Under prohibition, my life, your life and the lives of everyone reading this are nothing but cheap, disposable and interchangeable objects with which “messages” can be sent to all the other pieces of human trash…and then crumpled up and thrown away. – “Sending Messages”
Every December 17th, sex workers around the world gather together to mourn our dead, killed by the violence that inevitably results from the prohibition which pushes our work into the shadows. The observance began on the eve of the sentencing of Gary Ridgeway, the Green River Killer, in 2003, and many of the sex workers subjected to violence (fatal or not) every year are still harmed by men like him, evil individuals emboldened by society’s pretense that we are expendable and the knowledge that the “authorities” aren’t going to work very hard to solve crimes committed against us. But a far larger fraction of the violence committed against sex workers is committed directly by armed agents of the state, often though not always under the excuse of “gathering evidence” for our “crime” of having impure thoughts about otherwise-legal sex. And even when cops aren’t directly raping, robbing and caging us, politicians intentionally encourage others to commit violence by passing laws specifically designed to make us desperate and define us specifically as subhuman creatures who can be brutalized with impunity. Seattle, where I live, is an especially striking case of these evil procedures: one would think that the “authorities” of the place where the Green River Killer hunted his victims would be especially aware of how criminalization harms women, but no; instead they work to destroy us indirectly by hunting our clients, while mouthing toxic propaganda about how we’re helpless victims. And so tonight, as I have for the past several years, I will keep vigil with my sisters in order to remember the victims of these vile policies, and to renew our pledge to keep fighting for a day in which our own society no longer brands us fair game.
