#idevasw19

People asked us for the piece that Red shared this evening for International Day to End Violence Against Sex Workers, below is their introductory statement and Alisha's poem.

Tonight I’m reading a poem written by my friend and comrade Alisha Walker. Alisha is a self-described queer, mixed, Black woman and unapologetic whore. She is a member of the Support Ho(s)e collective, a poet and an artist. Alisha is also a criminalized survivor, currently incarcerated at Decatur Correctional. LeLe was sentenced to 15 years in state prison because she fought back against a violent client, Alan Filan, who was demanding unprotected sex and threatening her and her friend with a knife. Alisha saved her life and the life of her fellow worker that night. When Judge Obbish sentenced Alisha to 15 years he ostensibly said that she should have died that night when Filan attacked her. He ostensibly said that her life didn’t matter as much as that well-connected white man’s. Alisha’s survival and subsequent punishment underscores the racist and whorephobic violence of the police, courts and prisons. When Alisha called me a few days ago, she was adamant on me also sharing with y’all the violence of erasure that prisons perpetuate. She excitedly yelled into the phone, “tell them to remember all the hos in county and in the prisons! Remember us!” She wanted me to me also share that as it’s so important to come together to mourn and grieve our lost, it’s equally important to organize and fight to end the everyday violence sex workers face at the hands of the police, the courts, the prisons, the jails, the detention centers. She sends her love, rage and support to all y’all tonight.

Here are Alisha’s words:

I wrote this poem called "Battle" in honor of December 17th, International Day to End Violence Against Sex Workers. It's gonna take all of us to fight this hatred of us, and we need you to fight alongside us now. If you support sex workers rights you are supporting all other kinds of rights too--because it's the most diverse and marginalized profession out there. Show up for us.

"Battle"

How did I get here? What wrong did I do?

Defending myself? I guess was the wrong thing to do.

They said I should have laid down, that I should have gave up and quit.

Should have been a compliant little whore. Gave into a trick. That I have no right to say no, I don’t deserve to choose "She’s nothing, she’s useless, what’s she going to do?"

My escorts, workers, my family, you feel my pain, as I do you.

Listen

They have a plan: "take away our little security,"

Kill us off, decrease our numbers, divide and conquer

But they forget, we are mothers, daughters, partners, and friends. We have our own army. We will never end! We're survivors!

When you knock us down, it makes our skin tougher See....

We are a different breed

They fucking envy us! So they try to make us bleed.

We've lost so many in this war.

Just to name a few...

Hande Kader Alphonza Watson Vanesa Campos   Yang Song Sisi Thibert Alloura Wells

So listen up!

We as a community have shit to do. Stand! In solidarity!

Because this is a fight for our lives, WE WILL NOT LOSE!

Just got home from our December 17th protest vigil and community gathering. I kept thinking about what LeLe said on the phone this morning, “Tell people I’ve only got one more D17 inside, then I’ll be out there with y’all fighting. Remind people about all the hos in county and all us in here!” 

I’m feeling so many things. Mostly grateful and relieved to have a space to grieve and express collective love and rage. So much appreciation to Colette from CGLA for ensuring we had a warm indoor space to feed people and share projects and comrades who need support. Much love to La Flor Azteca for the beautiful and nourishing food! 

To all the folx who helped us hold space and speak names in the cold, thank you. To everyone who came to share space in comradeship and eat together, thank you. Organizing these gatherings and taking back/up public space is hard but so crucial. Here’s to mourning our fallen, holding each other with care and fighting like hell for the living, in the names of those taken from us. 

It is at once a preposterous and necessary act, to demand an end to violence against sex workers.  I cannot help but be reminded, at this moment in the midst of the extended decrepitude of American moral authority and prerogative, of another, equally preposterous and necessary ask, on behalf of Black lives, and wonder how many ways there are to request the same, basic dignities: freedom from violence, empowerment to self-determination, enablement to survive.   Of the many sex workers with whom I have been privileged to break bread, commiserate, or whose stories I have directly or indirectly been able to convey to college classrooms or other more or less casual company, “violent” would not be high among the modifiers I would use to characterize them.  “Strong,” obviously, in the sense of both conviction regarding their right to exist, and equally willing to discuss, when asked respectfully and at the appropriate interval, moments when that conviction has been most tested.  “Intelligent,” yes, but neither restricted to formal education nor the instrumental knowledge necessary to perform stigmatized and often criminalized labor.  No, the intelligence of the sex workers I know and know of extends both to emotional expediency and care (it is generally a talking crime, after all, as MGG reminds us) and to a highly acute sense of what they do, why they do it, and the extent to which it does or does not define them.  “Generous” is also apt; the workers I know are magnanimous even at their most desperate, because they tend to be willing to do for themselves and theirs whatever is necessary to resist the many vestiges of this world that does not want them to, either through neglect or aggression, from the pulpit or the precinct, chambers of government and chambers of cold, withered SWE(R)Fs with no purpose but to rescue those who do not need rescuing, or ignorance of how to help those who need it most.  Sex workers tend to know who fits into those categories, too, and I rely on them to remind me.

So I am sickened at the necessary commemoration of harms and losses that is endemic to the struggle for sex worker destigmatization, decriminalization, and decarceration.  I am disgusted at having to choose between sadness and rage, rather than celebrating future success and solidarity.  Because there is nothing inspiring about today, at least for me.  I hope that these people with whom I feel such strong kinship, my sisters (and especially LeLe), brothers, and others, find some comfort in the bitter cold of D17, are able to take a great breath and exhale before another day of avoiding ending up on a list read in a quavering voice, a voice of sadness and rage, and helping ensure others do not end up on that list, either.  It is a day of cessation, a demand for respite from violence, and a day of remembrance for struggles past and lives stolen.  For me, it is a day considering what it would mean for it not to need to exist, and scheming how best to keep moving towards it.  This I wish for sex workers and their chosen families.