Editors note: This essay contains mentions of sexual violence, state enacted violence and swerfs.
My name is Leely and I live and work on the southern border of the United States. I have lived and worked in New York City, New Orleans, Tucson, and now, somehow, I’m in Texas. I’ve been doing sex work in one form or another since 2004. I love being a full body sensual massage provider because I get to breathe, meditate and create a really intentional, conscious experience for my clients. I love that I get to delve into my own sexuality and sensuality. I love the leap of faith and feeling of trust it requires. I love connecting with people in this intimate way. I also love that as a single mom I don’t have to work forty hours a week. I love that I am able to put time and energy into mutual aid and community care because doing sex work allows me to make enough money in a short amount of time.
As a sex worker I stand in solidarity with every marginalized, oppressed group of people. As sex workers we know what it is to have our bodily autonomy constantly under scrutiny, if not outright denied. For example, there is a whole narrative among SWERFS (sex work exclusionary radical feminists), who say that all sex work is rape. As if we couldn’t possibly make the conscious choice to be paid for our time and intimacy.
As sex workers we are one of many groups being dehumanized and criminalized by the United States government. So we must stand in solidarity with migrants from the southern border, LGBTQ people, indigenous people, people of color, Black folks, people with disabilities, and children. Because there are so many of us when we can come together in solidarity and demand to be seen and treated as humans, to have the right to bodily autonomy and safety, the right to simply exist and make choices for our own bodies and lives that hurt no one, the right to safe working conditions and more, we are a force to be reckoned with.
In the US we don’t have a culture of care. We have a cut-throat-capitalist-culture of competition and consumption which is strategically, if precariously placed on top of an embedded attachment to individualism and the myth of scarcity. This is epitomized in the dehumanization that has become second nature to so many people, having been indoctrinated by the media and our government, they can thoughtlessly refer to a sex worker as being of a lower category, sub-human, a deviant deserving of any and all punishment, trauma, or sexual assault that befalls them. And yes, sex workers can be sexually assaulted. Consent is an ongoing negotiation, and just like civilians, we have the right to take it back, to change our minds.
It is impossible to talk about liberation, autonomy and humanization without also talking about late stage capitalism and the dehumanization it requires in order to keep on plowing through us and our whole world.
We seem stuck but are we?
We, the deviants, the so called perverts,, the sexy outlaws, pedaling a good time for a fixed rate, we always have the backs of our fellow under dogs, of other humans who are looked down upon, discriminated against, denied rights, respect and access to services, or threatened with state violence for expressing or requesting bodily autonomy. We don’t need saving, we need solidarity, against a state that would turn its head while we die. Dare I say, solidarity just might save us all.
The border is violent, it is a crisis of colonization. In the month of December we have had thousands of migrants who are seeking asylum crossing over on some days. Now that title 42 will be held in place until February, the US can continue to expel migrants using covid as an excuse which is inhumane for the migrants, many of those arriving recently from Venezuela, to be stuck in Juarez, in danger of being trafficked by cartels or Mexican military. We have many big empty buildings downtown in our city,, and the city declared a state of emergency to get six million dollars from FEMA, just to hand it over to the police so that they could harass these unhoused people who need shelter, food, water, warm clothes and bus tickets. The city recently sent out garbage trucks to come and throw away the piles of donations out on the street in one area of downtown where many migrants had set up camp. When migrants come in contact with border patrol all of their belongings are stolen. They are left only with the clothes on their backs (which are sometimes wet from crossing the Rio Grande). For the past few weeks, we have seen a large increase in numbers of women, men and children sleeping on the streets.
Many individuals; sex workers, members of my LGBTQ community, abolitionists, local businesses and nonprofits have picked up where the state would rather turn its head as it turns over funds to a militarized police force. We, the fellow under dogs, find warm shelter for people, we rub coconut oil or aquaphor on the chapped, broken, scabbed skin of babies' cheeks from sleeping outside in twenty five degree weather. We bring them coffee and blankets, gloves, warm clothes, and hot food. We help them to get phone cards so they can be in touch with family members. We risk ourselves under xenophobic unjust laws to get them into motels when the shelters are full and the emergency shelters working in collaboration with the city will not share their locations with the general public but they will invite senators and city council members for photo ops. Our governor has meanwhile loaded migrants onto buses to the vice president’s house in DC, some without jackets or shoes or any warm clothes and had them left there in the middle of the night.
I exhausted myself this past week going out to the streets providing direct aid. I feel raw and my heart is cracked open and heavy. It is difficult beyond words to see people; parents and small children with nothing, nowhere to go, hungry and sleeping on the streets in huge numbers, being criminalized and told by so many locals to go back home, back to a country they risked their whole lives to escape and find safety from, as if that is an option. And we know so much of this is pure xenophobia and racism, all we have to do is look at the way the media, liberals and celebrities have spent so much compassion on and opened their arms to Ukrainian refugees because they have white skin and blue eyes.
Now I go back to my clients, many of whom wouldn’t agree with the mutual aid I engage in when I’m not with them. Although one of them paid for a forty five cup coffee canteen so I could bring hot drinks to folks on the street and then sent extra money to get a family with a baby sheltered.
It does make me smile inside to know that some of my clients are the very people who believe deeply in the necessity of the violence of borders and that I can channel their dollars into the hands of migrants. That I can take their money and use it to meet the needs of people they might deem ‘illegal’.
No human is illegal. Not the whore, not the migrant, not the unhoused or the criminal.
One more thing that sex work has done for me is it has helped me to appreciate the humanity of everyone, even those who I have little in common with, they are humans showing me some vulnerability and I fall in love with each one of them a tiny bit for that. Because beyond our made up laws and our colonized minds we have our humanity. And we need to access it now more than ever.
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