BIPOC-AIC 'Politricks' Panel Discussed Sex Work, Law & More

CYBERSPACE—The Black, Indigenous, and/or People of Color Adult Industry Collective (BIPOC-AIC), which was formed at the beginning of the summer to support non-white adult industry members, and was partly inspired by the then-fledgling Black Lives Matter protests in the U.S., held its first "Politricks" panel online Thursday evening via Zoom. The discussion was moderated by BIPOC-AIC member and former APAC president Mia Little, an adult performer and sex worker, and panel members included Phoenix Calida, one of the new directors of SWOP-USA; Raani Begum, a Philadelphia-based sex worker and activist; India Thusi, an associate professor at Delaware Law School, where she teaches critical race theory, criminal law, regulation of vice and criminal procedure; Mia Lee, a former financial consultant and present-day sex worker; Kate D'Adamo, a Baltimore-based sex worker rights activist and organizer working with SWOP-NYC; and adult industry attorney Maxine Lynn, who created the Sex Tech Connect blog and consults on legal matters affecting the industry. The discussion was bookended by remarks by BIPOC-AIC members King Noire, an actor/director/content producer, and founder Sinnamon Love, a Black feminist sex worker dedicated to "decolonizing porn" and creating safe, gender-affirming spaces for BIPOC and LGBTQIA+ folks in the sex industry. Noire opened the conference by "sharing a vocal libation with everybody," which consisted of everyone present speaking their minds as to the "travesties of justice that we have been seeing in our country for the last 500 years." Various speakers lauded Breonna Taylor and others who were killed or roughed up/threatened by police and expressed solidarity with them. Noire then turned the discussion over to Little, who put forth several questions to the panel on topics for which input had been solicited from adult industry members and others—and the first was, "How are you thinking about the Black Lives Matter as well as defunding police intersecting with sex worker rights?" "Defunding the police is a housing rights issue, it's a reproductive justice issue, it's an issue of preventing death by overdose, it's an issue of domestic violence, it's an issue of nearly every single issue that you think of," opined Begum. "You defund the police and I assure you that the violence you're trying to counteract—you won't necessarily eliminate that violence ... but overdoses significantly fall when the police isn't around. Same goes for sex workers and their clients." Begum said she knew this from having worked with rights organizations in Philly and noted that there is currently a movement in that city to tackle homelessness and provide free medical care to the indigent, much of which could be funded by redirecting resources away from police. "Sex workers rights in general is an issue that is linked with a lot of different social-justice-based movements because sex workers are multi-faceted individuals," stated Calida, who spoke next, agreeing that the sex worker rights movement ties directly into Black Lives Matter and the widespread calls for defunding/abolishing police who, they said, "enforce a very violent status quo that refuses to allow people to move outside of a certain social hierarchy and punishes people for finding ways to exist in an incredibly oppressive system. ... We cannot reform the system when it comes to police; they have to be defunded, they have to be replaced." "If you go to almost any community and talk to street-based sex workers, they'll be able to tell you about direct physical, oftentimes sexual violence enacted by police, financial coercion effected by police," they added. "When it comes to Black Lives Matter and/or sex worker rights, it's really about the stigma that these groups face, because they are dehumanized and seen as 'less than' in a white supremacist, patriarchal capitalist society. ... We must also consider that sex workers are able to create non-police alternatives. We practice this daily, because we can’t report to police, but we still need safety protocols in the community. I'm very, very hopeful going forward that this is the solidarity moment," they concluded. Next up, D'Adamo opined that the criminalization of sex work by police "is about curtailing liberation," and felt that liberation of communities of color and gender-nonconforming people would go a long way toward curtailing white supremacy and capitalism, both of which she sees as a threat to sex workers. "Black Lives Matter is a very sex-worker-friendly space and very sex worker positive space," she said. Thusi agreed that there's a connection between policing of sex work and defunding police movement, noting that her research in New York City had revealed that city police "had arrested more people for prostitution than they had for rape," and was convinced that sex work decriminalization would "free up millions of dollars" that could be used for housing the homeless and treating workers with drug problems. Charging that police are "lawless," Thusi stated that, "Trying to reform an institution that really at its core is intended to promote and protect white supremacy is a futile endeavor, so moving beyond the police is important." For her part, Lee, who'd worked both in mainstream and the "underground economy," assessed that, "When I was working in finance, there was no criminalization of exploiting junior associates, and because of that, I was able to work my way up in that system and build a better life and career. I can imagine that I would have had a difficult time doing that as a sex worker if I had started out on the street." Little's next question concerned the EARN IT Act, which would establish a "National Commission on Online Child Sexual Exploitation Prevention" and is now before the U.S. Senate, the text of which can be found here. In part, the bill reads, "The purpose of the Commission is to develop recommended best practices that providers of interactive computer services may choose to implement to prevent, reduce, and respond to the online sexual exploitation of children, including the enticement, grooming, sex trafficking, and sexual abuse of children and the proliferation of online child sexual abuse material." Little asked, "Why is it [EARN IT] so debilitating for online-based sex workers, how will it impact existing platforms, and will it be more detrimental than SESTA/FOSTA?" Thusi stepped right up by noting that, "The EARN IT Act ... aims to push companies to police online platforms or they'll end up being sued if they don't comply with certain regulations, and it also aims to set up an independent commission that would create these different rules that online service providers would have to comply with. Part of the concern about the EARN IT Act is, there's no sense of what this online commission would say are the best practices for online service providers. It could harm online privacy and encryption, it could allow broad authority to the government to prevent online speech," and could easily wind up being worse than SESTA/FOSTA, the 2018 law that drove ISPs to shut down adult discussion/contact pages and sites. Begum also saw a racial basis to the proposed law, recalling how people of color had been targeted as "terrorists" after 9/11, and stating, "The nation state of the United States of America has this habit of framing entire communities in a certain way." "Many of these communities who work in underground economies for survival are black and brown communities, our indigenous communities, our migrant communities, our refugee communities, are purposefully left out of this dream, this false dream and false promise that capitalism gives us, that if you do the right things, if you take the right steps, you're gonna go up the ladder to whatever better is being promised." She noted also that traffickers are most often identified as "men of color, maybe former migrants, many of whom happen to be black, coming into our communities and snatching up people." Lee termed SESTA/FOSTA and EARN IT as "a really good example of likely a bunch of privileged cisgender white people sitting in a room and thinking about what's best for people who are not like them, and sure, if it worked in theory exactly as some people intended it to, like 'Let's fight online sex trafficking,' that's great, but the reality is that these laws are very ineffective in actually combatting online sex trafficking. If anything, they are promulgating additional trafficking by forcing some of the most vulnerable members of the sex work community into street work, more underground and into situations of economic hardship." "It's really hard to vote against a bill about child pornography," D'Adamo recognized. "That's how I see EARN IT especially ... I think what EARN IT is gonna do, it's much more gonna be the death of a thousand cuts; it's gonna be the closing of accounts, it's gonna be shadow-banning people. ... A lot of people pushing it don't care about the impact because they know what the impact is gonna be. It's that law enforcement has more access to the surveillance of people on their platform. Sex workers on a digital platform is already an experience of liability; [ISPs] are already exposed to FOSTA/SESTA liabilities, but beyond that, if we look at what Backpage was charged with, they were charged with money laundering and promoting prostitution; they weren't charged with trafficking, so when you discover you have people trading sex on your platform, you're already liable to a bunch of other laws, so if they force platforms to increase their surveillance, if you [the ISP] discover someone who is not trafficked and just trading sex, you are gonna kick them off anyway. "The EARN IT Act and FOSTA/SESTA, from a legal perspective, come in to amend Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act, and Section 230 was what allowed the internet to thrive as a place of open and free communication," attorney Lynn began. "That part of the law was what allowed Facebook and Twitter and all these other platforms to have people talking to one another freely, because Section 230 basically says that a website service provider is not liable for the actions of third parties on their website, so when you come in with a law like FOSTA/SESTA or a potential law, a bill like the EARN IT Act, that are attacks on Section 230 and that are narrowing Section 230, the outcome of FOSTA/SESTA is that we are already seeing a ton of censorship because companies are now going to end up having an unknown amount of liability; it's hard to figure out where the edges of liability will be because the amendments are so drastic. With the EARN IT Act, if that gets passed, you're going to see a ton of censorship." "People looking for information on sexual health, they're gonna get flagged in their private messages, in their posts," she added. "I counsel clients, and you've got to be careful what you say now even in your private messages on Facebook or on Twitter because they're watching, and they don't have a choice because of the potential liability, not only civil but criminal under FOSTA/SETA up to 25 years in prison. ... The sex worker community is gonna feel the effects the most ... I think we're gonna see a really different internet over the next few years." She also noted that EARN IT would make it harder to get liability insurance and that would lead to less free discussion. For her part, Calida focused on the law's likely effects on the sex work community. Because of FOSTA/SESTA, she noted, "people actually stopped doing outreach, people actually stopped passing around bad date lists, and that's incredibly dangerous because these are tools that the community needs, especially when you're talking to folks who are struggling with housing, who need access to more things, so it was devastating initially, and people who had never really practiced screening offline before are suddenly like, 'I can't screen online anymore; I don't know what to do,' or are going to street work and never worked in that environment before and weren't prepared, so the amounts of stories that initially came in about sex workers who were being robbed, were being assaulted, were being outed because of SESTA/FOSTA were astronomical and overwhelming, and I'm concerned that if EARN IT passes, we're gonna have that same thing again. "And EARN IT is even more vague, and that ties back to the first question: When we talk about things like Black Lives Matter and defunding police and sex worker rights, there's this history of lawmakers creating really vague policies and then enforcing them however they see fit by saying, 'The law is whatever we say it is now.' We've seen those policies go into things like stop-and-frisk policies or 'walking while trans' policies and say, 'Oh, you look like a trans person' or 'Oh, you were dressed how I perceive a sex worker to be dressed and you have condoms; therefore it must be; that's how I perceive it to be,' but digitally, and that's actually terrifying because it's such a broad scope, in addition to immediately hurting the community because folks will again be scared to post ads, screens, share information with other providers; it's going to be really dangerous in terms of how the government and groups already conflate sex work and sex trafficking [when] they aren't inherently the same thing, and a lot of people don't realize that. "I'm really scared that it's going to give a pass to media to keep conflating sex trafficking and sex workers, and that's incredibly dangerous," she opined, mentioning the uproar caused by QAnon that actually convinced people that a D.C. pizza parlor was running a child sex trafficking ring in its (non-existent) basement. "If something like EARN IT passes and we start losing private encryption, which I think is what will happen, all those types of activism are going to be even more highly surveilled, even more difficult to do, and so this is a call for solidarity with sex workers among other communities because anyone who does harm reduction in any sort of social justice capacity is going to be targeted." Little's final question—"Are there any bills/propositions in the works or currently that would effectively support sex workers or any politicians, representatives, assemblymembers or candidates in general that we should be looking for as allies in decriminalizing sex work or supporting sex workers?"—produced a hodge-podge of responses, with Lee touting her friend Eliza Orlins, a former NYC public defender now running for district attorney. "She has a very progressive criminal justice reform and pro-decriminalization platform," Lee assured. "She is going to essentially refuse to prosecute certain crimes against poverty, we'll say; crimes against marginalized groups, drug possession, drug trafficking, sex work—her perspective is, 'Of course we're going to prosecute sex trafficking when it is actually sex trafficking; we are not going to prosecute interpretations of the law that run contrary to public interest.'" D'Adamo brought up the Safe Sex Worker Study Act, introduced last December 17. "What it does is ask the Department of Health and Human Services to look at the impact of folks that trade sex when they lose access to digital spaces, and it goes into health, safety, trafficking and exploitation; what is the impact on rural folks, on LGBT folks specifically, and we're really hopeful that it'll go through next year," she explained. "The other thing I would encourage everyone to do is look at the Movement for Black Lives," she added. "They put out a platform that is really amazing and centers on what ending the war on Black communities, Black bodies looks like, and breaks it down into a lot of difference phases." Lynn, on the other hand, promoted educating politicians on the realities of sex work and related issues, stating, Kamala Harris, for example, voted in favor of FOSTA/SESTA; she helped pass that law. ... People in Congress just saw the preamble of the bill that just talks about, 'Oh, that stops sex trafficking; sex trafficking's really bad,' so bills get passed because legislators don't understand or realize what the consequences are going to be of a particular law. And we're all also a product of our own experiences, so some politicians may not have had experiences in interacting with sex workers or interacting with trans people, and maybe they need education to learn and to grow." Similarly, Calida felt that sex work activists should focus on the verbiage that politicians and others use to describe sex work. "I think it's really easy to come out and say, 'Oh, I oppose sex trafficking,' but how do [they] refer to sex workers?" they asked. "Do [they] call sex workers 'sex workers,' do [they] call them 'prostituted people'—what are the language choices? When that person is talking about sex work policies, are they conflating sex trafficking and sex work? Are they acknowledging that people go into sex work because they need to make money in order to survive, but are they framing that as 'sex workers are inherently damaged; that's why they choose sex work' as opposed to other people who go into other professions? The type of language choices that people are using will give a good indicator of where they stand on sex worker rights even if they don't explicitly say something publicly or have something explicitly on their platform." Begum, who said she has no use for politicians at all, supported Calida's idea regarding language. "I have been watching the words that Kamala Harris is using," she said. "Kamala Harris consistently uses the word 'decriminalize' and then props up the Nordic model, and it takes away a lot of the words that organizers use." She also argued that so-called "diversion courts," set up to divert some types of offenders away from jail and toward treatment programs, "keep people in underground economies, particularly the ciswomen; it is usually designed around ciswomen to keep them out of prisons, but it is just another block in the prison pipeline." She also urged activists to question politicians about their views on loitering laws, drug use laws, needle exchanges and other activities that serve the underground community. Thusi managed to get in the final words on the subject, voicing support for the Breathe Act, which she described as having been put forward by the Movement for Black Lives, and which "I believe it has provisions specific to sex work as well," but its main purpose is moving funds away from the police and into communities. Thusi, who recently was awarded a Fulbright scholarship to compare how differently New Zealand and Sweden treat sex workers, noted importantly that, "Part of the challenge is, you might work with people who call themselves liberal or progressive, but one challenge sex work advocacy in particular faces is that there are people who identify as being feminists who also inform these types of politicians that any form of sex work is sex trafficking; they help to contribute to that narrative that conflates sex work with sex trafficking, so that's a unique challenge. I think continuing education with policy makers about the harms that come from forms of criminalization, even partial criminalization; inform them about the research that's coming out of Sweden and comparing it with the research that's coming out of New Zealand, doing that sort of basic education with them is really important because they're getting this counternarrative from people that they believe are supposed to be representing the interests of women, when in fact they are concerned with elite women or certain types of women but not everyone. So education work becomes especially important." Those words brought the Q&A portion of the meeting to a close, and Little then asked the panelists for any last words they might have for the audience, as well as to feel free to promote organizations that they felt were fighting the same or similar fights. Various panelists mentioned SWOP-USA and its branches in Brooklyn and Seattle; Free Speech Coalition, the adult industry trade organization; Project Safe and the Whole History Project; and even SWEAT, a South African sex worker group, with Calida reminding that, "If you can't find an org to donate to, just give to a sex worker." Lee added that people should "support the passions of sex workers by direct donations. On Monday, my partner and I went to the gallery of one of my friends and we bought one of her paintings." But the final words were voiced by Sinnamon Love, who blurted out, "Wow, wow, wow, that was a lot to digest." She thanked the panelists and attendees and the BIPOC Education Committee, which arranged for the conference, and congratulated Calida on becoming one of the three co-directors of SWOP-USA, all of whose directors are now Black, as well as JetSetting Jasmine, who took over for the artificial-intelligence closed captioning generator when it failed midway through the conference. (Jasmine will be making transcripts of the conference available to anyone who requests it.) Love then read an excerpt from an interview with long-time political activist, philosopher, academic and author Dr. Angela Davis, who recently retired from US Santa Cruz, about how Black sex workers are treated worse than white, and why sex work should be decriminalized. "Malcolm X has a quote where he says the most disrespected person in the world is a black woman," Love explained, "and in light of everything that's happened with Breonna Taylor and the constant way in which Black lives, be they Black trans lives, Black women's lives, Black men's lives, Black sex workers lives, are consistently disrespected, I felt that was a really, really important piece to read." And with that, Love brought the roughly two-and-a-half-hour Politricks conference to a close.