Happy Whores Day!!

Happy Pride my loves! Today, June 2nd, is International Whores Day/International Sex Workers Day, and I’m so excited to celebrate with all of our queer sex working community. We’ve got lots of amazing content coming your way this glorious Pride month!

International Whores Day, like Pride, began as a protest. From Sydney Mardi Gras to the Stonewall Riots in New York, we sex workers have always been a part of these movements. On June 2nd, 1975, more than 100 sex workers gathered in Lyon, France, to protest police crackdowns and increasing fines. Demanding an end to police harassment and brutality against sex workers, they occupied the Saint-Nizier Church for 8 days. Though French police broke down their protest, its impact remains to this day and its significance is undiminished. Sex worker rights are human rights and All Cops Are Bastards. 

We’re launching two new series this month to celebrate our community: Hobby Whores; a series of all your fantastic adventures exploring your special interests and pastimes. We want to provide a space where you can share your interests and passions with the community. Afterall, we are more than the work, and we are not always on the clock! We want to show what you want to tell!

And, Hoes Odes; a poetry series by and for sex workers. Sex workers make incredible art across the board and we’d like to invite you to share your poetry in, around, and outside of sex work. This is your engraved invitation to flex your creative muscles and tell us a tale! 

We would also love for you, all our lovely and many varied members of our glittering community, to contribute your queer sex working stories. We’d love to hear from you! We recognise that we are part of a wider community that is often violently oppressed and whose members are not heard from nearly enough. 

In our publication, we love to see a multitude of voices from all kinds of workers, from across all kinds of backgrounds - especially those who might not otherwise be heard. Stories change minds, and in a world where sex work is largely stigmatised and/or criminalised, your stories matter. As an organisation by and for sex workers, we value the experiences and stories of you, the workers.

Are you a queer sex worker who’d like to write for us? We’d love to hear from you! Send your pitches here!

Everyone Wants To Be a Ho, No One Wants To Be a Whore

Above all else, to be a sex worker is to gamble with, and often lose, the ability to become someone, and something, else after leaving the industry.

Tryst.link BlogAdrie Rose

The Importance of Pleasure for Sex Workers

We’re in the business of pleasure; it’s what we do. Our role as sex workers is to create a comfortable, safe, and above all, intimate space for our clients. And whether clients recognise it or not, we’ve started that process long before we’ve met them!

Tryst.link BlogTulsi Tamora

Changing Landscapes: Retiring and Unretiring from Sex Work

I take short breaks from selling sex often, and occasionally find myself overwhelmed with anxiety about how to approach the new sex work landscape. More than once, I have stopped doing sex work with the belief that I will retire for good, only to come back to it within a matter of months.

Tryst.link BlogJack Parker

How To Talk About Us (And Not Over Us!)

If I can’t speak on this panel about the way that policing impacts my life and the lives of my sex-working comrades without incriminating myself to people who have the authority to arrest me, I am effectively silenced.

Tryst.link BlogJessie Sage

Looking Back: A Year of Decrim

On the one hand, I feel like sex work in Victoria has entered a new era. On the other hand, I’m worried that this improved situation for some of us will mean a decrease in motivation to push and to fight for the rights of those of us who have been left behind.

Tryst.link BlogGeorgie Wolf

No Sugar Without Sugar: Why Sex Work Can’t be Divorced from Sex

It’s totally fine to be genuinely curious about and want to do sex work – we all started there, after all – but the way people say it so flippantly can imply that it’s an easy job to jump into…

Tryst.link BlogLana

A Sex Worker’s Guide to a Life Without Bodily Autonomy

Come in, have a seat, take a load off. I hope your stay in the wonderful world of other people knowing what’s best for you and your body is a pleasant one.

Tryst.link BlogAdrie Rose

Motherhood, Autonomy, and Selfishness

I am always and forever a mom. My baby uses my body as food and I as mother have sacrificed my body for such a purpose. As a pro-Domme who also plays as a mommy Domme, where breastfeeding clients is common, I think about how I can give myself without it being as intimate as it is with my own child.

Tryst.link BlogHoney de Vil

Sex Work: Struggle, Success and Finally Buying a Bigger Bed

I needed to find a new way to make money. I turned to sex work, and I’ve never looked back.

Tryst.link BlogLana

Ten Reasons Not to Date a Sex Worker

The question of ‘would you date a sex worker’ is whorephobic and needs to stop. It’s rooted in misogynistic and outdated ideas of ownership, homophobia, and morality.

Tryst.link BlogAmelia Swann

So You’ve Found Out Your Adult Child is a Sex Worker

This heartfelt and healing conversation is for parents and their sex-working children who are trying to understand how to relate to each other, and perhaps how to heal from any pain that their relationships have undergone, in relation to sex work.

Tryst.link BlogJessie Sage

Coping with Burnout: What a Break From Sex Work Taught Me

I started sex work years ago, but had not had a break until recently – and this made it impossible to really tell how sex work impacted my relationship with my sexuality and desire.

Tryst.link BlogEm Rose