Beyond Pride
A Call for Queer and Whore Solidarity
Adore Goldman, Cyprine & Melina May
This text was written in the summer of 2022 and distributed at the Pride Community Day on August 5th and at the Anarchist Book Fair on August 6th, as the 24th edition of the International AIDS Conference in Montreal was ending.
Among the moral attacks that Pride is regularly subjected to – outside and within our communities – one criticism in particular seems indestructible: Pride is definitely an event that is too sexual. Indeed, from fetish outfits to drag parades to public displays of physical affection, they say that the sexuality queers exhibit is too present, too loud, too vulgar, too disturbing. Pride is a space of hypersexualized bodies, and those who participate are inveterate fuckers without dignity.
At the same time, this critique reveals the biases of those who formulate it: from a cisgender and bourgeois perspective, sex should be private, practiced in the bedroom, well away from the public eye. But on the other hand, it reveals the importance of sex in our communities. While this criticism misses the political dimension of sex, it is right about one thing: Pride and queer communities have put sexuality at the forefront of their political agenda. And that’s a good thing.
It is from these observations that we can question the place of sex workers (SWers) within queer protests and community spaces like Pride. If queers have in fact been associated with a movement of liberation and recognition of sexual minorities, what about the place of SWers? If sex is so present in our communities, and in a much deeper way than just “party sex”, how do those who practice it on a daily basis, those who are experts in it, the SWers, relate to the queer liberation project? As SWAC activists, we took the opportunity of Pride 2022 to remind our queer friends of some avenues of solidarity between our groups, and the need for a political position in favor of decriminalization of sex work in queer events such as Pride.
Queer and SWers, a Common History, a Liberation Together!
Queers and SWers share a collective history of struggle. Pride and its street parade, celebrating all gender and sexual minorities, takes place every year in homage to the Stonewall riots that took place in June 1969. Without re-telling this story that has become ultra famous (perhaps even too famous, to the point of making it year 0 of the gay rights movement), it is important to remember that sex workers occupied a central place in the so-called “deviant” sexual communities, and were precisely those who frequented the Stonewall Inn. Indeed, many queer and trans people relied on sex work for their survival. Above all, the Stonewall riots were particularly significant in that they established a power relationship with the police. It is precisely because of those who were most exposed to police violence that this rebellion could take place with such force. At the forefront of the systemic police criminalization were homosexuals, trans people, queers, and whores. All of these people were mixed together in underground and nocturnal spaces in the metropolis, creating counter-cultures and building parallel economies. Selling sexual services was the basis for the survival of many. This is not to say that all sexual minorities were doing sex work, nor that SWers were a homogeneous and fixed group always standing alongside other minorities. Rather, we would like to emphasize the cross-cutting nature of sex work in these spaces. Most importantly, regular police raids targeted SWers bodies, regarding them as dirty and unwanted, in the same light as queer bodies. It is no coincidence that these bodies moved through the same spaces, creating affinities and resisting violence together. This shared history of criminalization continues today; worldwide, 72 countries criminalize homosexuality, while the majority of the world’s countries have not yet decriminalized sex work (with the exception of New Zealand, Belgium and parts of Australia). In other words, SWers, like other dissidents of the cis-heteropatriarchal order, have been and are still subjected to state and police violence. Another important point is that the homophobic treatment of the AIDS crisis in the 1980s and 1990s gave rise to a pathologized image of gay men as vessels of disease, infectious bodies whose sexuality was inherently dangerous. In the same way, our sex-working bodies are seen as dirty and dangerous spaces, which only the most hygienic policies can deal with. Thus, one model of “management” of prostitution, called regulationist, aims to politically regulate the practice of sex work through sustained health control. This only feeds into this representation of a degraded and unhealthy body. Like gay men during the AIDS crisis, we are also constantly brought back to the idea of an absence of “purity” in our practices, and our identities are in themselves constant medical and social danger. Recent studies have shown that a significant proportion of trans women, who have been completely ignored by statistics until now, are affected by AIDS, but receive little care, while in some countries they simply do not have access to the latest treatments. In other cases, they have to choose between their hormone therapy and HIV treatment because they are incompatible. The issue of health and vulnerability has thus linked both queer and SWer communities since the 1980s (and again, these communities can’t even be referred as two distinct groups). Finally, Pride has become an increasingly well-known event in the last few years, and the price of this “mainstreaming” is high. Indeed, few remember Pride as a moment of celebration of the queer and SWers anti-capitalist force, spitting and rebelling against the police and the normative social order. The celebration of sexual diversity as a revolutionary political project has gradually been transformed into a process of institutionalizing homosexuality under the paradigm of tolerance, with a focus on the integration or even assimilation of cis-gay men into the cis-capitalist system. The issue of gay marriage, among others, seems to have taken on a disproportionate role in the political discussion. Like others1, we think this quest for equality is dangerous in many ways; by claiming marriage as an object of dignity for sexual minorities, the norms between good and bad sex crystallize and make us, SWers, lower-class subjects. It also trivializes whorephobia within queer circles, previously allies of our struggles. If marriage becomes the promise of political dignity, what about those who continue to trouble this institution, SWers for instance? Now, if it’s about being in a couple, having an adopted child, and a house on credit for two generations, how does that differ from the aspirations of a capitalist society based on the exploitation of the weak? Thus, queers, as a critical force of the gender binary, and as a target of the state, must divest from this political turn that effectively excludes SWers, trans people, and all those who distance themselves from the project of social integration and assimilation. Moreover, the word “gay” has progressively replaced the word “queer”, and the promotional images of Prides on an international scale are full of thin, able-bodied, white, cis-gay men. Our project is more radical than that, and one only has to look back to the history of Stonewall to be reminded of that. If historically there are clear links between queers and sex work, it is interesting to ask why queers today practice sex work. There are several reasons, and the list is far from exhaustive:-
- First of all, gender minorities around the world face material precariousness. The subject is not new, and there is a whole section of materialist feminists, and in particular those with a focus on Third World and are very critical of “development”, who have succeeded in formulating a fundamental concept to highlight this reality: the feminization of poverty. This means that economically, gender minorities systematically own less land, are less likely to be property owners, and receive fewer economic benefits than their cis male counterparts. Precariousness, in this sense, is not just bumping up against the glass ceiling, but is a whole system, from lack of guidance at an early age, to lack of access to schools, to housing discrimination. This particularly affects poor and racialized minorities, for whom sex work may be one – if not the only – way to survive.
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- Sex work is described by some minorities as a way of exercising with their peers. For trans women, for example, and trans women of color moreover, it represents a significant space in a society where their bodies are constantly rejected, denied, and treated as inferior. For those who transition physically, the costs of surgery and the lack of financial support pushes them to turn to sex work. Thus, “Monica Forrester, Jamie-Lee Hamilton, Mirha-Soleil Ross and Viviane Namaste argue that “a history of transsexuality is a history of prostitution,” contending that “the social enclaves that have historically enabled trans communities are predicated on the political struggles of trans sex workers, a category largely made up of women of color.”2
The Laid-off Workers of the Family
While the LG 4 movement has put forward the demand for marriage equality in recent decades, it is clear that these demands have served the interests of the middle class and the well-off more than those of poor queers, who are more affected by discrimination in hiring and profiling, including trans people who do not benefit from “passing”. As Peter Drucker states, while access to marriage may bring material benefits to the middle class, “for those most dependent on the welfare-state in countries such as Britain and the Netherlands, legal recognition of their partnerships can lead to cuts in benefits.”5 Embedding oneself in capitalist and heteropatriarchal institutions such as marriage has therefore been strongly criticized by the queer movement, particularly in terms of the number of resources invested in such campaigns.
It should be remembered that family as an institution is a site of capitalist accumulation. More precisely, it is one of the spaces where the reproduction of labor power takes place. When we talk about reproductive labor, we are not only talking about biological reproduction. It also includes all of the tasks necessary to produce workers who are physically able to work (for example, cooking a nutritious meal). This work is largely based on its gendered division within the family and society as a whole. Thus, the integration of gender binary is part of the capitalist discipline that is transmitted by parents through education and is essential to the process of capitalist accumulation. Even today, much of this work is done for free by women within the heterosexual family. And since queers deviate from the binary roles (male/female, dad/mom, productive/reproductive workers), they threaten the gendered division of labor and are further exploited. As Kay Gabriel affirms, “capital has “invented roles” for the social categories it abjects, and uses these as a lever of exploitation“.6
It is not surprising, after all, that the family is a particularly violent place for those who do not fit into the lines of binarity. One of its roles is to ensure that children integrate the capitalist gendered structure in order to be able to reproduce it in their turn. Even homoparental families are tolerated only if they do not challenge this state of affairs. Even though their rights have improved considerably in recent years, social expectations remain unchanged; it is important that the children of these unions do not deviate from the heterosexual norm and integrate the structure of gender.
According to Peter Drucker, the tolerance given to gays and lesbians in the 1970s and 1980s has only been possible by repressing gender dissident within their own lines.7 This allowed a certain class to benefit from the development of a gay market economy (and subsequently, its gentrification). The Société de développement commercial du Village, a gay neighborhood in Montreal, is a good example.
Thus, “queers serve as a category of ‘last hired, first fired’ with respect to the family… an optional category of reserve reproductive labour for a working class increasingly pressed in our efforts to self-reproduce”.8 In the context of neoliberal austerity and the crisis of social reproduction in the global North, the absence of family support is often synonymous with great precariousness. In the 1960s and 1970s in enriched countries, gays and lesbians benefited enormously from the favorable economic context, characterized by full employment and greater job security, to be able to emancipate themselves from their families. This is no longer the case. Multiple cuts to social services and stagnant wages have increased dependence on family and made those excluded from it more precarious. For poor, racialized, migrant, disabled, neurodivergent and trans people, sex work is not only a survival strategy in the face of double exclusion from the family and the labour market, but also a space for organizing to demand better living conditions.
ACT UP!9 Fightback!
Against the Criminalization, We Organize
In 1989, on the occasion of the 5th edition of the International AIDS Conference, HIV-positive activists from Montreal and their comrades from ACT-UP invaded the Palais des Congrès.10 They denounced government neglect and demanded access to experimental treatments and better funding for research. It is hard to imagine such actions in 2022. Indeed, the 24th edition of the International AIDS Conference in Montreal at the end of July 2022 showed the total integration of community organizations into institutional structures. Thirty years later, confrontation has given way to a dynamic of concertation and lobbying.
The struggles against HIV and for the rights of sex workers are intertwined. In Canada, the first advocacy group for sex workers’ rights was formed during the HIV epidemic. In 1983, under the initiative of street-involved sex worker Peggie Miller, a small group of sex worker activists came together to found the Canadian Organization for the Rights of Prostitutes (CORP), a political organizing and lobbying project fighting for legal changes, including decriminalization. In 1985, in an effort to address the basic needs of SWers so that they could devote time to political work, CORP activists decided to found a self-help project that would become known as Maggie’s, which is still active in Toronto. The idea was that SWers needed to meet their basic needs in order to be more able to get involved. However, according to Danny Cockerline, a gay SWer and HIV-positive activist, some activists were not convinced by this argument:
[M]any were concerned that we would end up with another social service that prostitutes would go to for help rather than joining us in a political movement to defend our rights. 11
These words resonate with those of ACT-UP New York activist and writer Sarah Schulman, who also questions the services offered by HIV organizations and their shift away from political action:
My life has shown me that activists win policy changes, and bureaucracies implement them. In a period like the present where there is no real activism, there are only bureaucracies.12
The tensions between service provision on one hand and political action on the other are still very present in our struggles. While condom distribution, sexual health clinics, legal clinics, etc. improve our health and safety, they do not replace mobilization and direct action initiatives. History has shown us that the state constantly takes over our struggles and organizations – including funding – in order to pacify them. While many SWers rights organizations have grown out of self-organization, the government’s proposed funding has been confined to the health issue, focusing the organizations’ energy and resources on that issue alone. History has shown us that the state constantly takes over our struggles and organizations – including funding – in order to pacify them. While many SWers rights organizations have grown out of self-organization, the government’s proposed funding has been confined to the health issue, focusing the organizations’ energy and resources on that issue alone.
As queer SWers, we believe that this space for compromise is a serious tactical mistake! While decriminalization is still not achieved, new diseases and viruses are disrupting our lives and making us more precarious. During the last three years of the pandemic, no single government public health policy has addressed our safety and health, as we are not recognized as workers. Even in a health crisis such as COVID-19 and more recently monkeypox, services for SWers, and more broadly for the most marginalized people, are inadequate. What we need is a replacement income, just like “regular” workers: in order to curb contamination, we must be given the means to stop working.
More Demands, Less Representation
The struggle of SWers is intimately connected to queer/trans liberation struggles. As in the mainstream labor market, the material conditions of trans people in the sex industry are heavily threatened by systems of oppression that exclude them from work spaces. The struggle of SWers is thus a struggle in and against the sex industry itself. Our colleague Jesse Dekel, a trans sex worker, writes about this:
Because of the fewer clients available to trans SWers, they are more likely to have precarious working conditions and are excluded from the better employment opportunities enjoyed by their cisgender colleagues. For example, trans SWers often face employment discrimination in massage parlors, brothels, and escort agencies that refuse to hire trans women, who are then forced to work on the street as their only option. They thus have poorer working conditions than SWers who work indoors and receive a disproportionate share of the stigma.
Also, laws criminalizing sex work in Canada particularly affect trans women. Women who trade sex in Montreal are regularly targeted by police – particularly those who work on the street and in bars – and are more likely to be charged with prostitution or other offences such as drug possession.13
In this sense, the repeal of the Protection of Communities and Exploited Persons Act in Canada and the complete decriminalization of sex work must be a central demand of the queer movement. We need to expand the spaces of solidarity beyond representation or a single letter in an acronym. We want access to labor rights so that we can self-organize in our workspaces, demand a safe and inclusive workplace from our employers, more easily report violence, harassment and discrimination in hiring, and obtain compensation for illness and pregnancy.
However, legal reforms alone cannot combat structural violence; our demands must also focus on our material conditions to liberate ourselves. Barriers to traditional jobs, difficulties in accessing decently priced and adequately sized housing, increasing difficulties in accessing free and universal health care, childcare, and more broadly, structural poverty and growing inequalities, are all factors in increasing violence. If we are to address violence against queer and trans people in particular, we will need to demand more resources, money in our pockets, and housing for all.
1. Against Equality: Queer Revolution, Not Mere Inclusion, AK Press, 2014. ↩
2. Kay Gabriel. (s.d.) . Gender as Accumulation Strategy , in Invert Journal ↩
3. 69.3% of trans people who do sex work have had a bad experience in the traditional job market and trans people who experience transphobic discrimination are three times more likely to turn to the sex industry.
Movement Advancement Project and National LGBTQ Workers Center. (2018). LGBT People in the Workplace: Demographics, Experiences and Pathways to Equity. ↩
4. We deliberately use the acronym LG to mean that these demands reflect more the concerns of gays and lesbians, mainly from a middle and upper class background, at the expense of queer and trans people. Thus, we want to refute the myth of the unity of the “LGBTQ+ movement” to better underline its contradictions. See Peter Druker. (2011). The Fracturing of LGBT Identities under
Neoliberal Capitalism, Historical Materialism, vol 19, no 4, p. 3–32 ↩
5. IDEM↩
6. Kay Gabriel. (s.d.) . Gender as Accumulation Strategy , in Invert Journal ↩
7. Peter Druker. (2011). The Fracturing of LGBT Identities under
Neoliberal Capitalism, Historical Materialism, vol 19, no 4, p. 3–32↩
8. Kay Gabriel. (s.d.) . Gender as Accumulation Strategy , in Invert Journal↩
9. Acronym for AIDS Coalition to Unleash Power. The first branch of ACT UP was founded in New York in 1987, and has since grown into an international movement. ↩
10. During the HIV crisis, ACT UP took direct action to demand access to research and treatment for HIV-positive people. The founding of the Montreal branch of ACT UP took place shortly after the action at the Palais des Congrès. Gabriel Girard et Alexandre Klein. (2019). Les leçons de la conférence de Montréal de 1989 sur le sida.↩
11. Danny Cockerline, «Whores History: A Decade of Prostitutes Fighting for their Rights in Toronto», Maggie’s Zine, n 1, hiver 1993-1994, Toronto, Maggie’s: The Toronto Prostitutes’ Community Service Project, p. 22-23. Traduit de l’anglais par Sylvie Dupont, dans Luttes XXX, Inspirations du mouvement des travailleuses du sexe, 2011, Les Éditions du remue-ménage ↩
12. Sarah Schulman. (2012). The gentrification of the mind: witness to a lost imagination. p. 16 ↩
13. Nora Butler Burke. (2018). «Double Punishment. Immigration Penality and Migrant Trans Women Who Sell Sex.» dans Red Light Labor. Sex Work Regulation, Agency and Resistance, UBC Press, p.203↩