First of all, the term sex worker is extremely problematic. It’s like using the word ‘helper’ for anything from a volunteer candystriper to a slave forced to work in a coal mine for 18 hours a day till they die.

What’s really going on is your sexuality is part of your art and the ‘sex industry’ is part of your palette. When you say you’re a ‘sex worker’ it’s a little like Bill Clinton saying he’s black.

Let’s expand that metaphor:

Say you are an amazing jazz musician in the South of the 1920s, and you’re white. You are respected and admired, and your fan base is growing. You have great fellow feeling for the black musicians working in your segregated society — perhaps you even find yourself attracted to them (who wouldn’t).

People just love minstrel shows. You start to think that if you perform in black face in a minstrel show, it’ll draw attention to yout work. You feel such solidarity with black jazz musicians that you convince yourself your minstrel show will honor them rather than degrade them. So you start performing in black face, and your fan base expands. You’re reaching fans that are serious music people, who never would normally go to a minstrel show. But here they are. And they are absorbing all the stereotypes from it. You hear one of them say, “Well, I dont’ see why we shouldn’t have segregation — I mean black people are so happy, always dancing, actually.” You feel a fishhook in your solar plexus for a minute at that. But then you say to yourself, well hey, it’s true — being forced to live like a subhuman can really hone your ability to find joie de vivre in the moment. Let’s go with it … and so on.

You begin giving interviews about black society, and you think this is OK. You begin acting like a pastiche from one of your minstrel show skits during interviews.

Meanwhile, some of the greatest jazz musicians in the world, who are black, are imprisoned by Jim Crow on Parchman Farm. They’ll never see freedom. They work in the sugarcane and cotton fields every day for 12 hours, they’re hands bleed and get infected, interfering with their ability to play an instrument in the unlikely event that they’re released. Some of them are are murdered by the wardens and buried in the Levee.

I admire anyone who turns themselves inside out in life and sex and writes of it honestly. That should be enough for art. You’re using the metaphor of sex work for your art. That’s legitimate. Why say you’re a sex worker — it makes people think it’s a profession that’s glamorous and cool, when actually it’s a place where so many find death. Two of my friends were murdered — one by a pimp, one by a john. One took a fatal dose of sleeping pill then called our ‘madam.’ The madam hung up on her, didn’t send help, and then letter sent goons to cleanse this girls apartment of anything that would connect her association with the madam’s business.

It’s kind of disgusting to call people sex workers, as if they’re experiencing the horrors of actually being a captive of the sex industry, when they’re actually successful artists dabbling in it to bring attention to themselves and their work.

I was a hooker in NYC for ten years, and I’m telling you that I never knew anyone who had their artwork in museums, like Zak, for example. Something like that would never have been possible — you wouldn’t be allowed the time and space to do artwork.

I’m not saying these aren’t good artists (I don’t know all their work), but you guys really are doing the trafficked, traumatized, broken, gang-raped, threatened women of the world who are prostitutes a huge disservice when you call people like the above ‘sex workers’ and you use the same term for, well, prostitutes.

You say Annie Sprinkle was a hooker? I say not very likely she’d make much money. She’s a performance artist using the label because it so fascinates those in the world on the other side of it.

At the heart of this issue is probably the issue of whether or not a person would like to use a prostitute. And their fantasy about what all that means.

Another truth of the ‘sex industry’ is that for the most part, if people aren’t more attractive than average, they’re not really part of the industry as it actually exists, crushing millions of young women’s (and men’s) lives every year. They’re maybe having sex once and a while and getting some money. If they become part of it after age 22, they’re experience is completely different than that of most prostitutes, becaue they’re are past their biggest earning power.

It’s death by a thousand cuts for me to read about all these so called sex industry workers who are actually exhibiting in museums, schmoozing, and whether or not their aware of it — promoting themselves at the expenses of millions of exploited women, children and men. How can we ever get anyone to care, when we propagate thise type of falsehood?

I wish you all inspiration, joy and fulfillment. But please, next time you call yourself a sex worker, remember me:

I was gang raped and held captive in an NYC apartment as I was systematically broken. Police and the mafia were involved in this, and I became so traumatized I didn’t think the police would ever help me. My early onset Multiple Sclerosis made me even more vulnerable than most abused young women without families, and I had no one to turn to. I lost all sense of what was dangerous, because every day of my life I lived with the knowledge I could be killed at almost any minute by violent johns and pimps. Thee girls I worked alongside and knew well died through violence, two murdered, and one took a fatal cocktail of sleeping pills and called our madam asking for help. The madam ignored her calls for help although she later sent some goons to cleans this girls apartment of any information that would lead back to the madam and pimp who’d enslaved her.

I couldn’t stop shaking for a year after I got out of ‘the industry’ as we’ll call it. I was extremely lucky. Most women endure an institutionalized death, unspeakable violence, and if they don’t die of violence, they die early for preventable reasons.

I implore you. Remember us when you are promoting your art. You are good people.