My Queerness, My Sex Work
What does it mean to be a mother? The socially constructed image—or rather, the image most culturally valued— is of a white woman devoid of economic concerns, barefoot and pregnant in the kitchen. A Madonna. A heterosexual. Or as Karl Marx stated nearly 200 years ago, a social class with the sole purpose of producing property heirs.
Queer people, by definition, reject heteronormativity. Implicit in our multifaceted identities as queers is the demand to love, exist, and thrive outside of what Gayle Rubin called The Charmed Circle of Sexual Hierarchies, wherein monogamous, straight, vanilla, non-commodified sex is culturally valued above all else.
However, the global turn toward right-wing nationalism and neo-fascism have produced some rather unsightly fissures in the queer community. Some of my fellow gays, as just one example, erroneously leave out the T in LGBTQIA+ acronymn, embarrassingly illuminating their own idiotic handle on the history of our movement.
Of grave personal concern, and related to aforementioned political trends, is the whitewashing of the historical relationship between queerness and sex work—by others in our community, no less— as lip service to respectability bullshit. Said faction of queers are what Maggie Nelson and other have called homonormative— they want their feminine archetypes unblemished and dichotomized. That is, a freak in the sheets and a lady in the streets. Madonna… but make her have a rainbow strap-on!
The reproduction of fascist ideology around parenthood, particularly motherhood, was never as obvious to me as when I release the first and only children’s book to feature a sex-working mother. The 2018 publication of How Mamas Love Their Babies (Feminist Press) was an exploration into many types of devalued, feminized labor. One page in the children’s book featured two lucite platforms with the caption, “Some mamas dance all night long in special shoes. It’s hard work!”
From khaki-laden bros perennially chattering about “pedophilia” to trendy, tweeded aca-dykes with the sole mission of achieving Andrea Dworkin’s porn-free society, my audacity at depicting motherhood as nuanced and complex (rather than falsely dichotomized into Madonna and Whore) seemed to earn hate from all sides.
One of the more colorful accusations I received deduced— quite poetically, I must say— that I was “de facto, a witch.” The Khaki Brigade seemed intent on dehumanizing me in these rather hysterically fantastical ways so that any violence I encountered would be understood as deserved. The Tweed Taskforce, alternatively, had a more refined and academic approach—in their estimations, I was “grooming” children for entry into the most patriarchal of all social institutions: the sex industry.
On a date with a woman after the publication of How Mamas Love Their Babies, the two of us got to talking about my (almost obsessive) work at demanding better representations of sex workers in media.
“I mean, OK,” she said. “But don’t you think that an equitable society would lend itself to the eradication of the sex industry?”
Translation: if sex work is to inequality as its absence is to equity, then better representation of whores is irrelevant. Because the goal, in this equation, anyway, is to make sex workers not exist.
My queerness, in her eyes, existed entirely outside of my sex work.
It’s really just as stupid as leaving the T out of LGBTQIA+.
My gay uncle was married to the love of his life in a hospital room ceremony officiated by Arlo Guthrie in the early 90s. Shortly thereafter, he died of HIV/AIDS. His husband and I are still in contact, more than three decades later. What so many queers forget, though, is that those hospital beds, like the one where my beloved uncle took his last breaths holding the hand of his new husband, were not just filled with the bodies of gay men. Sex workers of all genders, many of whom were active in the queer liberation movement, were dying there, too.
Indeed, prior to the participatory research paper colloquially referred to as “The Prostitute Study,” community-based research projects— on HIV/AIDS specifically and epidemics more generally— were nary a thing. You can read the paper here: https://nap.nationalacademies.org/read/1534/chapter/6
Sex work and queerness have always been entangled, both because the material reality for many queer folks is that straight work is historically difficult to secure and because both identities inherently disrupt nationalistic, heterocentric, and fascist conceptions of parent/motherhood.
It’s time for my tweed-loving, T-hating siblings to get their heads out of their asses and learn the history of our movement. Unequivocally, empirically, and in all other ways, our history is trans, it is sex work, and it is mothers and fairy godmothers and sugar mamas and backstage mamas and house moms.
What our history certainly isn’t, however, is a proverbial Madonna.