I firmly believe that one cannot utter the words Black Lives Matter and exclude Black sex workers.

I am a semi-out sex worker. By semi-out I mean I’m internet out: I haven’t announced anything to most of my family and the “in-real-life” people who need to know, know. I have dabbled in a bit of everything, from stripping to prostitution to sugaring to camming. I am also an artist, freelancer and homeschooling mother, so there is a lot of nuance in what I desire out of life for my son and I. My only other avenue would be minimum or below-poverty level wages. When I write, I focus on sex workers of color. Most of the time I narrow it even further to Black sex workers and Black trans sex workers who face the most ire, discrimination and violence from both the police and within the Black community. I wrote a series of Twitter threads on sex work that discussed sex worker rights and briefly mentioned our place in Black Lives Matter. Here is one of them.

Related: FOR BLACK SEX WORKERS, THE DECK IS ALREADY STACKED AGAINST US