By Maria Padhila
Hairdressers from Cameroon wore dresses and wigs made of female condoms. An international health organization has a tent in its lobby this week with a display of condoms and wooden dildos. And the Sisters of Perpetual Indulgence work their awareness magic, as reports Michelle Boorstein from The Washington Post live blog:
“The language of gender and sexuality has changed through the AIDS crisis, said Sister Vicious, a 66-year-old co-founder of the group who has been HIV positive since 1980 and looked like a cross between a vampy clown and Marilyn Manson, with a red wig, whiteface makeup and black and white ruffles all over her shirt and skirt.”
The International AIDS Conference is taking place in Washington, DC, this week, and while there’s a distinctive circus atmosphere I think I’d enjoy in my home city, I’m out of town on a working vacation with Isaac, hiking around in the Appalachians. They’ve got wifi in these here hills, but I’m still filing earlier than usual this week, so I apologize in advance if something wildly interesting goes down at the conference and I’m not aware of it.
Despite the amazing changes and new openness around HIV and AIDS, there’s a group that’s still being silenced and shunned: sex workers. From a Reuters report:
The United States … has clung to a prohibition on the entry of foreign sex workers established more than two centuries ago … Activists, and some conference officials, say that runs counter to a goal of achieving an end to the epidemic that affects more than 34 million people worldwide. On Sunday, a group of sex-worker activists carrying red umbrellas and noise-making vuvuzelas crashed the AIDS gathering’s kick-off news conference.
Other events planned for the week include daily live video link-ups with the Sex Worker Freedom Festival — an alternative satellite event taking place in Kolkata, India, in response to the exclusion from Washington of foreign sex workers.
Meg, a former sex worker from Chicago who asked to have her last name withheld, is one of the few voices representing the female sex worker population at this year’s conference.
She blames what she calls a ‘systematic exclusion’ of sex workers from policy discussions by academics, reporters, and lawmakers for prevailing stereotypes of ‘people thinking of sex workers as vectors of diseases.’
Sex workers also report that they are being threatened, harassed and even arrested simply for carrying condoms. You know, I’ve been driving around for a year with a long, shiny, golden strip of Trojan Magnums in the between-seats storage box in my car. They were a prop for a play (my guys use Kimono Maxx) but all the same — am I going to get arrested?
But there are more reasons than just the contraband condoms that this issue hits me: one is that I used to be a dancer, and while that’s technically not a sex worker, most people rarely draw such fine distinctions. I feel for what’s happening with sex workers and support their efforts to get better working conditions and protect their health.
Two, as someone who in real life does a lot of writing about public health, I know damn well the ones on the front lines in solving public health problems aren’t puritanical. They respect science and solutions that make sense. Who really knows the score in the fight against HIV?
I practically have the phrase ‘engage the key stakeholders’ on an autofill key. So why isn’t this group of beyond-key stakeholders getting engaged? Sometimes they are, on the down low, with funding from enlightened sources and through several changes of channels before the money goes through, so scared religious politicals can’t get in the way. Excluding foreign sex workers from this conference simply doesn’t make sense — it can’t possibly help anyone get closer to the goal of protecting health. It’s a waste of resources, energy, and brains.
Three, I have a dream (one that neither of my guys would approve of in any way, so it’s a kind of moot point). If I had my way, my daily work would be as a sex worker/therapist to older men. The loneliness and isolation some of them soldier through is a sorrowful thing, and it often ends badly. People need to be touched and listened to once in a while to stay human. And older men in particular need this from someone who doesn’t have an agenda — who doesn’t want something from them beyond payment for services rendered, who can give them the space to feel what they want.
Without romanticizing the difficulty of such work, I think it would be much more sane and constructive work, more healing, than anything I’ve been paid for thus far. That’s not going to happen in this lifetime, but that’s where I’m coming from.
Fourth, and the reason this intersects with polyamory: sex workers are human (news flash) and a certain percentage of humans have a polyamorous orientation, I believe. Also, polyamorous people are also regarded by the outside world as ‘vectors of disease’, when, like sex workers, they’re often the ones taking many more pains and care not to have any such problems.
As I write about polyamory, I’m often struck by the ‘white whine’ phenomenon — that I should be lucky to have such issues. Parsing the emotional territory of multiple relationships is in many ways a PPP: Privileged People Problem. But if you take the risk to love more, you may also acquire that deep knowledge that we’re all in the same boat, and what hurts the woman pulling that other oar is also going to hurt you. Sex workers are not the ‘other’ who should be excluded from the table — in fact, they might well deserve a place at the head of the table.
Maria: Thank you once again for opening my mind and my heart. Always after reading your words there is the sense of being the better for it. Very grateful for that.
MP writes…. “If I had my way, my daily work would be as a sex worker/therapist to older men. The loneliness and isolation some of them soldier through is a sorrowful thing, and it often ends badly. People need to be touched and listened to once in a while to stay human. And older men in particular need this from someone who doesn’t have an agenda — who doesn’t want something from them beyond payment for services rendered, who can give them the space to feel what they want.”
Now you’re playin’ my song! I have probably 20 widowers in my Medicare cohort of 90 or so people), and I completely get this message. One of my guys, a real sweetheart –90 years old, very helpful and forthcoming– blew his brains out a few weeks after our last interview. He had no major diseases; I could *see* the loneliness, but thought his family and friends had a handle on it. Apparently not.
But, reconsidering, I am not sure sex workers necessarily fit the bill. Usually there is a performance aspect to sex that is beyond anyone who isn’t Viagra-enhanced (and that comes with its own spiritual and physical complications). Something more like a good friend who is willing to simply *touch*… something rarer and rarer in this culture. Since I am in a unique position to do so, I try to make sure that I touch *all* of my subjects at some point in the interview – a hand placed reassuringly on a shoulder or hand, long enough to be clearly intentional, can go a long way.
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Maria; I agree — isn’t it possible that Sex Workers are at the head of the table re: Polyamory?
We could all learn from a turn or two on that dance pole.
Thx for the ‘report’.