When it comes to strategic planning around politics, outreach, and activism, reader Miss C brought up a good point in a comment on a previous post.

I've been thinking a lot about things people have done that have personally helped me in my activism. Maybe an interesting thread if it hasn't already been done here- who's been an effective ally for you, and what have they done? Sometimes it's the little things - whenever my primary partner's buddies get on him about not "controlling his woman" ie my whoring about, he always says "she's great at what she does, she enjoys it, and I'm proud of her."

It's an excellent topic to think about.

As sex workers (or members of other marginalized groups), what have people done to be a good ally to you? It could be something overtly political, like working together with another human rights organization towards a shared goal, or as Miss C notes, having a partner or friend stick up for you.

Here's an example from my life: after having one (now former) friend/lover callously drop out of co-presenting with me at the Desiree Alliance conference last summer (because he suddenly decided that being associated with whores might ruin his career), another friend gladly jumped in.  I grant big props to sexy geek / computer security rockstar Alex Sotirov for taking the time to speak as a part of our panel, "Safety for Sex Workers Through Personal Privacy: Digital and Real-World Techniques For Safeguarding Your Identity and Your Life."  It was genuinely heartening to see someone with a non- sex industry job come to the conference, and response on Twitter to his mention of presenting at a sex worker event (from other computer professionals) was amused/positive - not career-ruining.

A related question to the above: What have political causes done to reach out to you and get you interested in their issues?  If you're involved in activism, who or what lit a fire under your ass to try and change the world?

The reason I ask, of course, being that I'd love to employ those same smart and effective outreach techniques to get people interested in the sex workers rights movement.

It's common for grassroots activists to have issues with creating good branding and messaging, and this topic is something I've been thinking about a lot this year with regards to the sex workers rights movement and what I want to do with my upcoming project.  I've been trying to step back from things and look at them with a fresh pair of eyes.  What concepts are we most getting across to the public?  What are we directly telling them, and what are our actions more subtly telling them?  (This is sort of an extension of the outreach post I wrote earlier this month.)

Graphics-wise, we rally around the image of a red umbrella.  I have no idea how people came to pick this as our logo.  Was it because sex work is so sad that there's a flood of tears, and the umbrella is protecting us from the tear storm?  That's the best idea I can think of.  If I don't get it, I'm guessing that the public doesn't get it either.  It's not as vague a graphic/shape as, say, a red ribbon for HIV awareness, but it's also not as obvious as the Sierra Club's logo of a tree, or March of Dimes' logo of a figure cradling an infant.  "We feel safe inside red umbrellas!  We demand more free red umbrellas from the government!  Stop beating us with red umbrellas!" I have no idea what we're trying to express.

Going deeper than my quibbles with confusing clip art, I think it's a mistake that the sex workers rights movement in the US is pretty much perma-linked with the radical sexuality/BDSM scene.  I am a sex-positive pervert, but that doesn't mean that I think we ought to be tacitly pushing the message that sex workers rights is a niche concern only for sexual deviants.  I've touched on this before, but wanted to stress it again.

Closely linking the sex workers rights and sex-positivity/kink worlds feels like a clique-y move, the banding together of big city sexual rebels to thumb their noses at the vanilla mainstream, not a political strategy that wins mass converts and legislative gains.  I've said it many times: I don't want sex workers rights to be a cause only supportable by perverts.  No other labor or human rights campaign would have a construct like this.  "If you're not into sewing, then there's no room for you to express concern about sweatshops and working conditions in textile factories."  Or, imagine if the gay rights movement had sodomy as its key piece of branding and activism, conveying a message that if you're not into ass-fucking, you're not hip enough to support equal rights for queer people.

And what about all the sex workers for whom the job is just a job?  Must they be subject to grudgingly attending yet another erotic dance party/dildo decorating contest/porn screening fundraiser?  I don't want those sex workers to feel alienated from their own movement just because they're not in the mood to attend a sexually-themed event as a form of recreation.  Sexuality is a big part of my life, but I also have the self-awareness to realize that it's not that way for everyone, and not all sex workers identify as renegade sluts.  (Most don't, I'm guessing.)

It's hard to envision what a sex workers rights fundraiser/event would look like if it didn't involve some combination of topless women, sexually explicit art, loud music, sex toys, and cocktails.  Our message seems to be, "Support sex workers rights, because we're sexy people who throw a good party!"  I don't mean to sound like an anti-party wet blanket, but it would be great to see sex worker events that reach out to public through a medium other than sexy outfits, booze, and dancing.  What about a nice, wholesome bake sale - in the middle of the day?  Sex workers have some amazing cooks in our ranks, so how about we show off a talent other than entertaining people with our sexiness?  What about a "sex workers clean up a city park" day?  Aren't we trying to show that we're a normal and productive part of our communities?  By and large, public events that American sex workers organize are about mostly sexy/arty/party things, then some vigils for dead hookers sprinkled in.  What message does that send?  "We're creative sluts who party, then we get killed, and it's sad?"

Even with more multilayered events like New York's Red Umbrella Diaries, the dynamic of almost all of our happenings is that sex workers are for entertaining the public.  Whether we're titillating the public by working as strippers or telling stories about working as strippers, it's still reinforcing the one-dimensional role of sex workers that our value hinges on our ability to amuse the normals via sexually-themed entertainments.  (This is why I have the world's most boring sex worker blog.  It's pretty much entirely devoid of stories about customers, even though I know that's what brings in the readers.)

I'd like to see the US sex workers rights movement brand itself more as a labor rights movement, a human rights movement, a free speech movement, a privacy movement, an immigration reform movement, and less of a "for badass sexual outlaws only" party bus.  Sexual freedom and sex positivity definitely belong in that mix, but we're holding ourselves back by putting radical sexuality at the forefront with so much of what we do and who we bother reaching out to.  Sex work is a complicated topic spanning all sorts of working conditions, classes, genders, and motivations.  We're selling ourselves short to limit its appeal so greatly.

How do you want to see sex workers portray our cause to the public?  What notes do you think we're failing to hit?  What are similar causes doing it better?

(As with everything I've said this year that calls for more activism and more participation from more types of people, I know I'm going to get comments/tweets/emails bitching at me for daring to criticize existing activism.  I'm not saying "we can never have a party again," or "readings and storytelling are evil and must be banned."  I want to create balance by doing and calling for more of the things that I consider useful, not by censoring or preventing anyone from doing their projects.  Spare me the "Why are you trying to stop ____ from doing ____?" commentary.)

The primary thing I'll be doing with my upcoming project SWAAY (Sex Workers, Activists, Allies, and You) is to create accessible public outreach materials, online and offline.  And by "public outreach," I mean actual public outreach, not just speaking at sex blogger conferences or getting supportive re-tweets from BDSM podcasters.  (Which are both good things, but it's not the public outreach sex workers need to do to actually change laws and influence society in a big way.)

I admired how atheist Christopher Hitchens was running his book and speaking tours during these last few years.  In Hitchens' book tour, rather than do the expected and just hit New York, LA, San Francisco, and other bastions of atheism where he'd draw big crowds of people who already agree with him, he also went to the Bible belt of America and challenged religious leaders to public debates.  He didn't just want to read passages to nodding fans, he wanted to stir things up and confront religion on its home court.  He toured places like Alabama and Mississippi.  That's the sort of thing that inspires me, and I'm a champion of a cause even less popular than atheism.

I really want to see the sex workers rights movement in America stop being a social justice movement that pretty much only interests kinksters, feminist academics, sex bloggers, pagans/tantra hippies, and the radical sexuality community.  I'm an autiauthoritarian pervert who's not "normal" in so many ways, but I'm tired of the tacit message that sex workers rights is an issue that you need to be a kinky leftist to care about.  I want to see the sex rights rights movement to stop being so perma-linked with the sex-positive scene, feminism, and -gasp- even the left.  I want to help the other 99% of Americans notice our issues.  Or, to put it another way: I want to see the sorts of people who've never been to a sex party (nor have any interest in ever doing so) get interested in our issues.

So, my question for you now is: what sorts of public outreach have sex workers rights activists tried, especially offline?  I'd guess that the most successful American sex worker outreach campaign was the one around Prop K in San Francisco in 2008, but I could be wrong.  Who else has tried educating the general public?  How?  Where?  Why?  Please post stories and links (and handouts/posters?) in the comment area.  (Keep in mind that I mean public outreach, not just building bridges with other activists, marginalized communities, or kinky groups.  I mean reaching out to totally regular people.)

With all the talk last month about Sucker Punch, and negative and offensive portrayals of sex workers in general, I wanted to write an ode to a different action movie from 15 years ago.  I realize I've been doing less "weighty" blogging in the last couple of months, but this post isn't as shallow as it might sound.  How sex workers are represented in both the press and popular fiction is a subject that interests me, as these are the representations that influence the public - for better or worse.

Action and horror movies do tend to have a greater representation of sex workers as non-victim characters, but none of them have really resonated with me.  For example: I remember how excited I was when I read that George Romero's Land of the Dead would have a zombie-killing hooker as a main character.  But, of course, it is revealed that she was only a sex worker because the dictator of her post-apocalyptic society forced her to take that job, and she actually wanted to be in the militia protecting the city.  Thus, the character is redeemed to the audience for her whore-y sins, since they were not her choice.

I recently tweeted about how I'm not aware of a mainstream movie with a more positive and non-sensationalistic portral of a sex worker as the 1996 action hit Independence Day, and I wanted to expand on that.  Its director, Rolland Emmerich, is known for over-the-top absurdist visual spectacles of destruction with overbearing musical scores, such as in The Day After Tomorrow or 2012.  Yet, in Independence Day, he created the most normal sex worker character I've ever seen in a Hollywood film: Jasmine, played by Vivica A Fox.

Jasmine is a stripper who lives with her boyfriend Steve, a pilot in the US Marines who dreams of working for NASA.  She has a young son, and they live in a house in the suburbs of Los Angeles.  Her job as a stripper is treated as pretty much like any other job, and there's no dramatic scene where she's gang-raped and then made fun of, and her story is not one of being rescued from her work by a man.  She expresses zero desire to "escape" the sex industry, nor does her partner ever ask that of her.

Jasmine's job doesn't even really come into the plot, aside from a couple of of key moments: Steve's friend making a disparaging comment about the respectability of marrying a stripper, and Jasmine telling the First Lady (whose life she tries to save) that she's an exotic dancer, not a ballet dancer.  (These scenes can be found at 4:29 and 11:05, respectively, in my clip video posted below.)  The fact that this is not a "sex worker movie" makes it all the more cheer-worthy to me.  It's an action movie with a heroic character who just happens to also be a stripper.  It's very normalizing, despite being set in a movie about an alien invasion, filled to the brim with explosions and aerial fight sequences.  Independence Day was one of the highest-grossing films of all time when it came out, so it's not some art house flick with progressive themes that no one would ever see.

I went through and clipped all the Jasmine scenes from the movie, boiling it down to an 18-minute look at her and her relationship with Steve, the main hero of the film, played by Will Smith.  (I think it's fair to say that this is the primary romantic relationship of the movie.  The audience is meant to be rooting for them.)

Click the screenshot or click here to view or download my re-edit in Quicktime (.mov) format, which is 25 mb.  (I recommend watching the entirety of Independence Day on a regular basis anyhow.)

What this movie tells the audience about Jasmine and her life:

* Sex workers can be loving parents.
* Sex workers can live in normal houses in normal neighborhoods.
* Sex workers can have loving relationships with a partner who is not a pimp, sleazebag/loser, or a customer trying to rescue them.  (I think this one is especially awesome and important to note.)
* Sex workers' partners can catch flak about their jobs.  There is stigma to loving a sex worker, but if you're a good person, you won't let that stop you.
* Sex workers can care about each other.
* Sex workers can outrun explosions.
* Sex workers can be tough survivors.
* Sex workers can be capable leaders who take initiative.
* Sex workers can be discreet when dealing with famous people.
* Sex workers can be compassionate.
* Sex workers can be unashamed of their jobs and and tell people what they do for a living without making apologies.
* Sex workers can be on the hero team, rather than being caricatures, victims, and villains.

The mass outing of porn performers has been a big issue lately, and I wanted to post about the subject even while the story is unfolding.  (I usually like to wait a bit and see how things turn out, rather than being a blogger who "keeps up" with the day's hot topic.)  I want this discussion to be dominated by actual sex workers, not just whoever the first sex bloggers are to insert themselves into the situation for traffic.  (Disclosure: having never worked in mainstream hardcore porn, I have never been tested at Adult Industry Medical, and I am not a part of the group who have been exposed by the hacking/publishing of their database.)

It seems like this initial leak is just from AIM's database, but there's also been talk about the privacy of performer's information in 2257 databases, which the anonymous angry leaker has said they already possess and plan on publishing soon.  (2257 laws, in a nutshell, are federal laws in the United States that deal with the requirements for proving the age and identity of all performers in adult content.)

Last summer, one of the issues I brought up during my part of the privacy panel at the Desiree Alliance conference was that sex workers needed to be aware of how 2257 laws affect them.  If you work in porn (or "fetish erotica" or "art nudes" or whatever other pretentious terms some people use), you're likely subject to signing a model release and providing the photographer with two forms of ID to prove your age.  (You may also be subject to this if you're an escort/fetish worker who advertises on certain web directories, even if you're not even using "pornographic" images of yourself.)  I made a point of talking about what 2257 means for sex workers because I don't think that most folk think as much about this as they should.  You are handing over your private data to someone who might be reselling and licensing that data to anyone who wants it.

Personally, I shoot only exclusive content, which means I am not reselling a performer's information to dozens or hundreds of other people.  But, if you're just shooting for generic, non-exclusive porn photographers, you need to know that that photographer may be planning to sell your shoot to 100 people, and all 100 of those people will be getting a copy of your identifying information.  This isn't anything "underhanded," it's part of how the business works and stays in compliant with federal laws.  Anyone who is publishing your shoot wants a copy of the proof that you're over 18, and you can understand why.  Unlike a misdemeanor solicitation charge that other sex workers risk, pornographers who break laws are breaking federal laws, and risk going to prison if they fail to comply with all parts of 2257.  (So much for porn being "sex work lite" or "the legal option", eh?)

If you're a stalker who has your eye on a certain performer, you could find out any names they use (especially if they are an actual "name" in porn), and shop around until you find a content re-seller who will sell you a video shoot or photo set of them, complete with their model release and IDs.  I have no idea how well these big content malls actually police who they sell to, but I'd guess they don't do much to prevent stalkers from buying performer's private information.  Someone could experiment with this on their own, and try an undercover investigation of the number of businesses found in Google under "adult content provider," and see if they'll sell to any random nobody without even a functional porn site.  For example, here are two FAQ items on one content reseller that I'm guessing the performers didn't think about when they handed over their IDs:

Do you actually supply all the 2257 documentation?
We sure do. Together with the invoice, you get copies of IDs and model data files. Make a free purchase in the Bonuses section (yes, it’s 100% free) to see how these documents look.

Is this content on sale only here?
No. Normally, content providers put their content on sale on multiple sites. As a rule, the prices are the same from site to site.

I think that perfectly sums up how absurdly available one's images and personal information can become when they work for some pornographers.  Plus, this reseller seems to offer a free sample purchase, so you, too, can obtain the private information of a porn performer just to get a feel for their purchasing system!

During my talk at the aforementioned Desiree Alliance con, here's what I suggested to sex workers as steps they can take to try and protect their privacy while working in porn:

* As a performer, you are required to provide IDs and information in a model release for 2257 records.  This part you can't get around.

* Generic pornographers shoot content to license and resell to anyone who will buy it.  This means that any random person could potentially buy your identity for as little as a few dollars.  Your identity is for sale when you perform in non-exclusive content.

* The big issue: Your best defense against having your identity resold is to work with reputable, worker-friendly porn companies that shoot exclusive content.

* Being selective about who you work for will mean you're losing out on ways of earning income, but consider what it is that you're selling: your name, your address, and possibly your social security number.

*Use a passport as your primary form of ID - it doesn't list your home address.  Use a secondary supporting document that doesn't list an address, like a birth certificate.

* Finally: I, as a pornographer, have no way of knowing if your model release lists your real home address, or your mail drop in another state.

So, where do we go from here?  How can both sex workers and pornographers try to prevent future identity breaches, without the magical, probably-never-happening solution of "change the laws to favor privacy rights"?

Curious if you've been affected by the leaks thus far?  Check out this database created by an ally, and view the README file first.