In which it’s okay that we need to take care of ourselves.

(Photos: Steve Rhodes)

This Wednesday, December 17th was the 6th Annual Day to End Violence Against Sex Workers — with over 20 documented observances around the world, vigils and marches & memorials & protests. I took on bringing together the San Francisco vigil. A huge part of our local sex worker community had gone to Washington, DC to march on the Department of Justice, read the names of sex workers that we’ve lost to violence, issue some very cogent and community-driven demands to the incoming Obama administration. Bringing the San Francisco vigil together was my way of recommitting to the local: after two years of focusing on international activism, and a year of trying my best to be both a journalist and an activist but coming up stretched thin the whole way, it was a risk I wanted to take. Maybe no one would come. We all think this before every party.

On Wednesday afternoon, just as the sun started to slip behind Twin Peaks, just as I was headed out of my place and over to the Hall of Justice, which is what San Francisco City & County government call their jail and court and where we decided to convene our vigil, I saw that Dacia had twittered that her speech for the New York City vigil was posted online. In typical Max Fischer “It was totally improvised!” fashion, I hadn’t even written my own speech yet — Dacia’s words were all I had going in to the San Francisco vigil, even as Kirk Read, who met us on the steps, walked into the Hall of Justice with me and stood with me as I told the sheriff’s office staff at the door that we’d be holding a vigil out front shortly. “Some people don’t believe in telling them first,” said Kirk. So we told, not asked.

Kirk & Sadie performed two powerful pieces, and Shelly & Acire from Sex Workers’ Outreach Project spoke about the value of coming together in opposition to police harassment & violence done against our people, and Naomi led a moment of silence and then marched us down Bryant Street, up Sixth Street, and over to Mission Street — past St. James Infirmary, and to the Center for Sex & Culture. And with our march delivered there to the memorial, I passed my Mary Magdalene candle to Annie Sprinkle, and kissed Gina on the forehead, and slipped away with Nick and had soup and dim sum and a little guilt over needing to slip away.

Dacia’s words were about needing to take care of ourselves. “Even when it seems like there’s nothing but struggle in front of us,” I said, on the steps of the jail and courthouse, we need to take care of ourselves. Why did I guilt myself for needing to eat, be held, and be comforted after that night? Why are so many of us used to pushing ourselves to the breaking point? There is too much risk already in this work, in moving in the world as those who carry so much of people’s sexual shame and fear and pain. I don’t want to care for my community from that place, of near martyrdom. So why do I hold myself to that impossible standard, of going and going and going until I can’t?

There is always more to do. There is always further to go. But even in a world that reviles us most of the time, will click and page-turn hungrily to read about our trauma all of the time, we took charge of the mic ourselves for a night, all over the world, and said, Here we are, we are still surviving, we are still here. And the more of us there are, the more we can share this work, the harder & smarter we can fight, and a million other platitudes I’m sure I’ve been handed for years about activism, which right now, in this moment, mean we all have the permission to step back and be held and fed dumplings, that holding our own alone is not what makes you “good” for a cause, that the cause is us.

May no one utter our names on these steps and in these streets in memory of a life ripped short. If we don’t take time to hold each other, our voices may start to break from all our needed sounding out:

Never again, Ruby and countless nameless other transgender women, picked up off one street and left for dead on another, their murders ignored, their killers at large.

And never again, Eliot Spitzer & Randall Tobias & Harlan “Shock And Awe” Ullman, politicians glad to fuck us over for their cause, and also glad to fuck us for a fee, and then go free themselves, while we hang.