Welcome to Body Week 2022. This year, Them’s annual exploration of queer and trans embodiment comes at a time of crisis, as state-led attempts to restrict our bodily autonomy seem to multiply by the day. And yet, in every nook and cranny of this country, we persist. In the stories that form this special series, we sought to document not only the look of this persistence, but also its sensation: How does it feel to be LGBTQ+ and have a body today? Read more from the series here.
The first time I fucked a woman was in Amsterdam, behind a neon-lit window in the red light district. I was a 20-year-old tourist, and a painfully awkward and closeted one at that. I took a bicycle cab in the rain, first to an ATM, then to the same neighborhood where I had taken a walking tour some 12 hours earlier. In the daytime, tourists gawked as our guides squeezed us through the narrow alleyways, shoulder to shoulder, no photos allowed, thankyouverymuch. At 4 a.m., the curtains were drawn and brash tourists had turned into nervous clients. I walked past her window four times before I worked up the courage to knock.
Seeing a sex worker shaved years off of my queer shame. I asked her everything I thought I needed to know about loving a woman. She, in turn, responded in the blasé, non-judgmental manner of someone whose day-to-day work involved shepherding in the sexual revelations of dozens of strangers. I was nearly faint with relief that my queerness was entirely boring to her. It was a balm for my closeted self, something that my friends, dating apps, and therapist couldn’t offer.
This was my first experience with the kinds of radical healing work that sex workers do for our communities. By helping us reach parts of our sexuality, our trauma, our kinks, and our joy that so many of us cannot touch in any other way, sex workers’ work goes far beyond mere physical intimacy. The full breadth of their impact on their clients too often goes unappreciated, hidden behind the stigma of their profession. It took me a long time to become comfortable talking publicly about paying for sex, but I no longer feel like I can talk about my queerness without giving due credit to the sex workers who were part of my journey.
“The messaging in our society is that hiring a sex worker is a ‘last resort,’ which simply isn’t true,” says Rachel Wright, a sex and relationship therapist who often works with sex workers and their clients. “I ask my clients: what do you believe to be true about ‘someone who hires a sex worker’? There is usually some faulty thinking in there. Sex workers want to provide you with the safest space possible to explore your sexuality. When we can channel our curiosity, shame has trouble surviving.”
Unpacking that shame — around our gender, our self-expression, our sexuality, and more — can be a lifelong journey for many queer people. By creating a space where their clients can center curiosity and self-exploration, sex workers help us find our authentic selves underneath those layers of shame.
“I have many clients that I do gender play scenes with. Some are trans, some are still in the early phases of interrogating their sexuality, and some just want a break from fulfilling traditional masculine gender roles,” says Mistress Fae (link NSFW), a New York City-based dominatrix. “I enjoy these scenes because I get to provide a safe container for their curiosity. I’ve had scenes where I’ve done someone’s hair and makeup, put them in a dress for the first time, held up that mirror and seen them cry because this is the first time they’ve ever seen themselves as femme.”
In those types of scenarios, Fae says clients might feel more comfortable exploring gender when they can fantasize that they are being “forced” to, instead of confronting their own desires directly. That unique context frees some individuals to explore themselves more authentically, to experiment without shame. This deep psychological component to sex work isn’t a secret; many sex workers will tell you that their work is often more about providing unofficial therapy for their clients than it is about actual sex. “It can be intense to carry — someone books you, they leave as a different person than they came in, and you never hear from them again,” says Fae. “But sometimes you get to watch their entire journey, and that’s fucking beautiful.”
Queer life closely orbits the world of commercial sex. There’s plenty of pain hiding beneath this fact, stemming from generations of young LGBTQ+ people who have sought out sex work as an alternative to abusive homes or worse. But there also exists a deep world of community care and radical exploration at the intersection of sex work and queerness. Many queer sex workers find strength in their work and their communities, which allows them to challenge their own personal shame.
“I hate being called a woman in my real life. I’m not a woman,” says Fae, who identifies as an agender dyke. “But my domme persona feels a lot like putting on femme drag. It recontextualized many things I formerly hated. ‘Real me’ despises dresses and skirts because they remind me of uncomfortable traditional gender roles, but ‘domme me’ loves them because they’re an empowering costume for my role. I’m also lucky to have a great therapist who helps me work through this stuff. I’m grateful that she truly understands my sex work and takes a non-pathologizing approach, which means I can be fully honest with her about my experiences.”
Sex workers bring all of their identities into their work; their gender, body shape, and even race are openly part of their appeal to clients. Their work can be a way to connect with and even give back to their marginalized communities. “As an asexual trans woman, a dyke, a lesbian, a sex worker, and a leatherdyke, I think it's impossible to separate my queerness and transness from my sex work,” says adult content creator and journalist Ana Valens (link NSFW). “When I first started seeing clients online, the whole experience felt like erotic roleplay, and I immediately realized my clients were seeking me, a lesbian trans woman, specifically because they desired something about my queerness, about my transness, about my lesbianism.”
Challenging internalized shame is an active journey for many sex workers, who lean on the community around them and those who came before them to unlearn their biases. “You have to become aware of the stigma that resides within you, how internalized whorephobia may arise when you start doing sex work, and you have to accept that internalizing stigma is innately part of living in our society,” says Ana. Sex workers like Ana consciously center their values to eventually rewrite socially learned stigma. “Books like Revolting Prostitutes and Playing the Whore were foundational in my journey of unlearning shame,” Ana adds.
With how much sex workers have done and continue to do for our communities, it is vital that the queer community stand in solidarity with the community’s fight for rights and recognition. In addition to the ongoing battle to legalize their work, sex worker activists are currently organizing against legislation that would significantly increase the risks involved with practicing their work online. The 2018 passage of FOSTA-SESTA, a pair of bills that make websites legally responsible when their platforms are used for sex work, ushered in an age of sweeping online censorship and new dangers for sex workers. Despite failing to curb sex trafficking, as was the legislation’s stated goal, its mistakes are echoed in the EARN IT Act, a bill that aims to curb human trafficking and child abuse online by requiring platforms to monitor and censor potentially harmful users. Unfortunately, advocates say that EARN IT does little to protect vulnerable groups, and will lead platforms to remove broad swaths of sex-related content, which will have outsized impact on sex worker, LGBTQ+, and other communities. While EARN IT failed to pass in 2020, it was reintroduced in 2022 and is fast gaining momentum in Congress.
The fight against EARN IT underscores just how precarious sex workers' rights and livelihoods are. Queer sex workers deserve bodily autonomy as much as anyone else in our community. The work they do is essential to our liberation — they are healers who provide a vital avenue for self-discovery and queer acceptance.
Remembering the strength and healing that I drew from just one night in Amsterdam reminds me how important sex workers have always been to our queer stories. Sex workers’ labor is a bedrock foundation that all sexual minorities have benefited from, either directly or indirectly. At the end of the day, all of our struggles for our bodies and our freedom are intrinsically bound together. It is well past time for queer people to throw off our shame and break our silence around sex work, and show sex workers the solidarity that they’ve always shown to us.
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