of communication that work for you and yours, have a plan(s), and stay ready.
On this note, we love this recent Movement Memos episode, “We Live in Fearful Times. Our Safety Comes Through Preparing Together.”, from our comrade, Kelly Hayes and their guest, Che Johnson-Long. Listen to and/or read it here.
Texas, New Mexico, Chicago & Beyond! Ángel needs your support! The Free All Dykes crew recently shared this update: On April 25th, a little over two weeks ago, Ángel, a trans undocumented immigrant and political prisoner in ICE custody, was transferred without warning from Prarieland Detention Center in Alvarado, Texas to Otero Processing Camp in New Mexico. In the process, hir few possessions (and commissary/phone funds) were “lost” by the staff at Prarieland. This includes medical necessities — namely, hir binders. She needs funds to replace hir lost possessions and binder — and for commissary, phone calls, electronic messaging, shipping costs, and a small suitcase filled with toiletries & clothes for when she lands to Chile. American prisons are extortionate institutions, and ICE concentration camps are no exception. Most of the women inside the centers don’t have anyone on the outside who can add to their commissary, and they rely on people who are willing to redistribute the resources they have access to — your donations have helped feed & comforted dozens of detained women in addition to Ángel.
Austin, Tx & Beyond! Our comrade Kaia is still gathering stories, secrets, memories and oral histories. Have something you need to share with another SWer? Want to get something off your chest or vent? Just need a kind ear to hold space for you? Holy Heaux is a memoir project dreamt up and led by one of our ATX comrades, and will serve as a memory project for sex workers to talk or write about anything they desire. There will be options to share in written form or audio– all submissions can be anonymous, or under any preferred name. For more details, and to submit content, visit this link.
Ohio! Our Comrade LiRose has opened a dancer’s and spicy workers boutique in Akron! You can shop for work and performance apparel now at Intoxicating Rose located at 49 N Case Ave! Shop local and support sex worker owned small businesses! Check out the above video of her recent inventory!
Chicago, IL!
Looking to get involved in the struggle to support sex workers and criminalized survivors in Illinois? Check out DecrimIL!
Want to snag our latest zines and meet our crew? We’ll be tabling again at this year’s Chicago Zine Fest on Saturday, July 19, 2025, 11 am to 4 pm at the Harold Washington Library Center’s Winter Garden, 9th Floor! Zine fests are how we primarily raise our no-strings-attached mutual aid funds, buy our lit!
Our collective’s International Whores Day community gathering and picnic, will be held on Monday, June 2nd from 4:30pm – 7pm in Palmer Square Park in Chicago. All SWers and our chosen family are welcome to attend. Please bring a dish or drink to share. We’ll bring picnic blankets, some staple proteins, and paper goods. We’ll also have free harm reduction supplies / resources available, and copies of our zines. Join us to rest, reset, rage, and feast!
Howdy y’all–thanks for the grace as we’ve been making moves offline. Here are some more Spring updates, with a horizon-eye to the Summer.
First off, to the [sex] workers, all they produce! May this May Day fill your hearts and steel your nerves for the fighting times ahead. Whether you’re taking to the streets, building an altar at home, making quiet time for rest/recovery, or stuck hustling, we’re with you in struggle dear comrades.
Austin, Tx: For those that attended our International Sex Workers Rights Day zine making night and community vent sesh at Monkeywrench Books, your free copy of our collaborative zine is now ready for you to pick up behind the counter! If you did NOT make it to that event, please hold back on asking for this zine for the next couple weeks, to make sure participants get the first chance at copies. We can always make more, later!
Chicago, IL: Rene and the Free All Dykes crew have some updates about ÁNGEL! See hir statements below, and follow this link for the fundraisers and media coverage!
NYC: Red Canary Song has published a new zine, “Bodies Not Borders: On the Social Cleansing Crises in Queens, NY” –this is a zine collaboration by Centro Corona & Red Canary Song. The digital zine is available here. If you’re able please donate to support their mutual aid fund via venmo (@RCS_Fund) or becoming a sustaining member of RCS work here.
Austin, TX! Tomorrow, Saturday March 29th! Come out to Gender Unbound‘s annual Trans Day of Visibility Community Picnic and Artist Market! Our central Texas comrades will be out tabling with our zines and literature, so come through and say, “Howdy!” There will be music, so many amazing vendors, and just a wholesome time out in the sunshine.
Annd…Gender Unbound’s debut publication, The Pink Pages, will also be available in limited quantities!
“Available in print only, grab a free copy of this 40-page Trans Day of Visibility art project, highlighting trans small businesses, artists, professional services, and organizations! Debuting this Saturday at Gender Unbound’s TDOV Community Picnic & Art Market from 1-5pm at Grassroots Leadership!”
Cover art by Ashley Caswell
In other exciting news, our dear comrade, Karina Hagelin, has launched a kickstarter for their Survivor Affirmation Deck! The Survivor Affirmation Deck (2nd edition) is a collection of 40 rainbow affirmation cards for survivors healing from abuse. Please check out and support this beautiful project, there are only 22 days left to back it and help it become real!
Karina explains and describes the deck: “Each colorful card features an affirmation for self-love, carefully crafted to support you on your healing journey by a fellow survivor who gets how difficult healing can be. This deck is not only uplifting, inspiring, & empowering but beautiful, bright, & bold, because survivors deserve beauty. I created the Survivor Affirmation Deck because many of the self-love resources available for survivors didn’t speak to me: they were boring, black + white, & all “love & light”. These affirmations weren’t actually affirming to me because they weren’t trauma-informed, empathetic, or truly understanding of what I was going through. They weren’t created by someone who gets it: a survivor. The Survivor Affirmation Deck IS.The Survivor Affirmation Deck was created with care & my community in mind: 40 vibrant, colorful, cute AF affirmation cards for supporting self-love on your healing journey. The Survivor Affirmation Deck comes packaged in a pink tuck box, packed with care, solidarity, & lots of love.”
One of our crew, Red, recently joined the Just Practice Collaborative and spoke to their Building Coordinated Crisis Response learning space. From Just Practice, “This monthly virtual peer learning space is for groups and organizations working to collectively intervene in and respond to crises without police. This is an abolitionist collaborative learning space where participants are invited to share knowledge, experience, and expertise, as well as questions, uncertainties, nuance, and disagreements. This is a drop-in space open to anyone committed to building coordinated, non-carceral, non-police crisis response and prevention and to collaborative learning – no one is the expert in this space; we are all learning and growing toward the future we want together.”
We all helped prepare stories, examples and experiences based on our last 10 years of collective organizing, but also pulling from our lives since we’ve all been in the sex trades much longer than that. We spent a lot of time recounting anecdotes from different types of crises we’ve navigated and the hard lessons learned during each of them, Red synthesized and shared–the major takeaways are: don’t feel pressured to scale up your crew’s membership, small numbers can mean greater capacity; sometimes just being physically present, ready to fight or being prepared to flee with essentials is the best plan; harm reduction and risk assessment forever and for all things; and be prepared to move money in creative ways. We’re considering putting a zine together about our “Ho Survival Kit” builds as well–there was lots of interest in these! We’ll share the graphic notes from our talk once they’re finalized, and do not sleep on this beautiful, necessary space. We’d also recommend, Interrupting Criminalization‘s Transformative Justice Help Desk.
Two of our comrades recently created this zine all about the rise of Tech Fascism and The Network State–we’ll be distributing copies at all of our upcoming events in Austin, Chicago, NYC, the Bay Area, and in Portland! Like the cover says, “Arm yourselves with knowledge!”
In less exciting and stressful news, after 10 years we’re now in the market for a new fiscal sponsor. If your 501c3 organization wants to show up for queer and trans sex workers with incarceration experiences and our radical family, please get in touch asap via our Contact Form.
If you’re Chicago-based, and happen to be a night owl, an artist, a sex worker, queer or trans fam, a prison abolitionist on the near west side, a fan or worker of Dimo’s pizza, killing time in Wicker Park, riding around on the Blue Line, or just occasionally stoop squat on Damen Ave at “the crotch”…you’ve likely seen, bought art from, traded secrets and smiles with, shared food or gotten some life advice from beloved LaJuana Lampkins.
Scenes from a rally on September 22nd, 2012 in Calumet City, “Two Lives Stolen!”, LaJuana and son in top left. Photo taken by Red.
A few of our Chicago comrades got to know and organize alongside LaJuana in the coalition Illinois Campaign to End the New Jim Crow, which formed to bring together families who had loved ones, children mainly, murdered and/or tortured by police. One of our comrades wrote this piece in 2013, after working alongside LaJuana in the media crew for IL CENJC.
A photo of an article LaJuana wrote in 2009 with annotations.
LaJuana was/is a fierce friend, comrade, artist, mother, and fighter for justice. She had a way of speaking to you as if you were old friends (even if you weren’t). She was truly a light, a real joy to be around, and she lived unapologetically. She will be missed tremendously. We will continue to organize in her name, and in her honor. Her memory is a blessing to all who knew and loved her.
“Sleepin Boodie” by LL, July, 15th 2023.
LaJuana’s legacy of amazing, messy, beautiful, raunchy, artwork is archived here (an older account is here too) on Instagram. In 2021, she held her first formal art exhibition at a popup gallery space in Bucktown, you can read about it here.
Artist/Directors Julia Mondschean and Maya Horton worked on a film project alongside LaJuana called, My Mother is an Artist. You can watch the proof of concept short, embedded above.
From LaJuana’s son, Sir Gerald:
My mother, Lajuana Lampkins, left this world on Wednesday, February 26, 2025, to be with Allah, her mother, and her beloved son—my brother—Prince Bantu Akbar. My mother was a beautiful woman who overcame countless obstacles in her life but still chose to live fully. She was a fighter! She fought for us as children, even when she couldn’t be with us. She fought for her freedom. And she never stopped fighting for justice for my brother. She loved hard! She cherished her family—her siblings, her grandchildren, and her three children: Lamiea, Prince, and me, Sir Gerald. She was hilarious! Her sense of humor was unmatched, and I will always treasure our time together selling “Ghetto” art in downtown Chicago. She was unapologetically herself! My mother spoke her mind and refused to be censored. She embraced who she was, fearlessly and fully. She was an artist! Her beauty, her unique fashion sense, and her drawings were all expressions of her creativity and spirit. I share this to ask for your support in celebrating my mother’s life. I want to give her the memorial service and burial she deserves. Any contribution would mean the world to me.
Sir Gerald has started a GoFundMe to cover memorial costs, please give and share if you’re able. We are directing funds toward this as well from our collective hustles over the next week.
Last week, March 3rd was International Sex Workers Rights Day–and our Austin, Tx comrades gathered a mighty crew to zine make together at Monkeywrench Books. We gossiped, collaged zine panels, and talked about upcoming projects we’re all working on like Holy Heaux memoirs, Free All Dykes support efforts, Cecilia’s Act, and more! Stay tuned for what the final zine looks like!
Austin, Tx!
Holy Heaux is a memoir project dreamt up and led by one of our ATX comrades, and will serve as a memory project for sex workers to talk or write about anything they desire. There will be options to share stories, memories and experiences in written form or as oral histories–and all submissions can be anonymous, or under any preferred name. For more details, see the flier below. To submit writing, visit this link.
“Do you have a story to tell? Your voice matters! (NOTICE: this is for SWers ONLY. All information given is protected and private between Holy Heaux and the submitter. The submitter understands that Holy Heaux prioritizes the safety of all SWers over all else and by filling out this form, the submitter also understands they are providing personal information that will be published ONLY with their consent.)”
New York!
Decrim NY took the fight to the NYS Capitol on March 4th for their latest Advocacy Day, pushing for Cecilia’s Act for Rights in the Sex Trades. What is Cecilia’s Act?#CeciliasAct is a landmark bill that would decriminalize s*x work in NY, ensuring safety, dignity, and legal protections for sex workers. Right now, criminalization forces people to operate in the shadows, making them more vulnerable to violence, police harassment, and exploitation. Cecilia’s Act changes that. It allows sex workers to report crimes with less fear, access the resources they need, and work in safer conditions without the threat of arrest.
Chicago, IL!
Join the Free All Dykes crew for a Letter Writing Event at Nabala Cafe! March 21st from 7 – 9 PM! From the event promo: come correspond with trans and Black comrades who are currently locked up. All prisoners are political and they deserve and need our support! We will have some great vendors: @riverbendwellnessco, @st3viecore,and @watabeadsofficial to support our efforts raising money for Ángel’s re-entry costs in Chile!
Looking to get involved in the struggle to support sex workers and criminalized survivors in Illinois? Check out DecrimIL!
Have an event by/for sex workers in Austin, New York or Chicago and want it amplified? Let us know! We’re always down to build radical community with other lefty workers!
Celebrate International Sex Workers Rights Day! ☂️☂️☂️☂️☂️☂️☂️☂️☂️☂️☂️☂️☂️☂️☂️☂️☂️
Monday, March 3rd from 5-7pm, join comrades from the Support Ho(s)e Collective for an evening of crafting and zine making at Monkeywrench Books. Build community with other Central Texas SWers and accomplices! ❤️🔥
We’ll make a new collaborative zine together, and have our existing zines available for purchase too. 😏
We’ll bring zine making materials, but feel free to bring your own collage supplies too!✂️
A lot has been happening, more than can be summarized here. The world is on fire, Medicaid is under attack, and already those in power have ramped up their targeted harassment and deportation threats against our neighbors, loved ones and coworkers…among a host of other anticipated and also unforeseen atrocities. We know it can and will get worse. We don’t say this to fear monger, we say it to prepare ourselves for the fights ahead and to be real.
We also know who are people are, we believe in cross movement solidarity, and we practice hope. Let’s keep showing up for each other.
We wanted to share some updates from comrades René and Ángel’s respective support and defense campaigns–since their cases and self-advocacy is central to how we can keep showing up for sex workers, queer and trans fam, immigrants and racial justice organizers.
René (they/she) is a 2020 uprising defendant, Korean sex worker, journalist, & former political prisoner who recently returned to Chicago on probation after seven months in federal prison in Alabama. They’ve finally found a job, but are in need of community support to find a place of their own – which will be difficult due to her federal record. The feds will soon begin taking money from them for restitution & this will continue to place her in a position of financial distress.
Ángel (she/hir) is a currently incarcerated 2020 uprising defendant, undocumented immigrant, and Mapuche butch lesbian. She will face deportation to Chile as a result of a politically overcharged case related to the 2020 uprising — despite being in the US for over 20 years.
ICE will pick hir up at release on April 1 and begin removal proceedings. Ángel is going to fight like hell to continue hir life in the US — and she’ll be in ICE detention until a verdict is reached. If found guilty, she wouldn’t be able to return to the US for a minimum of 20 years – but probably a lifelong ban due to the political nature of the case.
In 2020, millions of people cheered on those who took political risks in the name of Black liberation & police abolition. The chats of “We Keep Us Safe” means community care and refusing to abandon each other in crisis, and Ángel needs us to fight with hir.
FMC (Federal Medical Center) Carswell is a federal prison in Ft. Worth, TX that is notorious for human rights abuses. Because it is a medical facility, the prison holds more trans people than average due to providing hormone treatments.
Last night, we received word from Ángel (she/her) that she has not been able to access her testosterone for about a month. As a result of Trump’s executive order this week, police came to the prison and took about ~20 trans women away with zero warning, most likely to be sent to a men’s prison. The women were sobbing in fear and physically assaulted as they were dragged away. This happened yesterday (1/24) around 3pm and resulted in a prison-wide lockdown for about 3-4 hours.
Ángel was also told yesterday (1/24) that they would be coming for the transmasculine people today (1/25) to be sent to ad-seg (separation from general population) while…
“Trump decides what to do with them.”
“You should have seen the evil looks of triumph as they escorted the trans women out of here… They just took them crying. The rumor is they’re all getting sent to men’s prisons. There’s talk about us transmascs getting sent to ad-seg until “Trump finds a place for us.” They’ve refused to give me my testosterone shots everytime I’ve asked.”
“A guard that tells me a lot of info did mention that ICE was told that they have 90 days to do all their deportations – “Worst Go First” is what the news was saying – so a lot of us immigrants are freaking the fuck out about what the fuck we’re supposed to do. Everyone’s getting torn from their families. I had so many of my friends (most of us in here are immigrants) just shocked to hell about what happened.“
Ángel was initially told that she would be deported at her release on April 1 – but if what the guard said is true, this could be a lot sooner. She is not fighting the deportation case and will sign over the right to any court proceedings so that she can return to Chile and regain freedom as quickly as possible.
Cashapp: $PunkWolfe2 Venmo: Loba-Cabrona GFM link here.
Ángel was recently featured in an article about the impact of Trump’s new executive orders targeting trans people in federal lockup–you can read that piece, “Trans Women in Federal Custody Face the Terror of Being Transferred to Men’s Prisons” from Shawn Musgrave at The Intercept, here.
You can stay up to date in real time on both these comrades cases and how best to support them, by following the free.all.dykes Instagram account.
These past weeks were filled with heartache and resolve. Sex workers and those that love us, gathered to mark yet another year where systemic violence took too many from us.
December 17th may only take place once a year, but it’s a day filled with a cumulative grief at the injustice of all the proceeding violence, oppression, discrimination that our sex working, trading, hustling community faces every single day.
Our people are taken from us, all the time—by cops, by prisons, by people they’re relying on for shelter and companionship, by clients, by so-called “intimate partners”, by stigma and shame, by capitalism, racism, transphobia, classism…by a WHOREPHOBIC society that makes us the butt of every dead hooker joke.
We are so angry, but we are also so full of love. Love for struggle, for each other, for the vision of a better world and the fight to realize it.
In Chicago, beloveds gathered.
The D17 Vigil Altar in Chicago, photo taken by organizer, Lilith Golde
In Austin, beloveds gathered.
Photos by Red
In NYC, beloveds gathered.
Veladoras adorned for the candle ceremony at Judson Memorial Church, photo by Veronica Vera
Allaround the world, beloved comrades gathered to honor our dead and recommit to fight like hell for the living.
One of our organizers wrote this, reflecting on the vigil they co-organized, “We chose Republic Square Park because it’s in the middle of downtown, it’s an area notorious for police harassment of our houseless neighbors, a central hub of harm reduction outreach, and because it’s one of the last physical spaces that remain of Austin’s historic red-light district, Guy Town. Queer, trans, sex working, immigrant people built that district and were the fabric of community (and the goddamn economy). We gathered, against the wind, with Kaia keeping the candle burning the whole vigil. Daphne brought beautiful signs, and I brought roses. Comrades joined us, sharing tears and stories. We spoke the names of those taken from this world, we brought loved ones into our circle kept from us by incarceration. We screamed into the night air, long and loud. The cops kept their distance. I am so full of grief, I am so full of love, I am so full of rage.”
What do we do with all this grief?
It feels unbearable that Cecilia, and Velvet and Hande, and Lorena, and so many other beloved comrade-whores are no longer on this earthly plane. We think it’s important to feel that grief, together, and doubly so to continue the work in their names, and to honor their legacies.
We’ve been listening to Movement Memos, but this recent conversation between Kelly and Sarah really hit hard and broke our hearts wide open. Listen here.
In the coming new year, we’ll be focusing on skilling-up in different ways: political education/analysis, hosting Ho-kit builds, learning more first aid and emergency/crisis response, sharing what we’ve developed for deescalation and bystander intervention, expanded harm reduction practices, body autonomy needs, and more.
We’ll share everything we *can* here. We’ll do our best to get creative and bring people in, offline and in-person whenever possible. Stay tuned and watch this space.
Sending all y’all lots of warmth and care this holiday season. This time of the year is full of reminders about the need to reflect, rest, and recommit to the struggle(s) ahead. So many of our loved ones are locked up, kept from us…from healing and living life!
We recently received the upsetting news (on 12/24) that friend and comrade, Ángel, has been placed in solitary confinement, where she will spend the holidays. Ángel (she/hir) is a Mapuche butch lesbian, and political prisoner who will fight deportation to Chile from ICE custody in April 2025. Like hir fellow defendants, she rose up for racial justice in 2020 and was subsequently harshly punished. Ángel is currently in federal lockup in Texas. Two days before she was moved to solitary, she shared the following message with friends and supporters:
“Hi, my people! Thank you for supporting me with letters, books, pictures, psychic moon messages, taking care of my family and myself in any ways that you can. Thank you for joining me in this struggle. All your tireless work has made my time here more bearable a thousandfold. Knowing that I’m loved and genuinely cared for is the most strengthening part of our struggle. I miss you all and will return to you soon. If you send me pictures and keep my GFM going, this will be the best way to support me. I can’t wait to share all the stories I’ve lived thru here with y’all. I miss you. I miss you in a way that lives in my bones. I have about 3 more months to go and my next chapter will begin. I love each and every single one of y’all. The work is hard but I’ve been rewarded w undying love. Thank you <3”
Let’s continue to show Ángel that she is loved and cared for, and not alone despite the cruel efforts of the state to isolate hir! Please send letters and share the GFM linked above. If you need resources for writing, check out our guide here.
🦋Disfruta poemas de hierbas compartidos en español de poetas locales. 🤎Descansa en asientos suaves por orden de llegada. 🍵Compre café, té y dulces frescos de alta calidad (opciones infundidas y no infundidas disponibles).
🦋Enjoy poems on herbal healing shared in Spanish by local poets. 🤎Soft seating first come first served. 🍵Purchase tea, coffee and delicacies (infused and non infused available).
Wheelchair accessible. No captions or asl provided at this event. Message your host for access inquiries.
At long last, Decrim IL has debuted its strategy for decriminalizing the sex trades state-wide, with its eyes on full federal decriminalization as a horizon point!
Our crew were among the founding members of the first iteration of DecrimIL over four years ago. Our comrade, Red, helped author this tribute to Dani, another founding member, who, among sharing strategy and tactics, lived experiences, and connection to anti-violence work, opened their home space up as our first official meeting place to build this coalition.
On Tuesday, December 3rd, Alisha & Red attended DecrimIL’s town hall, and were so thrilled to hear and see all of the updates and intentional reformations of the coalition. If you were unable to attend, you can view the town hall via this event recording. The coalition has empowered us all to share this link far and wide, and asked for subscriptions to their YouTube channel for future updates!
International Day to End Violence Against Sex Workers was first recognized in 2003 as a memorial for the victims of Gary Ridgway, the so-called Green River Killer who murdered people in and around King County, Washington, during the 1980s and 1990s. Ridgway would boast about his ease in murdering sex workers or houseless youth because they wouldn’t be missed, saying he was doing the cops’ work for them. Since 2003, this day has galvanized people around the world to organize against whorephobic violence and honor the lives of violence victims. For those who want to read the names and remember those who have been taken from this world, SWOP USA’s December 17th Project gathers them here.
Upcoming December 17th events our comrades will be participating in:
Austin, Tx: Our crew is organizing a Protest Vigil on Tuesday 12/17 from 7:30 – 8:30PM at Republic Square Park. Dress warmly, and bring signs with loved ones names. We’ll provide candles and blankets.
NYC: The Judson Memorial Church’s Sex Worker Alliance is hosting its annual D17 Candle Ceremony, on Tuesday, 12/17 from 6-9PM at Judson Memorial Church in Greenwich Village. There will be crafts, refreshments, and space to share stories about loved ones.
Chicago, IL: December 17th, 7PM, join us in love, rage, and grief as we honor the lives of sex workers who have passed due to violence in 2024 by reading their names together. Bring poems, candles, offerings for a temporary altar, and signs with names of loved ones or messages of solidarity. Red roses to honor those we’ve lost, and purple flowers to honor Chicago legend Mistress Velvet encouraged. Open to current/former SWs and accomplices. Meet at Van Buren and Clark St. (Near the Federal Metropolitan Correctional Center). Look for the red umbrella. MASKING REQUIRED FOR SAFETY AND ANONYMITY! N-95 masks provided if needed.
If you know of another IDEVASW gathering near you, please feel free to list them in the comments or send us an email via our contact form and we will amplify those on our socials.
One of our comrades wrote an OpEd, Ending Violence Against Sex Workers Means Abolishing Police and Prisons, for TruthOut a few years ago. The article highlights the rampant and societally-condoned violence that sex working/trading people face at the hands of the state and law enforcement. You can read it here.
Our Texas crew spent the first day of Diciembre in San Antonio tabling (for our first time ever) at San Antonio Zine Fest!
San Anto Zine Fest (SAZF) is organized by Yanaguana-based Latina zinesters who are dedicated to prioritizing queer and BIPOC independently-published media to grow community and creativity in Texas and beyond.
Big love to our venue hosts, Sociedad Fraternal Cruz Blanca, and to all of the organizers and volunteers, y the abuelas churning out tacos, who made the space so welcoming and warm!
We talked extensively with many fest-goers about how to access and download our free digital publications like our letter writing guide, our resources for teaching or health care provision and our SW Syllabus. We distributed multiple physical copies of these resources as well. We were among several tables featuring narcan/naloxone, and Plan B and condoms were available for fest-goers at the free table! We LOVED seeing this. While we didn’t reach our fundraising goal for this fest, we did make plans to build cross-state solidarity with other sex worker organizers–and that’s rich as hell.
We got to vibe with the comrades from Wetty Collective — who engage in work to dismantle oppression, and build queer eco-erotic conocimiento through radical queer feminist BIPOC literature & community activism. Absolutely over the moon to have met them!
And we got to spend more time with the comrades from Texas People’s Tribunal. Currently, TPT is building the foundation for a people’s tribunal on Texas’s use of lethal violence amounting to genocide against racialized peoples. Through this effort, TPT intends to further the movement to end the mass killings of targeted peoples, and abolish the death penalty in Texas–so thankful for all their work!
Our table neighbors were the most supportive crew!! This is what going to fests is all about–meeting other radicals, swapping zines and growing our networks of creative makers. We loved spending time with Gender Non-Compliant poetry and art, A Frustrated Bohemian, zeebintime, and Mobile Suit Marxist. Be sure to check out their beautiful zine, poetry, political education and art practices!
💋Where can you find us next?💋
Chicago: 1) Decrim IL has publicly launched! They held their first virtual public town hall today and shared their coalition’s commitments, strategies, and a fact sheet for the bill they’re supporting. Check that bill’s fact sheet out here. If you’re in Illinois, and want to get involved, fill out the form here.
NYC: Want to get involved with work to decriminalize the trades in NY? Check out our comrades in DecrimNY (a coalition of orgs and individuals, that we are founding members of). DecrimNY is responsible for the proposed bill Stop Violence in the Sex Trades Act (SVSTA) and regularly engages in public demonstrations, lobby days, mutual aid efforts and more. Fill out their interest form here.
On Saturday, November 16th, we tabled (for the first time ever) at Zine Fest Houston–and wow, were we ever over the moon! We’re still riding the high from all of the beautiful DIY community, grassroots organizers, artists, and neighbors who came through and shared their love, support and solidarity with us. We got to see some comrades from Austin, the Bay Area, and Portland, and make new friends and comrades in Houston. Shout out to the gorgeous venue, The Orange Show Center for Visionary Art!
YVE Houston Zine Fest announcement!
We tabled next to the fierce baddies, Youth Voices Empowered collective of Grace Place, and learned about their critical healing and advocacy work for queer and trans youth, neighbors experiencing housing insecurity and discrimination in Houston. Please follow and support their efforts! We also got to IRL meet the combabes from F*ck You Pay Me (zine) and WOW, we were fan-femme-ing HARD! Definitely seek out their zines!
f you pay me zine HZF announcement!
We reached, and slightly exceeded our fundraising goal (the first time at a zine fest this year)! Big gratitude to everyone who donated and snagged some zines! We debuted our latest zine, “all the Hookers in me are tired,” at the fest too! This mini zine came about because of some big frustrations we’ve had with whorephobia on the left, and we really want non-sex working people to sit with our anger and then help us make the organized left a safer place for sex working comrades.
We distributed over 25 drug testing strips (to test for fentanyl and xylazine) and talked extensively with many fest-goers about how to access and download our free digital publications like our letter writing guide, our resources for teaching or health care provision and our SW Syllabus. We loved seeing and hearing other zinesters discuss abortion as a community responsibility, emergency contraceptive access and distribute condoms at their tables! More of that at all zine fests please!
Our Austin, Tx crew had such a blast—thank y’all so much for the hospitality Houston!
A lot of people asked us how to get involved, THANK YOU! While we’re still a closed collective (meaning not actively recruiting at this time), there are absolutely ways to support our work, and the movement to destigmatize and decriminalize the sex trades.
Here are a few action moves we suggest:
Start a reading group with your chosen family and/or co-workers. We recommend to begin sustainably, and be gentle and flexible with each other. Pick a time every other month, read a chapter or an article or watch something together for starters, involve food or drink, and schedule time for both discussion and gossip. You can use our SW Syllabus as a jumping off point, but there’s so much more that’s been published/created since we did those initial readings! Be sure to check out Bluestockings Cooperative’s Sex Work titles.
Get involved with Harm Reduction organizations. Where’s there solid harm reduction work being done/offered, you can bet sex workers are involved. Nothing says you care like carrying Naloxone/Narcan, drug testing strips, condoms AND knowing how to use them all. Whether clean needle exchange programs, building safer sniffing kits, or learning how to reverse an overdose gets you excited, you’ll be sure to get plugged into decrim and destigmatization work locally. Check out the N.I.C.E. Project, the Texas Harm Reduction Coalition, Houston Harm Reduction Alliance and Space City Anarchist Organization.
Support our ongoing fundraising efforts. Right now, we’re engaged in a number of grassroots fundraising efforts to support our comrades and co-conspirators. By giving and/or sharing these campaigns, you’re helping us directly reach new communities with our radical whore agenda! If supporting sex working/trading parents and care-givers is your thing, check out our t-shirt drive. Maybe you want to ensure that one of our political homes can keep its doors open? You’ll want to check out how to support Bluestockings here. A few of our comrades have to pay heavy restitution fees even after doing time in federal prison. You can help them out here. Just want to make sure our crew has what they need? See our “donate” page.
Support our fellow comrade workers like Massage Parlor workers, Street Vendors, and other criminalized economy trades by showing up when demonstrations are called, defending workers both politically and socially, shutting down racist and classist rhetoric about these workers, and obviously…be a good patron! Read up on the linked orgs that are fighting alongside workers for rights, workplace protections, destigmatization, and an end to police intimidation!
Hire us, tip us, and pay for your porn. No really…we quite literally need our clientele’s $$$ to exist in this capitalist hellscape. Whether you’re going to the club, signing up for a fan subscription, picking us up, or scheduling a date, be cool, be respectful, be about giving us money.
💋Where can you find us next?💋
Texas: 💥Mark your calendars to join us for San Anto Zine Fest 2024! 💥December 1st, 10am-5pm 💥Sociedad Fraternal Cruz Blanca at 1619 W. Poplar, San Antonio TX, 78207 💥Free and All Ages welcome 💥Masking required and free masks provided 💥Featuring zinesters from near and far, zine workshops, and new t-shirts!💥The theme is Lucha Libre! 💥
Chicago: Save the date for another Dante’s Originals event, 7PM, December 21st!
NYC: Want to get involved with work to decriminalize the trades in NY? Check out our comrades in DecrimNY (a coalition of orgs and individuals, that we are founding members of). DecrimNY is responsible for the proposed bill Stop Violence in the Sex Trades Act (SVSTA) and regularly engages in public demonstrations, lobby days, mutual aid efforts and more. Fill out their interest form here.
! W O W ! What a whirlwind of a weekend (October 19th & 20th), y’all! What a beautiful gathering of zine fam— got to see so many friends, comrades and beloveds and make new ones too!
We moved 20 copies of our latest inside/outside collaborative benefit zine “Free All Dykes” and got to funds to our comrade Rene‘s partner Ángel (read more here about hir case and needs)! We didn’t reach our overall fundraising goal, but we got real close! A resounding THANKS to everyone who stopped by our table this past weekend to learn more about our work, snag a zine, or grab harm reduction supplies!
LSZF always feels so damn affirming and special—queers and trans folx always to the front, loads of representation from across the state, no one being weird about sex work, loads of resistance and mutual aid work, an abundance of love for each other and a hatred of borders. Deep appreciation to all the organizers and volunteers–y’all went above and beyond supporting us vendors! Here’s to you @lszinefest 💘
So where can you find us next?
TEXAS: We’ll be tabling for the FIRST TIME EVER at Zine Fest Houston, on Saturday, November 16th at The Orange Show Center for Visionary Art [Noon – 6PM]!
NYC: Ongoing campaigns we support, that you can uplift and learn more about — Bluestockings Cooperative is one of our political homes, please help keep their doors open by shopping with them, becoming a member, or snagging a shirt! We are founding member-comrades of DecrimNY & Red Canary Song, and they recently held a press conference demanding an immediate end to Operation Restore Roosevelt – a harmful 90-day policing campaign launched by Gov. Kathy Hochul and Mayor Eric Adams to violently remove street vendors & sex workers from our street by deploying state & local troops to our communities. RCS is also suing the New York City Department of Buildings (DOB) over their failure to respond to Freedom of Information Law (FOIL) requests to release documents related to inspections and enforcement against massage parlors. You can read more about their suit, here.
CHICAGO: Our comrade Donna|Dante is holding down beautiful community work with ARTEMPLE –a not-for-profit community arts center envisioned to serve Chicago’s South/Southeast sides. Planned for 9546 S. Ewing Ave. — the historic St. George church complex — ARTEMPLE aims to create a safe haven and beacon of hope, building creative community and transforming lives through art. Follow their work here. Our comrade E. wants to remind you that Quimby’s carries most of our zine titles in-store, and our comrade DoubleA has new work published, and a book forthcoming! Stay tuned!
ONLINE: There are a number of on-going fundraising efforts we want to amplify. We’re actively supporting a cohort of queer and trans s*x working parents and caregivers with incarceration experiences–you can visit our donate page or purchase a shirt to join us! Our networks have been moving funds to comrade-workers facing immense hardship from Hurricane Helene, join us by giving to this GFM for dancers and/or this mutual aid fund hosted by the Pansy Collective. As always, we want to make sure our beloveds over at Whose Corner Is It Anyway get the crucial support they need–learn more about their work and support them here.
TEXAS COMRADES! Come see us, THIS WEEKEND, October 19th & 20th, at Blue Genie Art Bazaar from 12PM – 6PM for the 8th Annual Lone Star Zine Fest! We’ll have zines, harm reduction supplies, and print resources available! Find us at *TABLE 81* both days!
We’re hard at work to debut an inside/outside collab zine in time for the fest! Like all of our zine titles, this one will also be a benefit zine! The proceeds from “Free All Dykes” will go to supporting our comrade Rene and her co-defendants as they face restitution fees, commissary and transitional funding needs.
Here’s a sneak peak of the zine cover!! 👀
From the LSZF organizers: We’ll have over 100 exhibitors! Come to the Fest to learn about zines! To buy zines! To meet zine creators! To make your own zine! Lone Star Zine Fest is a free, fun, all-ages event featuring zine creators, collectives, distributors, retailers, libraries, and small presses sharing their amazing work and showcasing the diversity of expression made possible by independent- and self-publishing. The Fest is organized by Austin Zine Friends, a small group of zine-loving volunteers who are passionate about creating space for zine creators and zine fans to come together.
Artwork by MOTHRA!
Can’t make it? There’s still lots of ways to support our work! We’ll also be sending zine restock to Quimby’s Chicago and Quimby’s Brooklyn soon too! What about Bluestockings Cooperative, you ask? Right now their zine consignment is on pause, but you can still support their space! If you work at a zine, info shop or bookstore and want to carry our titles, please get in touch via our contact page!
Back at it for @chicagozinefest & @midwestperzinefest 2024! We were invited to table in the Perzine Alley–held down by our MWPZF comrades, at this year’s Chicago Zine Fest at Columbia College’s Student Center, this past Saturday, October 5th.
We reconnected with a number of beloved Midwest organizers, picked up new zines from Midwest Books to Prisoners and talked with fest-goers about decriminalization, prison abolition, and disaster preparedness for our communities. We also got to do a couple mini naloxone and drug testing trainings table-side–shoutout to Bluestockings Cooperative for always making sure we’re stocked on innie and outie condoms, lube, narcan/naloxone, and drug testing strips! We distributed 35 drug testing strips, 50 condoms, and 5 naloxone kits. We love y’all!
We again didn’t reach our fundraising goal for our commissary and transitional monies mutual aid needs, but we deeply appreciate every single person who donated and snagged zines from us. Donations, zine sales and our own hustles are how we are able to continue offering support to our currently and formerly incarcerated sex working fam right now–please consider checking out our Donate page if you want to help us expand and sustain our efforts.
***Upcoming EventAlert!*** If you’re in the Midwest, be sure to check out our dear comrades Midwest Queer & Trans Zine Fest in Minneapolis, for their upcoming two-day fest on October 19th and 20th! We’ll miss tabling with them this year, but can’t wait to see all y’all in the Twin Cities next year!
The 10th NYQZF is in the books! Held again at The Center in the West Village, a bunch of tenacious crafty queers crammed in some much needed zine time and camaraderie on September 21st! This year’s fair was organized by Paul Moreno, one of the founders of NYQZF, and Kel Karpinski, zine artist and librarian/researcher.
Much appreciation and love to everyone who stopped by to show love, snag zines, learn more about writing to incarcerated queer and trans sex working people in our pen pal workshop and vent sesh. We also want to share deep gratitude to SWOP Behind Bars for sending us the contact info for more comrades inside. Even though we didn’t reach our ultimate fundraising goal, our hearts are still pretty damn full!
We also debuted our Support Ho(s)e YEAR EIGHT zine—which felt particularly momentous! We can’t believe we’re in Year 9 currently–what a beautiful, messy, wild ride it’s been organizing together thus far.
If you want more ways to support our organizing efforts, check out our Donate page!
On Saturday, September 14th, in celebration of Sex Worker Pride, one of our comrades brought all of our yearbook zines, years one through eight, the International Whores Day zine, and the Society for the Promotion of Vice’s zine, as donations to be added to the Sherwood Forest Zine Library in Austin! You can now check out our zines from the library and learn more about our organizing work and on-going campaigns. This is the FIRST place you’ll be able to read our “Year Eight” zine until a few upcoming fests!
You can learn more about the Sherwood Forest zine library, including how to join as a member, here.
A photo of all the zines donated to celebrate Sex Worker Pride 2024!
Even though we’ve celebrated Rene and Cody being FREE, they’re currently searching for employment to move on from their halfway house assignments. MJ and Ángel remain locked up, and Ángel is facing deportation proceedings once she completes her stint. All of them are now facing obscene restitution fees.
Please read the following message from Rene about the urgent need to pay off these court mandated fees as soon as possible. Funds can be donated via the following GoFundMe page: “Help a 2020 Uprising Defendant with Post-Incarceration Fees” for Rene, and if the *ultimate goal* of $35,000 is met, at least this part of the state’s punishment will be behind them.
It’s also Ángel’s birthday on September 20th, and we want to show her some big love by asking all our of community to share her commissary fundraiser and make a contribution if you’re able! Feliz cumpleaños querido camarada, ¡no te dejaremos atrás!
Rene cuts of Ángel’s ankle monitor, November 2021
Let these comrades know they’re not alone, and that we have their backs!
After doing 7 months in federal prison for charges related to the 2020 George Floyd Uprisings, I am now finishing my sentence at a halfway house. Even though I’m in a work release program, I’m not free yet. I’m still in BOP custody, and my codefendants and I now owe approx. $35,000 in restitution and fees (joint and several). I’m now a felon, and very recently I was a political prisoner—but I’m also some other things: a journalist, writer, organizer, foodie, friend, daughter of a Korean immigrant, lover, and queer community member. I’ve spent the last several years working—mostly in the sex industry and adult entertainment—to get through some financial hardships and build something of a savings. When I was sentenced to federal prison, I had to cancel the lease on my apartment and put all my stuff in storage. As I transition to life out of custody, I will have to find a new place to live and also rebuild my platform, which was the main source of my income—on top of making regular restitution payments (by threat of re-incarceration).
This is obviously a big setback, not just for me, but for my codefendants, as well. I am asking for donations from those who can spare it, if it is within their means, so that at least this financial burden can be lessened as we navigate this difficult time in our lives.
While I am in custody, and during my 2 years of probation, restitution payments will be taken out of my income. I will have to report all my financial activity and bank information to the government. They can even choose to garnish my wages. Refusal to pay restitution will be considered a violation and can result in me being jailed. I’ve been under federal supervision for the majority of my 20s because of a single political act of property destruction. My butch lesbian partner, Ángel, is still imprisoned and facing deportation. None of the time I did, on pre-trial or in prison, turned out to be a worse punishment than getting forcibly separated from her and being unable to be there as she faces what she called “her worst fear.” My way of winning, of being triumphant, is to keep on organizing, resisting, fighting, and to keep on loving and protecting each other, undeterred. And that’s exactly what we all intend to do on the other side.
“A famous dead guy, Henry David Thoreau, once said that in an unjust society, the only place for a just person is prison. Congratulations. You’re finally here. Now get to work.” —Sean Swain, Rattling the Cages
As a reminder, the best method of support for their other co-defendant, MJ, is to send commissary donations to $JohnLungaho on CashApp.
Thank y’all so much for reading our blog series #ReneRecords, donating to commissary funds, attending letter writing events we’ve hosted, and supporting Rene and her/their co-defendants. We are so thrilled that our comrade is back on this side of the wall. Free all political prisoners, FREE THEM ALL! Stay tuned for more updates from Rene ♥️
Photo from 2020
Rene is en route to the halfway house, and wanted to share these quotes and asks for support funds with y’all:
Post-release vibes!
Rene WAS FORMERLY incarcerated at a federal prison in Alabama. Please consider supporting her boo here, as well as her co-defendant Cody, here. The best method of support for her other co-defendant, MJ, is to send donations to $JohnLungaho on CashApp.
The following is a guest blog post, under the series “Rene Records”–Rene is currently incarcerated in a federal prison in Alabama. Please consider giving to her commissary fundraiser (funds are also used to support her reading group and fellow political prisoners). You can also support her boo here, as well as her co-defendant Cody, here. The best method of support for her other co-defendant, MJ, is to send donations to $JohnLungaho on CashApp.
August 27th Update
Grandma Peggy told me today that they’re taking her to the hospital in the next few weeks. Peggy is a woman in her sixties who I had begun growing close with during my time here. She has leukemia, and she says they found that the cancer has spread and she needs surgery. She had gotten news a few months ago that she will likely be released next year. She has been incarcerated for nearly thirty years, and her wife is in the free, and been holding her down this entire time. I told her that even though I’m not religious, I would still pray for her, and tell my people to do the same.
Crop of Elizabeth Catlett’s LINKS TOGETHER, 1996, hand drawn five color limited edition lithograph
Rene is a queer Korean journalist, sex worker, political prisoner and beloved comrade. You can find her writing at Autostraddle • Truthout • ThoughtCatalog • Arkansas Public Media • and KUAR.
The following is a guest blog post, under the series “Rene Records”–Rene is currently incarcerated in a federal prison in Alabama. Please consider giving to her commissary fundraiser (funds are also used to support her reading group and fellow political prisoners). You can also support her boo here, as well as her co-defendant Cody, here. The best method of support for her other co-defendant, MJ, is to send donations to $JohnLungaho on CashApp.
August 17th: Reflections
This topic is honestly super fun for me to talk about—I studied anthropology in college and spent a lot of time reading and studying subcultures, especially lgb/tgnc cultures/history, so ofc I immediately took an interest in the way gay culture and dating culture manifests in women’s prisons.
Most of all, I found myself very impressed by the amount of resourcefulness and creativity it takes in prison to flag, express your identities, perform rituals and create culture, as everything about prison as an institution is designed to suppress these things. Maybe that’s *why* it’s so important. One thing that’s certain: rituals and traditions are everything in prison.
I’d argue that flagging is even more important in here than on the outs bc there’s so few ways to communicate information about yourself to other people. think about it: there’s no social media—you can’t just put your pronouns and “femme lesbian” or whatever in your bio and call it a day. You don’t have things like bandanas or “dyke” shirts or earrings or docs or literal pride flags/pride iconography. So people have to get creative.
This is more prevalent across the street (at the larger, higher-security prison)—but rumor is that women over there braid up one side of their hair in three corn rows, then let the other side down. this indicates you’re gay and available. another way to indicate availability (this is much more well-known—to the point where it’s even referenced and parodied in pop culture) is to pull the pockets out of your grey sweats and let them hang out (but this is cliche to the point where people will make fun of you for it lol—at least it is here).
And since we can’t buy pride shit, people make it! I have never seen so many artistically talented people in one place before. We trade commissary with the hobbycraft girls to get crocheted and beaded accessories. During pride month, there was rainbow everything here! It was wonderful to see. my friend and I got matching rainbow beaded bracelets. I know someone who has a crocheted rainbow shoulder bag she carries everywhere, another girl here has a crocheted rainbow headband. My other friend who has a rainbow bracelet woven with sewing threads. An older butch (who has been crocheting for thirty years and is probably the most skilled at it, out of everyone here) made me a bag to carry my stuff to the halfway house. She surprised me by putting a bunch of rainbow hearts in the design 🙂
All masc-presenting people and people who take on a masc role in relationships are referred to as “bois” here. I see it almost as a gender all on its own, unique specifically to women’s prisons and very much wrapped up in gay dating culture. studs, stemmes, trans men, even aggressive fems and no-labels can be considered “bois”— it honestly seems to have more to do with your attitude/behavior and the role you play in your relationships and dating, though the way you look and present yourself is also important, too.
I think it’s worth mentioning that almost every aspect of prison culture in general is tied to Black culture in some way—whether the term or tradition originated in Black communities outside or inside first, is less clear. For example—very masculine-presenting lesbians who play a traditionally masculine role in relationships are always called studs in here, regardless of their ethnicity. I haven’t heard anyone say “butch” here.
Another thing: nearly everything that is popularly known about prison culture on the outs is primarily informed by men’s prisons (I think maybe Orange is the New Black changed that slightly, but still). It makes sense bc the vast majority of incarcerated people are men. However, culture and social dynamics in women’s prisons are *so* different from men’s, from what I’ve heard. While women’s prisons have a robust and very gay culture of consensual sex and dating, the culture in men’s prisons sounds violent, homophobic, and very hierarchical. At best, there’s simply no openly gay behavior, and it’s all very discreet, at its worst, instead of consensual relationships, there are exploitative ones where some men are targeted for sexual abuse and harassment, or coerced/forced into dynamics where they perform sexual favors for protection. That is so vastly different from life here, in a women’s minimum security prison, and from what I’ve heard, so vastly different from even the higher-security women’s prisons. Social life in women’s prisons tend to revolve around pseudo-families, instead of hierarchies of power.
Don’t Overthink Flagging Hanky by Archie Bongiovanni
Rene is a queer Korean journalist, sex worker, political prisoner and beloved comrade. You can find her writing at Autostraddle • Truthout • ThoughtCatalog • Arkansas Public Media • and KUAR.
The following is a guest blog post, under the series “Rene Records”–Rene is currently incarcerated in a federal prison in Alabama. Please consider giving to her commissary fundraiser (funds are also used to support her reading group and fellow political prisoners). You can also support her boo here, as well as her co-defendant Cody, here. The best method of support for her other co-defendant, MJ, is to send donations to $JohnLungaho on CashApp.
August 14th: social media update (aliceville healthcare)
Reading Imperfect Victims in the Aliceville prison library when I came across this completely by coincidence—literally amidst people here talking about the absolutely abysmal healthcare (or complete lack thereof):
“At the Federal Correctional Institution in Aliceville, Alabama, three women died of medical neglect between 2018 – 2020. Hazel McGary waited for eight months to see a cardiologist. She experienced fatigue, was confined to a wheelchair and regularly fell out of bed. On March 18, 2019, McGary’s roommate found her on the floor and called staff, who took her away. McGary died that day of a blood clot that started in her leg and traveled to her heart.” (p. 122)
I can’t help but think of conversations I’ve overheard here where women talked about witnessing COs at the FCI kicking women who were experiencing seizures while yelling things like “get up, you’re just high” or “I know you’re just on drugs.”
Even one of the officers here talked about how shocked she was when she started working here—she described seeing people falling out of bed, stumbling around like zombies, or leaned up against the wall with their head down, and everyone (including other officers) just walking past them as if nothing was happening. She said that other prisoners would try to discourage her from getting people medical attention because they were concerned the individuals would get in trouble for using drugs.
From everything I’ve heard from other prisoners here, and what I’ve witnessed myself, I can make some guesses about what happened to Hazel. The medical department assumed that she was high when she was exhibiting symptoms of a serious health issue. People fall out of bed while high on K2 all the time. People on suboxone often are fatigued. But not only that—there is a serious issue with the fact that people are scared to even ask for medical attention for fear of disciplinary action for drug use. Drug users and non-users alike deserve adequate healthcare. There are laws on the outside that protect individuals from legal action when seeking medical help for someone experiencing overdoses or drug-related health emergencies. There is absolutely nothing to protect prisoners from getting thrown in solitary confinement or getting their release dates pushed back if they get medical help, and are found to have been using drugs.
Rene is a queer Korean journalist, sex worker, political prisoner and beloved comrade. You can find her writing at Autostraddle • Truthout • ThoughtCatalog • Arkansas Public Media • and KUAR.
The following is a guest blog post, under the series “Rene Records”–Rene is currently incarcerated in a federal prison in Alabama. Please consider giving to her commissary fundraiser (funds are also used to support her reading group and fellow political prisoners). You can also support her boo here, as well as her co-defendant Cody, here. The best method of support for her other co-defendant, MJ, is to send donations to $JohnLungaho on CashApp.
Update from 8/13/24
There’s rumors of a COVID outbreak across the street. And none of the guards here wear masks. Let me explain:
Aliceville is a compound that consists of two facilities. One is Aliceville FCI (Federal Correctional Institution), a low-security women’s prison with a population between 800-1200. This is the main facility on the compound—where the majority of labor and resources are directed.
The other facility is Aliceville SPC (Satellite Prison Camp), a minimum-security women’s prison, where about 200 people—myself included—are imprisoned. When we say “across the street” or “behind the fence/behind the wall,” we’re referring to the other, higher-security prison that’s less than a mile away from us.
The two facilities are strictly kept separate. “Campers” and prisoners at the FCI can’t ever cross paths or communicate, due to our different security levels. However, many prisoners do end up transferring here from across the street, after lowering their “recidivism points” by taking classes or simply by aging. Prisoners can also transfer from here to over there—though it’s less common—by getting in trouble so much that their recidivism points actually increase.
The two facilities share the exact same staff. Many of the correctional officers even split their shifts, working at the FCI for several hours before coming here to the camp to finish, or vice versa.
So the dilemma is now clear: if it’s true that there’s a COVID outbreak at the FCI, and the same COs that work here *also* work there, then there is a very real and significant risk of COVID spreading from the FCI to the SPC. It would make sense, then, to take every precaution to prevent that.
And yet, I haven’t seen a single officer at the camp wearing a mask at any time. I have no idea whether or not they are masking up across the street. I’d like to optimistically believe that they are. I’d also like to believe that perhaps the COs are getting regularly tested for COVID, or have been vaccinated. I’d like to believe that this job requires vaccination.
But I have a sneaking suspicion I’d be wrong. The majority of the COs are white men from the nearby rural area, and many walk around here openly sporting a “Blue Line” shirt. It doesn’t take a lot of evidence for me to make a few educated guesses about what their political views might be—and the connection between right-wing politics, and anti-vaxxers and COVID-denial, is not a subtle one.
Not only that, but an email newsletter I’m subscribed to quotes a prisoner at the FCI: “there’s at least seven people I know of who are sick, coughing, congestion, headache, fever […] they go to sick call and are told by medical they have a ‘severe respiratory infection’ even though we are pretty sure it’s COVID.” Rumors are that these individuals are not getting tested for COVID despite displaying all the symptoms.
The only way any of us can get COVID is from a CO. None of us have any contact with the outside world. Every new prisoner from the outside gets tested for COVID upon arrival.
The COs should have already been wearing masks when interacting with us, if not getting regularly tested for COVID and receiving up-to-date vaccinations (which I seriously doubt they are).
photo circa 2021
Rene is a queer Korean journalist, sex worker, political prisoner and beloved comrade. You can find her writing at Autostraddle • Truthout • ThoughtCatalog • Arkansas Public Media • and KUAR.
The following is a guest blog post, under the series “Rene Records”–Rene is currently incarcerated in a federal prison in Alabama. Please consider giving to her commissary fundraiser (funds are also used to support her reading group and fellow political prisoners). You can also support her boo here, as well as her co-defendant Cody, here. The best method of support for her other co-defendant, MJ, is to send donations to $JohnLungaho on CashApp.
Book Club Update 8/11 from Aliceville Prison Camp
We just finished Two or Three Things I Know for Sure by Dorothy Allison, the girls enjoyed it and we had a good discussion on it! A lot of the girls related to Allison’s experiences in the book and there was a good discussion on what it’s like growing up in rural poverty and trying to go out in the world and “make it,” as well as discussion on how childhood trauma affects your adult life and especially one’s relationship to sex and sexuality.
We’ve linked the book titles to listings at Bluestockings Cooperative, so y’all can read along with Rene and her comrades!
Rene is a queer Korean journalist, sex worker, political prisoner and beloved comrade. You can find her writing at Autostraddle • Truthout • ThoughtCatalog • Arkansas Public Media • and KUAR.
The following is a guest blog post, under the series “Rene Records”–Rene is currently incarcerated in a federal prison in Alabama. Please consider giving to her commissary fundraiser (funds are also used to support her reading group and fellow political prisoners). You can also support her boo here, as well as her co-defendant Cody, here. The best method of support for her other co-defendant, MJ, is to send donations to $JohnLungaho on CashApp.
Journal Entry 8/6/24
The Federal Bureau of Prisons releases a memo, informing all of us that we are no longer “inmates”—we are “adults-in-custody,” or “AICs.”
“Stupid ass shit,” the girls grumble. “Man, just call us inmates. What difference does it make?”
If you don’t look too hard at Officer Spicer’s bullet-proof vest and mace and rings of keys, you might think she’s a high-school counselor. She has long dirty-blonde hair and wears long, loose dresses in pinks and baby blues and florals. She’s trying to get charcoal-filter water bottles on commissary for us, she says. We say thanks, but mostly we just want cinnamon, corn nuts, and better ramen noodles.
“I don’t like the term ‘AICs’,” she says, almost apologetically. “I prefer to use the term ‘incarcerated people.”
I don’t want to be an “incarcerated person”, I want to tell her, any more than I want to be an “AIC.” I don’t want to be an “inmate”, either. I don’t want to be property of the FBOP. I don’t want to be a prisoner. I don’t want to be number 22810509, at bunk “29 Upper”.
I want to be anyone and everyone else. I want to be the masked-up kid hanging off the statues in D.C, making the front page of an angry conservative newspaper. I want to be one of the people that makes Bill O’Reilly turn red in the face when he’s ranting on Fox News. I want to be the woman on a megaphone at a rally with a keffiyeh wrapped around my shoulders. I want to be the old Korean woman tapping a drum at the march and smiling.
I want to be the dancer that slides down the pole into the splits and showers in cash on the stage. I want to be the dancer who cusses out the manager and gets banned from the club for not paying her house fees. I want to be the dyke who picks her up from the club with food in the passenger seat.
I want to be the hiker who knows the names of all the mountains and where the best trails are. I want to be the one to score the winning point. I want a bunch of sweaty athletic women to lift me up while I wave a trophy in the air. I want them to pour Gatorade on me and scream my name. I want to run until my lungs burn. I want to feel my body working for me, feel my heart keeping me alive. I wanna cut across the grass and not worry about getting written up for it.
April 2023, in front of the Stonewall Inn
I want to be an outrageous tabloid headline, and I want to be the journalist who breaks the story. I want to be the photographer behind the camera, and the baddie in front of it. I want to be the upstart in the director’s chair, and the starlet in her film debut. I want to be the defendant who goes to trial and wins, and I want to be the attorney who helped them get away with it. I want to humiliate a prosecutor.
I want to be a wife and mother. I want to carry my butch’s egg in my womb. I wanna nourish it and give birth to a baby, born from only our love and nothing else. I want to be a cottagecore lesbian. I want to be the prettiest garden on the street. I want to be an elder queer who invites the youngsters to dinner and gives them half-decent relationship advice. I want to tell them: “Do as I say, don’t do as I do” and “You remind me of myself, when I was your age.”
I want to be the one who catches a pretty girl’s eye. I want to be the one who makes her nervous when I look back. I want to be the one a woman asks to fix her car. I want to get 0W-20 on my shirt and dirt on my face. I want her to ask me what my tattoos mean, and steal glances at my arms when I roll up my t-shirt sleeves. And I want to be the one with car trouble, too. I want to pretend like I don’t know how to put on a spare so I can watch my butch do it for me. I want her to call me “ma’am.” I want *only* her to call me “ma’am.”
I want to be a dirtbag, and I want to be the one that gets done dirty—real dirty. I want a beautiful dyke to break my heart, so that I know it’s still there. I want it to be worth it. I want to write a corny song about it.
I want to be a bad artist. I want to be the author of a confusing novel and a collection of meandering, woo-woo essays. I want to be the kind of poet that makes people roll their eyes. I want a gay kid, forty years from now, to read my writing and feel seen. I want to be the writer that makes them experience a sudden nostalgia for an era they never knew.
I want to be the girl who drunkenly plays someone’s guitar at a house party. I want to be the girl with a messy bun, sweats, and smudged eyeliner, rolling up to a gas station on a Sunday morning to grab a Celsius and some Camels. I want to be the girl you stay up all night with, getting stoned and watching bad movies and being lazy together.
Because to be free is to be imperfect, strange, and messy. To sleep in sometimes, to leave the bed unmade, to burn the eggs and spill coffee and spend twenty minutes looking for the car keys and end up running late. To lose patience sometimes, to cry in front of people and get embarassed, to say something stupid and regret it.
Prisons are not full of “AICs” or “inmates” or “incarcerated people,” they are full of mothers and fathers and parents, husbands and wives and lovers and baby daddies and baby mamas, addicts and recovering addicts and former addicts, fighters and survivors and victims, bad artists and bad writers and bad singers, dreamers and thinkers and learners and natural-born leaders. Prison is full of humans. Messy, imperfect, strange humans, who deserve to live messy, imperfect, strange, full, and *free* lives. Humans who deserve grace, whether they “earned” it or not.
Rene is a queer Korean journalist, sex worker, political prisoner and beloved comrade. You can find her writing at Autostraddle • Truthout • ThoughtCatalog • Arkansas Public Media • and KUAR.
The following is a guest blog post, under the series “Rene Records”–Rene is currently incarcerated in a federal prison in Alabama. Please consider giving to her commissary fundraiser (funds are also used to support her reading group and fellow political prisoners). You can also support her boo here, as well as her co-defendant Cody, here. The best method of support for her other co-defendant, MJ, is to send donations to $JohnLungaho on CashApp.
An entry from my journal 7/29
here is what prison makes out of women:
crooked eyebrows. dodging giggling friends who asked you if you threaded them yourself. missing teeth and receding gums from lack of adequate dental care. dry hands from harsh bar soap and hard water. swelling from water retention due to a high sodium diet. various new pimples. staph infections, lanced with sewing needles in the showers. hep-c from stick n pokes. a limited gut biome.
reluctant conversations with newly-Baptised Christians. more knowledge of the 12-step program than you ever really cared to know (but you’re not complaining). misuse of the word “accountability.” beliefs in questionable conspiracy theories. a bizarrely regimented routine. increased aversion to public crying. the ability to understand many more Spanish words than before. the ability to understand “intercom-speak.”
newfound appreciation for beaded jewelry and crocheted things. newfound appreciation for coffee creamer. an arsenal of knowledge on uses for tampons and pads. ears highly-trained to listen for jingling keys and certain footstep patterns.
irrational irritation at not receiving emails in eight hours. irrational anger when no one answers the phone. atrophying friendships. atrophying families. angry children. mothering from behind a computer screen and a broken-down phone. surprise at letters from people you thought would never write you. surprise at silence from people you thought were your family.
getting half-dragged to the chapel, howling hysterically, because she just found out from an email–delayed by two hours—that her son passed in a sudden car accident. (furlough denied).
french braids. dutch braids. cornrows. cornrows on people who do not look good with cornrows. a rich culture of black natural hair care. high-risk maneuvers to acquire contraband makeup. toothpaste face masks. honey face masks. coffee face masks. still more new pimples.
emotional breakdowns masked by humor. emotional breakdowns masked by an overzealous fitness routine. loneliness masked by “hoe-strolling” and shower hook-ups and “FaceTiming” at the windows between housing units.
mass isolation. extreme resourcefulness. cultures within cultures within cultures. resistance, in the form of picking wild onions in the softball field and preserving them in oil filched from the kitchen, in the form of sneaking abolitionist newspapers into the meager library collection and unofficial book club meetings on Friday nights, in the form of illegal red lipstick and altered pants and wearing too many earrings on one ear.
not what prison makes out of women. what women make out of prison.
Rene’s Femme Tattoo!
Rene is a queer Korean journalist, sex worker, political prisoner and beloved comrade. You can find her writing at Autostraddle • Truthout • ThoughtCatalog • Arkansas Public Media • and KUAR.
The following is a guest blog post, under the series “Rene Records”–Rene is currently incarcerated in a federal prison in Alabama. Please consider giving to her commissary fundraiser (funds are also used to support her reading group and fellow political prisoners). You can also support her boo here, as well as her co-defendant Cody, here. The best method of support for her other co-defendant, MJ, is to send donations to $JohnLungaho on CashApp.
July 16th, 2024
“My time in jail was intense immersion education. It was painful but ultimately mind-expanding and heart-opening and there is no other place I could have learned the lessons I learned there.” -Rebecca Rubin
It took almost 6 months, but I finally mastered the art of sleeping on a thin mat on a narrow metal bunk. I’ve become an early sleeper—which is astounding if you know me, because I have been a night owl my entire life—but you really have little choice when everyone goes to “dinner” at 430pm, lights out at 10pm, and your bed must be made and uniform-ready by 730am, every day for half a year.
This mail call was unusually late. I’m always happy to hear my name except for that night, because I was very much ready to go to bed. I don’t know why I was convinced it must not be anything important.
Except it was. From the halfway house: “We are ready to accept Renea Goddard on September 3, 2024.”
It is incredibly strange to hold a piece of paper in your hands that essentially frees you from imprisonment. And even stranger: prisoners here don’t receive these letters, ever. It was supposed to go to my case manager—a man who is widely known here as a petty, incompetent, retaliator who often sits on important information far longer than necessary. He’s basically a black hole of a person—but the letter had completely bypassed him and landed right in my hands.
“That was nothing but an act of God, girl,” Michelle said. Michelle is a stud in her fifties with a kind face, who wishes me a blessed day, every day, without fail. “That letter was supposed to go to you.”
“Only 7 months of an 18 month sentence, that’s truly a blessing, you know that?” my friend Juju told me. A Mexican lady with a daughter my age, she was the one who showed me around on my first day, walked me to lunch, taught me how to make my bed, gave me shower shoes and a toothbrush.
It is a blessing. And it could have all been so much worse. So why am I just as anxious and wary, as I am relieved and grateful?
One of the FSA (First Step Act) classes I took to reduce my sentence was NRDAP, or the Non-Residential Drug Abuse Program. My NRDAP book describes eight criminal thinking errors. One of them is “sentimentality.” “I had to sell drugs to support my children” is listed as an example of this “thinking error.” People who are accepted into the residential version of this program, at minimum and low-security prisons like FPC Bryan and FMC Carswell (where my codefendants were designated) are expected to be grateful—it takes a year off your sentence.
“A fellow prisoner described RDAP’s methods as: ‘They break you down completely and build you back up from nothing. That is why we are so mentally and physically tired at the end of each day.’
The guard-‘therapists’ (an intentionally blurred line) tell me that RDAP is a behavioral modification program intent on ‘challenging your core beliefs’ to orient you toward a ‘prosocial lifestyle.’ RDAP contends that all ‘criminal’ activity stems from correctible thinking errors and not material conditions. It is fiercely atomizing—attacking and neutralizing prisoner solidarity by reframing it as an anti-social ‘criminal’ lifestyle. Prisoners are required to break solidarity and publicly shame their peers, often creating escalating cycles that regularly destroy the social bonds that have formed. Racist, sexist, and transphobic events have gone unaddressed as the prisoners who did them are protected (encouraged and even facilitated) by guards.”
Menlo, a climate activist and political prisoner, wrote this in a Kite to the Editor for The Abolitionist, Issue 41. This, in a nutshell, describes the entire philosophy of “corrections” in the United States. Nowhere in these programs can you find any acknowledgment of how U.S laws, our economic system, and social inequality not only /creates/ things like addiction and illegal business—it /requires/ these things for the system to function as intended. Of course not. There is only “criminal” thinking and “criminal” lifestyles. Any acknowledgment of how material conditions create crime would betray the extremely lucrative business of “correcting” human beings.
“I do not know how many more there are like me: People quietly arrested and sentenced, given minimal time, and put in a Residential Drug Abuse Program (RDAP) unit. It is odd that the state tried to cover up my case and send me to a low-security federal facility,” Menlo writes. “It is reminiscent of that old philosophy of labeling political prisoners ‘criminally insane’ and quietly disappearing them to psychiatric facilities. It all sounds rather sinister when I put it on paper.”
Spicer, the NRDAP prison guard-therapist-whatever, is a smiley white woman who carries quilted bags and a thermos with a quilted coozie, jokes about her “addiction” to sweets, and often tearfully sympathizes with all the poor “incarcerated mothers taken away from their children.”
She also wears the same bulletproof vest and black belt with its heavy rings of keys that all the other prison guards wear. She is a trained correctional officer, even though she looks and quacks like a high school counselor.
“I agree, the system needs to change,” she cries, when I argue about the programming in class. “I’d burn it all down if I could!” she says, adjusting the mace can on her belt so she can sit more comfortably.
To her credit, one of the few times I’ve ever heard a CO make sense, was when Spicer told us once: “Whenever you start thinking that a staff member here is out to get you, just remember—this is a decent-paying job in an area where there are none. They don’t hate you—it’s not even about you. They just hate their jobs.”
When Max drove me here to turn myself in, the last couple hours was a drive through pure isolation. No phone service, barely even a gas pump for miles. The last little bit of human civilization before getting to the prison was a Walgreens, a gas station, a Cracker Barrel, and a Waffle House—where I had my last free meal before I came here (biscuits and sausage gravy, buttery grits, and sunny-side up eggs…I think some of the best I’ve ever had). Closer to the prison, there were a few trailers here and there in the woods. It didn’t occur to me until later that some of those may even belong to the duty officers who work here.
“Prisons and jails have become ‘answers’ to everything from unemployment to dilapidated infrastructure to revenue shortages to declining school enrollments.” Judah Schept writes in “Abolition From the Forest to the Mountain Top: Fighting for a Livable Future,” for The Abolitionist, Issue 41.
They put prisons, like this one, in the poorest parts of the country, like it’s some kind of band-aid. /It creates jobs, it’ll boost the local economy, rah rah rah./ This kind of thinking—the kind that has poor folk guarding cages full of other poor folk—is the same kind of thinking that also has poor folk here putting together bombs in Lockheed Martin and Raytheon factories, to bomb other poor folk halfway across the world.
“This kind of action is a prevalent error among oppressed peoples. It is based upon the false notion that there is only a limited and particular freedom that must be divided up between us, with the largest and juiciest pieces of liberty going as spoils to the victor or the stronger.” —Audre Lorde
It’s ultimately the prisoners and the locals who pay for this. The COs project their displaced resentment on us. The prison compound itself is ran incompetently, unprofessionally, and inefficiently, because the staff is apathetic and discontent. Combined with the extremely rural location, this results in delayed paperwork and release dates, bare bones programming, and a near complete lack of adequate medical care. Visitation is often abruptly cancelled due to lack of staff. Many of these women go without seeing their children for years because simply coming all the way out here is costly and time-consuming.
Meanwhile, the non-incarcerated locals deal with pollution and environmental disruptions (not to mention the prison sucking up all the jobseekers in the local area). One day in the garage I found the guard-foreman struggling to fix a large, rusty, and broken-down trash-grinder. He informed me that the prison has been disposing of all its waste in a nearby landfill. The municipal gov. has been complaining for years, and is on the verge of bringing a lawsuit to the prison—so only now is the prison attempting to find ways to destroy its own garbage.
Rural Appalachia has the highest concentration of prisons in the country. But abolitionists in the region work tirelessly: right now, they’re committed to preventing a new prison, FCI Letcher, from being built. There’s always a way.
“Is it true they have to snitch on each other in RDAP?” I ask Ms. Peggy, out of curiosity. Peggy probably knows corrections better than any CO who works here. She’s been locked up since ’98—the year I was born.
“Yes, it’s the only way to get through the program. But look,” she said. “This is what you do. You get yourself a buddy, right? Then you just make shit up about each other. Little shit. Like, ‘she takes too long in the shower’ or whatever. That way you help each other. See, there’s always a way.” She winked. “Just gotta get creative, right?”
Maybe I’m anxious and wary because this is not over yet. I spent a little over three years on pre-trial supervision prior to my incarceration, and I will spend another two years on probation after I am released. This place is full of probation violators—everything from “pissing dirty” to simply forgetting to pay your restitution can land you back in here.
By the end of this, I would have been under the boot for nearly the entire duration of my twenties.
And even after I’m punished, they will punish me. As a felon, I can’t vote in some states. If I ride in a vehicle with someone who’s strapped or has drugs on their person, I’d be risking a lot more than someone with no record.
“You’re only 26 and already in federal prison! Well, at least you got street cred for the rest of your life,” my coworker at the garage told me. She laughed and slapped me on the back. “So, are you still gonna protest and all that stuff, after all this?”
I didn’t hesitate. “Yes!”
A photo from SF Pride in 2022
Rene is a queer Korean journalist, sex worker, political prisoner and beloved comrade. You can find her writing at Autostraddle • Truthout • ThoughtCatalog • Arkansas Public Media • and KUAR.
The following is a guest blog post, under the series “Rene Records”–Rene is currently incarcerated in a federal prison in Alabama. Please consider giving to her commissary fundraiser (funds are also used to support her reading group and fellow political prisoners). You can also support her boo here, as well as her co-defendant Cody, here. The best method of support for her other co-defendant, MJ, is to send donations to $JohnLungaho on CashApp.
Screenshots of late June updates from Rene, posted on Instagram by her support crew:
Rene is a queer Korean journalist, sex worker, political prisoner and beloved comrade. You can find her writing at Autostraddle • Truthout • ThoughtCatalog • Arkansas Public Media • and KUAR.
The following is a guest blog post, under the series “Rene Records”–Rene is currently incarcerated in a federal prison in Alabama. Please consider giving to her commissary fundraiser (funds are also used to support her reading group and fellow political prisoners). You can also support her boo here, as well as her co-defendant Cody, here. The best method of support for her other co-defendant, MJ, is to send donations to $JohnLungaho on CashApp.
I suggested Two Or Three Things I Know For Sure by Dorothy Allison for our book club and the girls are very interested! I’m excited. Our first book was Little Fires Everywhere by Celeste Ng (the discussions on this one were heated, but really insightful) and we’re currently working on Kindred by Octavia Butler.
We meet every Friday. I’ve been passing around my copies of Octavia’s Parables Series to the girls, and some of them have been reading it independently, and they love it. My friends want to continue the book club after I go, I’ve already given them the contact info for Midwest Books to Prisoners, and my own contact info so I can help them too if needed.
The programming here is very bare bones and the staff is really apathetic and unhelpful, so anything we want, we have to do it completely ourselves. Organizing this little group has been very fulfilling for me and for the friends who are helping me and it’s personally made my time here easier.
photo circa January 2024
Rene is a queer Korean journalist, sex worker, political prisoner and beloved comrade. You can find her writing at Autostraddle • Truthout • ThoughtCatalog • Arkansas Public Media • and KUAR.
The following is a guest blog post, under the series “Rene Records”–Rene is currently incarcerated in a federal prison in Alabama. Please consider giving to her commissary fundraiser (funds are also used to support her reading group and fellow political prisoners). You can also support her boo here, as well as her co-defendant Cody, here. The best method of support for her other co-defendant, MJ, is to send donations to $JohnLungaho on CashApp.
“Communism is not the loving daydream of a better world, then, but something cultivated first from rage at what the world is not. We do not glimpse it. We feel it in moments of fever—of cities burning, of order breaking down, of loved ones dying slow and unremarkable deaths…because a better world is not built backwards from the future, but from where we stand now, at the peak of the mountain of bones that constitutes the pre-history of the human species.”
—Phil Neel
I met C* about three days into my federal prison sentence. A fifty-year old, half-Mexican and half-white anarchist, C kept her dark hair in long braids, made curious vegetarian concoctions with commissary ingredients, and spoke fondly of her dominatrix and stripper days in the 80s. She was also one of the few people in the prison who made me feel safe speaking openly about my political values and issues I care about.
When I told her my mom cut off contact with me after I had been convicted for destroying police cars and Confederate monuments during the 2020 George Floyd Uprisings, she told me that if I were her daughter, she would brag to all her friends about me.
“Are you kidding?” she said. “I’d be like, ‘my daughter is a freaking badass!'”
I don’t know if she knows how much that meant to me.
Since I started doing my time, I met numerous women with lengthy sentences for drug charges. Many have worked in the sex trade in some capacity. Meeting these women and coming face-to-face with the carceral system only further convinced me that any movement for liberation must advocate for the complete decriminalization of drugs and sex work. However, I’ve come to believe that we must achieve those goals while actively working toward a world where neither drugs or sex are commodified for profit, and where no one has to labor in degrading conditions under threat of starvation, homelessness, and imprisonment.
When I say I am an abolitionist, I mean that I am an abolitionist all the way, from the seed to the flower—as in, there is no prison and police abolition, without also abolishing U.S militarism and imperialism, and none of this is possible without abolishing capitalism.
photo circa 2019
I walked through the gates at Aliceville Prison Camp confident in these beliefs. But now, I will walk out of here understanding these things in a much more visceral and personal way than I did before. When you live with 100 other women—your roommates, friends, and coworkers—who have had their whole lives twisted and turned by these systems, you end up *feeling* the injustice in your bones.
“My time in jail was intense immersion education. It was painful but ultimately mind-expanding and heart-opening and there is no other place I could have learned the lessons taught there.” —Rebecca Rubin
My best friend in here is as young as I am—a Mexican lesbian who just turned 26. She’s serving an 11-year prison sentence. The crime? She happened to be in the car with her brother while he was trafficking drugs. Neither of them knew exactly what he was transporting.
Versions of this same story repeat itself everywhere here. My former bunkie, a Black woman in her sixties, also a first-time offender, was in a relationship with a man who was trafficking drugs. She’ll probably do about six years—just for knowing what he was doing, and counting his money a couple times.
I mention these stories to demonstrate just how egregiously the federal justice system overreaches, and also make a point about how common it is for women to catch charges for the men in their lives. Women’s prisons are full of ride-or-dies and accomplices. But don’t misunderstand me: it is always wrong to cage human beings. It’s a disgrace to the world that a massive and lucrative industry exists around imprisoning and punishing humans. This is no less true for the women in here who don’t have codefendants, who had leadership roles, who knowingly committed federal crimes, no matter how severe the offense.
It wasn’t until I started getting to know my fellow prisoners that I realized just how misinformed the general public is on convicted felons and the nature of our crimes. For example, liberal prison reform rhetoric often focuses on the most palatable felons—pointedly excluding sex offenders, people with multiple convictions, and so-called “violent” offenders. You often hear things like: “it’s not fair that drug dealers get more time than murderers and rapists!” and “it’s wrong for first-time offenders to get such long sentences!” I even hear this from other incarcerated and formerly incarcerated people themselves. I think much of this attitude stems from a gross misunderstanding of how the American criminal justice system works, and it is our responsibility as abolitionists to debunk these assumptions.
A few months ago, I encountered a fellow prisoner—a trans guy I’ll call “J”—arguing with his girlfriend M about “chomos” (the prison term for sex offenders whose crimes involved sexually exploiting, harming or assaulting children). He turned to my friend D:
“D, isn’t it true—chomos can’t use the phone or email, right?” J said.
“Yeah, that’s right.”
“Seeeee, M, didn’t I tell you?”
“I /know/, J, What I’m saying is, I thought it wasn’t /just/ chomos–” M said.
“She’s right,” D interjected. “My homegirl at the FCI is a prostitute—and I knew for sure because I saw her paperwork and everything. But yeah, she couldn’t use the phone or computer either. It’s not just chomos man, it’s all “sex offenders”—anyone who committed a sex crime.”
D herself is a “violent” offender. At age 22, she started robbing gas stations, mostly under the influence of Xanax. Though she never intended to physically hurt anyone, D was armed during her crimes.
In fact, anyone who possesses a firearm during a federal crime—whether the crime itself involved violence or not, like transporting drugs with a gun in your car, for example—can potentially be charged as a “violent” offender. My codefendants and I faced this risk, as well—my attorney was worried because ATF considered a Molotov cocktail a “destructive device.” So-called “violent” offenders do not benefit from the First Step Act—a law passed in 2018 that drastically reduced most federal prison sentences. D will be in her 30s when she gets out of prison.
My coworker, A, is serving her fourth prison sentence. Her last two sentences were on probation violations. What many don’t understand about parole, probation, and pre-trial supervision, is that the very subjective judgments of your supervising officer has an incredible amount of power over whether or not you return to prison. A “strict” PO can request the judge re-incarcerate you for something as miniscule as forgetting to make a restitution payment, arriving late for a drug test, forgetting to report an interaction with law enforcement, and missing a court-ordered therapy appointment, among many others. Another PO may completely dismiss these mistakes altogether. POs have access to your entire case file and criminal history—there is nothing preventing them from tormenting you if they take personal issue with you, like if you’re a sex offender, for example, or if they disagree with your political activities.
When we assume that all sex offenders, “violent” offenders, and “career criminals” are dangerous to society and deserve to be locked up, we are committing the grave error of lending credence to carceral logic. The reality is that this logic is flawed by design. Portraying convicted felons as scary and dangerous benefits the prison-industrial complex. So is creating obstacles for formerly-incarcerated people to stay out of prison—recidivism is a feature of the PIC, not a flaw.
So how does this problem relate specifically to sex workers?
There is a sex-positive, liberal feminist depiction of sex work that is currently trending in media and pop culture. This set of perspectives depicts sex work as inherently empowering, modern and feminist. Think TikToks of strippers flashing stacks and high-earning OnlyFans girls going viral on Instagram. This approach overwhelmingly highlights the voices of the world’s most privileged individuals in the sex trade—western cisgender women with financial security and a lot of autonomy—and assumes that these perspectives represent all sex workers.
Much of the global sex trade looks very different than what you see on the internet. Many women in the Global South (sometimes referred to as the “Third World” or the colonized world) enter the trade because they have few options to earn money in their home countries that have been ravaged by U.S military occupation or U.S military-backed coups. Many poor and working-class women here in the U.S. enter exploitative relationships with pimps, or are groomed into the trade from a young age, sometimes by family members. These less glamorous experiences are often glossed over, or spark defensive responses from liberal feminists—i.e, “That’s stereotyping—sex workers are not just victims to be saved!”
And that’s no lie. Most of us are incredibly regular people. Like most Americans, the majority of us don’t own much capital of our own. And many of us are also workers like you, with day jobs serving food, cleaning, pencil-pushing, and delivering. Some of us make decent money, some of us make very little. Some of us suffer less than others, some of us suffer more. But all of us are under the boot of capitalism. Like most everyone else, we are doing what we can, to survive, or have a decent quality of life—not necessarily what we *want,* not necessarily what is good for us, nor what is good for our communities, our societies, our Earth and our environment. That’s what must change, and it must change from the root up.
Other, self-described “radical” feminists react with the extreme opposite view, taking a hardline stance that all sex work is nonconsensual and exploitative, that pornography is inherently misogynistic, all while offering carceral “solutions” to the harms and dangers of the sex trade. The most popular of these solutions is criminalizing buying sex—the logic is that we lock up tricks for objectifying and exploiting women, and treat the sex workers like their victims.
But locking up tricks won’t end the sex trade, just like locking up drug dealers doesn’t end the drug trade. All it does is make the trade more dangerous, ruin more lives, and puts sex workers in closer proximity to law enforcement.
No more band-aids; we are looking for cures, and the only cure is abolition—abolition of capitalism and the conditions it creates, conditions that create not only the sex trade, but also the drug trade and the slave trade and all illegal business that necessitates violence and suffering to regulate itself.
Both the liberal and radical feminist approaches are failing us. When I say us, I mean all of us—all exploited, oppressed, colonized, and caged people. We cannot rely on the same pigs and politicians that cage people for decades on prostitution and drug charges to give any of us justice. And we cannot claim to care about sex workers if we only care about the loudest and proudest and richest of us.
“See this?” C showed me her leg. There was a long, pale stippled patch of skin on the side—an old, deep scar. “This was from when a cop broke my leg. I was in the hospital getting clean. He called me a ‘fuckin crack whore’ and stomped on it. All the nurses just stood there and watched.”
C signed my “fedbook” (composition notebooks bought from commissary, decorated with pictures, collages, and messages from our friends, to take with us when we’re released) the day before she went free.
“Keep stickin’ it to the man!” she wrote.
*All names have been abbreviated to protect identities.
Rene is a queer Korean journalist, sex worker, political prisoner and beloved comrade. You can find her writing at Autostraddle • Truthout • ThoughtCatalog • Arkansas Public Media • and KUAR.
So what is “Rene Records”? For a while, our comrade Red and Rene have been kicking around the idea of cross-posting and amplifying some of Rene’s writing while she’s inside! We’ll re-share her articles, reflections, updates, and fundraising needs under blog posts titled “Rene Records” so y’all can more easily find them! This first blog post is all about resourcefulness and political education, thanks for taking the time to read Rene’s words and holding space for our comrades inside federal prisons!
interesting women’s prison things (7/12/24)
u can get birth control here (i think it’s prescribed for painful/irregular periods, cysts or other hormonal/menstrual issues) and it comes in this plastic case where there’s a hole with a pill in it for each day of the week, and u just pop the pill out of the hole when u take it—the girls here will take the case apart and use the side with the holes as a cheese grater lol
i saw some girls take a mop stick and hang gallon bottles of cleaning fluid on the sides of it to do deadlifts. my friend and i will put weighted balls in our duffel bags to lift. for workouts where we would normally use ankle weights, we tie the bags to our ankles instead
the girls will take a toothbrush holder (it’s a long, thin cylindrical plastic case) wrap it up in ace bandages until it reaches whatever girth/shape they want, then slide a rubber glove over the whole thing — now u got a dildo lol. some girls will crochet straps for the dildos to make strap-ons. i heard that in prisons where there’s no crochet stuff, the girls use t-shirts or cut the straps off backpacks/duffel bags to make them
pretty much everyone uses tampons as sponges to wash dishes with, and maxi pads to wipe down the floors and surfaces. there’s also like a million other uses for them, including putting pads in your work boots (they’re super uncomfortable and cause awful blisters) as insoles, using tampons to apply foundation, the plastic or cardboard tampon holder to store c*gs, and i learned how to thread eyebrows using threads pulled out of tampon strings.
Read along with Rene! She’s been reading, We Do This ‘Til We Free Us: Abolitionist Organizing and Transformative Justice, by Mariame Kaba and friends, and really loved the essay about Cyntoia Brown’s story (you can read the original article here). Her reading group started reading Kindred by Octavia Butler earlier this month and are loving it! They’re already getting excited for their next read, “we all agreed that we’d like to read something nonfiction for our next book after Kindred, and everyone seems to be leaning toward a memoir or autobiography with a strong narrative.” We recommended, and sent these to Rene and her reading group (via Bluestockings Cooperative) to check out:
Support Rene and her comrades! Rene is a political prisoner, journalist and SWer! She hosts reading groups for other women inside and continues her journalism, even in the face of CO retaliation. You can also read more about her case linked in her commissary fundraiser. You can also support her boo here, as well as her co-defendant Cody, here. The best method of support for her other co-defendant, MJ, is to send donations to $JohnLungaho on CashApp.
Last Monday, July 8th, we celebrated the anniversary of Alisha coming home and leaving that hellscape of a place, IDOC, behind. Three years ago, our friend danced back into our arms, free from prison. So much has happened since then: growth, change, joy and grief. And yet, every year she’s been home, we celebrate with food and chosen family–grilling with our whole crew in her new home, dinner out at a fancy (for us at least) restaurant, beautiful pastries from a local bakery, and a bbq this year. This year was a little different, Alisha is now a mom, a new parent to 6 month old comrade-baby, K, so there was even more to celebrate!
We can’t stress how important it has been for our extended community to keep showing up for us, for Alisha, even though (especially though) she’s back home, and on this side of the wall now. As another beloved, Moni Cosby, recently remarked, “The prison follows you. Even when you’re free, it still comes for you.” Supporting people while they’re incarcerated is beyond crucial, AND supporting people when they come home cannot be overlooked or overstated.
With that in mind, we want to uplift several fundraising efforts for our currently and formerly incarcerated comrades:
Commissary for Rene! Rene is a political prisoner, journalist and SWer! She hosts reading groups for other women inside and continues her journalism, even in the face of CO retaliation. You can also read more about her case linked in her fundraiser. You can also support her boo here, as well as her co-defendant Cody, here. We’re still waiting to get the most recent method of support for her other co-defendant, MJ.
Respect & Defend Sex Working Parents and Caregivers! We’re supporting a cohort of 14 currently (in Cook County Jail) and formerly incarcerated queer and trans* sex working parents and caregivers. Our goal is to be able to send monthly stipends to all 14 people in the cohort for the next 12 months (at least). Please consider sending contributions via Venmo or CashApp (search SxHxCollective) or snag a shirt to visibly show your support.
🖤👀Tabling alert Chicago!!!❤️🔥‼️ We’ll be tabling down in Pilsen for PRINTED PAPER with besties Zine Mercado, Flatlands Press, Midwest Perzine Fest y más! Come through! Saturday, June 29th from Noon – 6PM at Definitive Selection!
Two tabling events in one weekend?! What are we, in our 20s again or something?! 😮💨Want zines❓We got You❗️ZineMercado PopUp with Zinester friends from around the country❗️Sunday June 30th, 2024, Noon – 6:00PM at Comfort Station during the Logan Square Arts Fest!
We learned on June 3rd about beloved Xitlalli’s passing. Rest in power and love, dear one. May your memory be a blessing and a revolution. We’re sending strength and care to everyone who knew and loved you.
¡Xitlalli, forever!
We encourage you to read/view this gorgeous photo interview in PAPER Magazine featuring her, read about and appreciate the art she made and exhibited, and of course to hold space for the profound love she had for queer, trans*, sex working, (im)migrant communities.
Chicago & Texas comrades, there’s been a fund established for Xitlalli’s funeral costs and to support her family, please share and give if you have the capacity to do so.
Memorial services will take place on June 22nd in both San Antonio, Tx and Chicago, IL. The Chicago memorial details are in the flyer below.
Tell your friends and comrades you love them, every damn day.
TODAY! June 17th! Join our comrade 🦋Donna|Dante🦋 as they read their poetry at a book launch for GIRL WORK hosted by Pilsen Community Books, at 7pm! Come through!
Yesterday, June 2nd, we organized a community altar build and picnic in Chicago’s Palmer Square Park for International Whores Day.
Check out this archived post from Survivors Against SESTA, this video from Alianza Mexicana de Trabajadoras Sexuales (in Spanish), or read the IWD NYC 2020 zine to learn more about the whorestory and legacy of this day of celebration and resistance. There’s also this documentary, Les prostituées de Lyon parlent (1975), about the events that led to IWD, and this book, Prostitutes: Our Life, is a must read!
With our organizing crew small, and our capacities limited due to THE WORLD, we still wanted to gather outside, in the sun, share a community meal and build a meaningful space to voice memories, hopes, and of course a righteous collective scream. We also wanted to make sure people had resources and support in writing letters to our incarcerated comrades, and time to do so together.
A beautiful cohort of fellow workers and co-strugglers joined us, brought food, contributed to the altar, and wrote letters to our comrade Rene–we are so grateful to all y’all who contributed, joined in, sent us well wishes, and held space with us. Thank you for also sharing memories and stories to call our loved ones, who are no longer with us on this earth, into our space so that we could uplift, and feel, them with us.
One of our comrades wrote this, in celebration of the day:
“Today (and every damn day) celebrate ALL of the sex working, trading and hustling people of this world AND that means your incarcerated, queer, trans, drug-using and criminalized survivor-comrades! Sex workers are with you in revolutionary struggle, and we are many! Honor the revolutionary struggle of sex workers resisting police repression and sexual violence! Uplift sex working parents and caregivers! Support building radical formations of care and political education informed by whore politics! Be unapologetic in your advocacy to decriminalize all survival! Commit to seeing sex working people as comrades and co-conspirators! Champion bodily autonomy for all! Give thanks to all your whoremothers, living and sunset, who you’ve learned from! Love live the whores of Lyon! Abolish police and borders!”
Join us on June 2nd, International Whores Day, from 2-4PM, for a community altar build in Palmer Square Park (look for the red umbrellas).
Share stories, (re)connect with folx, stretch out in the sun under the trees together.
Bring blankets to sit/share space on, and beloved objects, flowers, candles, photos, letters, and anything else you’d like to contribute to the altar.
We’ll build together, adding to our altar throughout the afternoon, and lovingly document and then disassemble it together. SxHx comrades will be sharing some current organizing and fundraising campaigns we are working on–and we will have letter writing supplies for anyone who’d like to write to comrade Rene who’s currently incarcerated for her racial justice activism.
Sunscreen and red parasols/umbrellas will be available for use during the build. Please BYO water/snacks.
Closest Buses are Armitage Ave & Fullerton Ave Closest Blue Line is California Bathrooms available at Parson’s (accessible) & a comrade’s house nearby (not accessible)
Mark your calendars!! Our comrade Dante|Donna has something in store for you!!
Dante’s Originals is a poetry series featuring local artists sharing original work. This is the dream venture of curator, host and event planner Dante Donna Marie Gary Marcus.
On May 31 from 6pm – 8pm, participants can access the event for a $15 entry fee supports Support Ho(s)e Collective and ARTEMPLE Foundation. No one will be turned away for lack of funds.
The event will include a Writing Workshop on Dreaming hosted by Dante, MC Male Spice will shepherd the poetry showcase featuring poets RISE, Kemi Alabi and Crystal Vance Guerra. Due to the intimate nature of the event, seating will be first come first serve with preference for folks who can stay for the workshop and showcase.
ComstockCon brought together organizers, historians, attorneys, journalists, artists, writers, and others to trace the connections between the political context in which the Comstock Act was passed and how it constrains our present.
Held at Harvard Law (located on the traditional and ancestral land of the Massachusett peoples) on May 14th, ComstockCon was a convening inspired by the fallout from the Dobbs decision and broader attacks on bodily autonomy.
Originally conceived by co-organizers Kendra Albert and Melissa Gira Grant in 2022 as a way to forecast what enforcement of the Comstock Act might look like without Roe, in the ensuing months, a coalition of anti-abortion, anti-LGBTQ rights, and Christian right groups have been openly calling for the next conservative president to enforce the Comstock Act as a nationwide abortion ban. We must imagine a post-Comstock future.
We were able to speak with other sex worker organizers, abortionists, reproductive justice activists and providers, mutual aid fundraisers, trans and GNC healthcare and tech experts, harm reductionists, and the media and legal people who learn from all of us, frequently. It was an intense day of historical framing, strategy and reflection. Here’s to a future where Comstock’s ghost no longer haunts us.
We know all of y’all are supporting and giving to so many vital causes right now, thank you for taking the time to read about one of our latest efforts.
The Support Ho(s)e Collective is launching a t-shirt fundraiser via Bonfire, which will run from today through May 31st (initially), to raise funds for currently and formerly incarcerated sex working parents and caregivers in our direct community. The campaign is called “Support Comrade Parents!” Essentially, we’re in need of unrestricted funds to create consistent methods of giving over the Summer to these sex working/trading comrades–and this fundy will do just that, and allow y’all wear your support!
Feeling so much gratitude for everyone who came out to our talk “Learning Survivor Support from Sex Workers”, which took place during the Phoenix Survivors Alliance Symposium at the University of Chicago, today, April 20th!
Red gave an overview of the history of our collective organizing, and Alisha (via video) and Red shared reflections on institutional and state violence, whorephobia, and why sex workers know best how to show up for ourselves and other survivors of gender based violence–and this conversation turned into a visioning session about the kinds of worlds we want to build! Then Red shared about the toolkit we co-created with Survived and Punished and other trusted comrades, and talked about organizing strategies and current mutual aid efforts (supporting our trans women + femme comrades in Cook County Jail, and letter writing for Rene, for example) that we are involved with.
We also met some powerful campus and community organizers **and some are community members in need of immediate support** like Sul*Sul* is a Black trans woman from Colombia, who recently arrived in Chicago and is struggling to find work and SWer community. She’d rather try working in other ways, but nothing is panning out. She’s nervous about working in this new place, and URGENT support is needed. Please help us welcome Sul* to Chicago! [Español aqui] If you’re a Spanish speaking SWer, she wants to meet up and talk! Please email us (sxhxcollective@gmail.com)! If you have money to share, please send to us on CashApp so we can forward to her friend/translator: $SxHxCollective (usein the note so we know it’s for Sul*)!
Also, a couple comrades who attended are in need of legal support to help navigate a workplace / harassment situation, please get in touch if you have leads on SWer friendly lawyers who are accepting new clients/cases right now!
We’re excited to be joining the Phoenix Survivors Alliance on Saturday, April 20th, from 12-1:30pm, on the University of Chicago campus (a site of imperialist, colonial, racist, sexist violence historically) to talk about the profound connections between supporting survivors of gender-based and sexual violence and the movement to decriminalize the sex trades, and all survival.
We’ll be talking about what sex workers are fighting for, how we know best how to show up for criminalized survivors in the sex trades, sharing resources we’ve created and of course why we think DECRIM should be something ALL prison/police abolitionists advocate for!
We held a Letter Writing event for Comrade Rene at Bluestockings Cooperative on Sunday, April 7th to send her much needed snail mail since her e-communications and commissary have been shut off for a month in retaliation for her raising concerns about the conditions inside the Aliceville Satellite Camp (federal penitentiary).
We want to express so much gratitude to Bluestockings Cooperative for hosting us, and to everyone who came through yesterday afternoon to write letters to our penpal and comrade who’s currently in federal prison for her activism and politics of solidarity. We want to give a special shoutout to Vikki Law and Maya Schenwar, authors of “Prison by Any Other Name”, for making time to write letters and learn more about Rene’s case! You can get the only signed copies of their book at Bluestockings!
You can read more about Rene’s case here, and also continue giving to her commissary fund so that she may purchase essentials.
This first New York Feminist Zine Fest in FIVE YEARS was held on April 6th, at Barnard College.
It was so surreal to be back in that same (extremely sweaty and glorious) room with so many of the zinesters we last saw in 2019, before the world changed (again). Our collective and organizers were in talks after the 2019 fest to help support with bystander intervention and deescalation trainings for the fest volunteers and organizers because we offered real-time support during the 2019 fest. And then the pandemic and everything went on hold. We were so grateful to be invited back and to see all of the amazing offerings the organizers had in place to support vendors and attendees–quiet space, mask mandatory spaces, eating space, greenroom with drinks and snacks, and a wellness space–intentional rooms and access points like these really make events more accessible and welcoming!!
Here’s a brief recap from Red about this year’s fest:
Wow. Zine fests are reunion, organizing, big feeling, and time travel spaces! I am still processing everything that was yesterday’s fest—and so grateful to the NY Feminist Zine Fest organizers and to all the zinesters and beautiful, supportive people who attended! I’m feeling especially thankful for my comrade table-mates and beloveds Jen, Aaron, and Karina! It was so good to hug and see Mariame, Zoe, neta, Hafizah, Juli, Joan, Lauren, Adder, the comrades from Unity & Struggle, Emma K, Marisol, Ayun, and Pau—I love and appreciate all y’all so much.
Can’t wait to see all y’all again soon! Here’s to a feminist zine-filled future for us all!
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!
Join us next weekend, Sunday, March 31st from 1-5PM to celebrate Trans Day of Visibility with Gender Unbound! We’ll be tabling with our zines and we’ll have cascarones (confetti eggs) to benefit our incarcerated loved ones! Crack a cascarón on our comrades (or your pals) for a good cause!
7910 Cameron Rd, Austin, TX 78754
Gender Unbound returns with a Community Picnic and Art Market for Trans Day of Visibility!
♥ Art market featuring all trans artists ♥ Relax on the lawn with picnic games and fun, chill activities ♥ Bring your own picnic blanket, lawn chairs, pillows, etc ♥ Bring your own snacks, foods, drinks (no alcohol or glass containers)
The worker-owners, comrades, patrons, and those reliant on Bluestockings Cooperative’s free store, have faced increasing threats of violence from so-called “neighbors” who are unhappy that the bookstore opens its doors to those most in-need of care and support in NYC.
The Support Ho(s)e Collective has utilized Bluestockings (the former and current locations) as a meeting space, a place to hold letter writing events for our incarcerated loved ones, book launches, community organizing action events, an arts & crafts and zine making space. Several of our members are former volunteers and worker-owners, and we personally know how life-saving having a physical space in the Lower East Side where queer, trans*, sex working people can gather is!
We know Bluestockings has an amazing membership program that helps them make rent, and of course the best way to support is to VISIT and SHOP–however, we felt that a public showing and declaration of our belief that “Bluestockings Saves Lives” needed to be made. We believe we need a LOUD, public, community outpouring to demonstrate how important this space is for so many of us, in and beyond, NYC.
Please share this widely with your networks! #ISWRD #SexWorkersUnite
The flowers we sponsored to honor our beloved whore mother and teacher Cecilia, are finally with our comrades at Bluestockings Cooperative–please go see, smell, visit the flowers, bring your grief and love, hold space for each other and reignite your commitment to fight.
This was after much distressing back and forth with the florist, who didn’t make them on time, or deliver the flowers to Cecilia’s services at St. Pat’s–we’re so appreciative of Bluestockings Cooperative for giving the flowers a home, and creating space for comrades to gather, love and mourn.
Her compañerxs, lovers, and family have established a legacy fund in her honor, please share it and give if you are able. We’ve made a contribution as a collective.
From our collaborative statement:
Our comrades from The Support Ho(s)e Collective commissioned this memorial wreath for our beloved compañera, teacher and whore mother, Cecilia Gentili.
We’re now hosting the flowers, and intend to build an altar for her. If you were not able to make the funeral, or simply need to hold a little more time, we welcome y’all to come and hold space, see the flowers, bring your own, leave mementos and speak or sign Cecilia’s name. We hope this brings some comfort and renewed commitment to struggle in her name and memory.
We are so blessed to have organized alongside, learned from your fierce love and teaching, and shared space with you. Cecilia, we will continue to fight in your name and memory. We love you, mil gracias for everything.
Please join us in uplifting a sex working comrade who’s being targeted by the state for her political activism. Rene is facing federal time, and we want to make sure she has ample commissary funds for essentials while inside. Rene is a beloved community member and now a political prisoner–please hold her in your hearts, and share this fundraiser!
Early this morning, Alisha gave birth to a tiny new comrade, K💕, and both are now resting and recovering after a difficult birth experience (see full thread below the methods of giving)!!
If you can, please send some love to them! Venmo @ SxHxCollective CashApp $ SxHxAl (Rose)
Something we all feared might happen, began to—Alisha hemorrhaged out, her blood pressure plummeting drastically, the hospital staff so slow to respond that she almost died while giving birth. We know this is all too terrifyingly common for birthing Black, working class people.
We waited, fearful, for updates through the night & morning hours. Finally just after 5am, Alisha was conscious enough to text and let us know she and K made it. In a country where being Black, birthing, cash poor, and single at a hospital can mean death…we are beside ourselves.
Please hold Alisha and K💕 in your hearts and minds—celebrate their fight for life and wishes for rest and healing with us.
Please give if you can toward their recovery time:
Today, December 17th, marks the 20th annual International Day to End Violence Against Sex Workers.
We’re spending the day with chosen fam in our respective cities, reflecting on so many years of mourning and resistance, remembering our loved ones and refocusing for the fights ahead.
(No, we do not f*ck with the majority of the editorial board of the magazine, but we were invited by a trusted comrade to sign this powerful statement, and we’re with Gaza and the Palestinian resistance 1000%.)
Reflections from Red: Day One of Midwest Queer & Trans Zine Fest is in the bag!! What a day! So many amazing zinesters, and so many wonderful supporters—it was a busy, bustling, beautiful time! Getting to see beloved comrades and meet new pals did my heart so good. Much love to everyone who stopped by the table and fest to talk and snag zines! Abiding appreciation to the organizers for creating such a welcoming atmosphere and environment for the fest. See y’all tomorrow for Day Two!
October 22nd!
Day Two of the Midwest Queer & Trans Zine Fest is a wrap!
Reflections from Red: Wow, what great, supportive, and kind conversations and meetings today! Many thanks to my table neighbors for being so amazing—I loved meeting all y’all, and learning about your zine making! Much gratitude to the organizers and volunteers again, y’all’s labor and care is so appreciated. I cannot wait for next year!!!
What an absolute whirlwind of a day! The New York Queer Zine Fair (October 7th, at The Center) was such a blissed out blur! Much love and appreciation to all the amazing zinesters we got to meet and chat with and snag zines from! Many thanks to the organizers and especially Kel for being so welcoming! Being able to see and hang with beloveds like Bluestockings Cooperative comrades was so wonderful! Queer Zines Forever!
The 7th annual Lone Star Zine Fest was such a blast!
Got to see some beautiful and powerful familiar faces and meet new zine pals. Everyone was so damn nice and supportive! We got to talk decrim and abolition with dozens of people and not one garbage thing was said to me!!! That’s literally never happened while tabling!!!! Incredible!!!
Totally over the moon that we got to debut the SxHx Year 7 (!!!!!!!) zine today! This was its first printing and first fest and people LOVED our collages and love-rant filled pages. So so thrilled to get to share this zine and those experiences in this affirming and supportive venue first. It felt damn good. It felt right.
Much appreciation and love to all the organizers who made today a reality! Huge congratulations to all the zinester vendors today—we really held it down, and in the sweltering heat no less!
On August 31st some of our comrades participated in harm reduction focused actions / gatherings in their respective cities in solidarity with drug-using community members and their families to grieve those we’ve lost, to organize, and to offer support in making harm reduction kits for distribution.
Sex working and drug using communities have taught us so much about how to show up for each other unapologetically and without shame. All love and power to those making our worlds safer for all.
The photos below are from an Austin, Tx gathering co-organized by the NICE Project, Texas Harm Reduction Coalition, and the Austin Drug Users Union.
August 12th of this year marked 7 years since Support Ho(s)e first met in-person with Alisha (which took place in Hell aka Logan Correctional) —and it also marks the day she formally joined the collective!
Now, 7 years on, we get to celebrate and visit in person whenever we damn want!!! With no COs watching and in our own neighborhoods. This really remains such a special and momentous feeling!!
If you want to celebrate with us, please consider sending us a gift so we can continue our work and continue supporting our formerly incarcerated comrades.
@SxHxCollective on Venmo $SxHxCollective on CashApp
Celebrating together in 2023. 7 years ago, on our way to visit Alisha for the first time!
Our collective got together again last night for another zine making, meal sharing occasion—we also spent most of the evening reflecting on the past year’s organizing, survival and creative efforts. Making time and space for ourselves, together, is always so replenishing!
Making time for rest and sunshine! Our SxHx Combabes Beach Day was such a lovely chance to connect, slow down and enjoy each other’s company. So grateful for comradeship and care!
Celebrating this beloved comrade today (and truly every day)! Happy SECOND Freedom Day anniversary, Alisha! TWO YEARS!!!! We give thanks every damn day that you’re home! Here’s to you, here’s to chosen fam, and here’s to a future without prisons! 💖🎉
Our “Year Seven” zine is in the works! Making time to reflect, share and assess our work together over zine making, shit talking and food is essential to our collective process.
Day One! The first night of Zine Pavilion in the bag, and no scary shit! In fact, mostly excellent shit! What a lovely opening night— several librarians from around the US bought our zines to add to their library’s holdings and said such supportive/kind things about our work, and told us they were so excited to learn more about sex worker politics and prison abolition!!
Feeling excited and emboldened for today! Huge love and shout out to our SxHx comrades who facilitated our safety crew last night— love y’all beyond measure! Big thanks to Pat for holding down tabling with me and N for literally watching my back the whole time. Y’all are true blue and our whole Justice for Alisha Walker crew appreciates you both so much!
Day 2! Our last day, because we’re sleepy SWers, of Zine Pavilion was also super lovely! A total whirlwind (librarians can talk!!!) of panels, discussions and really affirming conversations! Everything from how to engage teens with crafting/zine making to librarians coming out as former sex workers to queer and trans* library science students sharing stories with me—what a day!!! Bless, we even had someone share some Backpage memories with us!!
We met so many amazing zinesters, like @rosaxdahlia and her comrade Nicole who authored a zine primarily in Nahuatl! Got to see the Midwest Books To Prisoners comrades (who also offered safety support), the South Chicago ABC zine distro, hang out with the absolutely amazing @weirdosujour, talk with Avery (whose zines Red used to stock at Bluestockings)!!
We got to reconnect with a Chicago currently Texas pal, @vegantiff and meet (in-person) @manny_suena (s/o forever @rocksteadystonez for the connection)! We also met an amazing artist @keemerriweather of @homagetoblkmadonnas !!!
@jonastygram1 and Red had to send carrier pigeons to each other because our tables were so damn far apart but that was exciting. ((Also there were no scary vibes or shitty people that showed up, and the organizer/volunteers were really supportive and checked in a lot!))
Our crew is totally wiped out from the full day of tabling/talking but really really grateful to everyone for supporting our collective and our zine making! S/O to our comrade Sarah for coming through for support and love💖💖💖
See everyone at the American Library Association’s Annual Conference, the biggest library event of the year, for Zine Pavilion! We’ll be tabling Friday evening and ALL day Saturday (June 23rd & June 24th)
We’re so grateful to our extended community for helping us get an org safety plan together to make this feel doable after experiencing stalking violence at Chicago Zine Fest — it’s up to us to keep each other safe(r)! We have care and response plans we’re working thru.
We’re also working with the volunteer organizers of zine pavilion on the prevention front! It’s not been ideal, but we believe they’re doing their best. We’ve shared resources and hope this activates more abolitionist anti-violence conversation/action for them and this event!
We believe in being prepared, since sex workers, queers and criminalized survivors know best the shape of violence and pervasive unsupportive responses to violence. But we know it’s still NOT OUR FAULT if something happens that our plans can’t anticipate.
Sending love and strength and rage to all those in the struggle that have to deal with stalking, doxxing, harassment, and online/offline attacks on top of surviving, organizing, living our lives best we can, and every other damn thing! We’re with you! It’s not your fault!
Hearts overflowing from our SxHx combabes and extended fam #InternationalWhoresDay picnic yesterday! Love and gratitude for rest, sharing food, memories, and catching up on sunshine time together! 🌿🖤
Chicago Zine Fest 2023 was a (mostly*) magical time!
Many thanks to all those who stopped by our table on Saturday (5/20/23) to talk, ask questions, voice support and solidarity! Big love to all those who supported our organizing and mutual aid efforts by buying our zines!! Our core crew was able to all gather, spend time talking with folx about our favorites things: abolition, decrim and of course our zines for practically the entire day! It felt so good to be around so many supportive and affirming zinesters and the communities who came out to show love. S/O to the comrades Midwest Books to Prisoners, Chicago Books to Women in Prison, DC Books to Prisoners and of course Zine Mercado, Zine Club Chicago, Quimby’s and Rebirth Garments!
(CW/TW: stalking)*
Near the end of the event, we had to deal (again) with a stalker who has escalated from online attacks under different names to gloating about these violent actions irl. It was scary and enraging! We want to especially thank the CZF organizers and volunteers who moved into action in the ways *we* needed to feel safe (not involving cops etc). We refuse to be intimidated by this person. We will continue to keep each other safe. Sex workers and criminalized survivors are not to be fucked with, we have seen and been through too much.
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 Lili and other comrades inside, protested, found pro bono legal aid (a few times over), and maintained a grassroots campaign for clemency and her release. (Check out the hashtags we used over the years to see the online archive of this work: #FreeLeLe#StandWithAlisha#SexWorkersUnite)
We’ve compiled and shared a syllabus/reading list for political education reading groups for our sex working comrades and accomplices in adjacent queer communities utilizing our original reading group materials. https://tinyurl.com/SWerSyllabus
We’ve taken public space, held teach-ins, trainings, knowledge shares, hosted letter writing events, Know Your Rights events, spoken at virtual vigils + actions, and 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. https://youtu.be/vhWH5NSlpTk
We created guides for Letter Writing to incarcerated folx, best practices for Academics, as well as Media and Health & Wellness professionals to become sex work competent and create more ethical conditions for working with sex workers. https://sxhxcollective.org/digital-publications/
We saw and celebrated the release of one of our comrades over two years ago, Judy, who we’ve co-authored a book chapter, in “We Too: Essays on Sex Work and Survival,” with. https://bluestockings-bookstore.square.site/…/we…/1714
We saw and celebrated the release of our comrade Ada almost two years ago, and have crowdsourced and fundraised for her to be able to support her daughter. (( Her CashApp is $ada3636 ))
We welcomed Alisha home (at long last!!!!), seeing her released early, and able to organize, and turn up with friends and comrades on this side of the wall! ( Alisha’s CashApp is $SxHxAl ) We worked with our comrades at Hacking//Hustling to design a support/knowledge sharing effort called the “Formerly Incarcerated Worker Support Program” https://sxhxcollective.org/…/formerly-incarcerated…/ —more to recap that work soon! Alisha has recently joined QTPOC sex working folx and practicing therapists to found Equitable Care Certification, check out this essential work here: https://www.equitablecarecert.com
Our comrades Donna/Dante & L have traveled, hustled, created, and explored tremendously in this past year—their reflections on their recent experiences of surviving and thriving are coming as blog posts soon! ( Donna’s CashApp is: $thisispoetparty and L’s Venmo is: @Miss-Lydia-312 ))
Red started a new academic program, and has been focusing on making zines and toolkits, writing, conferences, and doing more relationship building/behind the scenes support work.
Aa has been busy teaching, publishing, attending conference and doing research for the collective, you can support our underpaid/overworked academic wing too by sending love to our Venmo ( @SxHxCollective ).
We believe we can always be doing even more as a community. We’ve got to keep lifting up our incarcerated sex worker family and work to get them free. 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 criminalization + punishment. 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.
A collaboration between Hacking//Hustling and the Support Ho(s)e Collective
by Red Schulte
What follows is a personal reflection and account of a program to support a friend and loved one coming home from prison better navigate technology and outside-change. This will also serve as an introduction to the “container” of our collective work. We started out imagining our “results” or better put, our work experiences together would culminate in a toolkit. We learned much, and among these lessons was that a toolkit (in the traditional sense) wasn’t an expansive enough container to hold all we found and made together. We needed flexibility, accessibility and different meetings/findings/learnings called for different methods of documentation and presentation. So, linked after this piece, you’ll find online access to our full, messy, wild archive of work. This is the only accurate way to reflect this work–the voice memo recordings, the zines, the typed notes, the photographs, the oral recaps of zoom calls and meetings. I hope this (all to real, raw, but intentional) work inspires others toward similar efforts to think ahead, imagine and anticipate needs based upon honest conversations with friends, comrades, loved ones. I hope you use this as a resource to honor all your labor toward support work in the wake of prison violence and carceral punishment– and the havoc it wreaks on the mind and body.
In February of 2020, with the COVID19 Pandemic in full and terrifying swing, I floated a more fully formed idea of a project that had been near and dear to my heart, and to my inside loved ones for a while, to my comrades at Hacking//Hustling. The gaps in structured and deliberate support after our friends, family, neighbors come home from incarceration (of any kind, and especially longer term prison sentences) are staggering–relying on individuals, family units to do the mammoth, usually uneven and un-funded work of catching our loved ones up with new technologies, new state bureaucratic systems, new cultural expressions– not to mention housing, sustainable mental health care, transportation and neighborhood knowledge, and more. Often, our neighbors who return home to our communities have extremely limited to no support from individuals or organizations (and certainly not state-based systems).
In March of that same year, a formal proposal was drafted in collaboration with the Support Ho(s)e Collective to create a funded effort to explore how we could better meet the needs of a community member returning to build a life after incarceration—this effort would be called, the Formerly Incarcerated Worker Support Program. Alisha Walker, a former sex working woman, was finally released from prison (in July of 2021) after a five year popular defense and support campaign toward her freedom. Alisha, a member of Support Ho(s)e, helped shape the asks and anticipated needs for the program’s first recipient while she was incarcerated. She would be the first person to pilot this program, alongside a host of trusted comrades and accomplices who would meet, call, and co-create resources and navigate early transitional needs together. The proposal read as follows:
Overview:
Hacking//Hustling + Support Ho(s)e Formerly Incarcerated Workers Support Program
This project specific program fund was developed in concert with our comrades from the Support Ho(s)e Collective and directly informed by the needs of their inside (currently incarcerated) organizers.
The need for structural support post-release cannot be overstated. Time and time again, when people are finally released from prison or jail stints, they have virtually no financial, technological, housing, or sustained community support. Basic needs, skill sharing and financial support must be made available to folx establishing themselves after the violence of incarceration.
Therefore, we should seek to create a sustainable, intentional check-in and support program that equips those of us on the outside (especially those of us who have been impacted by incarceration) to show up for those navigating life after prison/jail/detention.
The Proposal: I am seeking $10,000 for our first trial of the Hacking//Hustling Formerly Incarcerated Workers Support Program, and naming Alisha Walker as the first recipient. This sum would cover 3-5 months depending on the tailored requests of the recipient, and would be paid directly to the recipient.
We approach this program with the flexibility and understanding of post-release catch-up and also with an eye toward Disability Justice focused crip time.
We research and court organizations, grants, and institutions that could help us acquire free/funded technology-focused training, computers and phones, college level or vocational school courses, ensuring that at all times the majority of the funding is going directly to the recipient in the form of cash/direct deposit, helping them re-establish financial independence.
After this initial trial period for the program (3-5 months), the recipient can elect to do an exit interview with us and/or remain on as part of the team (funding willing if they’re unable for whatever reason to donate labor/time) to help onboard the next recipient and become a mentor themselves.
This Formerly Incarcerated Workers Support Program may materially include:
Monthly Stipend of $1,000 USD for the comrade returning home
Hacking//Hustling Collective Member Status
For input, decision making/shaping, and advising roles.
Paid Stipends for all mentors/support comrades depending on need/time contributed to the work.
Phone & Computer/Tablet Provision
Obtained through grants/sponsorships/donations
WiFi & Data Provision
Totalling $100 per month
Health & Wellness Provision
i.e. therapy, body care work, gym membership, etc.
Totalling $200 per month
Weekly check-in calls/video chats/in-person meetings with a rotating crew of H//H vetted mentors
Addressing topics such as: building social media and networks, navigating applying to social/health services and housing, brainstorming passion projects, harm reduction and advocacy, financial/tax planning, public speaking, creative content making/art therapy, etc.
Work-Study opportunities with Hacking//Hustling (and paid for/donated by partner organizations/institutions)
Compensated/Sponsored Coding Boot Camps
Compensated/Sponsored Programming Courses
Compensated/Sponsored Graphic Design Courses
Compensated/Sponsored Internet Literacy Programs
Compensated/Sponsored Grant Writing Workshops
Compensated/Sponsored Research & Personal Writing Projects
Compensated/Sponsored Language Learning Classes
Tech based mentoring that Alisha has named:
Online banking
Applying for healthcare online
Filing Taxes
Posting to a wordpress site/blog
Setting up a Smartphone
Setting up a laptop
Account Recovery (social media/emails)
Video Calls
Zoom
Jitsi
Screening/Harm reduction online
Overview of AVN/OF/NF
Social Media Tutorials
Twitter
Facebook
Instagram
Youtube
TikTok
The proposal was accepted, funds were sought after and at longlast allocated and the work began heading into 2021. Months before what would be Alisha’s release, initial emails went out and phone calls took place in March of 2021 to share news of this effort with a dozen co-conspirators whose passions, expertise and work focus areas spanned all of the ask and needs identified areas–some of whom had direct lived experience with incarceration as well. The majority of people contacted expressed capacity and enthusiasm for such a project and signed on to participate in various ways. Necessarily embracing loose directives, these meetings were intended to be just as much about building comradeships as well as imparting knowledge about a particular subject area.
At long last, Alisha was home. Come early July 2021, Alisha was eager to rebuild, grow and learn alongside a community she had only had prison-mediated contact with thus far, and meet entirely new-to-her comrades. We’ve learned much in the months since she was freed from Logan Prison. Some of the biggest takeaways I’ll expand on below:
Be flexible with timelines for programming. Healing and navigating trauma, especially after incarceration, isn’t a linear process, and flexibility affords a real responsiveness and responsibility to checking in and actually meeting needs as opposed to forging ahead for the sake of a projected timeline for a thing. Case and point, we thought initially this program would kick start immediately upon Alisha coming home, and parts of it absolutely and crucially did! However, Alisha quickly voiced a need to change pace, scale down, and reassess capacity. So we did just that. The first and most practical elements that we were able to meet were surrounding physical technologies: phone, phone coverage, wifi, laptop, email, encryption and online safety explainers. The second, equally important and of course more difficult to obtain because of bureaucratic obstacles: SNAP benefits, Medicaid healthcare coverage, and government identifying documents—the latter would try all our patience and strength at times.
Be realistic with outcomes, objectives and setting intentions. It is actually alright for a set goal/outcome to be about connecting two people for the sake of doing so, providing uninterrupted space to talk about experiences and feelings, to create a moment of support and encouragement. Interrupting the violence of the carceral state means cultivating connection, community, communication on our own terms, and fortifying consent in all its forms. Plenty of the meetings were spent talking, asking questions, laughing, shooting the shit and just sharing space. That is a valuable and important aspect of this work too—not to mention, the pandemic necessitated many of these meetings happening over video calls and email/text exchanges. This too became a practical application and learning practice with new communication technologies outside of the direct purview of the prison’s surveillance (of course the state still watches, monitors and censors us on this side of the wall, but damn did it feel amazing to be able to text my friend, watch my friend be able to hop on zoom on a whim after the hellscape that was prison video visits and shitty phone connections).
Move in this work with compassion and boundaries. There will be an urge, many urges even, to do everything for/on behalf of/in place of your friend doing this work. Learning takes all shapes and forms, sticks to no set experience or time, and that is frustratingly important and beautiful. Supporting agency, autonomy and self-determination actively is doing freedom work. Yes, there are things you should be doing, within your set capacity, however, there’s a balance that you, your support team, your loved ones should strive for and work within. Of course there’s going to be missteps, just be honest, open and take care of yourself as well as your chosen family.
Toolkits are vital, and messier archives are too. Starting out with specific containers in mind is a great idea, it can help determine what directions to go in, identify gaps in existing resources in circulation, and provide context and clear goals for your project work. That being said, don’t be afraid to mix things up and go with what everyone *actually* has capacity for! Asking questions throughout y’all’s process, creating opportunities for people to engage with one another across multiple platforms and methods is rooted in meeting needs and responding to varying learning styles and capacities. Resources are still resources, even if they’re not graphically designed and organized traditionally. Embrace the organized chaos!
Create internal reflection time. One of the defining features to wrap up the first iteration of this program area was to extend an invitation to Alisha to do an “exit interview” or an intentional time/space to share with Hacking//Hustling about how the meetings with comrades went and what may help improve upon this program should it receive funding again to support another community member when they come home. Another, was to offer a position on the collective to help inform, shape and grow our shared tech/sex work analysis from the perspective of formerly incarcerated people. Both of these things are on the horizon for us! This essay is also a reflective practice–taking time to document, write down actions and thoughts is (in my opinion) equally essential to doing the work itself. How else will our movement’s have memory?
Reflections on the FIWSP experience from the Hacking//Hustling annual retreat session here:
“This project area was my primary focus. It was the culmination of many months of discussion, a vessel to collect experiences, needs, asks, and demands. It went from an intense sketched out plan to something much more messy, and beautiful. Because we were recording it in real time, we shifted from thinking about creating a toolkit to instead making a multimedia archive of how experiences were being processed and navigated. This last year was so very hard, but there was also such joy in the midst of loss because of these connections. I have so much gratitude for space to slow down and take time and be with people in ways that feel generative to all of us, enabling people to be okay.”
“The knowledge and resources that I’ve gained, wow. Just wow. I’m emotionally and mentally in a bad spot, it’s been so hard. I wouldn’t have made it to this point without you guys. I have so much shared love and appreciation.”
“I didn’t even understand how integral something like this would be until we were in this work. Even the things we predicted would come up, after we’d spend more time meeting, we’d discover new things! To build confidence and having that caring support with you, alongside you, is so integral. Knowing the neighborhood and seeing the resources, and being able to guide, it became an opportunity to connect other people to resources that I discovered in our networks. Connecting people who wanted to donate time and labor, I really did appreciate the structure to get to know eachother better in a way that helped establish caring boundaries. This was impactful on me, remembering my favorite and my own resources too. I’m really grateful for this connectivity, I had grown really isolated and this was so nice to be a part of.”
Linked/embedded [coming soon // archive build-out in progress] is an archive of experience–you can listen to our frustrations and triumphs, read about our meetings, explore the zines created with Alisha’s needs in mind and more. I hope this welcomes experimentation, the transition of defense campaign work into homecoming support care work and illumination and appreciation around just how incredibly difficult navigating *anything* is after incarceration. Here’s to creatively thinking through what support can look like, what resourcing people once they’re “free” can look like and imagining worlds without these needs.
Amplifying a new project one of our comrades, Alisha, is involved with!!
The Equitable Care Certification (ECC) is created by sex workers, sex work-affirming therapists and sex working therapists; it is composed of the Equitable Care Coalition & the Curriculum Committee. The Equitable Care Coalition broadly supports the creation of the certification through outreach, marketing & consulting. The Curriculum Committee—led entirely by QTPOC, sex working therapists— creates all course content. ECC is overseen by two sex working therapists, Raquel Savage & Angie Gunn LCSW, CST.
Remembering a dear friend of Alisha’s and a true comrade during what is/was her birth week. Sweet Bear, you are greatly missed. Rest in peace and power, Lauren “Bear” Stumblingbear. We will continue to speak your name, and organize in your honor.
From Sunday’s (12/4/22) rainy but lovely tabling under the big top of Lone Star Zine Fest — seven hours of non-stop zine swapping, slinging and talking about decrim, abolition and collective zine making. On the whole, a really welcoming experience!! There were a few YIKES moments…but thankfully they didn’t linger.
Was also so thrilled with how excited people were to see a Survived and Punished (California) zine (two people recognized the organization’s name and stopped by the table because of that, yay!), and the enthusiasm over the BARE NOLA info zine!!
As of December 1st, our Support Ho(s)e Year 6 zine, lives!
Full of love and gratitude for friendship, boundaries, shared struggle and uncompromising gift-giving, and gentleness to ourselves.
We debuted this latest zine at the Lonestar Zine Fest in Austin, TX this past weekend (12/4/22) and we endeavor to have some listed on our website soon. We’ll also have copies at Bluestockings Cooperative and Quimby’s Bookstore later this month!
Join us and our comrades Survived and Punished for a virtual toolkit launch of our latest collaboration: “Supporting Sex Workers & Survivors: Lessons for Defense Campaigns” on Dec. 8th @ 6PM ET. Closed Captioning is available via Zoom.
Our comrades Red and LiLi will be joined by Alisa Bierria of Survived & Punished, Leila Raven of Hacking//Hustling and Queenie’s Crew, Kate D’Adamo of Reframe Health and Justice and will be discussing this new community/defense campaign resource, the process of creating it (and more) !!!
This beautiful toolkit features stunning art by Solomon Brager and stunning design + layout work by Jett George –we’re so thankful for them!!!
We also had a powerful crew of readers /feedback-givers including Elene of Butterfly and Emi Koyama (s/o Aileen’s) that we’re so thankful for!
By the day of the event, you’ll be able to access the toolkit virtually for reading/downloading on Survived and Punished and our websites! #SWToolkit
The 6th annual Lone Star Zine Fest is happening on Sunday, December 4th, 2022, at The Far Out Lounge in Austin, TX and some of our comrades will be there tabling!
We’ll have copies of our classic distro titles and hopefully (if we can get everything finalized) copies of our latest zine, Year 6!!
Mark your calendars! On Nov. 30 at 4-6 PM ET join Interrupting Criminalization for their latest online #NoMorePolice event, featuring editors/contributors to Abolition Feminisms—including our comrade, Alisha!
They’ll be discussing the criminalization of survivors and how survivors are leading abolitionist movements.
We barely have the words right now. We just learned that our comrade, movement elder, and teacher, Carol Leigh, passed away yesterday (November 16th, 2022).
Beloved, Scarlot Harlot, we are so grateful. Thank you for being such a kind and encouraging force. Thank you for your savvy analysis and commitment to struggle. Thank you for always uplifting our inside comrade’s names and their stories. Thank you for your warmth and grace. You taught us so much. You made us feel so seen and loved.
Artwork by Annie SprinkleBluestockings Bookstore, NYC, April 8th 2019, Red, Carol and AH
From one of our comrade’s latest published pieces, “Arts-based and cultural elements of organizing are often seen as superfluous, but I consider centering the cultural and artistic works of radical sex workers and co-conspirators as a way to imagine our futures collectively and honor past struggle. We change ourselves and the spaces we take up when we create, especially collectively. When our creations, be they artistic, technological, or work-safety focused, are created to undermine systems seeking to ostracize, oppress, and kill, they hold such power. Part of organizing a community is tapping into collective power, decision making, and political education, and wildly imagining together. This last element is what I’m most concerned with in these reflections — the ‘how to’ of aesthetically and culturally undermining violent systems. Questions like: What feels possible when you allow yourself to express unbridled rage and joy? What sorts of tools for rest and liberation would we fashion if we had unfettered access to resources? What can we vision-make together in the name of freedom work?”
Wow! What a whirlwind of a day! Midwest Perzine Fest’s first in-person gathering was such a blast! We completely sold out of all the zines we brought along—thanks so much to the organizers, volunteers, zinesters and attendees for making yesterday so special. We felt such big love from everyone!
Missed us tabling yesterday? Remember you can always visit Quimby’s Chicago or Bluestockings Coop in NYC or buy directly from our online shop!
CHICAGO! One of our comrades will be tabling and we’re so looking forward to the Midwest Perzine Fest—this Saturday, Oct 8th at Columbia College’s Conaway Center, 1104 S Wabash Avenue, from 10 am to 4 pm!
Been looking to snag more of our zines to support our organizing/political education/storytelling/survival/thriving?! Here’s your chance!
Thank you to everyone who was on and/or helped organize the URBAN SURVIVORS UNION NATIONAL sex worker call tonight. So much understanding, compassion and knowledge. Feeling seen! All our love and appreciation 💓
So much love and appreciation for Love & Protect, Prison+Neighborhood Arts Project, Rogers Park Seed Library, and Stitch x Stitch Con for yesterday’s (Wednesday, July 13th) beautiful gathering. Hearing Alisha, Monica and Sandra’s poetry recharged our hearts. It was so powerful to participate in building a communal art piece to be installed outside of Logan Correctional Center. This project is led by the guidance and work of incarcerated and formerly incarcerated organizers.
For Bear, for Tewkunzi, for Lulu, for all our loved ones. #FreeThemAll
Today we celebrate ONE YEAR of our friend, comrade, sibling, and organizer Alisha being home!! As Red put it, “My friend has been home for a year. It’s been wild, full of learning, love, and boundaries (!), care, and messiness and most days I still wake up and check my phone to make sure I can still text her because it still doesn’t feel real. Love to our people, fire to the prisons.”
Please support this badass, loving, fierce, exhausted/resilient, survivor babe by snagging some of our zines from the shop or sending some money if you can spare!
Feel empowered to help us celebrate by sending funds via @/SxHxCollective on Venmo or $/SxHxAl (“Rose”) on CashApp!
We’ve created a more web stable link to our Sex Work Syllabus document. We continue to hope this archive of our internal political education reading group materials (from 2015 – 2018) is useful for your self-guided or group organized learning/discussing/making!
During those first few years of our organizing, we voraciously read, watched, listened to and discussed everything we could gain access to. This meant we read a lot of excellent, insightful, but also mediocre and downright wild stuff. It was all important and relevant to how we formed our own ideas, politics and shared analysis together. All of those discussions and debates also informed how we embarked on our first zine making project together, and how we continue to create and revisit the resources we’ve put out into the world.
From Chris Giraldo of the Sex Worker Giving Circle, “I’m so thrilled to share that the SWGC and our brilliant comrades and SWGC grantee partner orgs The Kua’ana Project, Support Ho(s)e, and SWOP Los Angeles took over the latest issue of the Quarterly Journal on Responsive Philanthropy, titled “From the Frontlines: Understanding Sex Worker-Led Movements”. I’m so honored to have gotten the chance to co-conspire with all three inspirationally fierce (and personal icons to me) groups to take philanthropy to task and deepen the resourcing of sex worker-led organizing. Click here to read the whole issue, and of course, share with whomever you like!”
From Brandi Collins-Calhoun, the NCRP Movement Engagement Manager: “Be Fund(ed) or Die: The Precarity of Sex Worker Organizing” by Red Schulte, with contributions and considerations from The Support Ho(s)e Collective, is about the importance of “accompliceship, not charity” and names the “potential for participatory programs led by communities directly impacted to shift the discourse away from voyeuristic donor-driven charity and into accompliceship and wealth redistribution.”
Reflections from a Movement Art Whorestorian / The Sex Worker Gazes Back
2:45 PM – 4:15 PM EST
Talk Description: Reflections from a Movement Art Whorestorian / The Sex Worker Gazes Back will be a presentation space that documents, names and traces sex worker movement organizing, art making, curating, and resistance from 2015 – 2021 in Chicago and NYC as the notions of “Decrim” and sex work positivity took hold in ways previously unseen by mainstream artists, art workers, and the general public. This presentation will specifically reflect upon: the “/Sanctuary/” exhibition of sex worker and undocumented immigrant art works at the University of Illinois at Chicago, art and protest vigils mourning the murder of massage worker Yang Song, the first Hacking//Hustling convening at Eyebeam NYC which featured the resistance-object installation “Whores Will Rise,” the indoor and outdoor art protest happenings against the closure of Backpage.com and against SESTA/FOSTA in Chicago and NYC, craftivist whore meet-ups at Bluestockings Books, the community participation and programming of “ON OUR BACKS: The Revolutionary Art of Queer Sex Work” at the Leslie Lohman Museum, the short-lived (and complicated) installation “Sex Workers’ Pop-Up” that debuted as the pandemic hit NYC, and Sophia Giovannitti’s performance work “Untitled (Incall)” which opened at recess art just as NYC began to reopen cultural spaces. This list, while long, is not exhaustive. This is only a cross-section of the explosive art/protest activity that the last six years has seen (most notably) in the US (as our movement spaces have not garnered such mainstream notoriety) and internationally for sex workers’ rights and the movement for decriminalization. My presentation places these happenings and intentional actions to take back gallery and public space led by sex working people, hustlers and survivors amongst the broader acknowledgement of sex/sexuality in art spaces.
Q&A Session: “Exhibiting Sex Workers’ Art and Histories” is a combined Q & A for the presentations “Is Moderation Violence?: Exhibiting Sex Worker Art” by Lena Chen and “Reflections from a Movement Art Whorestorian/The Sex Worker Gazes Back” by Brit Schulte. For further information about the presentations, please click on the subsessions.
// CW for mentions of death of a community member below //
Alisha’s beloved (step) father passed very unexpectedly. We are writing to ask if y’all could please share and give so that Alisha and her loved ones have the financial support they urgently need.
Derrick was a kind, gentle and extremely supportive person to all of us who rallied alongside Alisha for years. He was a co-struggler and fierce believer in freedom and justice for criminalized survivors. May his rest be peaceful, may his memory be a blessing to us all.
We’re currently on a journalism/media hiatus for all requests–especially with regard to student journalists. Please see a guide we put together years ago, to support media workers in being better accomplices, under the digital publications section of this site.
If you’re a student journalist, and REALLY want to get our attention/time/energy, consider offering to let us use your department’s xerox machine, copy codes, Jstor login, or liberate office supplies for us etc!
If you read this and still feel compelled to reach out, please know that our consulting rate (for any requests coming in from unvetted / non-comrade media workers) is $150/hour, with a minimum of a one hour booking.
We encourage all media workers to use our website, zines and social media presence as a resource, and if you cite us, to please compensate us accordingly.
Please give and share widely to supply this community effort to honor, remember and uplift the life, works and revolutionary praxis of our beloved Comrade Velvet.
WE HAVE OUR BABE! She’s out, we’re hugging on this side of the wall for the first time! She’s out! She’s free from that prison!!! Scream with us: WELCOME HOME ALISHA, FREE THEM ALL!!!! ❤️🎉😭🎉❤️
Sever of our comrades are currently hurtling toward Lincoln (aka evil cornfield prison land) to stay the night in preparation for picking up our beloved comrade and friend Alisha early in the morning! Please send your love and well wishes as we navigate every emotion under the sun right now.
Please continue to share bit.ly/FundLeLe so we can ensure robust support and resources as we welcome LeLe/Lili home!
Thank y’all for always demonstrating solidarity and care for us. It’s been six long years—here’s to this freedom day eve, to friendship and much love, compassion and support for years to come and of course the fiery end to all prisons!
The most recent art fundraiser raffle may be over, but our comrade Dante (they/them) has some words for you to encourage folx to keep sharing and giving to Alisha’s welcome home fund! Please join us in these final pushes to welcome our dear comrade home with an abundance of resources!!
Something Red and Alisha have been working on for quite some time about the violence of prison technology and the importance of inside/outside communication, is finally debuting today in honor of International Whore’s Day! Please read and share, “Care and Connection as Resistance to State Violence and Surveillance” with your communities!
Many thanks to Hacking//Hustling comrades and to Astraea Lesbian Foundation for Justice for all their support in uplifting our comrades’ voices, reflections and analyses!
Today (and every day) celebrate ALL of the sex working, trading and hustling people of this world! We are with you in revolutionary struggle, and we are many!
This letter writing workshop series is conducted to raise post- release funds for a dear friend and comrade Alisha Walker. Learn more about Alisha here: http://bit.ly/AlishaWalker
During this generative letter writing workshop you will learn: Things to keep in mind before you begin writing to an incarcerated person. Best practices of letter writing and expectations. E- Correspondence suggestions. Prompts for new letters, and ideas for content.
ALL Participants will receive: Gentle constructive feedback on any writing you create during the session. Genuine warmth, validation and encouragement to continue writing from community members and the facilitator. Printing, shipping and mail support for sending your letter generated during the workshop.
First dibs sign up for Donna Gary’s donation based poetry workshop series with limited space in April and May. Participants who donate 15.00 dollars or more will receive: One zine from the Support Ho(s)e zine store shipped to your home.
For requests about accommodation please email sxhxcollective@gmail.com with ‘Letter Writing Party’ in the subject. This event will be auto captioned via Zoom. This event will not be recorded to respect the privacy of attendees.
Workshops are hosted virtually over zoom: Saturday April 10 1pm-2:30pm CST Wednesday April 14 1pm-2:30pm CST More dates coming soon depending on feedback, donations and engagement from the first two events.
Today, we’re turning 5 years young as a collective!!! We’re taking time to reflect on the last five years and invite you to support our work by donating to Alisha’s post-release fund, celebrating the launch of our latest yearbook zine and purchasing copies of our benefit zines + buttons! https://sxhxcollective.org/store/
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 LeLe and other comrades inside, protested, found pro bono legal aid (a few times over), and maintained a grassroots campaign for clemency and her release. #FreeLeLe #StandWithAlisha
We’ve taken public space, held teach-ins, trainings, knowledge shares, hosted letter writing events, Know Your Rights events, spoken at virtual vigils + actions, and crafts workshops to demand rights, respect and protection of sex working people. https://www.internationalwhoresday.com
We created guides for Letter Writing to incarcerated folx, best practices for Academics, as well as Media and Health & Wellness professionals to become sex work competent and create more ethical conditions for working with sex workers. https://sxhxcollective.org/digital-publications/
We’ve been honored to work closely with Alisha’s mother Sherri and family and have helped to facilitate numerous articles to highlight LeLe’s case for clemency. ((We’ve also pushed back on poorly written, disrespectful pieces.))
We saw and celebrated the release of our comrade Ada, and have crowdsourced and fundraised for her to be able to support her daughter. (( Her CashApp is $ada3636 ))
We have continued to expand our organizing work in NYC, and are helping to build radical community amongst current and former sex working people and co-conspirators. We’ve been humbled and thankful to forge bonds with Survived & Punished NY, Hacking//Hustling, Red Light Reader, Red Canary Song, IWD NYC, Kink Out, Bluestockings, and other renegade comrades who we learn from everyday!
We can do even more as a community. We’ve got to keep lifting up our incarcerated sex worker family and work to get them free. Especially now amidst a 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 criminalization + punishment.
Thank y’all for all your support along the way. Please keep sharing, keep writing LeLe, keep telling folx that she should be free–extend this care to everyone on the inside. bit.ly/AlishaAdvocate
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.
From the Red Canary Song solidarity + response statement: “Decriminalization of sex work is the only way that sex workers, massage workers, sex trafficking survivors, and anyone criminalized for their survival and/or livelihood will ever be safe.”
We’ve signed on in support. Read the full statement here, listen to and act on its demands:
Mourning with Asian Massage Workers in the Americas
关注按摩院员工生命和工作安全！
亚裔按摩院来自社区回馈社区！
亚裔按摩院合法工作权利必须保护！
亚裔按摩员工的命不能白白葬送！
按摩院工作合法专业应得全美社会尊重和保护！
In the wake of the deaths of multiple Asian women massage workers in Georgia, we are sending radical love, care, and healing to all of our community members. We acknowledge the ongoing pain and grief from continued violent assaults on our Asian and Asian American, APIA community, which has been compounded by the alienation, isolation, and violence brought on by racist rhetoric and governmental neglect in reaction to the COVID-19 pandemic. We are concerned that many of those calling for action in this moment have and will continue to endorse violence towards Asian sex workers, massage workers, and survivors.
We reject the call for increased policing in response to this tragedy. The impulse to call for increased policing is even greater in the midst of rising anti-Asian violence calling for carceral punishment. We understand the pain that motivates our Asian and Asian-American community members’ call for increased policing, but we nevertheless stand against it. Policing has never been an effective response to violence because the police are agents of white supremacy. Policing has never kept sex workers or massage workers or immigrants safe. The criminalization and demonization of sex work has hurt and killed countless people–many at the hands of the police both directly and indirectly. Due to sexist racialized perceptions of Asian women, especially those engaged in vulnerable, low-wage work, Asian massage workers are harmed by the criminalization of sex work, regardless of whether they engage in it themselves.
Decriminalization of sex work is the only way that sex workers, massage workers, sex trafficking survivors, and anyone criminalized for their survival and/or livelihood will ever be safe.
Media coverage that examines the racist or sexist motivations of the killings as independent of each other fail to grasp the deeply connected histories of racialized violence and paternalistic rescue complexes that inform the violence experienced by Asian massage workers. We see the effort to invisibilize these women’s gender, labor, class, and immigration status as a refusal to reckon with the legacy of United States imperialism, and as a desire to collapse the identities of migrant Asian women, sex workers, massage workers, and trafficking survivors. The women who were killed faced specific racialized gendered violence for being Asian women and massage workers. Whether or not they were actually sex workers or self-identified under that label, we know that as massage workers, they were subjected to sexualized violence stemming from the hatred of sex workers, Asian women, working class people, and immigrants.
We are asking that the community stand in solidarity with us and all immigrant and migrant massage workers and sex workers. We highlight the following demands from NY-based massage parlor workers:
1. Pay attention to the life and work safety of massage and salon employees!
2. Asian massage workers and businesses come from the community and give back to the community!
3. The legal working rights of Asian massage workers must be protected!
4. The lives of Asian massage workers must not be lost in vain!
5. The legal profession of massage work should be respected and protected by US society!
From Red Canary Song: “Eight workers in massage parlors have been killed in Atlanta. This is horrific, and is indicative of the violence that massage workers face daily. We are saddened and angered to learn of this, and we are sending our love to the workers in Atlanta.”
Our hearts break and we are filled with rage and a fierce commitment to solidarity with all our Asian family and comrades–sex working, massage working, immigrant, migrant, undocumented; we grieve those taken by this racist and whorephobic horror with you.
Please show up especially for our dear comrades Butterfly & Red Canary Song (both are grassroots organizations dedicated to supporting Asian and migrant sex workers and massage parlor workers)– and take supportive action as you mourn.
From our dear comrade Caty Simon of Whose Corner Is It Anyway:
This International Women’s Day, please donate to the 150 + low-income sex working, drug-using, housing insecure, Boricua, Dominican, Black, Native, and white cis and trans women of Whose Corner and all our organizing and mutual aid on each other’s behalf. Please help Whose Corner, our org by/for low-income/street/survival #sexworkers using opioids/stimulants or experiencing housing insecurity, reach Weds’ 2 K goal. We just served 113 members at our supply pickup and co-launched #decrimMA with Black and Pink Massachusetts. I will detail all our million and one projects, but we have been going through monies like no one’s business and could really use your support this cycle!
So, besides, you know, making MA history with the launch of #decrimMA , we have had a busy couple of weeks! During these last few cold nights, we launched a successful pilot of a program we wanna scale up next winter, providing emergency overnight shelter for some of our most vulnerable houseless members during snow/hail storms and below 10/15 degree weather. Many thanks to organizers Ivaneliz, Shae M, and M’s teamwork on that one.Our harm reduction advisor is now running more organized harm reduction/reproductive health supply access during our weekly drop-in hours, and helping our organizer Ivaneliz make plans for consistent outreach efforts to our community. We are now serving 10 people with syringe and safer crack kit access services during our weekly drop-in hours, and about 60 people–about half of the total number of members we see—during our monthly supply pickups.
Another one of our organizers, Vanessa, has been prepping a presentation on barriers to healthcare access for opioid using sex workers and how we provide healthcare options to each other as a community for a class of Umass nursing students. She’ll discuss bad overdose responses by EMTs; redflagged files &the perception of “drug-seeking”; lack of adequate opioid maintenance in in-patient care; verbal abuse; neglect of patient health in in-patient drug treatment; barriers to methadone access; difficulty acquiring prescribed antibios for abscesses; problems w/harm reduction based care; sexual exploitation of sex working, drug-using women(or drug-using women perceived to be sex worker) by clinic security guards and MART drivers; why drug-using sex workers rarely disclose sw in healthcare settings, and more.“ I told my family–’the next time I overdose, just let me fucking die,’ ” Vanessa commented in reference to the verbal abuse she encountered from small town EMTS responding to her last overdose.Our subcommittee member Shae McQuade, an ex-financial advisor before she became a survival sw, is now being consulted to do ongoing, specialized financial research for an exciting project soon to be launched by our allies nationally.
Finally, our bureaucratic midwifery/weekly drop-in hours team created a list of the referral skills we’d like to develop more, as well as beginning a fledgling resource list, collecting commentary from members on how each service provider treats us.
After March 14th, when Pandemic Unemployment Assistance stops taking new claimants, our drop-in hours team will start keeping the site open for 5 hours instead of 7 hours weekly, and then spend two hours in trainings each week designed to give us new skills providing resources.But you all wanna hear about #DecrimMA!Again, in coalition with Black and Pink Massachusetts, we launched the #DecrimMA campaign on 3/2, consisting of decriminalization of sex work legislation, HD 2200, An Act To Promote The Health And Safety Of People In The Sex Trade, our decrim subcommittee wrote in the MA House, sponsored by Rep. Lindsay Sabadosa (malegislature.gov/Bills/192/HD2200 ), and a bill in the MA Senate sponsored by Julian Cyr, SD 2226, which would at least strike common nightwalking from MA General Law, something Whose Corner has been aiming for a while.
(malegislature.gov/Bills/192/SD2226) A version of Julian Cyr’s bill–an Act to Stop Profiling Transgender People And Low-Income Women—has also been introduced to the MA House by Liz Miranda: https://malegislature.gov/Bills/192/HD3761…I have been bursting with pride but unable to tell you all about the hours of work weekly our decrim sub—composed of Ivaneliz, Madeline, Jaylanee, Kela, and my co-organizer Naomi Lauren—has been doing for months on this project! Our organizers partnered with mentors from the national community to learn how to create soundbytes and present their stories to journalists and legislators in a way which protects them from the retraumatizing process of having their lives turned to trauma porn. This is something us older sex worker organizers had to learn the hard way so many times, so now we at WCIIA hope to stop this cycle of fumbling autodidactism so that organizers on our decrim subc can learn how to frame their lives for the telling more intentionally.
Our organizer Jaylanee has been working with her mentor, Lorelei Lee. Jaylanee, always a strong voice in our organizing whether working on the crack kit, skeleton, or syringe access subcommittees, wrote about the racism she endured at low-wage work like Mcdonald’s, and experiencing sex work as a partial refuge from such racism. She also recounts the structural violence of being arrested when a client attacked *her*.“Ever since I got arrested, it’s been a living hell—the cops harass me and profile me as a sex worker forever because I once got arrested for it. In this way, the criminalization of sex work allows for discriminatory policing. Racism will never end…[sex workers of color] know that decriminalizing sw is the only path forward.”
Her fellow decrim subcommittee member Kela echoes her on the long term consequences of criminalization, “When you have a record you can’t get housing or a good job. It’s like a scarlet letter on your chest.”Our organizer Madeline states, “Everyday, people do what they need to do to survive—that is clear today now more than ever. For the LGBTQ, especially trans women of color like myself, that is nothing new. Many of us have been shoved out of our homes as teenagers and discriminated against when seeking a job. Do we want to do [sw]? Well, I’m sure different people would answer differently, but that’s not a question many of us have the luxury of asking.“Sex work should not be criminalized. We have learned that the criminalization of sex work violates many human rights. The fight for sex workers’ rights has always been an inseparable part of the fight for LGBTQ rights.”#DecrimMA has collected a powerful group of allies from other marginalized groups— GLAD, The Transgender Emergency Fund of MA, Urban Survivors Union, Reframe Health and Justice, Out Now of Springfield, ACLU of Massachusetts, and many others have signed on in support. For those who missed it, here again is @melissagiragrant ‘s New Republic piece quoting my work wife/Whose Corner co-organizer Naomi Lauren at length on the #DecrimMA campaign. https://newrepublic.com/article/161525/sex-workers-win…
So, we are chock full of activity and accomplishment, but the only problem is we are currently going through funds like water! Though now we have a small separate fundraiser for #DecrimMA, we have been spending $500-$800 a week on it for a while. Even the pilot version of the emergency shelter project is costing about $400 each night we do it. We are staffing extra subcommittee members at our drop-in hours to provide more services to our members, and that also carries a larger weekly price tag. Our last supply pickup ended up costing about $4.9 K just in cash honoraria, to say nothing of food and supplies. We will also be continuing to order tents, rope, duct tape, reflective blankets, wool blankets, ponchos, and mummy sleeping bags to distribute to our houseless members at our drop-in hours each week for as long as demand continues.After my long couple week hiatus from fundraising, this is a week where we could DEFINITELY use your help meeting and exceeding our 2 K goal for Weds. Beloved and consistent donors—help us out, but more importantly, please brag on us to all your trusted friends & convince them to invest in us as well! And remember, we couldn’t have done thing A—not to mention things X, Y, Z, etc unto infinity like we’re doing now—without your dedication and loyalty. Even when you don’t have funds to give us, we value your persistent cheerleading and tweeted lurv.All our love back to you in return. After what might have been the last life-threateningly cold night in MA for a while, we hope all sex workers, drug users, poor people, community members etc are warm and safe today and tonight.
It’s been time for the world to be unapologetic about the survival of sex working people! We rise up with our comrades Women With A Vision, INC. in Louisiana calling on all their community members to utilize their newly released “Deep South Decrim toolkit” to get educated and to push for the decriminalization of ALL sex work in their state!
Sharing this latest news from our comrades at Third Wave Fund: The Sex Worker Giving Circle Fellowship application is now live! 2021 Fellows will lead the SWGC in raising money, building community & political power, & making at least $550K in grants to SW-led groups, our biggest year yet. Deadline to apply: 3/14.
San Francisco Supervisor Rafael Mandelman, and the St. James Infirmary, named for its most storied founder Margo St. James, announced that St. Valentine’s Day in San Francisco is now officially, Margo St. James Day.
St. James, who founded the prostitutes’ rights organization, COYOTE, (Call Off Your Old Tired Ethics), and later, the St. James Infirmary, was honored by the San Francisco Board of Supervisors at its January 26, 2021 Board Meeting. “I am thrilled to honor Margo in this way. She was a tireless activist, and with a broad smile and sharp wit, exposed hypocrisy in public policy. What better way to honor a great sex worker than to name St. Valentine’s Day for her,” said Mandelman.
Veronica Vera, writer and former member of P.O.N.Y. (Prostitutes of New York) said of San Francisco’ Re-Naming of Valentine’s Day, “Margo turned St. Valentine’s Day into a celebration of women’s liberty. She used the joy of the Day to draw back the curtain on laws that marginalized mainly women. It’s taken all these years but look at what the New York State Legislature finally did – they repealed a law that sanctioned arresting people for standing on the street. Margo championed the disparity in bad laws starting Mother’s Day, 1973 when she founded COYOTE.”
Anita O’Shea, Operations Director for the St. James Infirmary also announced that a Celebration of Margo’s life is planned for May 1, 2021. O’Shea said of the event, “As Margo would say, ‘We want everyone to come.’” The online event will begin at 11 AM Pacific time on May 1, 2021. More details will appear on the St. James Infirmary website, at www.stjamesinfirmary.org
The St. James Infirmary, the first of its kind occupational health and safety clinic for sex workers in the US was founded in 1999 by St. James, Johanna Breyer and Dawn Passar, both of the Exotic Dancer’s Alliance, and with the help of Margo’s former campaign manager, in collaboration with the San Francisco Department of Public Health. The St. James Infirmary was designed originally by Priscilla Alexander, who headed COYOTE with Gloria Lockett, now retired, but who for over 30 years, was the Executive Director of CAL-PEP, (California Prostitutes Education Project) of Oakland, CA. Alexander developed a model for a peer-based health care clinic while working at the World Health Organization in Geneva, at the height of the AIDS pandemic.
Management at the St. James Infirmary come from the very same population served. In every way, the provision of health care is non-judgmental, informative, and has become a model for providing peer-based health care. Over the last twenty years, volunteers and staff have received PhD’s, become health educators, and collaborated with doctors at UCSF on studies, presented at the World Health Organization, and have found their own positions in health care, including contact tracing in this new global pandemic.
St. James Infirmary’s first Executive Director Johanna Breyer said of St. James, “She was a life force, a total BOSS and a friend and mentor to us all. Her memory, generosity, and kindness along with her fierce advocacy and unforgettable laughter are not just worth celebrating but honoring by passing on her legacy to the next generation of radical women.”
The announcement for the May 1, 2021 Celebration is attached, and was designed by Hoshi Hana, a member of the Art Tarts, part of the Margo St. James Memorial Collective.
Donations toward memorial organizing can be made here.
Kitty is a self-described survivor, mother, daughter, avid reader, animal lover, college student, and advocate for justice who is currently incarcerated at York Correctional Institution in Connecticut. With her supporters outside, Kitty has created a blog where she will regularly speak out about the violence she is surviving at York CI and share her reflections on inside organizing, self-growth, healing, and true justice. To launch her blog, Kitty’s Corner, they have shared their first post to be featured here. Please follow Kitty’s Corner here for updates!
Please also support her post-release fund by purchasing small knit items that Kitty has made in solidarity with other folks inside (pay what you can!) or by contributing directly. Please send funds via Venmo to @Joshua-vanBiema. If you’d like to purchase one of Kitty’s knit works you can reach out to Josh, one of their outside supporters, at jvanbiema0@gmail.com.
***
[cw: abuse, sexual violence, suicide]
“Why I started this blog”
By Kitty
“You have the right to remain silent, but I don’t recommend it”
-anonymous
I refuse to sit by any longer & not speak about all that has & does go on at York Correctional Institute the only female jail in Connecticut. I hope you follow my blog & share it with others as well so people can understand the injustice of what is called justice.
Before I go any further I admit to commiting the crime that got me here & by any means I am not saying that I do not take full responsibility or that I can commit a crime & there not be repercussions but I personally do not believe it is handled the right way. Before serving this 3 ½ years I’ve done so far out of my 5 year sentence I’ve been given, I believed jails/prisons were a place only bad evil people were sent to who had no respect for the law & that they were sent here to be corrected, like a child in time-out. Boy that was far from the truth as I am experiencing first hand myself.
First I was medically abused thinking & feeling like I was going to die ending up finally in surgery, then I was physically assaulted for trying to commit suicide, then I was given a controlled substance medication on accident for 10 days, & to top it off I was sexually assaulted by a marshal & when I reported it I was told I couldn’t even get counseling & I started receiving retaliation for reporting it. I have physical proof of all of this. The problem is people do not care because I am a poor woman who is a recovering addict, previous sex worker, & a convicted criminal so what I suffer behind these walls does not matter right?
Please if you don’t hear my voice find it in your heart to hear the voices of others going through abuse in prisons. I am not alone it happens more than you would believe.
Feel free to write me directly if you would like
Kitty
York Correctional Institution
201 W Main Street
Niantic, CT, 06357
[Image Description: Original art by Kitty; People hold hands in a line in front of a prison wall topped with barbed wire. The words “We All Have Rights” cross the sky in red and black.]
Much of the violence experienced by people doing sex work is at the hands of the carceral state; the sexual and physical violence experienced at the hands of clients, abusive partners and neighborhood vigilantes is a direct result of the state’s permissiveness of all forms of violence toward those stigmatized, marginalized and criminalized in society. The criminal codes, the cops and the courts (all of which are manifestations of white supremacy) sanction gender and sexual violence every day. This carceral logic is far reaching: our society has deemed punishment as “justice,” and locks up thousands of survivors.
December 17th is International Day to End Violence Against Sex Workers. On this day, and always, we honor the memories and lives of those taken from our community and recommit ourselves to solidarity–to the struggle to decriminalize + destigmatize our work and demand an end to criminalization. This is a day to demand the end of all racist, transphobic and whorephobic violence.
Video art by Valentina Vargas and Juan Pablo Robledo. Created in collaboration with UnionDocs, members of Survived & Punished NY and Alisha Walker.
Subtitles alternate between English and Spanish.
You can follow Valentina Vargas, on Instagram at @vvalentinavvs
Full text of Alisha’s poem that was sourced for this piece (her poetry zine can be purchased in our online shop):
Alisha has been moved to Housing Unit 4, the “sick unit.” She’s dealing with bad headaches now but no other change, it’s definitely covid, her test results came back positive.
For now, she can still call and email but is unsure about video visits because the GTL kiosk screen on the “sick unit” has been broken for awhile. She’s got friends in the “sick unit” too and will call again hopefully soon to give us a conditions update.
From the time she felt sick to now has been over 5 days, she said “I’ve just been giving this to everyone I guess.” She sends her love and also rage. There’s of course been no way to self-protect or distance to protect others inside prison.
We, along with countless others who have loved ones inside, have BEEN raising the alarm about the rate of those becoming sick and dying. It’s been time to FREE THEM ALL!
Logan Prison COs are pulling Alisha and others off their unit this morning (12/10/20) for testing. She got a call out to Red and Sherri to let them know. If positive for covid, she likely won’t be able to call for 2 weeks because there’s only one phone on the so-called “quarantine” unit.
That “quarantine” unit is a catch all for all those who test positive, and of course there’s no increased care or personal safety for them. Just more of the same prison shit.
Another horrible thing: we have to wait to *not* hear from Alisha to know that she tested positive, since the prison isn’t offering ways to get word to loved ones outside about our people’s status or condition.
Alisha has also heard that the WiFi over there on that “sick unit” is spotty at best too, so she’s not sure about if she’ll be able to send emails or get video visits. Forever and ever, fuck prisons.
There’s a slim chance (but it’s still one we’re actively preparing and pushing for) that Alisha could come home in February. Please help us ensure she has what she needs: http://bit.ly/FundLeLe
Comrades, our fears are playing out every day, and now this. One of our organizers just had a video visit with Alisha and let us know that Lele is sick with COVID like symptoms and will be tested on Thursday. The delay is apparently due to the prison wanting to wait in order to save time for themselves by conducting a “group test.” According to Alisha, her getting sick felt like it was just a matter of time with the number of cases they already had inside Logan prison and the terrible existing conditions. We’ll keep y’all posted as word reaches us. Please keep Alisha, and all those caged up, in your hearts.
It’s #GivingTuesday and our dear comrades Uptown People’s Law Center + Lifted Voices have helped us create a new, tax-deductible platform to boost our post-release fund for Alisha!
Donate TODAY to show up for a criminalized survivor as we plan for her release. Our goal is to raise $10K for this #GivingTuesday for Alisha’s post-release fund–and you can help us make this happen! When Alisha comes home from prison, she’s looking forward to establishing a home, looking into college courses and beginning her healing journey with friends and family.
Logan Prison is on increased lockdown AGAIN because a CO tested positive. Governor JB Pritzker, Lt. Governor Juliana Stratton when will our loved ones be released?? Our friends, family and comrades are trapped inside these deadly cages. We see and hear about this injustice. We are watching.
Comrades, rise up with us to call, email, fax and write letters Monday-Friday for Alisha and for everyone locked up inside Illinois cages. Visit: bit.ly/AlishaAdvocate for sample tweets, call and email scripts to put the Governor and Lt. Governor on blast.
Two women comrades sit on a bench inside a prison visitation room, holding onto one another and grinning at the camera.
Letters from Comrades on the Inside: In this episode, we hear from Alisha Walker, a comrade on the inside whose story is uplifted by Survived and Punished. She shares her experiences as an incarcerated person and her thoughts on justice and access to information.
This episode of Audio Interference is part of a series in collaboration with Survived & Punished NY, a coalition of defense campaigns and grassroots groups committed to eradicating the criminalization of survivors of domestic and sexual violence, and the culture of violence that contributes to it.
Visit audiointerference.org to listen to more letters from Survived & Punished’s comrades on the inside, as well as a longer interview with two Survived & Punished members. Visit www.survivedandpunishedny.orgto read Survived & Punished NY’s newsletters and explore their work.
A huge thank you to Alisha Walker for sharing her story. We’d also like to thank Lae Sway, Yves Tong Nguyen, Heena, Zoe Vongtau, Red Schulte, Mariah Hill, and Martina Ilunga, along with everyone else at Survived & Punished, for working with us on this episode.
To learn more about Survived and Punished NY, visit survivedandpunishedny.org
Last night Alisha had another video visit cancelled, but she was able to have one earlier in the week with another of our comrades and she was able to get a call out this morning with updates from “Hell” aka Logan Correctional.
After almost all of her personal items (clothes, letters, food, photos, bedding, etc) was lost, destroyed or confiscated during her forced relocation to Logan, she’s had to spend considerable time building her necessary items back up. This means less money can be spent on buying edible food because she’s had to prioritize bedding, clothes, hygiene items and more. The prisons are limiting shopping/access to commissary and citing this as a “pandemic precaution.” What this actually looks like is folx having fewer access points to things they need to survive inside.
Alisha still cites the increasingly deteriorating mental health of her fellow incarcerated community, calling the in-house counseling a joke a best and dangerous and harmful at worst.
There’s little to no access to wifi for emails unless she’s allowed in the day room. The law library is still closed, another so-called “pandemic precaution.”
There’s only one clothes dryer (which she said looks like it’s about to break down for good) for about 400 people to use, and everything must be washed by hand so that labor and the costs of detergents is taking its toll on everyone.
Even still, she talks about trying to reach people, build herself up, think through how to reduce harm in the now and the fight to get everyone free.
Survived & Punished NY (S&P NY) is the New York chapter of Survived & Punished, a national organization that seeks to end the criminalization of survivors of gender violence. Red, an organizer with both S&P NY and the Support Ho(s)e Collective, helped draft the group’s best practices and guides for letting writing. S&P NY has hosted in-person group letter writing events for members to connect with one another as they correspond with those inside. While they have had to take these events online due to the pandemic, participation has only increased.
“Letter writing is transformative,” wrote Red in an email to Prism. “Writing letters and building relationships with those inside spits in the face of the violent isolation that is incarceration. We are cultivating comradeship in the face of state violence. Letter writing is harm reduction, it demonstrates to the [correctional officers] that our comrades have people outside who will rally around them. It demonstrates to fellow incarcerated people that there is hope being organized and there are [folks] who will have their backs because letters and messages are shared, passed around and ripple beyond the first individual who receives one.”
Red notes that the benefits of letter writing programs are immense and are shared by those who participate both inside and outside. For those inside, it serves as a reminder that there are people who “care and will fight for their freedom and well-being.” For those on the outside, letter writing can put real names and stories onto the issues that they are advocating around.
“Building alongside criminalized survivors puts our politics in practice,” wrote Red. “It makes clear that we aren’t organizing around nameless oceans of statistics or cases but rather people, largely women, femmes and GNC [folks] of color, Black and Indigenous people, queer and trans survivors, who’ve been punished for their (violent) acts of self-love.”
Letter writing also provides an alternative to what S&P NY describes as the “violence and dis-connection of prison communication technology,” like video visits, emails, and phone calls provided by companies like GTL Network and Securus. In addition to these platforms’ high cost, low quality, and the fact that they are subject to surveillance, Red also notes that a lack of knowledge about how to even set up accounts can be barriers to accessing them and getting connected with loved ones.
Much like other organizers that foster connection through pen pal programs, Red sees the process of letter writing as a way to put their ethics of abolition into practice and undermine the dehumanization that incarceration inherently imposes.
“We are all shaped and changed by the relationships we choose to build and cultivate,” wrote Red. “The conscious act of writing, listening and learning alongside someone who’s incarcerated (ie someone who’s surviving state violence in a very specific way daily) is an act of rejecting the invisibilizing and disappearing work of the prison. When we intentionally decide on practicing radical empathy and solidarity we ourselves move toward healing.”
For our newer fam visiting our site! We’re a TINY formation of militant sex working people + trusted accomplices who put our energy into building radical ho community via agitating publicly + politically educating + resource + art making efforts! We also coordinate our incarcerated comrade Alisha Walker’s defense campaign #FreeLeLe, and support two of our formerly incarcerated comrades, Judy + Lorena! This often looks like making #zines, toolkits, doing protest trainings, and supporting our people materially!
This video was conceived by Mariame Kaba and narrated by CeCe McDonald. Directed and produced by Dean Spade and Hope Dector. Audio editing by Lewis Wallace. Artwork and photographs by Chartreuse Jennings, Alisha Walker, Bob Simpson, Love and Struggle Photos, Paul Goyette, Matt McLoughlin, UIC Gender & Sexuality Center, and Jean Lotus of the Cook County Chronicle. Created by Support Ho(s)e, Barnard Center for Research on Women, and Survived and Punished.
Bluestockings Bookstore, Café, & Activist Center, this beautiful space + its comrades has opened it doors to multiple events supporting our comrade Alisha, letter writing events for incarcerated sex workers, #IWDNYC celebrations and so much more.
They truly encourage sex worker-led movement building, and resource us whores constantly!
Alisha is finally out of quarantine/isolation after her forced relocation/transfer to Logan prison from Decatur prison. She just got a call out to Red and wanted some updates shared!
She’s beginning to recover from stomach/digestive issues that were a result of her not having access to safe drinking water or edible food for the past two weeks. Her only source of drinking water was from the small sink in her cell and COs told her not to drink from it starting about 5 days ago because it “wasn’t safe.” They wouldn’t comment further. She was eventually brought a bottled water. The chow meals were bad/inedible (almost as bad as cook county she said). So she wasn’t eating much.
She was able to shower this morning and was very relieved to have that “luxury” again.
She’s been put on D Wing, which is bringing up a lot of trauma responses for her. She’s trying to process and keep herself calm, but the terrible memories of last being kept on this wing are a lot to handle.
She’s working on finding her people, and building up a community for herself inside.
Email via ConnectNetwork is still the best form of correspondence for anyone wanting to reach out!
She still hasn’t received word about her property transfer or if her Decatur mail will be forwarded.
She sends love, solidarity and thanks to everyone who keeps her name circulating and to all those who send support funds!
As always, check out bit.ly/AlishaAdvocate for more on how to support and take action for LeLe!
One of our comrades got to visit Alisha’s family this past week and spend time catching up and picking up Alisha’s writings from when she was incarcerated at Cook County.
We’ve been organizing alongside LeLe’s family going on almost five years now!
The International Whores Day NYC recap video is here!
Watch and share widely! Video link here: #IWDNYC2020
A recap of the 2020 IWD Digital Rally staged by NYC and Philly sex working organizers. We invited you to protest, celebrate, support, and flood our feeds with messages of love and solidarity with sex workers — you delivered!
Video by Bambi for Kink Out Events. All Rights Reserved.
Those who’ve been emailing her, she’s sending updates as fast as those CO censors will approve them!
She’s got lots of takes on Logan vs Decatur! She’s hating the isolation, the lack of edible food, the lack of art supplies but she is looking forward to reconnecting with friends + family inside at Logan.
She’s resolutely committed to building community wherever she is, including this prison she hasn’t been in for several years. She should be FREE and out here!! These dangerous transfers must end!
Alisha got word to us last night that she’s at Logan, still very concerned and has been put in lockdown (no regular phone use, no video visits) for 12-13 more days.
They won’t disclose how long it will take to “move her commissary funds” to Logan from Decatur, so we’ve sent new funds that she can hopefully access after lockdown. She’s without much of her personal property which “is still being transferred.” She has no art supplies, no books, no writing materials until those deliveries happen.
She does have her tablet and so she said the best way to communicate immediately is through ConnectNetwork emails. You can also begin sending her physical mail at Logan–we’ve updated the mailing information here:
And as always, you can put IDOC and the Gov’s office on blast for the abuse, mistreatment and health jeopardizing acts that they’ve subjected Alisha and her fellow incarcerated community to!
We received word from our emergency phone tree that Alisha is being relocated (against her will) to Logan prison. We do not know specifically why, but we believe it is in direct relation to the existing harassment and retaliation she has recently endured. Her mom Sherri was able to get through to the prison to confirm this news we received.
Upon her relocation, she’ll likely be on a two-week lockdown, so calls, video visits might not happen. We will keep y’all posted as we’re able to get back in touch with LeLe and know what she needs and how we need to respond and take action.
We are beside ourselves with worry. Please keep checking in to this resource, to take action: bit.ly/AlishaAdvocate
C-grade kicked in so I cant make phone calls! I don’t know what else that includes as of right now..I can only call on Mondays I think? Tell everyone please! Idk about video visits? I just don’t know about anything, but I’m grieving it all because it’s very excessive for what actually happened! So it’s C Grade for two months, then B grade for two months, thats four months of this!! I won’t be “back to normal” until November!! Please keep calling Springfield! Keep going hard! They got me all the way fed up!
Alisha sends her love and appreciation to everyone who’s been calling, writing, emailing and faxing to support her clemency and to demand an end to solitary confinement and punishment against inside organizing. She asks to please keep it up! Please see bit.ly/AlishaAdvocate for how to get involved!
So far, there has been only one incident that we’ve heard of involving a covid positive staff member. Alisha mentioned that they increased the amount of time temps were being taken but that it’s obviously still impossible to social distance in prison, and new masks are only administered every Friday.
A “100 series” category 105 “Dangerous Disturbance” ticket has been administered against LeLe. No witnesses were called in her internal process per even the prison’s policies. She said they made it clear she was “guilty before she was able to speak her case about her actions.”
So far, she has not been “C Graded.” Meaning, she can still have a 20min phone use time per day, get ConnectNetwork emails usually, and receive video visits. However Decatur hasn’t rescheduled her legal call access yet, since the last one they denied.
She and her fellow roommates had a recent scare, one of her new roommates suffers from seizures and had an extended one a few nights ago and it took COs far too long to respond. As of our call, the roommate had not returned from “healthcare” (the medical wing). Alisha and her fellow roommates fears for her well-being.
She’s been focusing on writing and drawing–really channeling her recent traumatic experiences enduring solitary confinement into reflective and healing pieces.
We have also set up a new status check every two days to make sure we know exactly what Alisha’s status/grading is so we know her communication access.
**Update! LeLe called and even though her legal call was cancelled by the prison because of lockdown she’s still going to be allowed 1 call a day. Very relieved to have heard her voice. She says so far they ARE going to let emails and video visits go thru for now. **
This morning we received alarming news that Decatur prison, where Alisha is caged, has gone on Level 1 Lockdown because a staff person tested positive for covid. Please help us continue to put Governor JB PritzkerLt. Governor Juliana Stratton on blast!
We’re beside ourselves with fear for our loved ones and comrades who are being forced to work while caged during this pandemic. It’s unthinkable that anyone is still incarcerated during a global health crisis!
Starting at 10AM cst! Call throughout the afternoon!
Phone/Email/Fax Jam for LeLe + demanding an end to solitary confinement (aka SEG) + the immediate release of everyone caged inside IDOC!
Sample Letter/Email/Fax/Call Script:
My name is _______, and I’m (calling/writing) to demand an end to solitary confinement (aka “SEG”) and retaliation against the self-organizing amongst incarcerated people currently caged by IDOC. Recently, Alisha Walker, a criminalized survivor of gender-based violence was punished, again, this time for naming and attempting to raise awareness about the ongoing mental and physical health crises of people currently incarcerated at Decatur Correctional Center during this global pandemic. Alisha and a few others attempted to draft and share a letter with the warden outlining their concerns and paths to better, safer living and working conditions.
For this act of community love, Alisha was targeted, threatened with bodily harm and then removed to an interrogation room for over 4 hours. From there she was put in solitary confinement (aka “SEG”) for five days. Among the already tortuous conditions of severe isolation, she was also not allowed clean clothes, any form of communication with outside friends, family, lawyers, showers, anything to read or write with, or any privacy while using the toilet. She is now being denied access to commissary shopping, the only way to access edible foods and necessary hygiene items. This must stop.
I demand the immediate end to this hyper-punishment being used against Alisha. End the torture of solitary confinement and the blatant retaliation policies against those trying to reduce the harms they and their fellow incarcerated comrades endure every day while in prison, especially now during a pandemic.
Free Alisha Walker, free them all!
CALL: IDOC (217) 558-2200 x 2008 Gov’s Office 217-782-6830 or 217-782-6831 or 312-814-2121
After 5 days without contact, we finally heard from our friend. Alisha called Red around 2:30pm today, immediately after being released from “SEG” (solitary confinement) after 5 days of severe isolation.
On Thursday, July 2nd Alisha and several other comrades gathered (what she described as peacefully sitting together) to discuss their growing concerns for each other’s mental and physical health, lack of education programs being returned to them, the new forced work they’ve been mandated to do for the state, and other grievances. They had drafted a letter imploring the warden to care about what they saw as growing harms that were resulting in their collective rapidly deteriorating mental health during this pandemic. They gathered, with masks on, sitting 6 ft apart, and informed the COs who asked what they were doing that they wanted to discuss their concerns with the warden and offer solutions and ideas to solve the problems they were facing.
Immediately, more than 6 COs were called to “the scene” and began threatening Alisha and her friends. They were told if they did not disperse they’d be punished and possible bodily harms they might endure were also listed off. Alisha and her friends explained that they weren’t doing anything other than trying to offer a clear path to better conditions and weren’t going to stop discussing their concerns together.
Alisha was targeted and removed to an interrogation room for over 4 hours. From there she was put in segregation, “SEG” until today. Among the already tortuous conditions of isolation, she was also not allowed clean clothes, any form of communication with outside friends/family/lawyers, showers, anything to read or write with, or any privacy while using the toilet.
Alisha was also the only one retaliated against out of the small group who assembled to discuss their concerns. Upon being released from SEG she’s been told she won’t be allowed to shop for essentials until August at the earliest and her mail has been confiscated.
She wanted this account of what happened to her shared publicly. All Alisha did was gather with a few others to offer solutions to the harms they’ve been enduring. That’s enough to bring threats and acts of violence down upon their heads.
We’ll be planning online/call-in actions soon. In the meantime, please continue to use our support resource bit.ly/AlishaAdvocate to show up for LeLe!
Well the prison cancelled Red + AH’s first video visit with Alisha this morning. No warning, started the visit, empty chair where LeLe should be and then shut it off after 2 min. They waited for their second visit (so they’d have almost half an hour to visit) and that one was left on a blackout screen for the duration of the visit. Not officially “cancelled” the prison is just letting the time run down…
Obviously our comrades are worried about LeLe and also angry at yet again more prison tech communication fuckery.
We heard y’all really showed up for Third Wave Fund’s Sex Worker Giving Circle yesterday for Give OUT Day 💗 The grand total was over $80k raised to resource grassroots sex worker-led organizing!
Thank you to everyone who gave and/or amplified the fundraising efforts! You’re helping to build community power and resource the most impacted toward all our collective liberation!
Remember there’s no Pride without whores, and no queer + trans liberation without Black liberation!!
Thank you from your friendly neighborhood queer sex worker radicals 💪💕
From Project NIA: This conversation between Dr. Beth Richie, Moni Cosby & Rachel Caïdor is excellent. It kicks off Love & Protect & Moms United Against Violence and Incarceration’s Prison Is Gender Violence, Free All Survivors Week of Action. It addresses the ways that prison IS gender violence, and why we must work toward abolition if we are ever truly going to confront gender violence.
Did y’all know Give OUT Day is the only national online day of giving for the LGBTQ+ community? We know our queer, trans, and gender non-conforming communities of color have consistently been the first ones throwing down for each other before & during the pandemic and uprisings.
We also know that the police use sex work criminalization to target Black and brown queer and trans people. We say there can be no pride without abolition and no abolition without decrim!
Give to Third Wave Fund‘s Sex Worker Giving Circle this #GiveOUTDay(Tomorrow, June 30th) to resource sex worker-led collective liberation!
Every dollar up to $15,000 counts double thanks to an activist donor. To learn more about their work and donate, please visit bit.ly/2020swgc
We’ve got an ask from our comrades at Hacking//Hustling!
Take action today! If putting senators on blast is your thing, we need you to add this demand to your roster! The government is coming for internet privacy (again), and we gotta push back in every way! More details at the link!
One of our organizers spoke with Mike Ludwig for Truthout, about sex worker mutual aid and safety outside the carceral state:
“In the face of criminalization and whorephobic violence, sex working people have always sought to create our own systems of support and protection outside of the cops, criminal legal processes and societally accepted channels because most sex workers know those systems will never bring justice and have no interest in listening when harm happens…”
Tonight! 7PM! One of our comrades will be in conversation with Cecilia Gentili, Hugh Ryan, and Melissa Gira Grant! Their discussion will be streamed via The New Republic‘s page!
Sul* is a Black trans woman from Colombia, who recently arrived in Chicago and is struggling to find work and SWer community. She’d rather try working in other ways, but nothing is panning out. She’s nervous about working in this new place, and URGENT support is needed. Please help us welcome Sul* to Chicago! [
for literally watching my back the whole time. Y’all are true blue and our whole 
