✊🏾 Sex Work Is Queer History
Queer liberation has always had a red umbrella overhead.
Happy Pride month! I want to use this time to talk about queer history and the role of sex workers in advancing this particular social justice movement.
When we talk about queer history, names like Marsha P. Johnson, Sylvia Rivera, and Stormé DeLarverie inevitably come up—and rightly so. They were front-line warriors in the Stonewall uprising, icons of radical queer resistance.
But one thread we often overlook in this legacy? Many of these trailblazers were also sex workers.
That’s not a coincidence. The roots of LGBTQ+ liberation are deeply entangled with sex work, and to ignore that is to erase a critical part of our collective survival and power.
💥 Sex Workers Threw the First Brick
Let’s start with Stonewall.
The 1969 riots in New York City were a turning point for LGBTQ+ rights. But who led the charge? It wasn’t corporate sponsors or celebrities in rainbow merch—it was trans women, drag queens, and street queens, many of whom were sex workers surviving in a system that offered them few other options.
Marsha P. Johnson and Sylvia Rivera both engaged in sex work and never hid that truth. Sylvia spoke openly about hustling on 42nd Street—not as shame, but as testimony. These women weren’t just involved in the movement. They shaped it, using their lived experience and grit to build something the system never offered them: a sense of freedom.
So yes—if a brick was thrown, it was likely thrown by someone with a red umbrella in one hand and justice in the other.
🌈 Most Sex Workers Are Queer, Trans, and Gay
Here’s a truth mainstream narratives often skip: a huge number of sex workers are queer themselves.
Why? Because formal employment has never been safe or accessible for many LGBTQ+ folks—especially if you're trans, Black, undocumented, or disabled. Sex work becomes a form of survival, autonomy, and resistance. It’s one of the few ways queer people have been able to pay rent, support chosen family, and claim agency over their own bodies.
To talk about queer liberation and ignore sex workers is to erase the very people who are the movement. We’re not separate categories. We’re the same community.
Sex Workers Have Always Advanced Queer Rights
Sex workers didn’t stop at Stonewall. They’ve always been in the trenches of LGBTQ+ activism.
Johnson and Rivera’s STAR (Street Transvestite Action Revolutionaries) offered housing and support to trans youth doing survival sex work. Today, groups like SWOP Behind Bars, The BiPOC Adult Industry Collective, and Red Canary Song (among literally hundreds of others!) continue that legacy by fighting for decriminalization, labor rights, housing access, and healthcare.
Why? Because sex workers know how oppression works. They live at the intersections—of racism, poverty, homophobia, transphobia, and criminalization. So their vision for liberation? It’s bigger than just marriage equality or rainbow logos. It’s about safety, dignity, and power for everyone.
Sex Workers Show Up When No One Else Will
During the height of the AIDS crisis, hospitals turned people away. Churches closed their doors. Families disowned their own children.
And who showed up?
Sex workers.
They provided care, fed people, cleaned wounds, and held dying hands. They organized rent support and raised money for funerals. They built networks of mutual aid long before it had a name.
And it’s still happening. Today, sex workers are often the ones organizing mutual aid efforts, redistributing wealth, offering shelter, and showing up for community members—without fanfare or funding.
This is love. This is labor. This is queer care in action.
Queer Icons Were (And Are) Sex Workers
Let’s be real: some of your favorite queer icons were sex workers.
Jean Genet, French novelist and playwright, was a hustler before becoming a literary legend.
Bambi, one of France’s first public trans women and a renowned cabaret performer, worked in sex and nightlife.
Ts Madison, beloved Black trans creator and advocate, got her start in adult entertainment and now uses her platform to uplift sex workers and trans people alike.
Miss Major Griffin-Gracy, a legendary Black trans elder and activist. While not often centered in sex work narratives, Miss Major has spoken about her experiences surviving through "street work" and incarceration, especially as a young trans woman in the 1960s. She fiercely advocates for trans women who are or have been incarcerated or sex workers.
Jiz Lee
A genderqueer porn performer, writer, and advocate for ethical porn and labor rights. Jiz has been a key voice in pushing back against anti-sex work stigma within queer and feminist spaces.
These aren’t side notes. These are central narratives in queer history. They remind us that the line between sex work, performance, resistance, and survival has always been beautifully blurred.
Queer Liberation Must Include Sex Workers
Let’s stop sanitizing history. Let’s stop pushing the most vulnerable to the margins while profiting off the movement they helped build.
Sex workers didn’t just help with queer liberation—they fueled it.
They funded it.
They cared for it.
They lived it.
If our vision of queer freedom doesn’t include sex workers, it’s not freedom at all. It’s assimilation. And that’s not what Pride was built on.
So this June—and every month after—remember:
Sex work isn’t adjacent to queer history. It is queer history.
Want to support queer sex workers today?
Donate to: SWOP Behind Bars or The Cupcake Girls
Learn from: New Moon Network, Old Pros
Advocate for: full decriminalization, not just legalization