Today Is International Sex Workers Day

Today is June 2nd. International Sex Workers Day. Also known, in its original and unfiltered form, as International Whores’ Day.

The day has roots in something real and radical. On June 2, 1975, sex workers and their allies occupied the Saint-Nizier church in Lyon, France. Sex work was legal, but workers had no legal protections and faced constant violence and stigma. The occupation was sparked by the deaths of two sex workers and the police’s refusal to do anything meaningful about it.

Under a banner that read “Our children do not want to see our mothers go to jail,” they struck for eight days, calling for an end to police harassment, the reopening of the hotels where they worked, and an investigation into their colleagues’ murders. The protesters were eventually removed. The law didn’t change. But something else did. The following year, June 2nd became International Sex Workers Day.

The very words we use to talk about this movement have their own history. “Sex work” was coined in 1978 by Carol Leigh — a sex worker, poet, and activist known as the Scarlot Harlot, who was a member of the San Francisco prostitute rights group COYOTE. She invented the term at an anti-pornography feminist conference because the existing language framed workers as objects of use rather than people doing a job.

I met Carol Leigh in Montreal around 2001 or 2002. I was helping organize an event with the Coalition for the Rights of Sex Workers and she was our special guest. At some point that night she performed “Bad Girls” — the Donna Summer song — and it was exactly right. Joyful and political at the same time. She was warm and funny and inspiring. I didn’t have one big revelation moment. Just the feeling of being in a room where someone made everything a little clearer.

I’d been in the industry since 1998. I made porn. I worked on cam. I was proud of that work. But the label “sex worker” — I held it at arm’s length for years. I think part of me had absorbed the hierarchy the outside world projected onto the industry. Like there were gradations of respectability and I was somewhere safer, somewhere more abstract, further from whatever people pictured when they heard those words.

The friction was already there when I met Carol. What took longer was understanding where it came from and what to do with it. The more activism I did, the more advocacy, the more time I spent alongside other people in the movement, the more I understood that the same stigma ran through all of it. The same moral panic. The same legal and financial precarity. FOSTA-SESTA didn’t care whether you worked in person or online — it gutted us all around the world. The banking discrimination, the platform deplatforming, the shame that follows you into doctors’ offices and family dinners — that’s not niche. That’s the industry and it’s been going on for years and years.

It was also a two-way process. I needed to see myself in the movement, but the movement had to make room for people like me too. Digital workers, cam models, adult performers — for a long time we were seen as adjacent rather than central. It felt presumptuous to claim solidarity when my daily reality looked different from the issues that dominated the conversation.

But we belong here. We always did.

I am a sex worker. I have been one for 27 years. Carol Leigh died in 2022. I’m glad I got to be in a room with her. I’m glad she gave us the words.

Happy International Sex Workers Day to every person in this industry — in-person, online, on screen, on cam. The Lyon women who occupied that church in 1975 did it for all of us.