Dr. Melissa Ditmore is one of the sex workers’ rights movement’s most cherished academics. For twelve years, she has worked as a freelance research consultant, with an impressive list of clients that includes AIDS Fonds Netherland, UNAIDS, The Sex Workers’ Rights Project at the Urban Justice Center, and The Global Network of Sex Work Projects (NSWP).… Continue reading Activist Spotlight: Melissa Ditmore on Responsible Advocacy and No-BS Research
Tag: drugs
Quote of the Week
I won’t fund my use dishonestly. I promised myself that. If I can’t fund it thru work, I don’t use. This is the thing—no one sees sex work as a way junkies can use honestly. They just see it as a problem. —KC with some real talk on her tumblr (Please use the comments section… Continue reading Quote of the Week
Activist Spotlight: Synn Stern on Homelessness, Harm Reduction, and Sex Worker History
L. Synn Stern has been doing outreach work since the 1980’s. As an ex-sex worker and ex-injection drug user, she has a unique perspective on her work and the lives of her clients. She is now a certified R.N. and works as Health Services Coordinator at the Washington Heights Corner Project, a community space in… Continue reading Activist Spotlight: Synn Stern on Homelessness, Harm Reduction, and Sex Worker History
Activist Spotlight: Audacia Ray, on Telling Stories and the Tricky Politics of Inclusion
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… Continue reading Activist Spotlight: Audacia Ray, on Telling Stories and the Tricky Politics of Inclusion
In My Skin (2008)
In My Skin by Australian Kate Holden is an example of the “my drug whore hell” memoirs to which I am both attracted and repelled. I’m an IV drug-using sex worker but do not subscribe to the NA model of addiction-as-disease and don’t define my life as hell. Most media doesn’t show anything true about… Continue reading In My Skin (2008)