Activism

Activist Spotlight: Hawk Kinkaid on Negotiation and Shared Knowledge

by Dominick on April 17, 2013 · 1 comment

Hawk Kinkaid (photo of himself)

Hawk Kinkaid, a former escort, Internet porn performer and pro-dom, is the founder of HOOK, a grassroots non-profit organization that since 1997 has undertaken to share knowledge, reduce harm and build community among male sex workers. HOOK has published guides on best practices, negotiation, and legal issues, has collected stories and interviews, and runs the innovative educational program Rent U. He’s been a contributor to $pread magazine, performed at Sex Worker Literati, competed nationally in spoken word, and contributed to the upcoming omnibus anthology Johns, Marks, Tricks and Chickenhawks, edited by David Henry Sterry. We welcome new Tits and Sass contributor Dominick—a fellow contributor to Johns, Marks… and advice blogger for rentboy.com—who interviewed Hawk about the relaunch of HOOK and his other projects.

So tell me about your piece that appears in David Henry Sterry’s new anthology. It’s called “Ice Cream”—when did you write it? Is it cold and sweet?

I wrote “Ice Cream” a year and a half ago. It is a true story, but it happened over a decade ago. Cold and sweet? I love ice cream. The story is not about ice cream, the dessert. It’s about a man who makes ice cream; it’s about going cold when it’s part of your business.

Does Ice Cream Man know you’ve written about him? I wrote about a client, a married elementary school principal exploring raunch/kink/humiliation on the rentboy blog, and he actually saw it! He left me a friendly comment.

Ice Cream Man has no idea. And I don’t think he would appreciate the story. It’s true, but I don’t think he would like it. He may not even be alive now. I have no idea, actually. Discretion with and about clients is part of the job, but after all this time, it’s a different world.

Well, I think a decade is plenty of time to hold a good story in. Has writing always been a part of your sex work practice?

HOOK along with other great programs like the now extinct $pread magazine have always been great outlets for me to share important stories or thoughts about working in the industry. Poetry is another significant part of my life, ranging from national spoken word slamming to my work’s inclusion in a number of literary journals. Writing has always been part of my life—I think it just made sense to also use words to shape the many experiences I had as an escort, pro-dom, etc.

HOOK definitely helped me when I was escorting. I kept that wallet card on me at all times, and wrote the number of a lawyer on it. I never had reason to use it, thankfully, but I felt better prepared.

That’s awesome! It’s what we work toward in being a resource for working men.
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Quote of the Week

by suzyhooker on April 7, 2013 · 0 comments

in Activism, Quote of the Week

“There are only two kinds of whores in the media and in the minds of most feminists; the gorgeous rich glamazon and the beaten-down junkie whore. Hilariously, you can be both. You can also be neither. In fact, I’d say that most sex workers in the developed world fall along the axis somewhere in the middle and shift up and down depending on their circumstances. This binarist thinking is largely due to feminists appropriating sex worker’s experiences for their own selfish ends; the good whore supports the sex posi agenda and the bad whore supports the radfem agenda.”

–from “10 Tips on How To Be A Feminist Ally To Sex Workers” by Olive Seraphim on her new blog. Such a primer has never been more desperately needed.

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Activist Spotlight: Audacia Ray, on Telling Stories and the Tricky Politics of Inclusion

by Caty Simon on March 20, 2013 · 1 comment

in Activism, Interviews

Audacia Ray, photo courtesy of the Red Umbrella Project

Audacia Ray is perhaps most renowned in the sex workers’ rights movement for her longtime editing of the now sadly defunct $pread magazine. But as a sex workers’ rights movement activist, Audacia has really been everywhere and done everything: blogging for years about her sex working experience as Waking Vixen; publishing her book, Naked on the Internet: Hookups, Downloads, and Cashing In on Internet Sexploration; and working as an adjunct professor of Human Sexuality at Rutgers University as well as for the communications consultant for the Global Network of Sex Work Projects. Amazingly enough, in 2010 she had time to found the Red Umbrella Project, a peer-led, community-based organization that “amplifies the voices of people who have done transactional sex, through media, storytelling, and advocacy programs.” RedUP is now where her creative, media, and advocacy energies lie. Tits and Sass asked her some questions about this project.

In the introduction to the Red Umbrella Project’s writing workshop’s literary journal, Pros(e), Melissa Petro theorizes that sex workers teaching each other the art of storytelling can increase agency because by writing our stories, we can better understand our choices. This kind of storytelling will also hopefully decrease stigma by increasing understanding (rather than bolstering whorephobia like the memoir pieces full of disdain for co-workers, like so many of the sex worker bios out there.) How do you think telling our stories helps sex workers?

One of the Red Umbrella Project mantras is that we believe storytelling is the building block of social change. I think we need to be able to tell our stories and insist on making space for them in the world if we are ever going to make change for ourselves in the world. Our creative programs, especially the Red Umbrella Diaries events, are really the entry point for many people into the RedUP programs. It’s an easy thing to wander into, be curious about, and then hopefully we get sex workers into some of our programs, building their skills and community, while also getting potential allies to care and think more deeply about the many experiences in the sex trades. I think its important for creative expression to be individualized because there are just so many different kinds of experiences that people have doing sex work. It is also important to constantly look at the bigger picture – which sex workers’ stories are being represented and which are not? What experiences are being documented that indicate areas in which our rights are being denied and violated? And to me, the creative work cannot be an end point or a stand alone thing, it has to be linked to greater social change. I want to validate art for arts’ sake, but we’ve got a revolution to do here, and it’s important to link personal storytelling to cultural and policy change. That said, not everyone is an activist, and when sex workers show up at the Diaries or participate in one of our creative programs and feel awesome – that is enough. [READ MORE]

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What Antis Can Do To Help, Part One: Aiding Those Still in the Industry

by Lori Adorable on March 19, 2013 · 22 comments

in Activism, Politics

Image via Telegraph

I am a sex worker who hates the sex industry. As an anti-capitalist, I hate all industries. It’s not quite as if I’d prefer another system in place of capitalism. If I had to describe my ideology in positive terms, I’d call it fatalistic socialism, which I define as the belief that socialism would be really nice if we wouldn’t inevitably fuck it up. (Maybe I’m a Voluntary Human Extinctionist.) However, just because I have no solution to the current state of affairs and happen to be a misanthrope of the highest degree, doesn’t mean I can’t keep my hate-boner for capitalism in general and the sex industry in particular.

I’m not alone in my hatred of the sex industry, of course. Sex work abolitionist feminists* (see note below) — or as they are often known, the Antis — are right up there with so many religious zealots, conservatives, liberals, anarchists, and ecofeminists in the anti-sex industry brigade. They’re known as “Antis” because they’re also anti-porn, anti-prostitution, and anti-sex work in general (and typically anti-kink, anti-transgender, and even anti-penetrative sex as well.) A particularly perverse sort of second-wave radical feminists, Antis are a loose collection of mostly white, middle-class, able-bodied women from the Global North, the vast majority of who have never been in the sex industry. Still, they make it their mission to eradicate the industry by “ending demand” for ALL sexual services, so as to free ALL women from coercive male sexuality.

I find plenty of their theoretical points (if not their attendant practical solutions) agreeable to my own ideology. The sex industry is about satisfying male sexual desire at the expense of female sexual desire. Its continued existence is predicated on the economic and sexual exploitation of women, particularly queer women, trans women, poor women, disabled women, and women of color. But, just like I wouldn’t try to tear down capitalism and free all the “wage slaves” by burning down factories and leaving the workers jobless, I’m not going to destroy patriarchy and “save” myself and my fellow sex workers by scaring off—er, re-educating our sources of income. If sex work abolition succeeds, it will liberate millions of women (and men, third gender, and agender folks as well) right into homelessness. Further, in the interim, advocacy for abolition results in the kind of social marginalization and shitty public policies that exacerbate the discrimination and violence we as sex workers face on a daily basis. [READ MORE]

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A Nation of Sex Workers: An Interview with Tracy Quan

by Caty Simon on March 5, 2013 · 3 comments

in Activism, Interviews, Prostitution

photo taken by Stanton Wong

I’ve been reading Tracy Quan since before I was a sex worker, when a prequel to Diary of a Manhattan Call Girl was serialized on Salon.com, and I’ve been chummy with her online since 2003, when she graciously replied to my e-mails. I’ve learned so much from Tracy, her callgirl comedy-of-manners novels, and the quirky takes on sex work, relationships, and public figures in her articles. I imagine many of us have.

One of the first of the sex worker literati, Tracy was also one of the first to successfully transition from out sex worker and sex workers’ rights activist to in-demand freelance writer, modeling a career trajectory that helped bring our voices to the mainstream. Yet, her street cred as part of the sex workers’ rights movement is unimpeachable. After reading about the history of PONY (Prostitutes of New York) collaborating with ACT-UP in the 90s, I asked Tracy to talk about her involvement with PONY’s work during that era, as well as many other things.

You started working quite young, at 14 years old, as a way to gain financial independence from your live-in older boyfriend and your parents. Nowadays, there’s a whole lot of tangled discourse about youth sex workers, from a law in NY state that may be able to retroactively erase youth convictions , while another NY State law diverts those now arrested into “state protection”, to anti-sex work feminists shrieking fallaciously that the average age of entry into prostitution is 13, to the sex workers’ rights movement trying to figure out a way to help homeless queer and trans youth who subsist on survival sex. As a former teenage sex worker, what do you have to say about all this?

[READ MORE]

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