San Francisco:
Sunday-3/15 Sex Worker Panel at Anarchist Book Fair
14th Annual Bay Area Anarchist Book Fair
March 14th and 15th, 2009, SF County Fair Building, Golden Gate Park
http://sfbookfair.wordpress.com/schedule/
Sex Workers Panel
(Sunday Noon, auditorium)
Sunday March 15
"Be Nice to Prostitutes" - Presentations by sex workers and writers from diverse communities in the Bay Area.
Panelists will present their specific perspectives about the nature of sex work and about conditions for sex workers, and what they are doing for sex worker rights.
Issues include:
- stopping violence against sex workers and decriminalization;
- sex work,
- poverty,
- racism and classism;
- condoms used as evidence against sex workers;
- how some anti-trafficking organizations work to oppose sex worker rights;
- Jews for Sex Worker Rights;
- discussion of the Prop K decriminalization ballot measure campaign in San Francisco and more.
Note: By "nice" we mean an end to the criminalization, incarceration, murders, police abuse, general abrogation of rights, discriminations, economic injustices and more inflicted upon us.
Moderator Acire Roche is a long time activist and musician, winning the Windy City Times "Under Thirty Award" for GLBT rights political activism. As a member of Center on Halsted, she wrote for and edited a young women's anthology. As founding member of Sex Workers Outreach Project, SF, she is dedicated to building a new sex workers movement in the city. See also
www.swop-usa.org
In the first edition of her zine called System Bitch, poverty scholar, welfare QUEEN and mother, Ecsta Scene has published a collection of what she calls witness statements. Authored by a variety of different people, these witness statements are first hand accounts of people's interactions with systems in today's modern world. System Bitch is unlimited in the scope of systems its authors confront, including but not limited to jail, child abuse, work, love, religion and politics. See also
www.poormagazine.org
Rachel West is a spokeswoman for the US PROStitutes Collective, which campaigns for decriminalization of the prostitution laws, and for economic alternatives and resources, and contributed to the book, Some Mother's Daughter. She also coordinates In Defense of Prostitute Women's Safety Project which works to end violence against sex workers. West has been published in anthologies and newspapers for nearly 30 years. See also
www.prostitutescollective.net
Shelly Resnick is a sex worker, activist for the Prop K campaign, and a volunteer for many SF organizations including the Transgender Law Center and TGI Justice Project. She is on the Board of SF TEAM and a founding member of San Francisco SWOP. Shelly is currently challenging a case in which the local police and District Attorney trumped up charges, targeting Shelly immediately after the Prop K campaign. See also
www.swop-usa.org
Carol Queen is a writer, speaker, educator and activist with a doctorate in sexology. First as an organizer in the lesbian/gay community, where she helped found one of the first gay youth groups in the United States, and later in the emerging international bisexual community, as a sex worker and a practitioner of alternative sexualities, she typically teaches and writes from her own experience and that of her communities even as she references academic thought on these subjects. Carol Queen's work has been published in many periodicals and has been widely anthologized, and she has several books in print. See also
www.sexandculture.org
Poet and performance artist, Carol Leigh (aka Scarlot Harlot) coined the term "sex worker" in 1979. Leigh volunteered at the HIV Prevention Project (needle exchange) and organized a campaign against mandatory HIV testing. She was lead writer of the San Francisco Board of Supervisor's Task Force on Prostitution, and is a founding member of SWOP-USA, BAYSWAN and a long time COYOTE member. Leigh currently directs and curates the San Francisco Sex Worker Film and Arts Festival
www.sexworkerfest.com which will be the first week of June 2009. The "Scarlot Harlot Video Festival" podcast is available on iTunes. Unrepentant Whore: The Collected Work of Scarlot Harlot was published by Last Gasp in 2003. See also
www.bayswan.org
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