An Open Letter to Community about the Black Sex Worker Liberation March” — please read and participate in our Town Hall on Wednesday, Oct. 15
To my community:
I write with a heavy heart to address the allegations made about me by Gizelle Marie and Lindsey Hanako, Ashley Tribble, Black Domme Sorority, Mari magdalena, Santiago West and Florcy Romero. My intentions with this letter are to defend myself against whorephobic and classist accusations. Receipts attached.
This journey all started on a hot day in front of Stonewall on July 9th after a powerful speak out organized by Ts Candii on police brutality. After several BLM actions I participated in during the pandemic, I believed the Black Lives Matter movement could be more actively supporting Black sex worker rights. After a moving afternoon of speeches, I told everyone at the action to save the date for a Black sex worker march. I am proud to be the founder and lead organizer of the Black Sex Worker Liberation march and vigil, the largest sex worker march in U.S. history.
Our town hall to discuss this and more will take place Wednesday, Oct 15th 7:30pm EST. Sign up here.
The Black sex worker liberation march and vigil took place on August 1st, 2020. After tireless work from our community, we produced an amazing event that brought more attention to the political demands Black sex workers have been fighting for long before us. We had great speakers who brought attention to the needs and problems faced by Black sex workers. The vulnerability, risk, bravery and respect it takes to do that does not go unnoticed. Thank you. We took over Times Square with a well-organized march and finished with a vigil with more speeches. I would like to thank the security team for making sure our community was safe. I would like to thank our mutual aid community for making sure we had PPE and were fed and hydrated. I am proud to have been a part of that vision and felt that we all achieved what we had set out to.
I want to apologize to the community members, speakers and organizers who helped produce this event for the 4-week delay it has taken to distribute the funds during a time of dire need for many. It took longer than expected to raise the total amount of $10k. I want it to be known that none of these funds have been touched, and only recently have they been withdrawn from our GoFundMe in preparation for distribution. I tried on multiple occasions after August 5th to contact Gizelle Marie, to get her input on the distribution of funds. I was never able to reach her directly. Without being able to communicate with all of the lead organizers, I felt unable to distribute any funds or move forward. Since it was hard to communicate with Gizelle, I continued to leave the money in the account until there could be better communication, and until fundraising goals could be reached.
I understand being in a leadership position requires mindfulness, intelligence and diligence to deliver what is best for everyone. I have kept all the money raised in the GoFundMe to allow time for us to meet and build consensus on how we disburse the funds. I also understand that during this pandemic, many people feel an urgency to have access to this funding right away — I realize now that it was a mistake to wait so long to distribute the funds. I should have been more proactive in my leadership to make sure we took care of this important task more quickly. I sincerely apologize for any harm I may have caused for those who have stated that they desperately needed this money. This was absolutely never my intention. However, intention does not always equate to impact, and I understand the impact, for some, has been deep.
Before, during, and after the march, I have put in hundreds of hours putting together logistics, holding meetings with volunteers, dealing with media requests, following up with coverage and organizing assets. I want to thank my active co-organizer TS Candii with Black Trans Nation, and all of the amazing volunteers from DSA, Asian American Feminist Collective, Fight for Our Lives Coalition, and other community organizations. While organizing, Gizelle appointed an assistant, Lindsay Hanako, to speak to me and handle any work related to the planning of the march,this proved to be very difficult and unproductive. This assistant claims to have helped in contributing to a press release, but she has also not only been unhelpful, but acted in racist, self-aggrandizing, and destructive ways, slowing down the process of our work. However, I understand that Gizelle circumstances and emotional history with activism have been difficult and I wanted to forward them with empathy and patience.
To offer fuller transparency, during the last month since the funds have been raised, I have also faced having to move from NYC back home to the state of Missouri while battling my depression. Like many others, the organizing of the march has not been an easy time for me, and I have faced many challenges. However, I am committed to our broader movement, and I want to see our community win respect, and show that we can come together — and I am disappointed by the ways we have jumped to conclusions about each other, and attacked each other, instead of focusing on the larger work we share.
I want to be clear that these funds we raised were always for the production of the action and to do continued actions for the Black Sex Worker Liberation movement, and the money was never raised as an emergency relief fund or mutual aid fund. I do apologize if this was not clear to the community or those involved in the action. It was described in the GoFundMe page, but I understand active transparency and clarity is needed when raising funds. I promise to do better in the future.
To further address the above-mentioned allegations, I would like to speak about a call led by Gizelle Marie and Lindsey Hanako that took place with eight other speakers and organizers on October 5th, 2020. I asked many times who would be on the call, and Gizelle ignored my requests, willingly bringing me into a hostile and unsafe environment. I want to note that if Gizelle, or any of the others who were worried about the way I was dealing with the organizing and fundraising simply reached out to me, this all could have been resolved. Before this call, I had no direct contact with Gizelle or any of the other speakers since the march on August 1st. Gizelle’s assistant, Lindsey, formed a group to make accusations that are entirely unfounded, while never contacting me directly. Lindsey also claims my work on the press release as her own and exaggerates the degree to which she has contributed to this march. This, I cannot accept. I will not accept a white woman claiming my work for her own. I will also not accept communicating with a “proxy” or someone speaking for an activist
Within our very first interactions, Lindsey immediately made accusations against me and threatened to “expose me to the community” for not unifying Black women and being a “dirty American activist” because I “did not release” Gizelle’s SW Relief Fund logo on the initial flyer for the event. Lindsey failed to send the logo to me. Gizelle was also not reachable for this. I happily included Gizelle’s logo on all future posts, as soon as I received the logo assets, but Lindsey has continually made unfounded accusations about me.
Lindsey has also accused me of “stealing her intellectual property,” saying she “wrote my quote” for the Black Sex Worker Liberation march and vigil, and “wrote the political demands of the sex worker movement in NYC” (audio attached). Actually, the press release was formed with the help from other activists, including Kate Zen and Mistress Blunt.The list of demands is shared by everyone in the sex worker movement, belonging to no one exclusively. I find it unacceptable that Lindsay, a white-passing woman, continues to appropriate the work of women of color, hiding behind activists she believes has “clout,” and then using her position to create disunity within the Black sex worker movement. In Europe where Lindsey used to be an activist, sex workers have also said that she has had a long history of making a mess of things, self-aggrandizing and claiming credit, and exhibiting a pattern of behavior in which she manipulates and undermines the people she claims to want to help.
I will not accept gatekeeping and ego from people trying to take claim of a movement that has existed far before ANY OF US. The movement for the decriminalization of sex work is a common struggle that we do not monopolize as individuals for our own benefit but serve as representatives for all of our fellow workers who cannot publicly stand up.
I have also been accused by Lindsey, Gizelle, and the people they’ve gathered around them, of “not being a real sex worker,” of “not being vulnerable and forthcoming enough about what sex work” I do in my public speeches, and, as a Black woman, of moving “like a white woman.” It should be obvious to sex worker organizers why a sex worker would need to be discreet for their own survival and self-protection. It’s such harmful behavior to make these accusations, and implicitly coerce an activist to out themselves. We should never engage in this kind of behavior with any of our colleagues.
The accusation that I act like a “white woman” comes from an analysis of “white supremacy culture” in which people who do activism “with a sense of urgency” and “perfectionism,” or offer a lot of their time in a way that manifests “martyrdom” are somehow intrinsically white supremacist. This is messed up. It’s not exclusively white supremacists who have a sense of care and desire to get things done in the face of obstacles. Actually, essentializing these qualities as “white” is extremely racist. It also dilutes the definition and real dangers of white supremacy. I took leadership in the work for the Black Sex Worker March because I am passionate about challenging white supremacy. I believe that the Black Lives Matter movement should do more to highlight sex work decriminalization and that doing so is a matter of urgency. For me to pour so much of myself into creating a movement for Black sex workers only to be undermined by a white agitator, criticized about my racial identity, and harassed is the real racism at work. I am a Black sex worker from Missouri, daughter of a formerly incarcerated mother, twin sister of a victim of gun violence and like many a transplant to New York City.
I’d like to call your attention instead to the actual white woman in the picture. Attached is a short audio clip of the harassment I received from Lindsey and her “plagiarism” accusations. She made inappropriate sexual comments towards me that made me feel very uncomfortable, which the rest of the people on the call laughed at. She admits to rounding everyone up to ambush me on a Zoom call. I want to make it clear that Lindsey is an incredibly harmful person to this community. I want to make it clear that Lindsey does not stand in solidarity with Black women, and instead has made many attempts to divide us. I want to make it clear that I do not support white women continuously centering themselves within a Black-led movement.
The thing that disappoints me most is the judgement from the group about me personally. Questioning what right I had to be part of this event, whether I was a sex worker, what my personal story was and how it fit in with the other speakers and organizers. We have no chance of moving forward if we do not embrace all Black sex workers in our movement. As an organizer, I tried my best to embrace all participants, respect their situation, and passed absolutely no judgment on any of you. Even to those on the call, I will still continue to care for you and support you. I do not hold hate in my heart for you. Radical ‘thotfullness’ and empathy is not a tagline for me. It is a way of life.
I believe that for true accountability and transparency moving forward, it is vital that we invite all of our community who helped produce the event into a Town Hall discussion. This event was publicly organized and the funds were publicly raised so the Town Hall will be publicly held with a mediator and de-escalation expert. The Town Hall will be open to everyone who showed up and put in the work, so we can all have a voice in discussing how we believe the community event went, what can we improve, and what we would like to do moving forward with the Black Sex Worker Liberation project, the accountability process and distribution of funds raised.
The town hall will take place Wednesday, Oct 15th 7:30pm EST. Sign up here.
as always, be thotful
