You’re curating the art exhibition Sex Worker Visions, which will feature art made by sex workers and/or about sex workers. What can we expect to see there, and what’s the curating process been like? Is there a fundamental difference between work by sex workers and non-sex workers?
Curating Sex Worker Visions has been pretty excellent fun, because I love seeing the way artists and sex workers represent the sex industry and express themselves visually. In the exhibition, you’ll see an enema painting made by Joe Gallant and one of his starlets (yes, it is what you think it is), a self portrait by former SuicideGirl and illustrator Molly Crabapple, intimate portraits of porn stars Seymour Butts and Mari Possa by Paul Sarkis, and collages by activist and former escort Shane Luitjens. You’ll also see a music video called “Whore Power” by Scarlot Harlot as well as a rather intense video by former streetwalker Anne Hanavan called “Paranoid.”

It seems that non-sex workers who are sympathetic to the cause of sex workers struggling for their rights and against stigmatization are really keen on showing sex workers as whole, beautiful, interesting and complex people. In their art, sex workers are more expressive about the pain and conflicts that sex work has created for them. I think the sympathetic non-sex worker artists sometimes shy away from this kind of content because they don’t want to contribute to the negative cultural attitudes about sex workers.