AUDACIA RAY
DECEMBER 17, 2004
About a dozen people gathered in Washington Square Park in New York City. Someone handed out cheap red and white candles that had been on sale for Christmas. We held the candlesticks in our gloved hands. Our bodies, wrapped tightly in our winter coats, formed a half circle in the near-solstice darkness of the evening. I don’t remember who spoke or what they said, but I do remember the piece of the vigil that would become standard at every December 17 event I would attend over the following decade: the reading of the names. Someone had done the painful work of collecting names from news reports about murdered sex workers, and we stood in the cold and listened to them read out loud. Name, age at death, location. Repeat. Many were name unknown, age unknown, and a location where the body was found. It was several minutes before they had all been read. After the reading of the names, the group dispersed pretty quickly. It was too cold to spend much time comforting each other or sharing thoughts. I was glad it was over quickly. I left in a bad mood, feeling like I’d wasted my time shivering in a cold park, thinking about the depressing and personally irrelevant topic of violence.
I attended my first International Day to End Violence Against Sex Workers event—the second ever annual event—out of a sense of obligation. I didn’t want to go. It seemed like a serious bummer that didn’t have anything to do with me or my experience. I had been a sex worker less than six months, and I had found it to be empowering. Nothing terrible had happened to me, and I didn’t think anything terrible had happened to the handful of other sex workers I knew. I had made the leap from being slutty via Craigslist Casual Encounters to selling sex a few clicks over on the site’s Erotic Services section, and I was obsessively documenting both in daily posts on my blog. I lived for the adventure of it all; I felt liberated and in control of my body and my income. My reductive understanding of empowerment would become deeply complicated in coming years.
As a twenty-four-year-old white, queer, cisgender woman living in Brooklyn and working toward my MA at Columbia University, I understood that sex work was socially and politically stigmatized. I had privilege to spare, so challenging the taboos around sex work—even just the idea of choosing sex work when I had other options—was exciting to me. Through the sex blog I started writing the summer before I began doing full-service sex work and porn, I crafted a version of my experiences that was analytical, but also titillating. I started the blog under a pseudonym and initially didn’t post pictures, but quickly started to take the risk of increasing exposure and reducing privacy, first by doing porn and cross-posting some images to my blog as well as eventually by coming out to my family as a sex worker and legally changing my name to the name I chose for porn, activism, and sex blogging. The more I shared online, the more I was rewarded with writing gigs, speaking engagements, media hits, and awards. People wanted to know what I thought about subjects ranging from feminist porn to the best sex toys. My blog brought me in touch not just with an audience of curious onlookers, but also with other sex workers, and being an out and proud hooker made my opinions count.
As I built my social capital on a foundation of white privilege, youth, and conventional attractiveness, my star rose in sex blogging, porn, and sex worker activist circles. I connected with a group of women who were working to establish a magazine called $pread, making culture by, for, and about sex workers. Though we initially only talked about the magazine and not our personal experiences, the founding crew of $preadsters were all around my age, white, and child-free. I assumed that our experiences were very similar, though I would later learn otherwise.
They say sex work is dangerous, but I didn’t see it. My clients were mostly kind, mostly not pushy, upper-middle-class, overwhelmingly white New Yorkers who liked the idea that I was a student and worked independently. I maintained this perspective through $pread’s collaboration with the more established sex workers’ rights group Prostitutes of New York (PONY) to organize the 2004 vigil for December 17. The event had been conceived of in 2003 as a day of vigil after the conviction of a serial killer, Gary Ridgway, who confessed to killing at least seventy-one women in the Green River area between Seattle and Tacoma. In his presentencing statement, he declared that he chose sex workers because no one would miss them when they disappeared.
The vigil was important to the $preadsters, but I didn’t think these murders had anything to do with me. The women who had been murdered were mostly street-based workers, many maintained drug habits and supported families. Some folks were trans. Their lives looked nothing like mine. I understood violence as something extreme—unwanted and damaging physical pain that could be disfiguring or deadly. It didn’t seem like a possibility that I would experience anything like that in my daytime encounters with married businessmen. I didn’t think that any of the sex workers I’d been getting to know had already or would ever experience the threat of violence either.
For years, I would loudly proclaim that I had never experienced violence as a sex worker, even after that stopped being true. I was defensive about this claim. I wanted to protect my much-maligned profession and prove that it wasn’t as bad as the press it got. Much later, I came to understand that the narrow definition of violence that I had at this moment was insufficient, that violence is not just physical but actually includes the use of power to control, manipulate, or harm. It is so common that to name and try to heal from every act would be overwhelming. And furthermore, violence is not just a thing that happens between two people; it can be enacted by institutions like the police and hospitals. It is not simply active harm, but blocking access to health and economic security. But I didn’t understand any of that yet. All I knew is that on this appointed day, I would think about murder and feel bummed out. After my first December 17, I had planned to go out and see friends, but instead I went home. The party mood I had planned to be in was out of reach. My night was over.
TRUST
After a year of sex work, I was learning to balance my relationships, my personal sex life, and the demands of clients and photographers. After starting out as a full-service sex worker, I made the choice to limit myself to modeling and massage sessions, establishing boundaries that I lacked during my first few months. I was living up to the sex-positive, ethical-slut ideals I was projecting into the world, surrounding myself with people who supported my choices as a sex worker. I started to expand my modeling repertoire and build friendships with a few photographers I liked. These relationships were collaborative and creative—sometimes we both got paid to produce something commercial, sometimes we’d just work on a weird idea we had.
One of these photographers had also made photos with a bunch of women I admired, and I wanted to show up in his portfolio alongside them. After we had shot some commercial stuff in studios together, he approached me with an idea for a personal project that would involve nudity. Most of the shoots I had been doing, both for fun and money, involved me getting naked. That piece of it felt normal to me; I liked being naked and it made me feel free. There wasn’t any money in it for either of us: we’d share copyright and I’d get prints and digital files to keep. Instead of spending money renting studio space for the day, he suggested we meet and shoot at his apartment.
I arrived at his apartment building in Greenwich Village on a hot, late spring day, and walked up a few twisty flights of stairs to his apartment, getting sweaty under my loose clothing. The photographer was waiting on the landing outside his apartment when I made it up the stairs, and we hugged hello, his dark hair brushing my jawline when he got close. We drank tall glasses of water and sat on the floor in the middle of the biggest room in his railroad apartment, where he’d pushed most of the furniture into a corner to make space for his light kit setup. He pulled out a portfolio book and showed me images from the nude portrait series in which I was about to participate.
The portfolio featured pictures of the women I admired as I’d never seen them, nude and with minimal makeup. I was used to seeing them as glittering statues of womanhood, dressed in latex or elaborate feathered costumes, rhinestones dramatically adorning their cheekbones. But these photos were so different, intimate, close, a little raw and vulnerable. I wanted to know the women in this way, felt almost jealous that he had gotten this access to them, and honored that I got to see these images of them. The pictures weren’t posted online, while many other pictures he’d taken of the same models were. He laughed as he showed me, saying, “Oh, they’d kill me if they knew I was showing anyone these pictures.” In a few photos his hand reached into the frame, sometimes just at the edge, sometimes making contact with the model’s skin.
I immediately wanted to be part of the project. A few of the models were dommes who I’d seen at parties and shoots. One was a model who I was starting to cultivate a friendship with, but felt a bit shy around. He was clearly proud of these images. I wanted him to be proud of the images we’d make together, too. His comment about the models not wanting other people to see the images didn’t really register with me. These women seemed to trust him. They all continued to work with him and recommend him to others.
I unceremoniously stripped off my clothes as we gossiped about mutual acquaintances. I felt comfortable, relaxed. He invited me to lie down on my stomach on his bed. I felt the mattress sag as he knelt behind me, and the camera clicked away. His leg brushed against the outside of my thigh, and then I heard the distinct jingling of his belt buckle coming undone. I froze, confused. We were friends. He had always been easy to work with. I trusted him. We’d previously shot glam fetish photos, including a shoot with my girlfriend at the time, who was also a sex worker. After that shoot, the three of us had a meal together and my girlfriend teasingly said I should date him since we had a similar nerdy affect.
His voice switched into a hoarse whisper as he moved closer. Although I had been very up close and personal with photographers before, I realized that none of them had ever touched me; this was new territory. I had always been flippant about the stilted way many photographers gave me privacy to change clothes or take my clothes off, the way they tiptoed around boundaries they thought I should have. I usually dispensed with their nervous behavior by joking about how I was just going to be showing them my stuff in a few minutes anyway. This man whispered, “I like to share vulnerability with my models; I think the pictures are better that way, don’t you agree?” The pictures he’d shown earlier me were intense, some of his best work. I kept thinking of his vast portfolio and the tacit approval of those other models. But I was uncomfortable. “Relax, relax, relax,” he repeated over and over, nearly chanting, as he got closer and started to move his hand up my leg, all the while snapping photos.
I rolled over, not because I wanted to expose myself to him, but because I wanted to see what he was doing. His pants were open. He continued shooting, angling the camera, a digital one with some heft and a long lens, down at me as I moved. My vision felt fuzzy, my limbs heavy. He lay down next to me and pressed his now-hard dick against my leg. He set the camera beside us and rolled on top of me. I clamped my thighs together.
“Come on, relax. It’s just me,” he said, almost whining, seemingly offended that I had tensed up and gone cold. I said nothing, I could not respond. “I thought we had some chemistry. Sorry if I misread,” he coaxed, faux-humbling himself, as he continued to try to press himself into me. He had his dick in his hand and was trying to push it inside me, even as he apologized. I kept my thighs clamped and rolled my hips so we were next to each other on the bed, and then I reached for his dick and quickly got him off with my hand. I felt nothing, thought nothing. Something in me took over and piloted my body to this action, which in the moment I understood as cooperation, an acknowledgment and assent to his need. Years later, in therapy, I would come to understand my decision as a protective act of harm reduction. I jerked him off to mitigate the violence, to put an end to this assault in a way that he would read as a concession, through an orgasm that I bet correctly would neutralize him.
He wordlessly got up, came back with a damp washcloth, and wiped my thigh clean. I looked everywhere in the apartment except his face. We made some small talk but didn’t directly mention what had just happened. The space to address it closed up quickly.
What had happened made me uncomfortable, but I didn’t give it a name. I didn’t tell anyone about it. When I left and took the subway home, my body felt strange—subdued, cold despite the heat of the day. Although I often blogged about my experiences at photo shoots and in my sex life, I didn’t blog about this day. I figured maybe I would post about it once I received the pictures. I liked to show my readers what went into doing a photo shoot: being naked in a cold room, arching my back until it ached.
The photographer never shared the images with me. Months went by; I didn’t follow up with him, and he didn’t invite me back.
I had agreed to go to a sex party later that night with a casual partner, who picked me up at my apartment and drove us into Manhattan. The wind from the open car window traveled over my body as we drove across the Brooklyn Bridge. All night, there was something in me that felt different, colder, less responsive to touch and the enthusiasm of the other guests at the party. I squashed it down. I needed this party to ground me, make me feel present in my body, desired and desiring, acting on my desire. I dove into a pile of women I knew and a few men I didn’t, kissing and groping, where some hands were gentle and others were more persistent. I drank a lot. In the early hours of the next morning I fell into bed, feeling like the fun, hot experiences I’d had at the party could not erase the grip the photographer had on my skin earlier in the afternoon.
TORN
A few weeks later, a casual sex partner accidentally tore my labia. I had been encouraging him to fuck me vigorously with his hand, when he slipped and a too-long fingernail pierced my outer labia. There was so much blood that it was hard to see what exactly had happened or where the wound was located. He looked panicked, then started laughing and said, “It’s a good thing I’ve seen so many horror movies!” He grabbed a roll of paper towels from his kitchen. I wasn’t really in pain, just stunned by the flow of bright red. More than the injury, I felt disoriented by the quick turn from feeling good and wanting more to the surprise of injury. I shrunk into myself. I wadded up paper towels to apply pressure to my entire vulva, soaked through the first batch and grabbed a second. By the third bundle of towels the bleeding had slowed considerably. I held them in place while I waddled to the bathroom to rinse off and see if I could find the site of the wound. My date stood awkwardly to the side, offering no help. After I rinsed the blood off, I didn’t have the courage to look at the wound. When I walked back into the bedroom, he was dressed. He said, “Well, I guess that means our date is over.” We stood for an awkward moment until I realized that he was done with me, didn’t want me to stay, and wasn’t going to offer any additional support.
I wouldn’t even consider going to the hospital. If this man to whom I’d trusted my body wouldn’t come near me, I could not imagine walking into the emergency room alone and showing this wound to a bevy of nurses and doctors. I wadded up a fresh batch of paper towels and carefully put my underwear and then my pants back on, and walked slowly through the busy evening streets of Manhattan to the subway. I stared into space as I rode home.
When I got back to my apartment, I called a sex educator friend with whom I had shared many group sex adventures. She was supportive, unflappable, and solutions-oriented. She came right over to my apartment, let herself in, and found me curled up in bed. “Come on, let’s get you cleaned up,” she said, supporting me as I walked slowly to the bathroom and undressed. She got the shower hot enough for me and sat on the toilet while I stood under its stream. As I pressed my back against the shower wall and slid down into a sitting position in the bathtub, it was clear to her that I was in shock, even if I remained oblivious. She turned off the shower and climbed into the tub with me.
Always ready to show people their vulvas under better circumstances, my friend brought a large hand mirror with her. She asked, very gently, if I could show her where I was hurt. I spread my legs for her and she gently opened the folds of my labia to see an angry, crescent-shaped wound on my right inner labia. “Do you want to see it?” she asked, and I nodded my consent. She handed me the mirror and kept a hand reassuringly on my leg. What I saw was a tiny hole in my labia. Confirming its actual size made me feel better—I had been imagining a disfiguring wound—but I became dizzy with the recognition that my body had been changed by what happened earlier. We agreed that it didn’t look like it needed stitches, but that I would make an appointment with my doctor first thing in the morning to get it checked out. We slept curled together, with her as my big spoon.
When I saw my doctor the next day she confirmed that I didn’t need stitches, but she also admonished me for not going to the emergency room. The doctor spoke to me with a focus on the wound to my flesh, not acknowledging the wound to my psyche. The sex was consensual, and yet I felt violated and going to the hospital would have deepened that feeling. I didn’t feel like the violation was intentional, but an abstract, passive voice told me that a bad thing had happened, an injury had been incurred. This wound was, in a sense, deepened by the emotional violence my friend had done to me by his joking and dismissiveness: “I guess that means our date is over.” Both my injured body and my emotional reaction were burdens to him, inconveniences.
After seeing my doctor, I tucked a panty liner into my underwear and went to see my afternoon massage client. My friend encouraged me to cancel, but I did not want to acknowledge that something heavy and difficult had happened; I wanted my life to be normal and good.
That night, I went home and blogged about the incident. I started the post like I started many of my writings about my sex life, describing the action in a mix of documentary and erotica styles, leading up to the abrupt moment of the injury and its aftermath. I wanted my readers to be shocked by this moment of injury, as I had been. I ended the piece with, “It will get better—I know I’ll heal and my cunt won’t be broken forever, but I just feel awful today: shaken, sore, and achy. Worse than the physical pain, I feel like the happiness and security of my cunt is a thousand miles away, floating on a plane of dull, achy, and marred flesh.”
I had not allowed myself to feel much about the assault I’d experienced weeks prior, and would not call it by that word for years; but I allowed myself to fully feel betrayal and rage about the accident. My friend had not hurt me on purpose, while the photographer clearly had every intent to violate me. After both incidents, I rushed into trying to recalibrate and establish normalcy. I did not want to be changed by them. The accident brought concrete, physical injury, so I was less able to move past it unchanged. And I had more language for what had happened—it was an accident, random and unfortunate, even if it did feel like violence. I had a physical wound: a tender part of me to take care of and heal. After the incident with the photographer, I didn’t know what I was left with, what part of me to attend to, so I buried my shame and confusion. And since I had participated by getting him off, I didn’t think I could claim it as violence. I was committed to maintaining the narrative that the sex industry was not as terrible or dangerous as everyone said.
Channeling my anger through my blog post about the injury and inviting my readers into these feelings with me felt cathartic. My date was a part of my sex blogging social universe, and many of my readers and blogging peers were also people who went to the same sex parties, people with whom I had had sex, as had he. He apologized profusely in the comments, but I can’t remember if he reached out to me privately. “I broke our Dacia!” he wrote, “I’m so sorry.” I felt irritated that he, or the community, was staking a possessive claim to me with that “our.” In this moment, I belonged to no one.
In a follow-up post after I wrote about the details of the night and the injury, I hung onto my anger. I was angry that the rest of my friends could go off to a sex party soon after my injury when my enjoyment had come to a screeching halt.
I would continue to say publicly that I had never experienced violence.
TAUGHT
There was no one moment of epiphany in which I began to understand the broad umbrella of what violence is: how it manifests in my life and the lives of sex workers who are and are not like me. It was cumulative: it took time to realize I had refused to look deeply at hard things, and at times perpetuated violence myself. I definitely owe that learning process to Black and Brown sex workers—especially trans women of color—as well as women in the international sex workers’ rights movement and collaborators who showed me what I was initially unwilling to see.
Violence can be great or small acts, and many acts in between. It can be a violent man posing as a client, hitting and choking and threatening workers. It can be deceptive managers who traffic would-be workers into situations they would never agree to on their own. It can be police coercing massage workers into trading sex in exchange for their freedom from arrest and detention. It manifests as whorephobia from judgmental doctors, and the information sex workers withhold from health-care workers for fear of stigma. Violence exists in the structural barriers that prevent workers who have prostitution arrests on their records from moving forward with their lives.
Violence exists in the ways our brains fold in on themselves, convincing us that what happened isn’t that bad, that it is easier to push forward without naming the thing that happened as violence. It exists in the ways sex workers create and uphold a hierarchy within the larger industry and have disdain for people that do kinds of work they’d never do (or might do only if the rent was past due). Violence exists in the ways that white sex workers uphold white supremacy both in workplaces and in activist spaces. Violence exists in the maintenance of “empowerment” and “choice” narratives that exclude sex workers who have ambivalent or negative feelings about their work.
DECEMBER 17, 2018
Over more than a decade, the annual December 17 events have marked the ways my reckoning with violence has changed. One year, a fellow activist spilled red paint over white sheets in the shape of bodies on the steps outside Judson Memorial Church. I started emceeing the event at some point, usually breaking down in tears in front of the crowd. We moved from outside the church and into the warmer sanctuary space, where ministers to queer youth welcomed us. One year, the event immediately followed the discovery of the bodies of four sex workers on a beach in Long Island. Their deaths were declared the doing of an active serial killer who, as of this writing, remains at large. One year, I got called out for making December 17 a space for white feelings while the reality is that Black and Brown sex workers, especially trans women, are often the most vulnerable to state and interpersonal violence. That year, I began to understand that some of my activism had been experienced as violence and erasure by Black and Brown sex workers. It was necessary for me to stop emceeing and cede the space to QTBIPOC, to play a support role and keep my mouth shut. And one year, I experienced violence in my own relationship and realized that holding space for survivors and mourners while your own survival is at stake is not possible.
In 2018, after four years of not attending a December 17 event, I felt like I needed it again. But instead of performing feelings in public, I wanted to be with friends and acknowledge the hard truths of the day while also making a space that might feel like healing. I had come to understand that I could not be in service to other people’s healing while my own trauma was untended.
I invited a small crew of friends and comrades to my Brooklyn apartment. We surrounded ourselves with framed photos of sex workers we had known or had advocated for, who had died by murder, suicide, overdose, or lack of access to health care. We lit candles. We talked about the movement and about our lives over platefuls of puttanesca, the pasta sauce reputed to have been created by Italian sex workers who needed to prepare quick meals between clients. Someone performed a sound bath and I listened to my friends breathing deeply.
The feelings of empowerment and invincibility that I had those first months as a sex worker will never return. Those feelings were rooted in denial, inexperience, and a lack of understanding of my relative privilege. Reckoning with violence, including both naming it and understanding how it impacts other sex workers, particularly trans women of color, has complicated everything. Violence is complex and wiggly. And if we allow our definitions to be large enough, we can acknowledge the painful reality that it has impacted us all.
My early understanding of how violence impacted sex workers was that it happened to and among strangers: I believed that lonewolf, scary clients did violence, and the sex workers I knew—who looked whole and fine to me—had not experienced it. I believed that there was a set of tips I could follow that would protect me. When violence happened to me, with men I knew, I didn’t recognize it, couldn’t name it. Over the following months and years, I began to understand that it wasn’t that I didn’t know this was violence—it felt bad, sent me spinning, I needed to recover—but that if this was violence, then violence was so common that it was unremarkable to everyone but the survivor. I had expected something else from violence. I didn’t know it could be so intimate, that I would have to struggle to acknowledge that it was real, that two acts that cumulatively took place over less than an hour would shape my experience of my body and my truth for years to come, long after that crescent-shaped scar had faded.