Wealthy Beijing Housewives Would Love Thalia Vacha

This is the third installment in a series of interviews I am carrying out with various sex workers. The purpose is so that people can hear various perspectives from sex workers who aren’t necessarily immersed in the philosophy/theory world. My hope is to paint a more realistic image of the various professions that fall under sex work, show what sex workers actually think about what they do, and give some women an opportunity to talk about their jobs. If you want to read the first two interviews I did you can find them linked here and here.

Thalia Vacha is an essayist, fiction writer, and poet. Her writing has appeared in the Los Angeles Review of Books, Joyland Magazine, The Audacity, Longreads, Black Warrior Review, and The Masters Review. But you probably know her writing from her amazing Substack. She is also a professional domme and Shibari model. She was born in London and now lives as a trans refugee in Bangkok. Before Bangkok she lived in Los Angeles California where she began a PhD in Creative Writing and Literature at the University of Southern California, a degree she is now completing from half a world away. She has an MFA in Creative Writing from UC Riverside and a BA in Philosophy from King’s College London. But above and beyond all that, Thalia is my friend. We talk several times a week at minimum, and often more like every day. Since my essay Sex Working Through Your Ph.D. went viral (over 300,000 views), I’ve been trying to interview fellow sex workers to get their perspectives on the work we collectively do. My goal is to provide a variety of perspectives so that it is not merely the most lyrical writers, or most upset posters, that have their voices heard. It has also been an absolute pleasure to include in these interview series interviews not only with strangers, but with friends like Thalia. The interview which you are about to read is not only the first time I’ve interviewed her about sex work; it is a transcript of the first time we’ve seen each other face to face on video call.

AA: Here’s a question that I’ve been thinking about. It’s from a piece of your writing. It’s this line someone said to you, that they were a natural sadist because they don’t care how the other person likes it or if the other person likes it. I take issue with that, because I don’t think that’s what makes a sadist a sadist, obviously. But I supposed you have no illusions about being dominant in your personality or your life or your sexual preferences, and yet you’ve chosen to be a domme. This is one of the main ways your services are requested and utilized. What is it like doing work that is so against your proclivities?

TV: When people ask, I have a joke, which is that I’m a professional dominatrix and a lifestyle submissive, and I’m a professional bisexual and a lifestyle lesbian. I do do a bit of both, but work being a submissive kind of rarer. If it counts, I sometimes do work as a Shibari model, and I’ve been a sub for shoots, for online clips. And that is often really fun because I’m doing something I enjoy with someone really hot. It kind of sucks that we’re doing it for the male gaze, but at least it can be a fun day together.

You brought up that line, “I’m a real sadist, I don’t like it when they enjoy it,” which my horrible ex said. And being a professional dominatrix, something that people miss is that ultimately it’s a service job. You’re serving a client, and you’re meeting their needs, and the way you’re meeting their needs is by making them serve you. And you obviously want to be able to create within that frame power dynamics, ways in which they are serving you. You are challenging them, you are the one who’s taking the lead, and doing the session on your own terms, but ultimately, if you’re me, you’re still thinking about it in the way we often think about commercial transactions. Like, okay, I don’t want to give him everything he likes, because I want there to be stuff that he comes back for. And I do want to try and find a way of making this for me as much as possible, but obviously I want to make sure that he’s enjoying himself.

There are lots of professional dommes who are really into it, who manage over the long term to create real dynamics with people who are also clients. But in doing it on a session-by-session basis, in some ways it works for my more subby side. Because if someone is very clear about what they want, if they have a very specific set of activities that I don’t mind doing, then it’s like, okay great, we’re going to do these activities. And in that sense it feels kind of like any other service job. It isn’t, because the emotional and sexual exchange has a different kind of charge and consequence.

The truth is that on the one hand, because I have so much experience as a sub, I have a really good inner map of how things feel in terms of sensation, emotions, and so on, and so I feel like I’m when I’m doing those sessions, I’m a conductor orchestrating a symphony on someone’s body or in their mind. And I’m really good at the job because I know that stuff so well that it does translate. I also do think I have a lot of repressed energy that may be more dominant, or may be more sadistic, and may be more aggressive, and so on, that I can’t let out, usually. And it comes out in those sessions a little bit, and it kind of scares me.

But the other aspect is the fact that I’m doing it with men. I still can’t fully find a way to articulate it, but I will do a session, and in the moment it will feel kind of fine. It will sometimes be interesting in that I get a kind of glimpse of heterosexual sensations. I feel like I gain access to some sort of universal library of behaviors women can perform in order to deal with men, whether it’s lying, whether it’s making pornographic noises, whether it’s batting them away or being teasing in a certain way. All of these things come out of me that I didn’t know were there.

And I’m obviously being sexualized by a man in a way that makes me feel like a woman distinctively. That’s always an interesting thing for me to get a glimpse of. Like, oh, this is how a man is able to kind of validate my femininity and my feeling of womanness. That’s very fascinating to me. But at the same time, often I will find after a session I will just be not in a good way, and I’ll often dissociate, for a few days afterwards. I’ll just be kind of not fully in my body, very distractible, not able to focus on anything, feeling a bit gross. And I can’t pinpoint the activity that does that to me, but I feel like it’s in the energy exchange combined with the fact that I’m kind of repulsed by men in a sexual context.

I don’t want to say anything too harsh about men, but in terms of engaging with men sexually as sexual beings, it makes me feel a little bit sick being in that dynamic. And something that I think is true for a lot of forms of sex work, especially more taboo forms of sex work, is that some of your clients will have been going around holding these fantasies down for a long time, letting them build up, watching porn, feeling ashamed of the fact they’re watching porn, wanting no one to find out about the stuff that they’re into, maybe feeling like it reflects on them in a bad way, it could be a threat to their marriage.

So the spring is fully wound up, and they come to you, and they channel all of this energy through you. It’s a hard thing to describe in a tangible, corporeal way, but I find that is something that makes the work distinctive and makes it so exhausting. And when I talk to people who do different kind of kinds of sex work, it’s a feeling that I feel like a lot of people share. It’s not just in the dominatrix business.

AA: Holding someone else’s fantasies definitely seems part of it for almost everyone who does sex work. It does really seem to be a universalizable aspect of the jobs that fall under this, and the weight that can involve.

You said that your clientele is primarily male. In my own work, most of mine are actually transfem at this point.

TV: I’ve almost never been approached by a trans woman.

AA: I think I accidentally curated a vibe for myself where I am aspirational to a lot of trans women, even in the anonymous or semi-anonymous sex work I do. Don’t get me wrong, I do get male clients, and the ones that are most forward and the most pursuant of services are men. But the actual bread and butter is now entirely trans women. I realize this is mostly hypothetical for you, but do you think your opinions or feelings about it would change with who the submissive is?

TV: I’ve had some female clients. I’ve had inquiries. I’ve also had situations where a cis woman will approach me on a dating app and be like, oh, I’ve always wanted to try a trans woman. And I’ll say, well, I’ve never wanted to be tried as a trans woman. So I can help you with that, but it would be a paid-for service. There’ll often be a little negotiation, maybe they’ll even send a deposit, but often they’ll get scared and chicken out.

I think with women there can be a different set of challenges, because I don’t care about men. They have more power than me. They often approach me in an extremely entitled way. My domme persona, she’s much cooler than I am. She can do stuff that I can’t do. She can dismiss people, she can ignore people. With men I can be really strict and not worry about their feelings. I find a large part of the work is dealing with inquiries and dealing with the preamble. So with men, I can be like, look, we can have exchanges of two emails, and if you’re not putting money on the table after that, then I’m not going to waste any more time. My experiences with women is firstly that they know that I can empathize with them a lot more. I can feel who they are, and I have sympathy for them.

And I also know it’s like, fine for men to see sex workers, it’s so normal. Whereas, women, we’re not really supposed to have sexual desires of our own. And seeing a sex worker is kind of the ultimate expression of having a sexual desire just for yourself. And so I think when women approach, there can be shame. And then there’s also the fact that sexual access to us is supposed to be our value, and so being the one who pays is difficult for people’s egos. And I don’t know about trans women on this because I think in some ways it could be even more difficult.

I had a client – I’ve got an essay about them – it’s just a funny little story. They were a couple and they split up before I could meet them. But they were paying to keep on talking to me. And at one point the girlfriend wanted to buy me a latex dress, she had a thing for latex, and so we were going to go back and forth on what dress would I like. So to the guy I was like, I think we should talk about that directly. I don’t really want to do that through you. And so he introduced me to her.

And I was trying to avoid being their therapist. They were trying to use me as their therapist, and I just kept saying, “Look, I want your money. It’s not like anything I tell you isn’t real and true, but ultimately I want you as a customer, I want your money, and everything I said can be shaped by that.” In the end, they broke up, and so I ended up with two clients. And I had this situation where they would try and come to me to check if the other was still talking to me.

It’s a really funny situation. But the woman was really hot. These guys were quite like elite people. The guy was apparently besties with Christopher Nolan, and they would go to fancy events and dress up really nice, and the woman was beautiful. She’s the kind of woman where, if I saw her in a bar, I would be like, oh my god, I would never have a chance with her, I’d be too afraid to talk to her. And at the same time, she was the one who was paying to engage with me and wanting me to domme her.

We never did the session because of issues that came up. But I think if we did the session, it would have been a lot more fun for me, and it wouldn’t have left me feeling fucked up in the same way. I have different issues about being dominant with women, like hurting women and seeing a woman in pain. Unless it’s me that’s suffering, I struggle with it. So the thing that came up firstly was she kept sending me nudes and she kept on trying to do stuff that would end her client status. You’re a client, this isn’t going to change, we have a boundary. You came to me because you wanted a service, and you’re not going to charm your way out of that. Things like that do happen in the sex work world, but I ended up just feeling like she was constantly trying to manipulate me. And that was really hard to deal with.

So I’m not really talking about the stuff that’s in the sessions themselves, but dealing with the negotiation and the inquiries and so on. Dealing with women is a much more sensitive and complicated dance. There’s a lot more feelings you have to be aware of. Men are always trying to manipulate you, but the ways in which women will do it can be a little bit more subtle and emotionally challenging. So it’s hard for me to answer your question without much experience. I’ve done sex work with women when I’ve been a rope bottom, and when I’ve subbed for videos, and that has also presented challenges. Because I’m a sub in the scene, it can be really hard to prevent external power dynamics, actual real power dynamics starting to stomp on the scene in the way of the ones that are supposed to happen in sex. If you’ve read my story, White Ladyboy, there’s a great example of that.

AA: I guess if you’re dating Christopher Nolan’s friend it’s not a huge deal, but I’m always just like, oh my god girl, you sure you want to spend money on this? The worst is when you find out that they don’t make that much money, and then you’re like, honey, let’s get you a financial advisor. Stop.

TV: I agree, if they don’t have money, then that can be an uncomfortable thing. At the same time, I think what a sex worker can be for a trans woman is actually quite different from what it can be for a cis man, and I think it’s quite different from what it can be for a cis woman as well. And I mean this pre- and post-transition. I read something that was by a trans woman that was calling any trans woman who saw a sex worker a class traitor. It was a straight woman who was saying trans lesbians were predatory. I was like, yeah, okay, you’re trying to push the stigma one step off you, but honey, we’re all the same to them. We’re all the predators. They don’t care that you’re straight.

My first long-term girlfriend was a pro domme, which was kind of my introduction to this world, because I got to see a lot behind the scenes. But I think if you think about the predicament of a trans woman: a cis man sees a sex worker, he’s horny, and he’s entitled, and he wants to do the thing he wants to do. Whereas a trans woman is someone who, especially pre-transition, has maybe internalized an idea that they’re a threat or a predator, and has a very keen sense, because of who they are, of the ways that sexual desire can be threatening to women. And so I think for some trans women that can leave them with not many places for their desire to go in a way that feels safe. There’s not an easy way for them to pursue their sexual desire if they’re afraid that in doing so they’ll be seen as a predator or a threat.

There’s also the kind of autogynephilic aspect. Pre-transition, it’s kind of hard to know how to enjoy your sexuality because you’re trying to enjoy it in the wrong role and in a body that doesn’t feel right. So in some ways I imagine as a trans woman, pre-transition or post-transition, going to see a sex worker is like, this feels like a safe way that I can explore my sexuality without harming anyone.

I can imagine someone hearing you say that a lot of your clients are trans women and bringing out the transmisogyny being like, well, that shows how trans women are like men. They’re all horn dogs wanting to see sex workers. But I think that it actually shows the opposite. It shows how dangerous sexuality is for trans women; seeing a sex worker allows them a space where they can be really confident that what they are doing is fully consensual, fully agreed upon, has very clear bounds in terms of what it is.

AA: You’re very much correct about this. It’s a dynamic where usually it’s a trans woman who is in an unsafe environment in their home or in dating or if you’re isolated somehow. And it can be very difficult to enforce boundaries of, hey, this is paid, I’ll respond to you, I’ll be friendly, but what are you paying for. I understand why you need this, but it gets weird, and you don’t want to lead them on.

TV: Which I think is an empathy thing as well. Because it’s like, men are going to get obsessed, men are going to get attached. Like, fuck off, like, down boy. I’m not concerned for their feelings. They’re the ones that have a lot of power here. But if you’re interacting with a trans woman, you sense her vulnerability. I feel this even outside of a sex work context. When I meet people who are very early in their transition, I feel like I really want to be authentic and I want to be myself, but I also really want to take care because I think that that’s such a difficult place to be. And it brings up a lot of stuff that I don’t want to think about. I don’t want to remember myself when I was at that phase. And so I’m having all this stuff coming up, but I’m like, I can’t bring that baggage, because this person is in a very vulnerable position that I understand, and the world is being extremely cruel to them.

This dynamic is also really interesting in a lifestyle sense, because I have a curse myself, which is I like BDSM, and I’m submissive, and I’m a masochist. Because of my community, I know a lot of dommes. People who are outside this world would maybe be surprised by the idea that there are celebrities in this world. But there are people who have really big social media followings, and they do amazing photo shoots. Some of these people are the biggest sadists you can imagine, like they’re so hardcore, and they do the craziest stuff with their clients and in their videos. And then they’re with me, and they’re like, “I really just want to cherish you and take care of you. I can’t hurt you, you’re so vulnerable. The world is already so cruel to you. I can do that to men because they deserve it, but I’m not going to do it to you.”

And I’m like men do not deserve for you to give them what they want! I deserve what I want! And I’ve had this conversation a few times, and I tease them for it. This isn’t even in a sex work context, this is a lifestyle context, but I remember some quote unquote male dom saying “one of my subs is coming over to do laundry.” And I was like, honey, that’s not BDSM, that’s just patriarchy. You’re not bringing anything here. You’re not bringing a dom. You’ve already got the whole infrastructure behind you. When it’s a woman doing it, we’re actually being powerful as individuals and subverting something. There’s all of these things that go into the power dynamic. So obviously it’s great when I meet someone who’s like I don’t give a fuck, I’ll fuck you up.

AA: The shift from doing sex work in the United States to doing sex work in Thailand, can you talk a little bit about it?

TV: My biggest spenders in the US were people who were like, “Oh, I just want to know you.” I had this guy who was obsessed with the idea of being friends with me. I was like, “You don’t understand.” But he was like, “You’re so intelligent, you help me understand the world, and I just want to listen to you, and I want to talk to you” and all of this stuff. I mean, he originally came to me because he wanted to eat my shit, you know? He was like, “Could you make me eat all of it?” And I was like, “Yeah, sure, I don’t care. The price is right. I can try.”

Even within the US context, it’s hard to compare one experience to the other. I would have thought of it as you become a domme, and then you have these one to two hour sessions that people book, and you go to them, and so on. But things end up often getting a lot more weird and random. Like the example of the couple who tried to make me pimp them out. (It was really bizarre. You can read the story separately. It was a really, really weird situation.)

So coming to Thailand…when I first got here I was nervous about whether I’d be able to keep my PhD funding, and so I kept the door open a little bit with sex work, but I didn’t pursue it. I just kept some accounts up. It’s usually just been opportunistic. So the first instance was I connected with a rope top who was in debt. She’s quite famous, so she’d been approached by these Chinese guys who had heard about her, who seemed like gangsters. And they wanted to put on a show in Pattaya—one on a boat and one in a go-go bar—with Shibari. She originally hired me to domme a porn star on stage who’s really famous actually. She was famous because she was in the news. She got arrested for having an OnlyFans in Thailand, and she just got out of jail and was working again. But in the end I ended up being a rope model for the performances that we did. And I don’t know, it was kind of a fun time at first. But it was all based on tips, so I didn’t know how much I was going to earn. And it’s Thailand, so I didn’t really earn that much money. So it was the blur between I’m getting a lot of meals paid for and I get to stay with some people I actually quite like in this fancy villa. And for the second trip, I wasn’t really working, but the top brought her mentor and they were like we want someone to practice tying on and have fun with in between the work. And I was like, oh my god, okay! Two dommes are gonna take me on an all-expenses paid trip and domme me! What more could I ask for!

I was working in the US illegally on a student visa, and the US is much more scary in terms of online surveillance. There’s all sorts of crazy ways in which sex workers are surveilled and so there’s a lot of risk that comes with that. In Thailand, I’m not so worried about that, but it’s much easier to run into situations where you’re not sure if you’re out of your depth. Everything seems really friendly and fun here, but these guys [in Pattaya]…the boss always has these two henchmen behind him, these muscley bodyguard types. And the boss was like, obsessed with me. He was talking about me all the time. We met this other local Thai kingpin who put on beauty pageants, and they wanted to find a sponsor for me. They were talking about how they were going to find a way to get my bottom surgery sorted. At one point they were talking about “oh, don’t you think that the wealthy Beijing housewives would like her? She’s a lesbian, so it won’t be like cheating to the husbands, but they can have so much fun with her.” This kind of thing.

I backed out of the situation, but if I’d taken the job, the reason why I wouldn’t have got in trouble was because they had the police paid off. So I didn’t have to worry about the fact that I didn’t have a work permit. Only I did, because you’re talking about these kinds of people, they’ve got no scruples. And I’m thinking there’s all these ways they want to make money out of me. Then I’m safe from the police because they’re keeping me safe, and they kind of own me.

I was kind of naively like, oh this is a really fun adventure because I’m getting tied up a lot by hot girls and so on. But then there’s also this sense of this could be fine, it’s probably fine, because I have the Thai people with me, I’m in the Thai people’s crew. And these people are Chinese, and they’re not going to win in that domain. But it’s a kind of uncertainty of whether I was two steps away from a trap, which could have ended up in Beijing, doing work that I didn’t want to do, living a life that I didn’t want to live for a long time, and unable to get out of it.

I shouldn’t have been, but I was in Vietnam, and I had some opportunities come up. A domme there advertised doubles for us, and then some other domme that I was speaking to in a more casual way, who knew about it, started threatening to blackmail me. She started sending me all these screenshots of my online profiles, and she was like, I’m going to go to the police if you don’t send me money. That was really scary. She couldn’t do anything in that situation, and I have Vietnamese people I could go to who could tell her to fuck off. They were like, “You’re making Vietnam look bad. Don’t act like this.” But for me, as someone who can be a little bit unhinged and uninhibited, and I say yes to things and see where things go sometimes, every now and then I realize I could be in over my head. I could be in a situation where I could really end up in a lot of misery.

AA: Is it more transactional in the US?

TV: In the US I feel like things are very transactional, and I keep them very transactional. But I think in Asia, you always need to kind of schmooze and win trust. With the number of big meals I had with the Chinese, they’re kind of showing off, but your behavior is also being watched. You’re performing in the right way and you’re doing the things you’re supposed to do to win trust in a Chinese business context. Which is a lot to learn very quickly. You have to be quite nimble and observant. The other thing is I’ve only had one client I actually went to for a one-on-one session. I’ve had other inquiries, but they’re usually Europeans and Americans.

AA: I was curious if it was more transactional in Asia because of the amount of sex tourism, the amount of people who are coming here to have a one-off transactional thing that never follows them anywhere. Whereas in the US you have the guy who wants to be your friend.

TV: Foreigners are often very rude, but it really depends on what country they’re coming from. They bring a different culture and bring different expectations. So it’s quite varied. You get a lot of idiots, you get a lot of time wasters, but it’s a hard thing to make generalizations about, especially because I’m not actively working on advertising. My old sex work page has basically become a personal sapphic shibari page. It’s like a thirst trap, but for hot dommes these days, more than a sex work page.

You also don’t get the typical sex tourist, because the typical sex tourist is looking for something that is more affordable. Something that they can’t afford at home. But doing sex work out in Asia as a white person, you have huge privilege. You can charge maybe double the rates of some of the local people. There are local people who establish themselves and will charge as much as you, but you can charge a lot more just for being a white person because there aren’t many options. You tend to get inquiries from the people who are here looking for something that they can’t afford at home, but then they find out that they can’t afford it here either. So you get a bit of a select clientele. But like I said, I hardly get any inquiries. I’ve really not been working out here.

AA: How does transness interact with whiteness?

TV: I can’t quite work it out, and my Thai friends can’t quite help me work it out either, but people treat me differently from other white people. That might just be because I’m a very friendly person, and I make people feel safe, but I also sometimes feel like in Thailand, some people are like, yeah, trans women, that’s kind of a Thai thing. You’re kind of a Thai thing. And so I sometimes feel like being a trans woman gets me closer to having a kind of honorary Thai status.

AA: Wait, is this like homo nationalism working in your favor?

TV: It could be! I don’t know, I’m really speculating, because I’m quite bad at understanding why people treat me in such bizarre ways.

I sometimes feel like being a trans woman, it’s kind of like a status equalizer. It’s like you’re white, which gives you this status, but then you’re a trans woman, which kind of puts you below me, so we’ll break even. I think that there is something about being a trans woman that can make people accept you as an outsider paradoxically. I find that as a trans woman, when I’m in outsider groups, like among sex workers, for example, I gain a greater degree of acceptance, and my outsiderness as a trans woman gives me some sort of affinity status.

AA: I always try to end on a on a happy note, so what’s one happy thing, like a specific instance, where sex work has benefited you?

TV: I find it really hard to say positive things about sex work to a public audience without them wanting to take that as you saying everything is roses. But one is the community. Sex workers are the best. Before I started, I was like, “I’m such a clueless naive girl,” so I contacted a bunch of people and asked them how they worked. And they met me for coffees, and they were so enthusiastic to teach me everything. Opposite to things where you have imposter syndrome, and you wonder whether you’re welcome in the space, the sex workers I met were all just so ready to support and embrace me.

I mentioned in one of my essays, my friend Antonia was like, “I don’t care if you feel like you’re to blame for what happens. I don’t care what happens. If something bad happens, you can come to me and I’ll never say I told you so.” I knew if someone really fucked with me and I wasn’t safe, I had people I could go to, sex work community, and I probably could ask them to put him in hospital, and they would have done it without asking any questions. I didn’t know any other community like that. It’s really bad bitches, forged out of necessity because we all know how hard it is. We all know how dangerous it can be, and so obviously you get bad apples, you get lots of shitty people, but the good people are pretty awesome, and all really hot as well. It’s cool having super sexy friends, especially as a trans woman who feels very insecure being around the cool girls or whatever. It’s fun.

The other thing is it actually makes transparent a lot of things that are deliberately made to be opaque in terms of the way transaction operates in day-to-day society. I tell people, they might look at sex workers and think that we’re the ones who are working in the domain of fantasy. But I think you enter sex work and then you look at the civilian world and you start to see how fantasy is serving as a kind of infrastructure through which transactions take place, and the way that fantasy and performance are used to render the transactional nature of some things invisible. Particularly the exploitation of women, because so often in sex work, so many of us have these experiences of “this is something that someone should pay for, someone will pay for this.” And previously people would just extract it from me as if it was their birthright, as if I owed it to them.

I think it lifts the curtain up on a lot of everyday social dynamics. Which is part of the irony of the way that anti-sex work feminists, etc. talk about us. Sometimes they don’t realize how much what they’re saying applies just as much or more to their world. Obviously there this old whorephobic thing they’ll say where it’s like, a housewife is just a sex worker, but when they say it in a way of denigrating a housewife. But I’m thinking about it the other way around, where you can see new things about the way that social dynamics are operating.

Also for me, learning to put up boundaries, learning to communicate, learning to talk about difficult topics, all of these things – the stakes are so high for being very clear about what activities you’re going to do, what the sexual interests are, what the barriers are, very clear about talking about money, very clear about not letting someone encroach. Getting very repetitive training on the ways that men will try and manipulate you. It developed in me a lot of skills. I, as someone who’s a bit of a pushover, quite a submissive personality, I badly needed those skills. And they also transfer well to some day-to-day lifestyle, including in relationships.

It’s interesting, when I talk to other sex workers, it’s just so normal to negotiate certain types of topics. And I forget when talking to someone who’s not so familiar that talking about anything sexual can be terrifying. And the norm is to be vague and evasive and to be scared to approach the topic that you really want to approach. I’ve had a lot of bad experiences, but especially as someone who’s a writer who wants to be able to see things and tell the truth about the world, I think that fortunately, for all of the shit that I’ve accrued, even for the relatively little amount I’ve done, I’ve still gained a lot. Especially the community. The coolest people I know are sex workers. People who will genuinely step up and have your back in a way that I think is very rare. I see it among trans people. We turn up for each other for surgeries, things like that. Very rare, even in cis queer communities. So that kind of sense of people being willing to put something on the line and step up for each other, even if you don’t know each other too well, is really cool.