Here goes

a first post I half-hope no one reads

I think all the time that I will start a newsletter, but then I think: everything is too private. I am terrible at keeping secrets. They burst out of my mouth like weeds coming up from the sidewalk cracks. I can’t be trusted. I have so many secrets, and I ache to be relieved of them. For me, this ache has been an accompaniment of doing sex work for so long. And yet, I’ve united all my personas. I do not have - as I once thought I needed - a separate writing name from my sex work name. I live under a pseudonym that has become my “real” name in so many ways. This is like wearing a see-through mask - it hides almost nothing. I’m just Lorelei. Hello. Welcome to this space where I may or may not tell you everything.

I’m writing a memoir, speaking of spilling secrets. It is so revealing, it’s as though I’ve never been naked in public before. As though this will be the first time. It’s been twenty-five years this year since I was first naked in public. I never expected it to become a part of me, and that is in part what the memoir is about. How do we become our jobs? I’ve learned so much. In truth, sex work is stickier than other kinds of jobs. That’s not theoretical. I didn’t make that up. The law intentionally, over two hundred years, has made sex work stick to the people who do it.

In the early 19th century, Alexandre Jean-Baptiste Parent-Duchatelet, a “sanitary engineer,” Timothy Gilfoyle writes, “. . . was haunted by the transiency of prostitutes and their ability to reintegrate themselves into society.” So he invented a system of licensing and regulation that is the origin of the regulatory systems we now describe as “legalization.” Rather than a system for freeing sex workers from policing, legalization is a system of surveillance, meant to mark sex workers so that we cannot simply move between different kinds of work.

It’s so hard for us now to escape that system of marking. A regulatory system can so easily become the lens through which we view the people it regulates.

Should I keep posting here? Should I write about the four systems that regulate sex work around the globe? Is this stuff you already know? If you are reading this, tell me.