turnin tricks for the liberation of Mother Earth

This was originally written in 2013 for a book that was never published. It was recently returned to me but I did not know where to publish so I just blogged it….


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I really am not sure what to write about, kinda nervous… not so much because I don´t think my experience is worth sharing, but because all too often it has been delegitimized for not being like other people's, many times by folks that one would have thought were allies.


During the times I was a sex worker I was not a teenager, nor a runaway. I was not trying to put myself through school or support my family- none of these difficult life circumstances that conventional society tries to use to create an atmosphere of despair and pity for all people who decide to take on sex work.


I was older at the time; I started at 23. Since at least middle school I had been actively engaged in my South Florida community, working on a variety of issues including immigrant rights, anti-gentrification, and solidarity work with different indigenous communities in South and Central America who were defending their territories from different extractive industries. As with most Floridian Latin American kids whose families send them upstate for college, as soon as I finished I went right back to the 3-0-5.


Some afternoon, I remember it was November and I had left my job at County Parks not too long before that, my mother´s homophobia reached a boiling point where the last words exchanged where “si vas a ser así, pues aquí no puedes vivir” (if you are going to be like that, well you can´t live here), and with the slam of the front door and turning gears of my road bike, I was outta there to spend the next 3.5 months sleeping on friends' couches, the beach, and eventually living in a shanty town that had been created on liberated public lands to address the lack of affordable housing in South Florida. Look up Umoja Village and Take Back the Land.


Folks who know me know that for me, word is bond. It just so happens not a month prior I had helped host a leader from a community that had survived a massacre due to coal mining interests in their territory. I had been invited to go down to the Caribbean Coast of Colombia for a year and help develop some communications projects with folks from that community. I had four months to save up money and being homeless and jobless was not an excuse to not keep my word.


I´d had had friends who practiced sex work for some time, though they are all women and none of them lived in South Florida. So after hours and hours of looking through Craigslist's Erotic Services ads (back in the day when there were no fees), and talking to my local friends about it, I decided that I would take on sex work to facilitate an income while i continued to support communities fighting off these Earth-destroying businesses. It worked, I worked, I hussled; I saved the necessary money y así me desaparecí to the other side of the Caribbean for two years while mostly working in rural communities passing as a straight male; and while in the cities I sought out the queer and sex worker spaces so I could just be.


It was hard at first, getting over the mental/emotional baggage, not being afraid of creep-o-johns, and probably the hardest part—I had to learn to fit into the gender molds expected of me by my johns. I tend to be a very versatile and allergic to the polarized, heterosexist sexuality that is often reinforced within gaystream communities. It’s okay to like both topping and bottoming, or neither, but what I quickly learned is that that had no place in the workplace. Nearly all of my johns had some very stringent roles with their sexuality. They either wanted to be debased, humiliated, used and insulted homophobically or they wanted to dominate, fuck me so roughly it seemed they were disgusted, and almost always trying to do what was not consented, like "slip" their dick in me without a condom or consent. If I could get only paid for every time I was told, “la puntica no mas” (just the tip). So through sex work I also learned to act, to be boring and one dimensional, be that submissive or power bottom boi that the daddy was looking for or that cold, macho dude that just “cared” about getting off and the other person did not matter.


I came back to the US in 2009, feeling torn from my context in South America due to debts and other obligations in the North. I came back and had two things clear—1) fuck this empire that was destroying planet earth, I don't wanna live here I have a territorio I belong to, and 2) sex work was gonna help me get the fuck out and support the communities I had developed relationships with over the last few years. As the child of South American immigrants in the North who finally had the chance to go back, decolonize, and strike my own path and story in the lands my peoples are from, leaving South America was not what I wanted and well, in simplest words, the Peaches song “Fuck the Pain Away” was the anthem for that year.


As I toured up the Atlantic Coast giving fundraising talks about the situations of these communities during the day, in the evenings I was also spending my time fundraising by making arrangements on Craigslist and seeing who was interested in my profile on Rent Boy. Some of my privileges such as being able to pass for white, male, and straight (of which I am none); not having kids or familial obligations like that; and not having a home or stable living situation that required regular bills allowed me to live very nomadically that year and support myself as well and get many needed materials to communities facing off mines, pipelines, dams, and other projects that would destroy the land and displace the people (ironically, forcing many folks into sex work, but under very different circumstances than mine—because their homes would be destroyed and they would have no other opportunities as displaced peoples in the larger cities and towns).


So 2009 was an array of massages with happy endings, threesomes, receiving head while calling the client a maricon sucio, and even cuddling with a widow. Some of my clients became weekly regulars and would even use my services as a non-sexual escort at times; I would go to dinner parties and talk “deep” things with folks who had boring, materialistic and superficial existences. By then I felt much more secure in what I was doing. I had an incredible network of friends and allies to support me, I had enough income where I was not just barely surviving, and I was supporting territorial defense in different places including in my peoples’ homeland.


Meanwhile back in South America, when ever I would communicate with folks from land defense processses and I was informed of needed economic support, my story was always the same... "lemme talk to some foundations to see if they can support"... ¿¡que foundation de que?! ¡nada!... two weeks of hussling later, "mira que this foundation said they could support, ya te pongo el envío". It worked well but I had to tone it down because this story ended up working against me when some folks started thinking that I had a bunch of foundations of automatic dial and that I had money at my fingertips. Those stories of "foundations" that supported slowly changed into "benefit parties".


When I started sex work, I was in a different place with my internalized colonization clouding my head, issues around masculinity, domination, and objectification. As a person who passes as a cisgender male and being within this patriarchal Latin American society, I did not really grow up with these concepts being issues for me in terms of how I related to the world. Most cis and cis-passing men don't go through life having to fear walking down the street beyond the fear of the police or being robbed, or know what it's like to be sexually assaulted or raised in a culture where you are stripped of your self-determination or your bodily autonomy due to your gender. These are all things I learned as an adult and as a sex worker, because even despite some undesirable incidents that happened to me in my childhood—men trying to forcibly pick me up when I was a pre-teen at bookstores, or men grabbing my ass or crotch when I would go to the supermarket—my socialization as male in a heteronormative culture awarded me with the stupid ability to not acknowledge my own oppression or privilege while it was happening because if I did, it would make me less “male.”


Through sex work I can sincerely say that I became more secure in my body, sexuality, and gender identity. I won´t be so brash to say that it would work like this for anyone, queer male-presenting or not, but in my own personal experience it opened a world to me about enjoying my body, touch, human interaction, without having complexes of machismo and manliness or worrying that if I did these things I was less male or whatever. Through sex work I learned to not care, to feel good, and that it was okay. As a firm believer that liberation is a mental state and not just a political-social one, somehow or another, I found my liberation through selling time with my body and self.






J.Lu.- is mutant native person living and resisting out of northern Abya Yala (South America) who dedicates their time to land defense and Earth liberation processes through direct action, cultural resistance, community communications and popular education.