(I meant this to be a much longer and thoughtful sort of retrospective, sum-it-all-up, make-it-all-make-sense sort of blog post. But in the interest of moving my life along rather than documenting the back story perfectly, here it is:)

On Wednesday I’ll be joining the staff of the Third Wave Foundation, a feminist, activist foundation that works in the United States to support young women and transgender youth. As External Relations Officer, I’ll be finding ways to amplify the stories of our partners’ work: advocates intimately engaged in supporting reproductive justice & sexual health and rights. A good deal of that will involve using new media, and a good deal will be done the beautifully old-fashioned way: through relationships, trust, storytelling. It’s a crossroads move for me: from San Francisco to New York, from working out of cafes and bedrooms to a Midtown office with other people in it, from staying up until 3 am writing to oh who am I kidding!

True and appropriately embarrassing story: I first came to Third Wave as a loud-mouthed but shy-faced sex worker activist, invited to speak on a panel on sex work and feminism. I dug up the bio I submitted for that gig on Valentine’s Day in 2003, and oh god I am not it sharing here but! It is young and precious and earnest and also, not that off-the-mark. Now six years later, I just had to pull the same kind of thing together, but this time, for my new staff bio. And this is what I wrote:

Melissa Gira Grant is a writer, artist, and activist working at the intersection of sexuality, new media, feminism, and human rights. She is the incoming External Relations Officer at Third Wave Foundation, and the former Development Coordinator and Social Media Coordinator at St. James Infirmary, a peer-based clinic for sex workers in San Francisco. Working in collaboration with grassroots community-based organizations and non-governmental organizations, including the Open Society Institute’s Sexual Health and Rights’ Project, the Tactical Tech Collective, the Desiree Alliance, THE LINE Campaign, and the Internet Sex Information Service (ISIS-Inc), Melissa develops editorial content, education and advocacy campaigns, and offers technical assistance and peer-led workshops in using new media for social justice. She is the co-founder of the sex worker policy watch and media advocacy blog, Bound, not Gagged, a columnist for $pread magazine, and a contributor to Slate, The Huffington Post, and RH Reality Check. She lives in Brooklyn, and her website is melissagira.com.

Aside from the fact that not a lick of that existed in 2003, again: I don’t feel I’ve changed all that much, honestly, in who I am and what I do — even if I rarely spell it all out in one neat paragraph (and how I have tried). What does feel like a shift is that now that I have a title on my head, some people are going to look at me as a sort of professional feminist. With all the attendant and marvelous baggage that brings.

Like more pencil skirts and smart blouses and heels! Of all of the things I’ve done for money, I’ve never got to wear office drag in a legitimate office environment quite so often as I’ve donned it for the purposes of slipping in and out of hotel lobbies and airports to look as little “like a prostitute” as possible. And because of the beautifully curved way my life has come around itself, I do not even have to offer this story as a grand coming-out gesture to any of my new colleagues. For once, that outing moment is actually among the least incendiary things I could say about myself. They know. They’ve funded the sex worker run clinic I once called home, St. James Infirmary, based on a proposal I co-authored. They’ve already seen me blushing and awkward and ready to take on whatever long before I was ready for everything I’d set myself up to take on.

There are no closet doors here.

But of course there always are.

Just give me at least a few weeks to obsess on the one that’s directly across from my own bed before I start talking about how it feels to emerge from the rest.

Two weeks ago, my new New York pal Kat Bridgeman (who has given me permission to call her fella) invited me to an unconference that she’d helped to organize, and at breakneck speed. SocialChangeCamp was for internet people and non-profit people to get together and figure out the answer to everything, or at least as much we could before the open bar. Out of my commitment to the BarCamp model of valuing one’s ability to show up and talk cogently about whatever, and one half of one cup of coffee, I proposed a session to round-up the people who worked in sexuality and related issues, and the people who wanted to absorb us talking shop.

Which produced (ha ha, that’s the first Foucault callback) this thing! This thing! I am in love with this ad hoc infographic. At the very top of the session, one participant commented that his organization (a pretty progressive political party) “doesn’t work with these issues” because sex was so “private” and “personal,” and I couldn’t hide my shock-dismay-educable-moment-face and called out, “I’m shocked.” And then asked someone to fetch me a marker and started drawing this: first writing Sex, then /uality, then a nice little protective bit of nylon umbrella (it’s red in my head, of course), a pretty curvaceous handle, and then these two divided spheres: the bedroom and the public square.

And from there, the rest, until it was clear that sex contained (yes) a lot more than fucking.

There are tensions here, all over this thing: my head broke a little when I had to figure out where to place GLBTQ on the infographic, and so I deemed the umbrella broken — until we had to figure out where to put race, gender, and class, too, and so mended the spine with all four of them.

Also awkwardly positioned in the middle: that would be the internet.

While the conversation swung and wheeled around sexuality as a cluster of concerns — how the physical act of sex is re-constituted across issues like health care, citizenship, rights to mobility, and education — we stayed grounded in this idea that it was wrong to confine sex to the realm of illness, or danger and risk, or even the erotic. To people who work in policy, or development, or health, or human rights, this isn’t abstract. We can say from experience, we are not usually turned on when gathered around those tables together. Even at St. James Infirmary, which is a pretty sexy place to work, the exam rooms adorned with marabou feathers and signed posters from all the major gay porn studios, we hold firm boundaries between our individual sex lives and the ways we talk about sex with our community members (which was St. James-ese for the people formerly known as the patients). Maybe it’s because so many of us have done sex work that we have that ethic, that we value it so: we know from experience how to set the tone around sexual talk, and we know how to keep different parts of our lives and experiences separate yet still whole.

It turns out (and here’s where Michel and I may diverge) the more we think and talk about sex, the more control we develop — and the more forms of social control we participate in. For good and certainly for ill, sexuality isn’t an unruly, messy, overly personal force: it’s one of the most regulating forces in the human social order. Sometimes I’m sure that nothing could be less private, less personal, less individual than sex.

Just like in the hot mess of a picture at the top of the blog, there’s a big middle space between who and how we fuck, and our power and mobility in the world. That tension across the middle is where sexuality lives: just like fucking, it’s always taking place between people.

I’ve been working this summer not only documenting online advocacy campaigns, but launching one with filmmaker Nancy Schwartzman: where is your line? Using Nancy’s personal documentary film THE LINE as its center, we’re going to be throwing the questions raised by her story back to our audiences: how do we express consent for what we want?

Nancy and I started talking in April, when I had about two weeks to decide if I was going to leave San Francisco. This project made that choice a little easier, and gave me some faith that I might find good work in this middle space between art, activism, and technology. There was also something totally seductive about a project where our audience was so specific, and so already immersed in the internet.

Last week, we got to bring the film and the campaign together into the world for the first time, at a screening at American University. One of our interns, Carmen Rios, is an American student (and blogger, and unshutupable activist), and hosted us and gave us all the inside info that yes, talking about whether or not to friend your hookup on Facebook is an issue for real, but also, so real that to talk about “hanging out on Facebook” like it’s all that different from “hanging out” period is getting to be a less meaningful distinction. I was equally immersed this summer, in our little office on Broadway right near the crazy bull statue, listening in on and trying to design our campaign around the many smart observations from Carmen and Melanie Wallner (our NYU-based intern) on what’s going on with sex and communication and pleasure in college.

Backstory: I was a community educator in a program at my college women’s center, doing workshops on rape, dating violence, sexual harassment, and porn, trying to infuse a sex-positive perspective to a body of work and activism that didn’t have a lot of room in the prescribed curriculum for discussions of healthy expressions of sexuality. I remember being told that by offering a bowl of condoms and lube in our open community gathering room, we’d risk triggering survivors of sexual violence. Forget the fact that I am a survivor and I’m the one making the request. I got so many messages from the other educators and the staff at the center that my experience was too hard to consider. I wasn’t the right kind of survivor: I still had and enjoyed having sex.

Nancy and I hoped that we could create an online space where people would feel comfortable exploring how we talk about consent, and then share that conversation in places where they are already hanging out online. Using Facebook alone to talk about sex is problematic: does everyone want to share everything they say on a drunken hookup amidst all the other info on their Wall? This isn’t to say people need anonymity or privacy to talk about sex honestly; we need contextual space, where we have control over what stories we share are connected with what other pieces of our identity.

All of this so neatly connected with conversations I’ve been having with Sarah Dopp for the last year, and so she was the first person I thought of to bring in to help me translate this to a real website. Sarah’s Genderfork project just masterfully deals with all these issues of identity, consent, authenticity, and storytelling. She also put me up on her couch when I was in San Francisco, and that’s where we worked until late in the night on one marathon day.

The entire campaign website is drawn from the design of our stickers — inspired by the Saudi campaign, We the Women, that raises dialogue about laws that prohibit women from driving by using anonymous stickers posted and photographed in public space, and then shared on Flickr and Facebook to inspire dialogue. Over loads of emails and two (hilarious) Skype chats, our designer in Paris, Thomas Cabus, brought the whole thing — all my messy drawings and twisty, windy explanations of what we wanted to do — together.

What’s next is more screenings, more stickers, more videos, more fun in Photobooth after screenings and sharing stories with the young women and men who want to hang out and tell us what they need, what’s not working, what’s getting missed in the media.

And I hope I get to do more things like this — just turning on the Xacti and relating the lay of the land at the college we’re about to visit, talking back to what I was taught in college to call the “rape culture” but in a voice that’s got a chance of getting through — because if we’re not spending time figuring out how to say yes to each other, we’re giving in.

Laugh, cry, rend your fishnets and ask for extra credit: Eliot Spitzer is now an adjunct political science professor at City College of New York, teaching a three hour section once a week on law and public policy. In another reality commanded by the New York Post, he’s also plotting a return to office.

I was not serious, New York, when I lamented not being on the ground in March 2008 to cover his “downfall” from having “availed himself” of the “services” of a “prostitution ring” — and a porn-load of other gross, gross metaphors that do nothing resembling fair reporting on the fact that “Client 9″ is no different than scores of other elected officials who are happy to legislate and enforce prostitution as far as they can from the guilty, nasty, professional sex they enjoy in expense-accounted suites.

(And they are so guilty. You can see how guilty quite a bit on MSNBC. Or at Slate.)

It’s not happening. And if I’m wrong, you can tease me for ever having shamefully hoped I might get my chance at him.

(image: my inbox, just last week.)

(That isn’t to say I always feel welcome in those circles.)

And I’ve always had feminist men and feminist boys in my life. There was Darryl, who was a human rights activist at 14, and the first straight kid to step up and loudly support the Gay/Straight Alliance in my high school. Andy is the guy who took the Gay/Straight Alliance over from me, and he turned me on to Patti Smith, Sonic Youth, and Huggy Bear the summer before I moved away from all those kids (and he also was totally patient when I figured out that I only wanted to play bass in his band because of my girl bassist idols, not any real talent). The dude at the Minuteman copy shop in my home town, he could have been a feminist: that he didn’t refuse outright to photocopy my zine when it had stories about sex in it written by me, a fifteen year old, was pretty, if not accidentally, political. It’s also no accident that the feminist men in my life are really immersed in other stuff besides “the men’s movement” — if that’s of interest to them at all, which I don’t think it is. They make music and media with women without lording their expertise. They go to rallies with women and make connections between what goes on out there and in our own bedrooms without wanting a big gold star for it. They are sexy. Sometimes, they’re queer, they’ve been around, they’ve been the one to take the 3am phone call coming home from the party gone wrong or the tears after sex when something really old and really painful came back, and they don’t expect approval for that giving or loving. The good ones, anyway. The ones I still add back on Facebook even if we haven’t seen each other in a decade and would gladly curl up with and run around with after diving through those dark nights and hard conversations.

So. The other night. I turned out for a panel of feminist men, organized by Paradigm Shift NYC, “New York City’s feminist community.” I knew what I was getting into. One of the panelists, Bob Brannon, is the co-founder of the National Organization for Men Against Sexism, is the leader of their Task Group on Pornography and Prostitution. He’s also the co-chair of the National Organization for Women (New York state chapter) Task Force on Trafficking, Pornography and Prostitution. People who combine advocacy around porn, prostitution, and trafficking tend not to ally themselves with people who advocate for sex workers’ rights. This is a huge mess for sex workers and for feminists right now, as recently as this summer’s fight in Rhode Island over re-criminalizing indoor prostitution, where people calling themselves feminists in a fight against violence against women (they usually leave out the men and transgender folks in the sex industry) are saying some pretty ruthlessly stupid stuff, and just flat out lying, about sex workers actual lives. My life. My life was the one I put on the table, and didn’t really want to.

To say I have a complicated relationship to the sex industry is really just to sum up my professional life. (That, and a lack of health insurance.) Thanks to the insufficient privacy of San Francisco blog & activist life, it was rare that I met anyone socially or politically who didn’t know that I’ve done sex work. Now that I’ve settled in New York, I’ve forgotten what it is to come out. So when I prepared my question for Brannon, after he’d taken his fifteen minutes to talk about what an amazing victory for feminists that intensified anti-trafficking laws are, laws that hand even more power and control over to the police when it comes to ensuring the safety and rights of people who sell sex — which the police don’t historically and actually do such a great job at — I was not going to couch my question in terms of my sex work experience. It’s just not relevant. It was also likely to frame me up in a convenient box in which he could dismiss me. I mean, these so-called “anti-trafficking” people actually believe there is a well-funded pro-sex work political lobby, backed by the industry (as if the big players in the sex business, the strip club owners and porn production companies, could get that big a PR act together), that any sex worker who speaks back to them is a part of.

And the truth is, for at least the last two years, I’ve spent more time reporting on the sex industry than being part of it. My life has shifted to a different disreputable course.

Whatever happened when I asked Brannon my question, I knew I didn’t want to have the first question. But the Q&A got off to a jolt when a lawyer who defends sex workers — and that was his term, sex workers — asked Brannon about the implications of the trafficking law for his law practice. Was it true that sex workers who were arrested could be treated as victims, rather than criminals, by claiming they had been forced into sex work? What possibilities for a new sort of defense did this leave open? (And in fact, a law passed in New York in June does allow victims of human trafficking to have any prostitution convictions removed from their records.)

Brannon dodged the questions almost entirely, saying he’d be glad to discuss it later, that this wasn’t really his area of concern, and that also, he wanted to “draw [the lawyer's] attention” to his “language.” Brannon continued, taking up more airspace with this semantic argument than he did with the question at hand, that “some people” are trying to use the terminology “sex work” but that he and his movement believed this was incorrect and obscured the “real issues.” When the lawyer asked what the preferred nomenclature was, Brannon replied that the proper term should be “women who have been used in prostitution.”

This is where I was so glad I was sitting next to Audacia Ray, longtime activist friend and blogger-in-arms, former sex worker, and all around rock who could see the “oh no HE DIDN’T” on my face and echo it back without even moving a muscle.

I raised my hand to make sure I had the next spot, and I changed my question.

And I got it.

I stole a play from the book of the Latin American sex worker activists, who open every critical statement with a bit of gratitude before launching into their take. (And this mostly works, even for long meetings, conducted with simultaneous English/Spanish translation, in headsets. It was like the sex worker UN up in there some days at the AIDS Conference in Mexico City last summer. It was fantastic.) I said to Brannon that I was sure I was the beneficiary of some of his good work, the year I joined a community advocacy program against violence against women in college, we just integrated men into the group. That it was so valuable to work together with men. But that I had real concerns for how his group addresses trafficking without including the people most impacted by their advocacy around trafficking: people in the sex industry. Had they spoken to people who had been raped and assaulted by the police when they were arrested for prostitution? Because to hear him just speak, I didn’t feel that he had. And to hear him just speak, it made asking this question of him that much more challenging, as I, a sex worker, actually did prefer to be called a sex worker, and that for anyone else in the room curious about how to refer to someone who sells sex, they should defer to what people call themselves and want to be called by others. Did they understand (I continued, I mean, I really continued and graciously, no one cut me off) that relying on police to arrest people who sell sex was therefore problematic, and that the raids and “rescue” missions themselves are traumatic and re-victimizing? What was his group doing to ensure that sex workers had access to housing, health care, and education? Rather than focus on what they believed was the inherent abuse in selling sex, how were they working to end the rape and abuse of sex workers at the hands of the people that his group believe can “protect” them — the police? Had they listened to sex workers at all?

Brannon again claimed that this wasn’t really his issue, or his concern, and that though his people had worked with people who had left the sex industry and were trying to “make a fresh start” (or some similar metaphor, which I forget, at this point, not having had a notebook out to record anything so much as I was just trying to hold my ground and his eyes) but that he “didn’t believe that sex workers [were] the experts” on these issues or deserved a place at the policy table.

So here we are again. None of this is surprising. I have friends in the community of sex worker advocates who do this all the time: try to get on some common ground with the “anti-trafficking” people in the feminist movement, go to their events, ask questions. It may seem like sanctimonious barnstorming, to show up where they show up, but some of these “anti-trafficking” activists are not people who respond to kind emails or invitations to debate or discuss. They use scare tactics and smear campaigns, and frankly, I don’t feel all that safe in one-on-one discussions with them. I preferred the open forum of this panel as a way to ask for some accountability, and I knew full well I probably wouldn’t get a response that even shimmied near anything resembling ethical consideration.

So how does one even respond to someone that a feminist organization has pitched up on a pedestal for a moment as “the good guy” telling you, for your own good, that you have been used and to just be quiet and let him get back to work?

It certainly would be sanctimonious of me to imply, oh god well what sort of man does that sound like!, because for me the answer is, countless crap bosses I had as a teenager, and a handful of jurassic-era teachers, and my still-living-at-home fifty-something uncle and my own abusive, rapist father.

But you know. Having men tell me how powerless I am is why I turned to a life of contracting with them the specific terms under which I could give them attention, and also under which I would ask them to treat me.

Even after that lovely assessment of my and hundreds of thousands of other women’s morals and political abilities, I did stay to the end. I made an effort to “network” — which meant taking questions from the men who now, after my speaking up, considered me the safe person to talk about sex with in the room. I thanked Dacia and Nancy Schwartzman (who I’ve been working with on a sex-positive advocacy campaign for her film, The Line), who gave me a sincere shout-out to the panel as someone who was her ally in anti-violence work, thank you very much, no matter how “used” one of them just told everyone I was. I imagined how I might write this up and knew that I’d have to, after having told Twitter about the night up to that point.

So here’s the pull-quote:

If men like Brannon want to do right by women, if they want what they tell women they want, they need to do what men are socialized (sorry, guys!) to be really lousy at: ask before doing something that takes such control of our bodies and our lives, ask and listen and not in some awful “active listening” way that really just reminds us of yet another guy wanting to get down our pants, ask and listen and don’t you dare tell another woman she has nothing worth listening to because she has been “used” by the system or by men or whoever, when what you really mean is, “let me use you for myself, for my own career and my own political ends.” How wonderful, a voiceless mass of women to invoke as your beneficiaries. How awful, when any of us do show up.

I’ve been so (happily) immersed in an info-activism project with the Tactical Tech Collective for the last two months that I neglected to blog that I had moved to New York. I know. When your desk is Skype and your office is Twitter, where you lay your head starts to matter a whole lot less. Or seems like it does. Hi, from Brooklyn!

This next week is giving me a pretty much perfect opportunity to explain a little bit about what I’m working on: New Tactics in Human Rights and Tactical Tech are hosting a week-long online dialogue, “Turning Information Into Action,” from July 8 – 14th. It’s a mini-reunion from our camp in Bangalore this past February, and a chance for you to get a preview of the work we’ve done since on a multimedia guide for info-activists (otherwise known as, that project I try my best to articulate when I bump into you at a party). The guide has been my life for the last two months, and will blend both viral video and recipe-style cards to break down tools and techniques for using information/communication tech for human rights and social justice.

Documenting one’s life and work is one of my most enduring obsessions, as that’s been the crux of this project: speaking with advocates around the world about how they do what they do, their successes and their words of wisdom for those inspired to take up their lead. And for all the documentation of my own life I feel like such a natural at, documenting my advocacy work isn’t one of them. As a writer, I can just link you to a new piece — the back-and-forth of how it got there is just candy. (Though I do want to break down how my Slate story happened, because it’s still a story I keep telling.) It’s why I asked a friend to come livestream our vigil for the International Day to End Violence Against Sex Workers: at least that would be live faster than I could type. But still, why we chose to do a day of action as a tactic, and who our audience was, and what targets we’d chosen for our intentions, and what we’d needed for support and resources — all that’s invisible. It doesn’t need to be. It’s not magic. But unless our campaign draws an audience of media pundits calling it a “revolution,” that sort of discussion rarely makes it online — and even then, they so often miss the point, and we so rarely have have the time to step back from the campaign to unpack the hype and respond.

So come ask me anything. Check these videos to get oriented to the kinds of campaigns we’ve been following. You don’t have to limit your questions for me to sex work advocacy — you can start with what’s up with the pink panties.

(Photo: por petite)

I first met Stephanie Hankey like nearly every amazing woman I’ve met in the last ten years — over the Internet. The NGO that Stephanie co-founded, Tactical Tech Collective, was beginning a project for sex workers who use technology for advocacy, and I had been brought on to work with her and Tactical Tech’s Movement Building lead, Dirk Slater (who took this lovely photo). Tactical Tech is at the absolute forefront of keeping technology relevant, accessible, and powerful, for advocates and the communities we are part of and serve. I’ve never had so much asked of me and been so thankful for it.

When I try to explain Tactical Tech and Stephanie (its Executive Director) to people who have never been to one of their trainings — like the Info-Activism Camp in Bangalore this February — what I try to capture is her conviction and her resilience. Working through all kinds of barriers — whether that’s language and geography, or finding the funding, or getting a workshop going in spite of intermittent electricity — Stephanie guides us all in holding space for truly diverse groups of people to learn together, from each other.

Tactical Tech’s ethos is that nobody knows everything, and everybody knows something. It’s a beautiful philosophy, but it plays out pragmatically, as well. How else do you get so many people to huddle around laptops showing each other around a new CMS (especially with a very inviting pool outside)? The crazy thing is, we keep asking for more. I met people at the Bangalore camp who come back to Tactical Tech’s events to re-orient themselves as much as to pick up new skills. An international, mobile, multi-issue community has formed through Tactical Tech. It’s not just Tactical Tech or Stephanie’s network — it’s all of ours now who make it, to lean on one another, to collaborate and co-conspire, to take inspiration from and take solace in — because this work can still be as exhausting as it is energizing.

For the hundreds, and likely thousands, of people who, through Tactical Tech, have taken their power, claimed their rights, and carried that work on to countless others, thank you, Stephanie, for your vision, and your willingness and your perseverance. There’s still something radical in doing it ourselves, but something even more powerful in doing it ourselves together.

This just in from some fabulous activists at St. James Infirmary — the nation’s only for & by sex worker health clinic, and one of my second homes: the Coalition to Save Public Health in San Francisco needs people to come speak out against Mayor Gavin Newsom’s mid-term budget cuts that would mean the end of crucial services to sex workers, GLBT adults & teens, homeless youth, and harm reduction services to folks of all kinds struggling just to get by.

They’re calling for a vote to reduce the damage of the cuts now, and for a special election to put these cuts before San Francisco voters, and need a big turnout in support at this week’s Board of Supervisors meeting on January 27th. The whole organizing effort is collaborative, between all kinds of community people working in HIV prevention, harm reduction, sexual health services, and mental health services, and sex workers have been at the forefront of this fight.

Can’t make it? You can follow along at the hearing on Tuesday with the @SaveHealthSF Twitter account, and also on Flickr and the Save Public Health blog.

Now he’s back with his 2009 agenda, delivered like the others, as a kicker to his column. In it, he asks that the Obama administration pressure the Cambodian government to bust more brothels, on the premise that the risk of going to jail for selling sex will hurt brothel owners’ profits and will protect more women from abuse and violence. Yet such stings and raids are already the centerpiece of a disastrous crackdown on Cambodian prostitution. The Bush administration has supported the raids of Cambodian brothels for at least as long as Kristof has been demanding they step up a fight they are already in – and losing.

It was under threat of sanctions from the United States that prostitution was outlawed in Cambodia. The resulting government-sponsored raids on brothels did not lead to a great improvement in the lives of women and girls. Instead, the same police tasked with “liberating” women from Cambodia’s brothels have been accused by human rights groups of abusing these same women.

In a video made by members of the Asia Pacific Network of Sex Workers (APNSW), one survivor of what was called a “rehabilitation center” relates the story of being gang raped by six members of the police force: “They raped me from one after the other… the last one didn’t use condom because I got only five condoms. I told him that I have HIV but he was not believe me. He said if I had HIV, would have scar on body, not so smooth.” Another woman survivor describes her time in the Koh Kor rehabilitation center. It sits on the same island that was once home to a Khmer Rouge prison and execution camp. She explains that when she asked questions about why she had been taken in against her will, and what was wrong with what she was doing, she was repeatedly beaten by her captors – the police. These are the people – the police, and the government officials who have operated brothels in a network of corruption – that Kristof would like us to trust to combat violence.

Setting a human rights agenda for the United States will be an enormous challenge for Barack Obama and his incoming administration, with a host of failed Bush campaigns to contend with. His handling of so-called “sex slavery” will be but one. When considering how he ought to proceed, to undo damage done, and to improve human rights around the globe, Obama should look not to Kristof and his urgent cries, but to those women who are currently imprisoned and violated by the people who were supposed to “save” them. To endorse brutal, violent raids and “rehabilitation” as a solution to the brutality and violence of coerced prostitution ignores the evidence that raids do nothing to discourage abusive conditions — they perpetuate them.

DIRTY DIRTY QUEERDOES FOR DALY

And somehow I’d escaped the term “queerdo,” in my years of verbal torment from public school students. Mostly, they called me a freak. Sometimes, a witch. Usually, they’d append it all with dyke. Being queer and strange, it was all the same to them — just like getting harassed for it was just part of growing up outside of a real city (which, with syringes and condoms, also teem with grown-up gay people).

The fifteen year old part of me, that’s still a riot grrrl, and really wishes she’d had the courage and foresight to start a band called Ramona and the Quimbys? She’s definitely a queerdo.

I’m a bad gay myself. I keep sleeping with boys. I’m a bad straight. I keep on fucking, and not getting married. I don’t think I’ll ever get married, even though I almost did when I was 23. I don’t think I’ll ever be gay or straight. Bisexual is a term that barely even fits. I gave up on this notion that I’d only ever want to sleep with or love someone of “my gender” or its “opposite” a long time ago. I don’t even know what the “opposite” of my sex is anymore. I forgot before I even moved to San Francisco.

So for lack of a better word, queerdo will do.

And if I have a generation — I barely have one of those, straddling X and Y as my birthday does — we’re the queerdoes. We don’t fit. We grew up with the internet. We barely had to come out. We’re hyper and more likely to get our community organizing chops from teaching our baby queer friends how to have safer sex with a latex glove, how to sneak into a dyke bar, how to cruise boys on the subway, than how to organize a rally. We learned what we know about politics from fucking and keeping our communities together amidst all the fucking. We’re spastic and driven and can do eight things at once.

My queer community welcomed me as warmly as its designated sex party planner as it did when I dragged the PA up to the student union steps for National Coming Out Day. There’s a photo. I have an awkward butch hairdo. I look more like, as Gina de Vries puts it so delicately, “femme chicken” than the earnest lesbian I thought I was supposed to be.

We can do all of that, the rallying and the loving. We just don’t always get credit for it from the folks who came before us. Who hire straight PR people to be their face rather than risk us, the wrong kinds of gays, getting too much press.

And it’s been like this, since I was 17, when my closeted health teacher took my best friend and I into her classroom to lecture us for having run around with the Lesbian Avengers, waving the evidence in our face — the front page of the Boston Globe, with a photo from the Pride parade featuring topless women in black leather suspenders making out on a float, that was really just a queen-sized mattress, which they crashed the Parade with after being denied a permit.

We got the message: we’re going to have to figure out how to survive on our own, if even our gay elders aren’t going to stick their necks out for our right to be young for ourselves. And so we didn’t rally around the right to marry, to be a soldier, to buy a nice house in the nice part of town with our nice spouse. We went to work in health clinics, and faith organizations, and started magazines, and made porn, and went to demonstrations against war and war and war and took home the cute people, and kept warm together in the dark.

It’s been twelve, thirteen, fourteen years since then, since coming out seemed like the biggest thing in the world I could do. It no longer feels that way. I’ll keep doing it, but what I’m going to do next — after organizing a major sex worker day of action in San Francisco, hos first — is make sure that I bring a few people to EqualityCamp, which is on January 3rd and will be a chance for all of us overly-internet-ed activists to put our heads together and figure out what to do next, now that history has handed us what we didn’t do to hold onto the right to marry, that a lot of us would never exercise anyway.

I’m never getting married, I’m sure, but I’m going. Because I don’t ever want another campaign for “my rights” run without people I love in the middle of it. Because those of us who haven’t been in the middle of these ornate political sideshows have been doing hard work that has made us ready for it, even if we didn’t know that at the time. Because there’s a lot of us who’ve been off being queer in a way that the Human Rights Campaign and their brethren will never notice, never call to the middle, never give a seat at the table. Because we’re queerdos: we spend too much time thinking about all this gay stuff, and honestly, too much time online. I’ve seen you on Twitter. You can’t hide.