Research for Sex Work is an annual journal dedicated to the topic of research on sex work. It aims to provide a platform for the exchange of ideas, experiences, observations and research results with regards to sex work and HIV prevention in the broader framework of health and human rights. Although the title suggests otherwise, Research for Sex Work is not an academic journal. Readers and authors are from sex workers (support) organisations, HIV prevention projects, local and international NGOs, universities, research institutes, etc.

Volume 10 of the journal is now available online, in both English and Spanish. VAMP and SANGRAM of Sangli, India, were the production partners for this edition. The bilingual table of contents for this edition is listed below.

Editorial
Melissa Ditmore . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .Cover
Resisting Raids and Rescue
VAMP Collective and SANGRAM . . . . . . . . . . . . . .3
Los trabajadores sexuales en la India
enfrentan abuso en Ataques de incursiones
en la Colectividad de VAMP . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .5
SexWorker Activists: Embodying Aberrance
Stewart . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .7
Activistas trabajadoras sexuales:
Expresando la Aberración
Stewart . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .8
A participatory-action and interventional research
approach to HIV prevention and treatment
among women in survival sex work
Shannon and Bright . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .9
Una aproximacion participativa e intervencionista
en la prevención del VIH y tratamiento en mujeres
que hacen trabajo sexual para sobrevivir
Shannon and Bright . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .11
“My one-way ticket to Kamathipura”:
Rights of sex workers compromised
Karandikar and Próspero . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .12
“Mi boleto de ida a Kamathipura”
Karandikar and Próspero . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .14
The PEPFAR “Anti-Prostitution Pledge”:
A Case Study from Nigeria
Elder . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .15
El “Compromiso Anti-Prostitución” PEPFAR:
Un estudio de caso desde Nigeria
Elder . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .18
Sex worker organising in Madagascar
Greenall and Rasoanaivo . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .21
Organizando a las trabajadoras sexuales en Madagascar
Greenall and Rasoanaivo . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .22
Unfriendly encounters
Freeland . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .23
Encuentros no amistosos
Freeland . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .25
Street SexWork and SexWorker Rights?
Blinding Connections
McCracken . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .27
¿Trabajo Sexual en la Calle y Derechos de las
Trabajadoras Sexuales? Conexiones cegadoras
McCracken . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .29
Tribes Bangin in Da City
Jeffreys, Tapuhi, Abigail and Huynh . . . . . . . . . . .32
Announcements / Avisos . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .33
Colofon . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .Back Cover

From Sin City to the Big Apple, sex workers are organizing for political and economic justice. Now in the Nation’s Capital we are capitalizing on the sex worker electorate to Grind the Vote! The sex workers of $pread Magazine, Different Avenues and Helping Individual Prostitutes Survive (HIPS), are proud to host their first voter registration event and dance-party this July 30th.

Grind the Vote 2008 in D.C. will register voters and create awareness around the issues concerning sex workers throughout the country. Please forward this information to Beltway contacts!

9PM-2AM, Wednesday, July 30, 2008
Be Bar’s “be:xx” night
1318 9th St NW
Washington, D.C.

Join us for politically-inspired performances and a rockin’ mid-week dance party featuring strip-tease, drag acts, raffle, DJs Bent & Kofi, burlesque, voter guides. Also featured will be updates from Different Avenues and HIPS on the policing of sex work in D.C., Prostitution Free Zones (PFZs) and the political entrepreneurs of Washington, D.C. For the first time in D.C. history, candidates running for election in the district will be asked about their positions on the criminalization approach to sex work in the city by an established political advocacy group, the non-partisan Gay & Lesbian Activists Alliance.

“Grind the Vote is the first-ever national voter awareness and registration event for sex workers and their allies in the United States,” said Carol Leigh of Bay Area Sex Worker Advocacy Network (BAYSWAN). “Our fast growing movement has learned much about the political process and how crucial our political participation is. This day is a milestone in the history of political participation and
self-representation in the USA.”

William Rockwell, $pread Magazine, 917.345.0404, will@spreadmagazine.org

Darby Hickey, Different Avenues, 202.829.2103, darby@differentavenues.org

Cyndee Clay, Helping Individual Prostitutes Survive (HIPS), 202.232.8150, cyndeeclay@hips.org

Saturday late morning, or maybe it was early afternoon I rolled into the third day of the Desiree Alliance mid-way through the morning plenary. The room was half full and a panel of male identified sex workers were sharing the mic. People slowly trickled in, grabbed some fruit and found their seats as the guys talked.

The panel consisted of about 7 men, which was a noticeable increase from last year. They came from San Francisco, New York, and Chiacgo and maybe L.A. They were very well spoken as they discussed issues of inclusiveness, outreach and sexual orientation. When the panel opened up for questions, one of the first was from Naomi of St James Infirmary who brought up the excellent point that if we as a community want to really welcome and include the male workers, we would get up and show up for their plenary. If after a weekend night of partying the guys could be ontime and ready to present, the least we could do is be there to support and listen. Stacey Swimme, one of the very hard working key organizers responded that she was hoping that giving them the opening slot to kick off the day would show that they were valued and bring everyone else out to listen.

This made me think about the issue of timing at conferences such as these, and the message it can inadvertently send. I have never organized a conference so its easy for me to have an idea about it without full knowledge of all of the factors involved, but I know that it is complex and difficult and someone is always going to be unhappy with the position of their presentation. I think weekend mornings are naturally going to be especially difficult with our group. Its amazing how a schedule can affect the mood of all the participants: when the breaks are, what the day starts with, who gets undivided attention. I think the organizers to a fantastic job on working these things out, and that it is an ever morphing beast that will just get smoother and more fine-tuned.

Some other interesting points from the (second-half of) the “Male Sex Workers: How to Organize, Support and Advocate for Themselves in the Movement” Plenary:

-possibly there a less men in the sex workers’ rights movement because most male sex workers are gay and stigma against sex work is far less in the gay men’s community than the rest of society. As one man put it: “we (gay men) are all whores anyway” so they get more support and a sense of community.

-in response, one of the panelist classified himself in this way: “I’m me first, then gay, then a sex worker” so while he is very active in activist work, he proposes that many men may not necessarily feel the need to organize around sex work specifically as it is a outer layer of identity.

-there was a discussion about openness and inclusivity, and that they needed to start in the language and imagery of our own movement. Many of the panelist didn’t feel terribly represented or included in all of the “women”, “ladies” language and images that focus on female (often white and biologically female) sex workers. People often look at promotional material to determine whether or not an event or community or cause is “for them” and even if they are invited personally, they will not feel totally welcome or wanted if they do not see themselves represented in language and images of the group.

-another panelist shared a maxim he learned early on that helps him deal with stigma and oppression called the 3 F’s. “If someone isn’t Feeding, Financing or Fucking me, than why the hell do I care what they think? What right do they have to say anything about how I live my life? Fuck ‘em!”

I can’t wait to see the groups of men and transpeople at the conference grow. It seems that numbers attract numbers and I think the more people we have from every group of sex work we have at our conference and in our movement, the stronger and more representative we will be as a force for change and helping each other and ourselves.

Here are some impressions from the first full day of the 2008 Desiree Alliance conference.

It is so goddamned hot here in Chicago but luckily sex workers know how to strip. Half way through the first day Stacey Swimme set the precedent by filling ice water spritzer bottles and peeling down to her comely skivvies. Many moans arose from those confined to their clothes because they arrived at the conference sans coulottes. Says ‘David’: “I never seen so many people in this industry take their clothes off with no money exchanged.”

The keynote anti-oppression workshop kicked things off and it also kicked my ass, emotionally. One of my favorite parts was the presenter’s metaphor of the house of ‘isms’; where adultism lay at the foundation since it is a cross-cultural experience for babies/children and youth, and mental health oppression as the roof as all deviations from socially established norms (emphasis on sex workers here) are pigeonholed as crazy and easily written off or persecuted for mental health instability. Other ism’s such as racism, sexism, anti-semitism, etc. are the pillars that hold the house up. Talking in small groups about our personal definitions of super loaded terms and creating lists of terms and phrases associated left a lot of us thoughtful, riled up and raw.

After lunch we split into different workshops, I went to “Transgender Intra-Community Relations”. It really felt like we didn’t have nearly enough time to hear the panel of eight or so women from Chicago and DC talk about their organizations, experiences, and the issues facing their communities. One thing that was mentioned several times were strategies to unite and unify young transwomen of color, the problems of transwomen sex workers who are harassed and incarcerated by police with complete lack of respect for their gender and are placed in men’s jails, and the idea of an accessible conference specifically for transwomen with emphasis on women of color.

We ended the first day with a plenary on Challenging Discrimination among Sex Workers where a wallop of topics were introduced including: accessing the porn community as allies and bridges, the horrible phenomenon of partners, friends and colleagues with a grudge turning sex workers into the police, and division and judgment between workers in different fields of the sex industry.

But I was fried, my brain was a weepy puddle of lust and attraction, fear of rejection, new ideas, old pains, empathy, self-reflection and the desire to be accepted. A conference full of gorgeous sweltering hos tackling topics like institutional oppression will do that to me. There is so much information and so many perspectives and so many people who have been marginalized and misunderstood by much of society trying to find their common ground. So as my act of harm-reductionist self care, I went to Bleeding Heart Bakery and drowned my intense sensitivity in delicious organic sugar….stay tuned for more Desiree updates!

Thank you to everybody who worked to get this initiative onto the ballot!  Here is information I received:

The San Francisco Department of Elections announced that the 
measure prohibiting city officials from spending money arresting and 
prosecuting people for prostitution, and mandating equal legal 
protection for sex workers, has qualified for the November ballot. Of 
500 signatures randomly sampled and checked by department personnel, 
80 percent were found to be valid. “This is a happy day for San 
Franciscans who want government to focus on fighting real crimes like 
homicides and robberies, and are tired of seeing resources wasted in 
a futile effort to police consensual sex between adults,” said 
Starchild, a sex worker activist and spokesperson for the campaign. 
“We’ve cleared the first hurdle.” By the Elections Department’s 
tally, supporters had turned in 12,745 signatures of registered San 
Francisco voters on July 7.

The campaign to decriminalize prostitution will hold a kickoff rally 
and press conference to formally announce the results on Tuesday at 
4:00 p.m. July 22 in front of the Polk Street entrance of City Hall, with 
speakers to likely include Supervisor Jake McGoldrick, who was a 
signer of the petition to put the measure on the ballot along with 
two of his board colleagues. “It is way past time that the 
recommendations of the Board of Supervisors 1996 Prostitution Task 
Force were implemented, ” said the measure’s proponent, Maxine Doogan. 
“Criminalizing sex workers has been putting workers at risk of 
violence and discrimination for far too long.”

The prostitution reform measure joins two other voter-submitted 
measures on the local Nov. 4 ballot, along with eight measures put on 
the ballot by the mayor or members of the Board of Supervisors, with 
many others expected to be added in the next several weeks.

A note about Desiree Coverage:

I’m just talking about things that tickled or interested me particularly, or workshops I personally attended, this is not meant to be comprehensive and anything I write about is only a minute glimpse of the many amazing things happening here right now. Also I am leaving out names of anyone that I don’t personally know or I know to be public figures in an attempt to respect privacy. I’m sorry if this means that only the same 3 or 4 people get mentioned by name, please feel free to comment and take credit for anything you said or did that I didn’t attribute to you.

A group of well spoken media whores from SWANK/SWOP NYC are in the middle of a panel presentation called “Sex Workers and Mainstream Media: What We Learned from “Spitzergate”-Tools and Inspiration for Progressive Messaging” moderated by Audacia Ray.

They have explained some of the trials, horrors and hard-won victories against the New York Times that came from the media frenzy surrounding Spitzergate. So the issue of media accountability and how to handle mainstream media is a major topic of conversation. A fucked up interview can really do a lot of harm, one of the presenters lost her job based on misrepresentation from a New York Times interviewer. However after 2 weeks of hard work and legal threats to the editor they succeeded in getting a retraction printed; a major win in terms of realistic representation and the ability of sex workers to create their own image. Audacia has a helpful guide for talking to the media on her blog Sexwork 101, but the fact is that most of the mainstream media does not care enough to veer from their pre-existing concepts of what sex workers do and think (like the assumption that ’sex worker’ means prostitute), and of course sensationalism sells papers ad gets clicks.

Ok, this may be redundant, there are very eloquent accounts of sex worker response to Spitzer all over this blog and many others.

But KittenINFINITE came up with a brilliant new tool to watchdog the media and train them to treat us respectfully and portray us realistically: a white list and black list of media contacts, widely posted and updated. So anytime a reporter does a story with fair and accurate representation of sex workers their name and contact is added to our media ally list, and anytime a reporter fucks up or drops the ball, they get added to the Hall of Shame. A key point to help encourage compliance would be that if someone googled the reporters name there place in the Hall of Shame would pop right up. A perfect addition to BNG, I think.

Stacey then followed with her own brilliant idea: A National (or possibly International) Sex Workers Speakers Bureau to create a collected resource of media savvy and ready sex workers who are willing to speak publicly on a variety of subjects. An intensive media training conference could be arranged, and there would be a variety of speakers with different core interests and back-grounds to address whatever demographic or issue the mainstream media was covering.

The call was then put for people to “bottom line” these two projects (New York terminology cracks me up.) So who wants to compile the media info and let us know who is worth talking to and who to avoid?  And who wants to work on organizing a media focused coalition of sex workers….Veronica Monet? Are you out there?

Just a personal note: the sex worker activists from New York always impress the pants right off me. They present such an organized, smart and dedicated face to addressing sex worker issues and needs. They can pull off the air of professionalism often required to get the lay world to listen and take us seriously, while retaining and conveying a broad scope of information and the interests of diverse communities of workers. I love the variety of styles of activism our community encompasses, and the $pread and Swanks of this movement play a key role.

Hey all,

Consider this your official invitation to Working Hearts: www.workingheart.blogspot.com,

the blog I recently started to create conversation and support for sex workers and their personal partners around sex workers’ unpaid love/sex relationships.

I would absolutely love it if any of you wanted to write a blog post, please just send me an email and write “post starts here:” right before the part you want me to publish.

Currently the blog has a few posts from a couple of different people and some informal polls, the current poll is about trying to leave the industry and the factors behind the decision to leave.

Partners are also welcome to post, eventually I will probably create a separate site for partners, but for now I’d love this to be a place to discuss opinions and experiences around relationships, answer each other questions and help support each other around this important topic that to me seems crucial to our health and quality of life as a community.

Audacia Ray interviewed me about Working Hearts for her Village Voice blog  Naked City in the interview series Four on the Floor, if you’d like to read more about why I’m doing this and what my thoughts are on the subject, check it out.

The 2008 Desiree Alliance Conference starts today in Chicago! The Desiree Alliance conference is different from most academic, activist, or community conferences in that we screen all participants and close the conference to outside media. That doesn’t mean we won’t be making our own media. For participants who want to cover the conference by blogging, sharing photos or videos or audio online, by using Twitter or other online messaging services, or on social network sites, we’ve established some guidelines to maximize participation by everyone at the conference, so that everyone may feel free to speak without being spoken for. We want to collaborate in sharing our experience with those not in attendance, and to document our community from the inside.

If you would like to be a part of the Conference Live Blog at Bound, not Gagged, a sex worker group blog, please email boundnotgagged@gmail.com to be given an account. If you have your own blog, email us the link so we can add it to our blogroll. If you tag any blog posts, podcasts, photos, or videos with “desiree alliance 2008″ so they can be featured here on Bound, not Gagged. If you post any audio or video, send us the link and we can also embed it here.

Posted on request:

Bill Would Divert Girls to Social Programs; Opponents
Say Threat of Jail Is Needed
By Robin Shulman
Washington Post Staff Writer
Sunday, July 13, 2008

NEW YORK — The girl is very slight, pretty, with
glasses, nervously fingering the blue and gold beads
on a bracelet she made herself.

She seems like a typical shy high school kid. Little
about her suggests the tortured story she tells: At 14
she ran away from sexual abuse at home and met a
24-year-old guy who seemed like he wanted to be her
boyfriend — until he told her he wanted to be her
pimp.

“I was like, wow,” recalled the girl, now 16, though
she looks younger. She was shocked, but desperate, she
said. “At the time I needed a place to sleep, so I was
like, ‘Fine, I’ll go along with it.’ “

On and off for the next two years, she said, she
traded sex for cash, under the control of several
different men who took most of the money for
themselves. Her work as a child prostitute caused her
to be arrested in March and placed in detention.

“The whole thing makes me sick to my stomach,” said
the girl, who did not want her name to be used, like
several others who worked as prostitutes and gave
interviews for this article. “Most of the time we do
not have the right to say yes or no.”

Now New York is struggling with the question of how to
treat young girls who are involved in prostitution.
Are they criminals — or child abuse victims?

Gov. David A. Paterson (D) is considering signing a
groundbreaking bill that would divert young girls
arrested for prostitution to social programs rather
than punishing them.

The bill, known as the Safe Harbor Act, stipulates
that the first time girls 15 and younger are arrested
for prostitution, they should be designated “persons
in need of supervision,” not delinquents, and get
counseling and a safe house to protect them from
pimps.

Advocates say the bill helps to redress an inequity in
state law, which sets the age of consent for sex at 17
but sets no age limits on the crime of prostitution,
so that if a 12-year-old is paid for sex, even if she
turns the money over to a pimp, she can be arrested,
charged with an act of juvenile delinquency, and
prosecuted.

“This law is going to protect children who mostly come
from broken or dysfunctional families, who have either
been enticed or coerced into commercial sex, who need
help,” said state Assemblyman William Scarborough, a
Democrat from Queens who sponsored the bill. “We will
surely spend much more on these children if we do not
get them out of this life.”

But prosecutors have argued that it is necessary to
hold the threat of jail over young girls to encourage
them to testify against pimps.

And the administration of New York City Mayor Michael
R. Bloomberg opposes the bill, saying that the best
way to keep girls from running away from services is
to keep them in the criminal system.

“Legal leverage is the best way to provide services,”
said John Feinblatt, the mayor’s criminal justice
coordinator.

Across the country, cities and states are grappling
with this issue. Las Vegas has decided to arrest and
detain kids to keep them safe. Boston considers them
child abuse victims and generally does not charge them
but treats them. San Francisco has a hybrid model of
arresting girls and then diverting them to services.

These questions arise because incidences of very young
girls being coerced or forced into prostitution have
become alarmingly common, according to law enforcement
agencies, researchers and advocates. The age girls
most frequently enter prostitution is between 12 and
14 years old, according to a University of
Pennsylvania study, which also estimated there could
be several hundred thousand youth being paid for sex
across the country.

And although prostitution in New York has largely been
chased from the Times Square area, the streetwalker
culture — often built on young girls — is thriving
in poor neighborhoods in the Bronx, Brooklyn and
Queens.

“It’s a huge, huge problem,” said Kenneth Kaiser, an
assistant director at the FBI, which has launched a
special task force, Innocence Lost, to arrest pimps
and help children forced into prostitution. “You’ve
got young children, 12, 13, 14 — these are innocent
victims nobody ever hears about.”

Another young, former sex worker is trying to change
that. With sad, long-lashed brown eyes and a smile
that lights up her face, she speaks publicly about her
history in prostitution and has advocated passage of
the bill.

At 15, she said, she was an honor student at
Manhattan’s Art and Design High School but left home
to escape her parents’ alcoholism and abuse. She ended
up in a group home, she said, where she tried to
commit suicide — but no one even noticed.

Then she met a pimp, she said.

She said he told her, ” ‘I’m going to be your
everything. I’m going to be your mother, your father,
your sister, your brother, your best friend. I’m going
to take care of you, I’m going to love you.’ “

She was inducted into a world with the trappings of
family — a girl often calls her pimp “Daddy,” his
friends “uncles-in-law,” his other girls
“wives-in-law.” But this world also has its own brutal
hierarchy: If a girl looks another pimp in the eye,
that pimp has the right to kidnap her. When her pimp
was jailed, he bequeathed her to an “uncle-in-law,” a
“guerrilla pimp” who used violence. She said one of
his tactics was to hold a hot iron so close to her arm
that she could feel the steam melt her skin.

There were beatings, a kidnapping, a gang rape, she
said, but she was always put back to work. “I felt at
that point that my soul was dying. You’re just going
through something that’s so unimaginable you just
can’t even think, you just can’t even feel.”

Then she was referred to Girls Educational and
Mentoring Services, a nonprofit group that helps about
200 commercially sexually exploited girls each year,
and is perhaps the best model in the state for
delivering services and creating the safe and
nurturing atmosphere envisioned in the Safe Harbor
bill.

“Sweetie, let’s see your report card,” said Rachel
Lloyd, the founder and director, to one of her girls
on a recent afternoon. Lloyd read aloud a string of
A’s. “I’m very proud of you,” she said.

Lloyd, who years ago worked as a prostitute, oversees
a staff of 19 to provide counseling, tutoring and job
training, along with classes in subjects such as
cooking and yoga. She will do anything for the girls:
go searching the streets at night when they disappear,
confront their pimps, and give them Christmas parties,
baby showers and the other missing rituals of family.
Sometimes it’s enough to help a girl leave her pimp.
Sometimes it’s not.

“One of the girls called me on Mother’s Day,” Lloyd
said. “She said, ‘I want to come by, but it’s like
going to church. It makes me want to do better, but I
feel wack about where I am in my life.’ “

Research shows the girls in Lloyd’s program are likely
to have certain things in common. A study by the New
York state Office of Children & Family Services found
that about 85 percent of the girls in prostitution
were the subject of an open child welfare case, often
because of abuse or neglect, and that 75 percent had
been in foster care.

Their numbers seem to be growing. Katherine Mullen, a
New York lawyer with the Legal Aid Society who
represents youth involved in prostitution, said that a
decade ago she might come across perhaps two such
children under 16 in a year. Now she represents about
200 a year, many of them 12 and 13 years old, and this
year she represented two 11-year-olds.

These girls are likely to come from the country’s
poorest urban neighborhoods, said Kirsten Widner, a
fellow at Emory University’s law school. She said they
may have been caught in a changing profile of local
crime that has yet to be fully assessed: At some point
in recent years, the neighborhood drug dealer might
have realized that it’s more lucrative to sell
neighborhood girls.

“The word on the street is they can sell a packet of
drugs once, they can sell a person many, many times,
so it’s a better business model,” Widner said.

Hello Jessica!

I read your “article” entitled “Undercover ‘John’ takes on trannies, pimps” on the website for the Boston Herald. It was widely circulated after you succeeded to piss off the LGBTQ community starting with your opening line “James Fong has been trapped inside houses of ill repute by giant naked trannies… ” And the transphobia didn’t stop there.

Geez, Jessica? Could this article be anymore terrible? It’s salacious and ignorance portrait of sex work and transgender sex workers, I feel like I am reading a tabloid. Or the NY Post! Did you not realize as you typed away you were being lascivious and derogatory? Hard day at the office? Do you have a repressed sexual desire you want to share with the group?

“Fong arranges a meeting through a pimp who’s inevitably at the other end of an ad. The pimp will direct him to an apartment or hotel, wherever the call girls have set up their brothel. ” I mean… COME ON! If you just wanted to use the words “pimp” “call girls” and “brothel” in the same sentence, you have other options besides this sentence. Did you realize a huge percent of your readers might have had experiences soliciting sex, and might be laughing at your attempt for 101? Did you realize the Boston Herald might have advertisers who identify as queer, transgender, or have half a brain to see your article is tasteless and trash?

I understand you are new to journalism, and I am sure you are frustrated with a journalist entry level job as a court reporter. I am sure you cannot wait to get out of this low rung staff job, and I can see you are willing to write anything to do it. I ask you, how low are you willing to go?

Listen Jess… can I call you Jess? You are cute, I see your little picture up there next to the article. You are young, blonde, you can write (when you aren’t spreading transphobia I think you have real talent), I am sure you have a huge student loan to pay off…. ever consider sex work??? I don’t think you belong in newspapers.

You could channel your pseudo erotica into your advertising, or write a revealing tell-all book about your life as a call girl after you pay off your loans in six months. I think you would like it. It’s safer than court reporting, you don’t have those bosses at the Herald who grope at you, and you can make your own hours so you will have all the time in the world to do what you really want to do…. write. Think about it. You don’t have to listen to police scanners to see an accurate portrayal of the work. Just open your eyes to the world.

One more thing: Stop disrespecting our transgendered sex workers by making a mockery of their viable career choice. You only wish transgender sex workers were cop drama extras. In reality, they have more suitors, more money, and more femininity than us bio girls can muster. So stop hating. You of all people should know “a girls got to make a living”.

Love, kittenINFINITE

______________________________

The Gay & Lesbian Alliance Against Defamation (GLAAD) and Massachusetts Transgender Political Coalition (MTPC) are encouraging people to contact the Boston Herald and ask editors to apologize for the paper’s offensive slurs and sensationalistic coverage of transgender people and sex workers.

See the full press release here.

CALL THE BOSTON HERALD!

Boston Herald Contacts:
Jessica Van Sack
City Reporter
jvansack@bostonherald.com
(617) 619-6461

Joe Dwinell
City Executive Co-Editor
jdwinell@bostonherald.com
(617) 619-6177

Kevin Convey
Editor in Chief
kconvey@bostonherald.com
(617) 619-6403