Editors Note: mentions of violence, violence against sex workers and blood.
The tatted, scarred, burned, pierced, modified, shaved, and bruised. I flock to you in every intestine and gut of the beast. Inside these busted places we find our reasons to live. I think about the advice we trade to keep each other safe. All the people checking my location to make sure that i'm okay and where I said I was going to be. The weird shaped rock or bone or vial of blood choker that someone will give to me as a token of love. The extra questions people ask when I'm about to see a trick: what time are you supposed to be back? Where are you going to be? Do you have a knife? Be safe, I love you. I think about how many trans people I know do sex work because there aren’t many options available and the different sites we trade our tactics. It feels like exchanging ammo on the battlefield and we are the loaded guns. It's like the time my ex gave me its vans to wear when I was wearing platforms and wanted to skate bowl in slab city. Or the time my chosen brother took out my skin staple after a gig at a leather fag bar in folsom and made sure to pull them out carefully and slowly and with so much caution. Sometimes I think about how many sharp edges the world has and how easy it is to get punctured but how lucky I am to have freaks ready with wire, string, lace, leather, zip ties, hardware, blood, and spit to close all the wounds back up.
When I started doing sex work I remember how much advice I was able to receive to make a reliable vetting process and keep myself safe. We traded funny stories and horror stories. I remember laughing when my friend was like,” I fell in love with my client just because he was being nice to me, im so crazy” or my heart hurting over a friend whose client made them feel so unsafe they had to leave the city and go into hiding. I think about all the trans sex workers who disappear and are found later in the most horrific ways and I think about how much I wish I could wrap a cloak of spikes around every single one of my sex worker friends that they can use to impale someone if they need to. I would go around and impale every person who wants to harm us if I had the power to. I think about how lucky I am to have my patchwork of all types of scavengers learning how to crawl at the bottom of the ocean and find the jewels that will keep us alive to see the sun rise again. I always love staying awake until sunrise whether its on a rooftop after a rave or in a park or watching on someone's balcony and thinking about how lucky I am to have survived to another day. I feel like no matter what the sun still rises and the night still comes with all the nightcrawlers and creatures of the night who brave the unknown to try and find a mean to survive.
One of my namesakes is nightlife and I think it makes sense as someone who has worked in the night in varied forms for years. I started in the diy underground as a experimental musician and performance artist performing at different venues, bars, squats, and renegades across the world and slowly moved into sex work. It seemed like the natural progression after doing erotic performance art and smut and it was at a time where I was really in need of income and unable to get a stable job due to being transient and not having a permanent address from always being on tour. When I decided on naming myself dagger on tryst it came from the arabic word for sword and also I had been thinking alot about how I feel like I am both the sword and the wound. I think that going by dagger allows me to let people know that I can cut deep and sharp if I need to protect myself. When I looked at the swords that are my namesake I saw a weapon that is intricately beautiful and has so many different twists and shapes that make it what it is with engravings and prayers etched into the blade. I think of myself that way, as something sharp as a knife but also fragile with intricacies that will take time to see and learn. In many ways, sex work is also a form of performance for me and I like to see how I can challenge myself as a performer and how that translates across my other creative practices too. In all elements, the realms of fantasy, imagination, and desire are so present and a huge part of how I approach all practices in my life. Sex work takes a huge amount of creativity because I am creating myself in the imagine of what the person who is paying for is seeing. I am molding myself in a way where I am taking parts of me that are true to myself but having to curate a different version depending on what the trick wants from me. As a loverboy slut with many different types of partners, I have learned to view sex work as a separate act than sex in my personal life. I think when one seeps into the other it can get very confusing for me and has led to me not being able to present for sex in my personal life in ways that I want to if i'm feeling more detached and dissociated from my body. Part of learning to separate these two aspects of my life was really tapping into my own body and autonomy and being able to distinguish the performance of sex from sex with someone I love or am lusting for.
I also am very freak4freak and t4t in my daily life and many of my clients are older cis white men which is really interesting because I think a lot of the time they are looking for a certain type of experience that is out of their comfort zone with someone who is really different from anything they are usually surrounded with. Like for example, someone was like wow you seem like such a crazy girl to have crazy sex with. I also have been asked multiple times what genitals I have and if I have a penis because some tricks are really genderfucked by me I think and don't know what to make of it. I've thought about wearing a wig because it might help me get more clients if I looked more feminine but I already had to make a promise to myself to not wear a wig to hide who I am anymore. I did a whole wig letting go ritual where I let one of my roommates at the time wear the wig during their noise porn performance that ended in setting a bible on fire and a orgy. It feels important to me that I can show up as myself in all aspects of my work and I try to do so even within sex work where I am withholding parts of myself and still performing certain roles but still want to show up as authentic as possible. Part of teaching myself to sword fight in the woods in Mississippi was also me training myself to be my own sword and learn to slash sharp edges with precision and glisten in a devastatingly dangerous and beautiful way.
If I could crack open the ground and pour in everyone I loved and build a secret safe world for all of us I would. The freaks, sluts, dolls, punks, fags, and all other menaces to society deserve better. I want more for us and I want us to have everything we need and more on top of that again. I think about how much we are able to do with so little and im in awe of those around me. Its almost like doing magic tricks but instead of pulling a dove out of a hat its the bondage ware someone made from scratch or screenprints or chainmail or a weird monster plushie. I hope there is a light at the end of the tunnel and that it shines so strongly that its uv rays disintegrate everything that is unholy and corrupt in the world and leave us to love, rest, and live. I hope that we can all live to see eternal sunrises in places I cant even imagine.
Love
Dagger
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