Destigmatizing Black queer sex workers makes our movement stronger
This essay is part of the Color of Long COVID series, supported by the Disability Visibility Project.
Listen to Khalil (Kae) Dennis read this essay:
Black transmasculine cam model Goddexx Olive pivoted to online sex work in February 2024. His day job proved untenable: He faced frequent autistic burnout exacerbated by a lack of accommodations. All of it was made worse by Long COVID.
“Making it through day-to-day [felt] like an assault on the senses,” Olive said. He faced challenges looking for a new “civ,” or non–sex worker, job in a deteriorating job market riddled with discrimination. And to Olive’s dismay, he did not see himself reflected in the largely white online Long COVID community. He felt “like an impostor [whose] case isn’t as bad as the people in the online spaces,” despite his own misfortunes with racism in medical diagnosis.
Long COVID advocates are “still playing into respectability politics,” Olive said. “It feels like people who are more marginalized are seen as a theory.”
To Olive and other Black queer community members, many of those advocates pay lip service to the disease’s disproportionate effects on Black, Brown, and trans communities while excluding those voices from larger policy discussions. Unfortunately, many advocacy groups seem unwilling to reckon with their own racism, classism, and whorephobia, often overlooking sex workers in favor of a more “perfect” (i.e. white) victim.
On the internet, Long COVID-related accounts and sex workers’ platforms for earning money face similar censorship. Black trans sex workers are hardest hit by these conditions as they face overwhelming state violence, racism, and exclusion. For this essay, I spoke to five Black trans sex workers with Long COVID and drew on my own experience as a long-hauler organizing against both COVID-19 denial and sex worker discrimination.
Long COVID advocates are “still playing into respectability politics,” Olive said. “It feels like people who are more marginalized are seen as a theory.”
Black queer sex worker, therapist, and founder of Zepp Wellness, Raquel Savage sees the obvious contradictions. After all, Savage is a long-hauler who’s been a sex worker for over a decade.
“People are not thinking about sex workers as people to turn to for wisdom and advice on how to navigate mitigations,” Savage said. “[We are] the people who are, in real time, utilizing this knowledge to figure out how to continue [doing] things as safely as possible.”
Long COVID advocacy is inadequate without sex workers, who have a long legacy of catalyzing consent education and facilitating disease prevention. Mask blocs and Long COVID advocacy groups should engage with established networks of information sharing, resource distribution, and safety systems created by sex workers.
These networks are already more connected to Long COVID than advocates may realize, as sex work has become more commonplace among long-haulers experiencing widespread unemployment in the last five years. The sex work economy saw a major influx of both online adult content creators and escort services early in the pandemic, amid rising inflation and diminishing COVID-19 safety nets. Unacknowledged are the queer and trans people, many left underemployed by Long COVID, who began erotic labor due to inaccessible, openly antagonistic workplaces. As sex workers, they are constitutionally unprotected laborers.
“For disabled people, whether physically disabled or having mental illness and madness, [sex work] can be life saving,” said Mistress SALT, a Black nonbinary full-service sex worker. “It absolutely was for me.”
Sex work and online censorship
Online Long COVID censorship follows a trend of anti–sex work censorship. In 2018, Congress passed the Fight Online Sex Trafficking Act and the Stop Enabling Sex Traffickers Act. The first bill largely failed at its main goal of prosecuting sex traffickers; the latter bill placed pressure on websites to target sex workers. Anti–sex work groups lobbied third-party advertisers like Discover and Mastercard to cut ties with websites hosting content related to sex. To avoid financial or legal repercussions, websites curtailed “suggestive” content to combat sex trafficking and, by proxy, sex work.
“I’m seeing disabled people [and sex workers] being shadow banned, talking about their Cashapps, Venmos, and PayPals being shut down,” SALT said.
As the sites that sex workers relied on, like Backpage, were deplatformed, anti–sex work legislation also gave politicians license to extend censorship and surveillance to all internet users. They claimed to restrict content deemed “unsafe” for children, a vague phrasing governments can reappropriate to censor dissenting advocacy groups and gather internet users’ ID information, through such laws as the United Kingdom’s Online Safety Act.
Trafficking survivor Reverend Mistress Dahlia, a Black trans Indigenous professional dominatrix who also has Long COVID, returned to sex work after seven years of incarceration to find Backpage dismantled.
Dahlia felt the rug pulled from underneath her as she now relied on social media to market herself. The level of visibility was both unfamiliar and dangerous compared to previous online spaces constructed for sex workers. Now her access to housing and other resources are “on a public platform that can be taken [away] at any time,” she said.
These financial repercussions for workers like Dahlia mirrors the suppression of social media posts mentioning mutual aid or activism, something many in the Long COVID community have noticed. Some sex workers speculate that auto-moderation is trained to associate money exchange with “scamming” or sexual solicitation, as both activists and sex workers, who are sometimes the same person, endure heightened shadow banning. They have little recourse when their platforms are mass deleted.
“It has nothing to do with the content itself,” Dahlia said. “With Black and Brown bodies engaged in sex work and on social media, it’s like a dragnet that happens [and] it seems like it happens in waves.”
For years, sex workers warned us as their banking access and online accounts faced restrictions and altogether deletion. But Long COVID advocates don’t acknowledge the throughline. Their disinterest illustrates that sex workers are important only when victimized, demonized, or, as Savage added, “romanticized.” Everything except humanized.
It has nothing to do with the content itself. With Black and Brown bodies engaged in sex work and on social media, it’s like a dragnet that happens [and] it seems like it happens in waves.
Reverend Mistress Dahlia, Black trans Indigenous professional dominatrix who has Long COVID
Solidarity: Outreach, resource distribution, and decriminalization
As I’ve been advocating for masking in Chicago, I have heard the term “sexless” ascribed to the Long COVID community by people inside and outside of the community.
“Sexless” is a common ableist epithet and, while infantilizing, broader Long COVID advocacy has not countered this. The irony is even more glaring considering Black people have historically been fetishized and depicted as hypersexual, their very sensuality marked as deviant or even criminal. It is no wonder the broader Black community sees Long COVID as a “white issue,” considering the absence of prominent racialized perspectives within its own advocacy.
“I want us to be seen and listened to and not just tokenized,” said Eros Valentine, a Black transmasculine online and full-service sex worker. “I feel like [Long COVID advocates] look down on us for not being able to be as strictly COVID-cautious as we desire to be.”
Valentine described being looked at with repulsion by COVID-safer people who aren’t sex workers when disclosing that he accepts in-person clients. Instead of advocates centering reducing the harm of infection and helping others with safety precautions, “it was a way to make me feel disgusted by [my] job and the choice [I] had to make to survive,” he said. For him, this COVID-safer advocacy repackages a shame that mirrors AIDS epidemic hysteria and demeans the reality sex workers contend with.
Rather than looking down on sex workers and Black people, COVID-conscious organizers must be willing to combat their own whorephobia and internalized racism. To establish consensual relationships, there must first be trust — a core truth for both erotic laborers and the Black Long COVID community.
COVID-cautious communities rely on disclosure tactics like COVID-19 mitigation checklists, which follow sex workers’ legacy of formalized consent education. As early as the 1980s, sex workers and BDSM practitioners have used foundational ethical frameworks to reinforce well-informed individual risk assessment.
Savage noted that for sex workers, it is customary to identify partners’ desires in addition to what preventive measures should be taken. It’s also common to disclose health risks. “There’s so much built into our identities that makes navigating COVID easier,” Savage said. “We’re just straightforward, because that’s what we do in sex work.”
There’s so much built into our identities that makes navigating COVID easier. We’re just straightforward, because that’s what we do in sex work.
Raquel Savage, Black queer sex worker, therapist, and founder of Zepp Wellness
Building on this experience, many immunocompromised sex workers require clients to test for COVID-19 despite potential cancellations and income loss. More resources and general empathy for sex workers’ financial realities would help them expand those mitigations. “The lack of normalized COVID mitigation in our society means we have to bear the burden of making sure our clients don’t get us sick or vice versa,” SALT said.
Savage wants to see Long COVID and COVID-19 advocacy groups break bread with, and provide resources to, established Black sex working networks. “More white COVID-conscious people, [especially folks with class privilege], need to be giving their fucking money.”
Dahlia founded one of those groups: the Leather Whore Collective, a decentralized, BIPOC, sex worker–run group with disability justice as a core tenet. Through their book club, the group uses mutual aid to raise money for free and incarcerated Black trans sex workers.
“People have so many conversations about helping the marginalized, and they’re almost never fucking talking about disabled [and] incarcerated people — like ever,” Dahlia said. “The dominant culture doesn’t need any fucking help to survive. We do.”
Long COVID and disability advocates must support efforts at sex work decriminalization, a public health response to the very AIDS epidemic they cite while white-washing a radical history of Black queer activists. And they must resist neoliberal frameworks like the SWERF, or sex worker exclusionary radical feminist, movement.
That can mean supporting decriminalization bills, like the New York state senate’s bill SB2513, “Cecilia’s Act for Rights in the Sex Trades,” which gives back autonomy to sex workers. We must contact representatives and urge them to oppose bills that would stifle free speech and expand online surveillance, like the Kids Online Safety Act currently being rammed through the U.S. Congress alongside numerous age verification bills.
As our data and speech are compromised, Black trans disabled sex workers remain at the core of this unprecedented amount of government oversight and political repression.
“[White Long COVID advocacy is] no different than a lot of other white social movements,” Dahlia said.
“It’s never about the abolition of power but about the acquisition of power and assimilation. They don’t want to abolish an oppressive dominant culture because they’re not oppressed like we are.”
[White Long COVID advocacy is] no different than a lot of other white social movements. It’s never about the abolition of power but about the acquisition of power and assimilation. They don’t want to abolish an oppressive dominant culture because they’re not oppressed like we are.
Reverend Mistress Dahlia, Black trans Indigenous professional dominatrix who has Long COVID
Khalil (Kae) Dennis is a Black trans artist, organizer, and freelance journalist based in Chicago, IL. When energy permits, she can be found writing stories, cooking delicious meals, and watching hours-long video essays.
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