Sex Work & LGBTQ+ History: Allies in Liberation
June 12, 2025
Throughout my three decades as both a sex worker and an advocate for sexual liberation, I've witnessed firsthand the deep connections between sex work and LGBTQ+ communities. These aren't separate movements that occasionally intersect—they're natural allies in the fight for sexual autonomy, bodily freedom, and the right to exist without shame or criminalization.
Today, let's explore the historical bonds between these communities and why our liberation remains intertwined.
The Shared History of Marginalization
Sex workers and LGBTQ+ individuals have always occupied similar spaces on society's margins. Both communities have faced:
Criminalization: Laws that make their very existence illegal, forcing them underground and making them vulnerable to violence and exploitation.
Medical Pathologization: Being classified as mentally ill, deviant, or diseased by medical establishments that reflected social prejudices rather than scientific understanding.
Religious Condemnation: Being labeled as sinful, immoral, or contrary to divine will by religious institutions that wielded significant social power.
Family Rejection: Facing disownment and abandonment by biological families who couldn't accept their authentic identities or choices.
Economic Discrimination: Being denied employment, housing, and basic services due to stigma and prejudice.
This shared experience of marginalization created natural bonds between communities that understood what it meant to survive on society's edges.
Historical Intersections and Overlaps
The connections between sex work and LGBTQ+ communities run deep through history:
Pre-Stonewall Underground: Before gay liberation, many LGBTQ+ individuals found acceptance and community in the same underground spaces where sex work flourished—speakeasies, bathhouses, and other locations outside mainstream society's control.
The Compton's Cafeteria Riots (1966): Three years before Stonewall, transgender women, many of whom engaged in sex work for survival, rioted against police harassment in San Francisco. This uprising is often considered the first LGBTQ+ uprising in the United States.
Stonewall and Beyond: The Stonewall Inn regularly served sex workers alongside other LGBTQ+ individuals. Some of the key figures in the Stonewall riots, including Sylvia Rivera and Marsha P. Johnson, engaged in sex work for survival while fighting for broader LGBTQ+ rights.
Early AIDS Activism: Sex workers were among the first to advocate for safer sex practices and needle exchange programs, often working alongside gay men's health organizations when the government ignored the AIDS crisis.
Shared Legal Battles: Both communities have fought against discriminatory laws, police harassment, and moral crusades that sought to criminalize their existence.
Why These Communities Remain Natural Allies
The alliance between sex work and LGBTQ+ communities isn't just historical—it's based on shared ongoing struggles and values:
Bodily Autonomy: Both movements assert the fundamental right to make decisions about your own body, whether that's who you have sex with, how you express your gender, or how you use your sexuality economically.
Sexual Liberation: Both challenge societal shame around sexuality and assert that consensual adult sexual expression is healthy and normal, not something to be hidden or criminalized.
Economic Justice: Many LGBTQ+ individuals, particularly trans people and youth rejected by families, turn to sex work for economic survival. Supporting sex worker rights means supporting LGBTQ+ economic security.
Anti-Criminalization: Both communities understand how criminalization increases vulnerability to violence while failing to address underlying social issues.
Intersectional Identities: Many people are both LGBTQ+ and sex workers, making the movements inseparable in their lived experience.
The Contemporary Landscape
Today, the connections between these communities remain strong:
Trans Sex Workers: Transgender women, particularly trans women of color, are disproportionately represented in sex work due to employment discrimination and family rejection. Their survival often depends on both LGBTQ+ acceptance and sex work decriminalization.
Queer Sex Workers: Many sex workers identify as LGBTQ+, finding in sex work a space where diverse sexualities and gender expressions are more accepted than in mainstream employment.
Shared Advocacy: Organizations like the Sex Workers' Outreach Project and Black Lives Matter explicitly connect sex worker rights with LGBTQ+ liberation, recognizing their intersectional nature.
Legislative Battles: Both communities face ongoing legal challenges, from bathroom bills targeting trans people to FOSTA-SESTA laws that increase danger for sex workers.
Community Support: LGBTQ+ organizations increasingly recognize sex workers as part of their constituency, while sex worker organizations advocate for LGBTQ+ rights as inseparable from their own liberation.
Understanding Sex Work Stigma
To understand why sex work and LGBTQ+ liberation are connected, we need to examine the roots of sex work stigma:
Sexual Shame: Society's discomfort with sexuality generally makes it particularly harsh toward those who are open about sexual desires or who profit from sexuality.
Gender Policing: Sex work stigma is deeply connected to the Madonna/whore complex that punishes women for sexual agency while also policing masculine sexuality.
Economic Morality: The idea that certain ways of earning money are inherently degrading reflects classist assumptions about work and worth.
Religious Moralizing: Many arguments against sex work are rooted in religious beliefs about sexuality that also target LGBTQ+ individuals.
Feminist Divisions: Debates within feminism about sex work often mirror debates about LGBTQ+ sexuality, with some factions embracing liberation while others focus on protection from perceived harm.
The Harm of Criminalization
Both sex work and many aspects of LGBTQ+ life have been subject to criminalization that increases rather than reduces harm:
Driving Underground: Criminalization forces activities into dangerous, hidden spaces where violence and exploitation are more likely.
Police Violence: Both communities have experienced systematic police harassment, violence, and abuse, often with impunity.
Preventing Safety Measures: Criminalization prevents the implementation of safety measures like safe injection sites, safer sex resources, and violence prevention programs.
Increasing Stigma: Legal penalties increase social stigma, making it harder for people to access healthcare, housing, and other essential services.
Targeting the Vulnerable: Criminalization disproportionately affects the most marginalized members of both communities—people of color, transgender individuals, immigrants, and those experiencing poverty.
My Personal Journey in Both Movements
As someone who has been part of both communities for over three decades, I've seen how interconnected these struggles truly are. My work in adult entertainment has given me a platform to advocate for sexual liberation that benefits everyone. My nursing background has helped me provide healthcare advocacy for communities that face medical discrimination.
The fans who approach me at events often share stories that illustrate these connections—young people who are both queer and considering sex work, families struggling to understand both their child's sexuality and their survival choices, healthcare workers learning to provide better care for marginalized communities.
Why Solidarity Matters
Supporting both sex work decriminalization and LGBTQ+ rights isn't just about helping individual communities—it's about building a world where:
Sexual autonomy is respected as a fundamental human right
Economic choices are made freely rather than from desperation
Diverse forms of love and sexuality are celebrated rather than criminalized
Bodies belong to the people who inhabit them, not to the state or society
Community care replaces criminalization as our response to social challenges
Moving Forward Together
This Pride Month, let's remember that our liberation movements are stronger when we recognize our interconnections rather than trying to distance ourselves from other marginalized communities. The same forces that want to control LGBTQ+ bodies and relationships also want to control sex workers' bodies and choices.
When we support sex worker rights, we support bodily autonomy for everyone. When we fight for LGBTQ+ liberation, we fight for sexual freedom for all. These aren't separate battles—they're the same struggle for the right to exist authentically without shame, criminalization, or violence.
Here's to the drag queens and sex workers who threw bricks at Stonewall, to the trans women who continue to fight on multiple fronts, to everyone who understands that sexual liberation means liberation for all of us. Your courage has created the freedom we celebrate today, and your ongoing advocacy will create the freedom our communities deserve tomorrow.
How has understanding the connections between sex work and LGBTQ+ liberation changed your perspective on both movements? What role do you play in supporting intersectional approaches to sexual freedom? Let's build solidarity that strengthens all our communities.
In admiration,
Nina