In the mid ‘90s, when I was a baby stripper, I rode the 22 Fillmore to Market Street Cinema in San Francisco, a filthy nude strip club where I danced three or four times per week. One time, a man sat next to me. My heavy gig bag was on the floor, between my feet. It overflowed with zebra print spandex booty shorts, red gingham bikinis, glitter, purple hairspray that smelled like bubblegum and Hello Kitty everything.

The man’s legs pressed against me, so I inched closer to the window to scoot away from him. He looked down my shirt, put his arm around my shoulders. He sniffed my neck. I looked ahead, frozen. We sat like that for what felt like ten minutes, but was probably sixty seconds. The bus lurched ahead, up and down the steep hills from Hayes Valley towards Market Street. At the next stop, I got up, moved to another seat where I sat alone and watched the wet fog darken the city.

A couple stops later, the man walked towards the front of the bus. When he reached where I was sitting, he punched my head. His fist knocked me hard, near my eye with enough force to slam my face against the window with a loud crack. Then the man stepped off the bus. I rubbed my forehead to check for blood. But there was just a knot.

Around me, passengers were engrossed in their quiet passenger activities: women with lots of shopping bags flipped through paperback novels, young men nodded off to whatever beats blew through their headphones. A man used a rolled-up newspaper as a pillow and dozed. Girls wrapped their fuzzy scarves tighter around their necks. No one responded to the man who punched my head.

“That guy hit me,” I said to the driver. I figured he didn’t hear me. “That man. The guy who just got off the bus?” I said. As if my further explanation would elicit a different response. The driver said to the air in front of him, “Did you want to get off here?” I said, “No”. Or maybe I said nothing. Maybe I went back to my seat for the rest of the ride to Market Street. Maybe I just stood there, stunned and ashamed, like I had spoken out of turn. Like I was making a fuss over nothing. I remember heat. My face and neck burning red.

I never told anyone about the man who punched me on the 22 until now. This is the quiet violence sex workers face every day because of gender discrimination, stigma and whorephobia. It’s easier if we stay silent and pretend it’s not happening. But it’s also easier for us. Because if we speak out about violence against sex workers, we will be blamed for living a “risky” lifestyle. We will be fingered the Whore.

When a sex worker is attacked or raped, she is told she chose a job that puts her “at risk.” She is thought to have low self-worth, daddy issues or vague emotional damage. It’s assumed she has been abused, forced, or trafficked, even though she has one of the only jobs in America where women make more than men and always have. Sex workers earn as much as the average attorney with no formal training, credentials, or education.

How dare a woman hold a vocation where she has agency over her own body? How dare she have the audacity to perform high femme sexuality for decent, motherfucking money? When a sex worker is punched in the head, pretend it never happened so she can blame herself accordingly for existing in the first place.

It’s a crime to be a sex worker in America, to be a woman of color, to flaunt our curves, to show our nipples, to utilize our bodies and sexuality in a way that supports our lives while simultaneously being denied financial access to resources. It’s illegal to thrive in a primarily high femme workforce.

Take a look:

When every manager in every strip club commands me to take off my clothes in his office so he can see my body. When he pats my ass, laughs, tells me, “You’re a good lookin’ woman.” When that same manager tells a gorgeous black stripper he already has “enough black girls,” even though she used to work there a year ago, even though she traveled hundreds of miles to work there now. When a strip club manager watches me dance naked on a cold stage alone, turns to another man and asks loudly enough for all of us to hear in a bored, tired voice, “Should I hire her?”

When a table of six men and women watch intently while we dance topless on stage. When they point, whisper and don’t tip—not even one dollar. When that stripper walks off stage after her set and tells them we survive on tips and that it’s rude to not tip when they are sitting that close to the stage.

When the middle-aged white man in their group complains to my manager and I can hear him say he has never been told to tip and would not be back because how dare I. When I am already locked in an embrace with another joyful, tipsy customer who is saying he loves me, and that I am gorgeous, and he tips me, and this helps for about ten minutes because fuck that other customer.

I never told anyone about the man who punched me on the 22 until now. This is the quiet violence sex workers face every day because of gender discrimination, stigma and whorephobia.
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When every twofer Tuesday, a customer slides his fingers underneath my second layer G-string. When I say no. When I grab his hand. When I flash him my best tight smile that contains an additional warning. When I move his hand to my hips. When he grins and says, “Don’t worry.” When I say, “We’re on camera.” When I move his hand. Again.

When a man stands in the doorway of a private room and doesn’t let me leave. When his arms are up, blocking me, his palms on the edges of the door frame. When a black stripper hears me scream and appears behind him, grabs him by his t-shirt, pulls him off of me and he runs. When she says nothing, just locks eyes with me, pivots, and slowly walks away. When I realize she’s walking slowly because she is very pregnant.

When a man slips GHB in our drinks and three women go to the ER, but one is an immigrant and too scared to go to the authorities and all three women have kids under twelve years old. When security gives no fucks. When a customer asks me if I am fifty years old. When a man asks me to leave with him for two hundred dollars and gets angry and confused when I decline his offer. When he pontificates about God and Jesus and his wife. When he tells me about his fancy room at the Ritz Carlton and shows me pictures of his boats. When I finally say, “You’re just used to getting what you want” and I walk away.

When a close friend tells me in a low, distraught voice about another trans woman sex worker who was stalked by an ex-boyfriend and his accomplice, dragged out of her apartment by her hair and shoved into a van to be murdered. When she tells me that the girl’s neighbor heard screams and wrote down the license plate of the van and the cops pulled the ex-boyfriend over and he went to jail. When she tells me about court and having to testify and how she lives in constant terror. When a pretty famous male writer says to a room full of students, “Everyone loves a whorehouse” and no one flinches except for me.

When I bite my lip until it bleeds. When I clench my teeth until I have lock jaw. When the migraines kick in and I am at the strip club working and I keep dancing because: rent.

When woke-as-fuck friends make flippant, derogatory remarks about sex workers when we have been lamenting violence against women of color and LGTBQ communities for decades. When people I trust and love exclude sex workers from their feminist agenda at an event that is supposed to support marginalized communities. When I send a photo from the marquis across the street on Sunset Boulevard outside of said event that flashes in yellow block letters, “Girls Girls Girls” and watch it ten times because I need a reminder that I exist.

On June 2, when I marched for sex worker rights after SESTA/FOFSTA legislation further criminalized sex workers and feminists, queers, and liberals mostly didn’t show. When bystanders looked at us with obvious disgust on their faces. When more legislation passed that digitally erases sex workers us from the internet—a place where we screen clients and always have. This is violence against sex workers. When my friend’s Instagram accounts are seized by the FBI. When we are shadow-banned, deleted, erased, incarcerated. Gone.

Want To Know Why Tumblr Is Cracking Down On Sex? Look To FOSTA/SESTA

When a man tells me, he could never love me because I am a hooker, just like his mother.  

When this happens, I get back up. When this kind of violence happens, I listen to sex workers talk about cleaning houses, being homeless, being hungry, being attacked, being out of their meds, being broke, being raped. When this happens, I lend them my car or money. When this happens, we go to IHOP for sausage and pancakes. When this happens, I send emails and cry because I’m calling out powerful people who are in a position to help and friends who are silently standing by, pretending sex workers are not being murdered and erased and I tell them they have made a grave error. When this happens, I get scared. But after this happens, I get back up.

On April 11, 2018,  Trump signed the SESTA/FOFSTA bill designed to appeal to evangelical anti-sex worker conservatives with a thin promise to end child trafficking but really, it was intended to attack sex workers from thriving in a digital marketplace. Backpage and other adult-content hosting sites were shut down by an overwhelming majority, ruling in favor of “third party liability” which holds websites and social media responsible for child trafficking and other illegal activities.

When a pretty famous male writer says to a room full of students, “Everyone loves a whorehouse” and no one flinches except for me.
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The effect this has on sex workers is monumental and devastating. Sex workers have always been sagacious about using the internet as a survival tool to encrypt our identities and screen clients. But criminalization, stigma, and whorephobia continues to cockblock. Monday, December 17, 2018 — the International day to end violence against sex workers — Tumblr decided to ban all adult content, erasing our identities from the mediascape, rendering us invisible. But we will not be erased.

When whorephobia happens, sex workers become homeless because they lack resources, family, and opportunities to find work. They are notoriously vulnerable to violence, rape, discrimination and murder, particularly women of color, disabled and trans sex workers. This year 70% of sex worker deaths were POC and trans. Banishment from the internet makes our livelihood more dangerous. Extreme criminalization and femme erasure on a massive scale makes our lives much more difficult and scary. Evangelical stigma surrounding sex and sex workers must be crushed with the highest stiletto. When SESTA passed, we met secretly.

When I send a photo from the marquis across the street that flashes in yellow block letters, “Girls Girls Girls” and watch it ten times because I need a reminder that I exist.
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On Monday, we gather at the women’s center and hear the names of the sex workers who died in 2018—three times more than last year, prior to the passing of SESTA. Votives glow as the names are called along with the places where they lived. Our hands are linked. We are building momentum. I’m not the baby stripper I used to be—I’ve been sharpening my red rhinestone claws and I’ve been raising my voice. I’ve got pink Hello Kitty pepper spray for the next person who tries to punch me in the head. And when decriminalization happens—and it will happen—our glittering femme workforce will not merely survive, we will rise.

The first time you quit stripping in 2003, you shoved your pink spandex bikinis and black booty shorts into a garbage bag and brought them to a lesbian bar in the Mission and gave them to a leggy blonde with phenomenal teeth. You moved from San Francisco to Los Angeles, away from the strip clubs where it was too easy to waltz in at any hour you wanted and work until 3 a.m. and leave with a wad of twenties in your boot. You gave away three more garbage bags full of sleazy costumes over the next 10 years to baby strippers.

You moved. You quit because of the misery of being mauled by strangers and the slick void it left was too lonesome. You were the most miserable stripper to palm five hundred dollars. And some nights you believed you were only as good as your tits and your sex appeal. So you quit. You waited tables, you cleaned houses. You wore scrubs and drew blood and siphoned porn star piss and stayed away from the nude clubs in the sticky valley.

You’re 44 — which is approximately 187 in stripper years. Okay, you’re really 46, but you lie to everyone about your age and have for years: to friends, co-workers, your dad, your bosses, your customers, CNN. You have been working in the sex industry for over 25 years. You wish there was someone you could talk to about it but you don’t know anyone who has clocked in for booty duty this long. You look like hell. You have the shits. You’re dehydrated. The only thing multiplying in your cells are the dark circles under your eyes from zero sleep. Now, when you throw your neck out, it stays out. Your lower back screams. Your knees click.

You don’t know anyone who has clocked in for booty duty this long.
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After your boyfriend lied, cheated, broke up, and moved out, the same month your close friend died from breast cancer, your rent more than triples. The last thing you want to do is flirt with dudes who neither care about you nor pretend to, allow them to hug you with their sweaty arms and squeeze your butt with both hands. The last thing you want to be is an emotional pit stop for sad golfers. The last thing you want to do is grind on cock, song after song, twenty bucks a pop. You feel more like a whimpering dog who was returned to the pound than a sexy stripper.

You’re hungry. You’re out of cat food again and your car payment is 10 days late. You can no longer put off work. You dash to the desert again — to the only titty bar in Coachella Valley.

At the strip club on a Tuesday afternoon, you feel like a hag on a death bed.

Once You Have Made Pornography

Whispers can be heard from the stage. You turn to see Kat, a thick redhead with blotchy black tattoos on both thighs, talking to a short stalky bald customer you’ve seen before. He sips Coors Light and watches you strut toward the stage. You dance to “White Rabbit,” the Jefferson Airplane cover.

“How old do you think she is?” he asks, pointing at you. From the pole, upside-down in a descending angel pose, you see the whole bar and everyone inside. Two girls give lap dances in VIP rooms, the bartender scrolls through her phone, and the front door opens. A blast of aggressive sunlight and hot dust lands on Kat’s naked stomach that glows creamy-white in the red, black club. You remove your flimsy sequins bra and let it fall to the stage. Kat and her customer are a few feet away from you in low soft chairs.

They think you can’t hear them.

“I’d say somewhere in the neighborhood of 45,” she says. She’s halfway in his lap now, drinking his beer. Her knees between his legs. She makes a show of tossing her head back to shake free her red ropey hair that smells like weed. Later you will watch her count your dances, keeping score. She will smile at you angrily through freckled pink glossed lips. You are still one of the top earners in this club. You dance circles around most of your co-workers and they know it. You smile back. Tell Kat you like her lacy top.

‘How old do you think she is?’ he asks, pointing at you.
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She walks into the smoking area outside with one of your regulars. That month your friend died and your boyfriend left, Kat asked you if you were all right because you weren’t. She told you it was going to be okay and she meant it.

A couple days later you saw her pale fingers slide inside your small black purse when you were dancing on stage. You didn’t say anything. Were you imagining things? You bought a brighter, pinker purse so you could watch it more carefully from the top of the pole. She only took a couple of twenties. That day was horrendously slow and all the girls were panicked, but you had a regular give you a couple hundred. Bored desperation followed all of you into an endless, deader night.

Some girls cannot help where they find themselves: lost, grieving, broke, and panhandling in sparkly panties. Stripping at any age is an orgy of change: skin, bones, wrinkles, muscles, and hair. You didn’t know you’d be surrounded by the newer, bouncier products that delight customers — that you’d stare middle age in the face and carry its soggy weight for everyone. And yet, you don’t feel ugly or incapable. Your fingers and toes are an alarming orange red — fucking immaculate.

You still work the shit out of the pole. You’ve become more compassionate, sincere, and crafty in your hustling — the way you hold men by their bald heads while they cry during lap dances with their father in prison and mother dead from cancer like yours. Usually the crying men are significantly younger than you.

And youth is so fleeting, it’s as if you’ve never felt it, because years of stripping have raced by. Decades of dancing is so physically demanding, mentally draining, deeply competitive, and ruled by jealousy, and you’ve spent your entire adult life dancing with naked women you envy. You wouldn’t have it any other way.

The stealing doesn’t bother you as much as the whispers.

Customers ask your age and when you don’t reply quick enough, they grab your chin and tilt it toward the ceiling light. They move your head left and right like you’re a statue, a Barbie, a nameless fuck doll. They assume you lie about your life, your long-term sobriety, teaching, writing — all of it. But you only lie about your age.

“Twenty-eight…Thirty-six,” they say. You nod. Change the subject.

The stealing doesn’t bother you as much as the whispers.
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Clyde, a regular customer, sits at the bar working on a whiskey neat, probably his third or fourth. You sit next to him. You consider the many times Clyde offered you money to fuck him, the times he got plastered and asked you for a ride to Indio and the time he tazered your security guard. You’d never seen it happen up close until that night: the pow pow of the tazer that sounds like a gun shooting half a dozen fast bullets. Sam, your security guard, convulsed violently then — Boom — face planted on the floor with his arms and legs in a starfish pose on the zig-zagged yellow, gum-stained carpet.

“How much would you charge to murder me?” you ask Clyde. He chuckles, then stares at the men’s watch you still wear. It’s chunky, expensive, maybe worth more than anything you own. He shakes his head. Sips his Jack. You take off your watch, drop it into his shirt pocket.

“I’m serious,” you say. He tries it on but it’s too small. His wiry wrist hair gets tangled in the band.

“I’ll do it for free,” he says. You’re called to the stage. You leave Clyde and your watch at the bar. During your second song by The Black Angels, you wonder if Clyde is waiting for his ex-girlfriend to show up so he can taunt her by flirting with you. He’s a guy with lots of dirty motives. Some say he preys on the weak. That day, you figure, you qualify. This time, when your bra is tossed, Clyde walks up to the stage and leans over, one leg perched on the chair. If anyone else did that, it would feel menacing, but it’s more like he’s being polite — paying his respects. He tosses wrinkled dollars on your stage — around 15 bucks. No one else tips you.

The Exhausting And Unpaid Emotional Labor Of Sex Work

You are Luce Irigaray’s femininely gendered body at work encircling male hysteria. Your very body, your touch, your role acts as sexual oxytocin for men. You are emotional rock candy adept at sweetening the jagged edges of broken men.

You’re little orphan Annie in whore form. You sing, you dance, you make a mean lemon bar. You wash dishes like a motherfucker. Why won’t anyone adopt you?

You have quit dancing a dozen times but it never sticks. Your writing life is about large and small rejections and those rejections echo inside the strip club when you sit on a chair shaped like a leopard print stiletto, waiting for customers while checking your rejection emails.

You hear more flashes of little conversations from the other girls like, “She’s too old to work here.” You look up. No one is there.

Later, you agree to meet Clyde up the road after your shift. It’s a windy, warm night with a negligible bullshit moon. When you get there, Clyde’s sitting in a tacky brown booth with his son, cracking up. He buys you pancakes at Denny’s and gives your watch back.