In Our Fight for Sexual Liberation, We Must Not Forget About Sex Workers

“Sexuality is so often something that we are taught is supposed to exist in private space, behind closed doors. Maybe with an intimate partner, maybe not even with an intimate partner, and that is part of [the] shame,” Wu continues. ​“I believe things that can exist in public or collectively can be healing spaces for people to come together and feel like we are part of something bigger than ourselves. … Having sex in public spaces is part of our queer heritage. That has always been part of the culture, and the AIDS crisis dampened the wildness that some of our elders created in the ​’60s and ​’70s with the sexual liberation of those times. It’s important to bring those back specifically for queer and trans folks.”

Sex educator Jamie Joy adds: ​“I’ve interacted with hundreds of people in this industry over the last ten years of my life, [and] whether it’s people doing in-person sessions, sex educators or porn performers, the underlying connection between them is that they believe that sex is healing. It inherently exists within and beyond capitalism. They deeply believe in the transformative power of what they’re doing.”

Our relationship with sex and gender is intrinsically braided into all facets of our pursuit of liberation. Sexual liberation begins with sex education, sexual diversity and protecting sex workers. And let me be clear: Legislation alone will never liberate us while it exists within a system designed to oppress. Street-based sex work is especially vulnerable, and all sex workers substantially feel the trickle-down effects of violent and harmful legislation, including the wave of anti-trans and drag bills, the overturning of Roe v. Wade, and the creation of the Allow States and Victims to Fight Online Sex Trafficking Act and Stop Enabling Sex Traffickers Act, or FOSTA-SESTA, a package of laws passed in 2018 under Trump that is ​“intended to fight sex trafficking” but ​“actually hurt the people it aimed to help,” explained In These Times columnist Kim Kelly in the August article ​“What Sex Workers Want from Kamala Harris.” Project 2025 is simply the newest mutation of a lineage of subjugation promoted as protection.

The decriminalization of sex work takes priority over other legislation because decriminalization gives workers the autonomy to utilize their labor in a way that suits them, individually, the best — whereas legalization opens the door for further government control over our bodies. In other words, the criminalization of sex work drives it further into the shadows, increasing the same predatory practices that legislators claim to want to eradicate.

But we cannot free ourselves through pleasure alone. When we center ourselves only on pleasure, we can become distracted from the necessary labor needed to dismantle colonial systems. Capitalism encourages our pursuit of feeling good while requiring our failure to feel satisfied time and again. Just as coal, oil and other natural resources have been pilfered to the point of lasting corruption, so too has the natural resource of our sexuality been abused — from the rape and bodily commodification of Indigenous people and Black people since before the inception of the United States to the societal minimization of feminized labor, such as domestic care and sex work.

Reclaiming our sexuality is one step of many to rewiring our relationships to power. One central aspect is internal reconstruction, the development of an active and collaborative practice of releasing shame and questioning our biases. Sex educator and kink enthusiast Tabz (Goddess Hullanta) believes collective sexual liberation begins with the individual:

Release your shame around pleasure and allow yourself to have the spiritual or physical pleasure your ancestors were not allowed to have, but you are in a better space to explore. Filling your cup with an orgasm or even different forms of intimacy within your relationships can heal traumatic wounds. … Where are you harming yourself with old ideas? What you can do for sex workers is the same thing: reevaluate yourself. Are you harboring some slight inner slut-shaming that you’re putting on other people? What’s stopping you from fully supporting a sex worker?

Community change is the next step. To embrace the public means to rewrite our core societal structures, allowing sex to exist openly. Public sex is an ancestrally queer concept that has existed in defiance of the state and homophobic society. Hot Bits is of that legacy, but there’s still much work to be done in the Philadelphia queer community. As Hot Bits collaborator and burlesque performer Xerlina Devine explains: ​“I want to see [decolonial practices like Hot Bits] in larger ways that don’t feel subcultural. It still feels very underground, and I would love to get it above ground in really meaningful and tangible ways, such as legislation that directly protects these things and is fully informed.” Moving sex into the public is literal, but it’s also a collective concept that represents increasing sexual education, safer practices for sex workers, protection of vulnerable youth and LGBTQ rights.

Nightlife artist bb Basura believes that public outlets like Hot Bits can ​“help teach us how to take care of each other better and look out for each other, how to see in the dark literally and figuratively, how to protect some of the last few public spaces where we can explore sexuality and our eroticism out in the open, [which] can lead to the developing of shared desires and affinities across and beyond identity lines.” Basura goes on to say that ​“a more liberated queer sexuality lives out in the open for me — not in the open as in assimilation and normalization into capitalism, and not hidden further into the closet of private property or institutions or the limits of our own queer bubbles, but in the open, under the stars of this world we are constantly made to be alienated from.” Much like the deceptive trap of representation without reparations, exposure without care and abolition leads to violence to those exposed.

So let us unbind sex from the private, hidden and shameful. With sexuality collectively accepted as more than just a physical act, more than just procreation, we will learn who we are and have room for the expansiveness of others. When I sat in that Hot Bits theater surrounded by queer eyes flickering with delight and desire, I knew we were moving closer to untangling ourselves from classist and privatized pleasure, collectively reclaiming the sexual liberation we deserve.

We are communally reliant cellular organisms existing together as one body. It is all me. It is all you.