Thank you so much to all of the supporters of SWAAY's sex work billboard!  We did it!

Extra special thanks to @xiancallgirl for being the largest donor, and to Dr Brooke Magnanti/@belledejour_uk for plugging the fundraiser so many times on Twitter and her blog.  It was also covered by The Gloss, Feministe, and countless other sex bloggers and sexuality tweeters.  Supporters of the billboard collectively raised an impressive $7572, which exceeded the goal of $7300.  (Epic Step says they use overages beyond the target amount to get a placement in a higher traffic area.)

Thanks to all of you, sex work issues will be breaking further out of the pink bubble.  (LAist.com has already created some buzz about the billboard, and I was contacted by a Los Angeles TV station this afternoon.)  This is exactly what I started SWAAY to: bring the cause to mainstream audiences and help the sex workers' rights movement grow beyond our current tiny (but awesome!) network of supporters.  One billboard in one city isn't going to change the country overnight, but it's a step in the right direction.  Only through greater public understanding and respect can we ever hope to start chipping away at the laws that criminalize our lives and make our work dangerous, stigmatized, and filled with over-burdensome red tape.

The billboard will appear in LA in about 2 weeks, and be up for 4 weeks.  As soon as I have a date and location, I'll post it.  Since this was such a success, I will be doing a billboard fundraiser again in the future for a different city, but I'll give you all a break from my incessant fundraising pleas for at least a couple of months.  (I'm thinking either DC or NYC, since both of those cities, like LA, are filled with people who influence the rest of the country.)

What now?

If you donated, please forward your Epic Step confirmation email to swaay AT swaay.org if you would like to be added to the donor thank you list on the about page of swaay.org.  I'm happy to thank you under whatever name, company, or handle you like, as well as link to you.  I'm eventually going to be creating a donor thank you tree of "silver/gold/platinum-level" supporters, so please let me know how much you donated.

Please let me know if you are owed a gift.  Anyone who donated $7 or more is eligible for a 10-pack of stickers, so forward your Epic Step confirmation email and your mailing address to swaay AT swaay.org  Donations over $100 from currently active providers are eligible for a 3-month trial of SafeOffice.org  If you forward your Epic Step confirmation email to swaay AT swaay.org, I'll send that along to the folks at SafeOffice.org.

The next thing I'm focusing on between now and when the billboard goes up is to get swaay.org in perfect order.  The main area that the site is lacking in the section on how to respect sex workers.

Rather than having me or any other one writer explain to people how they can be respectful friends and family members, ethical clients, and good allies, I wanted this section to show an array of voices from current and former sex workers.  The "hurdle" I have for this area is that I am looking for people who have worked in the US, and I want to post a small photo of your face alongside your short writing contribution to humanize us and show that we're relatable, fairly normal-looking people.  If you're someone who is out enough to be showing your face online, I really hope you'll take 5 minutes to submit something.  Please forward that link and send your own advice for how other people can treat you well.  There's so much writing about "it's awful that people do [shitty thing] to us," but I want to have something more positively-framed about how people can be good to us.