Like my rich clients, Epstein promised jobs, fancy trips, and connections for young women and girls

I should tell you I turned away many rich men. Left them sitting in the strip club audience holding car keys intended for me, waiting for their dick pills to kick in.

This was a privilege that my race and gender allowed me: the ability to say “no,” and trust that there would be other paying clients who would offer cash-in-hand, no strings attached. Having the privilege of leverage as a cis white girl is not lost on me. Some of my colleagues who were street-based sex workers worked in the club sometimes to get out of the San Francisco rain. Many of them didn’t enjoy the luxury of a brusque “no.”

At that time I was not old enough to order alcohol from a bar, but I was old enough to dance nude at a full-contact lap dancing club. Regardless of our position in life, in the club we were in close proximity to poverty, danger and risk. We were there for our economic survival. Unlike Epstein’s victims, I was a consensual sex worker, clear on what was expected and wily enough to negotiate the interaction with force. It was not pleasant. Most jobs aren’t.

Back then, the nude club in San Francisco that I worked at for 12 years was the one that Dr. Jennifer Worley described as “just a smelly whorehouse” in her book Neon Girls: A Stripper’s Education in Protest and Power (154). She was referring to the Market Street Cinema, where I danced when I also worked at The Lusty Lady. During our labor war, the union busting boss iced us out and began limiting our shifts because we disrupters had the audacity to unionize strippers.

It’s fascinating to me how whorephobia and classism dulls the blades of our potential solidarity as if needing to work in the raunchiest place in town to survive made me less of a Lusty Lady at heart. Worley’s middle-class aspirations and her second-wave feminist tendencies had her look down at strippers like me; strippers who resorted to giving extras as our stage fees went up and up and up.

I realize now, looking back, that I was a pity hire at the Lusty Lady. From the Market Street Cinema to the Lusty Lady was a big step up for me, but for Dr. Jennifer Worley, it was a big step down.

After all, I was a Kathy Acker stripper. Not an Andrea Dworkin stripper. But you will have to wait for the full story about that time and place. I am writing another book, guys.

Sex workers have the right to privacy and the right to work. The faith-based groups who conflate sex work and sex trafficking are scheming to “end demand.” That means, they want to eradicate the industry altogether, which would economically punish people who are already struggling to survive. Legislation that appears to care about the welfare of minors is actually aimed at hyper-criminalizing consensual commercial sex.

Bills that are showing up in Trump’s Epstein era are designed to trick you into assuming normality and good faith, because why wouldn’t anyone with a pulse want to help survivors of sex trafficking and sexual abuse? No one cares about sex trafficking MORE than sex workers. Due to our proximity, we are often on the front lines, because if talking about a bad situation is going to get you arrested, you’re not going to. And if a person is being abused and trafficked and they don’t seek help, they will experience more harm—possibly even death.

Here is the educational part: California’s AB379 is a trash bill. It is an anti-trans, immigrant-hating, sex worker-fearing bill packaged as anti-sex trafficking. Please help us repeal it. If you thought criminalizing sex work was unconstitutional—and it definitely is, then AB379 is psychotic.

AB379 wants to punish someone for “intent to purchase a commercial sex act” which means, arresting someone for a thought crime. In practical terms, AB379 wants to arrest people for walking outside of a strip club, for smoking a cigarette near a massage parlor, and for waving to someone, especially if that someone looks a way cops don’t like, which means Black, Brown and/or trans, and happens to be walking somewhere, anywhere. Racist, evangelical SWERFS want to collaborate with ICE by giving them carte blanche to arrest and disappear Black and Brown consensual sex workers from existing. This is their “end demand” fever dream.

Trafficking minors is already very illegal, with steep penalties. We workers are often first responders to victims. Our clients are also often first responders. The Nordic models and bills like AB379 that criminalize walking while trans are asinine and counterproductive.

We need your help. Please familiarize yourself with the extremely regressive bills being signed by Gavin Newsom that seek to further obliterate sex workers and the erotic industry that so many people rely on for survival. Newsom signed the bill on July 30, 2025. It was supported by Maggie Krell, Todd Gloria of San Diego and District Attorney Summer Stephen. Sex workers and advocates made several trips to Sacramento to explain that as adult entertainers, we are more concerned with trafficking than anyone else, but AB379 is harmful and counterproductive, just like SESTA/FOFSTA. Legislators have refused to include sex workers before cooking up these terrible bills that ruin our lives. It must stop!

If you believe all workers deserve dignity, a living wage, life, liberty and safe working conditions, free from harassment, abuse, deportation and incarceration, please help us repeal AB379! Don’t be a SWERF Barbie like Gavin Newsom.

PLEASE help us educate civilians on the difference between consensual work and trafficking.

JOIN US:

Rally for Repeal of new Loitering with Intent Law

Democratic Party State Convention

Moscone Center 3^rd/Howard, San Francisco

Saturday, February 21, 11AM to 1 PM