I’m 35 right now and in state of both external and internal flux. I can’t tell if it’s watching the slow motion train crash of what appears to be a path towards societal breakdown, an identity crisis from hitting the 2 year mark (and longest stint of formal employment I’ve ever had) at my day job, moving towards some type of midlife crisis, or a combination thereof but I’ve been siezed by a mighty sense of, “if not now, when?” this past year.
After a solid decade of mostly working nights in bars and clubs being pretty at peace with how I made a reasonable living (although drinking reeeally heavily), besides wanting better labor rights and more of a stake in the businesses benefitting from the attractive young femmes driving their profit models while making primarily unreliable tips for income I had no active plans or much of reason to change the way I made my money. Until 6 years ago when it all fell apart.
I was living on the East Coast at the time and had been at the same club for 5 years while bouncing around between other performance, bartending, and production gigs when the owner of my club decided he’d had it with my labor rights focused outside events and fired me with no notice 6 years ago. I had a hard time finding another good club in the city that would hire me and I could make decent money at, and while in and out of eviction court was even trying to drive to neighboring states to try out clubs where I was leaving with too little money to afford the road tolls home.
Events, performing, and the bartending gigs I was getting hired for weren’t consistent enough to stay up to date on bills, my partner who was making more reliable income didn’t want me to do other types of higher contact independent sex work, Backpage had shut down their adult section leaving our entire community similarly scrambling for income, and I was secretly seeing clients with uncertain boundaries and wildly inconsistent rates while trying to catch up on back rent and find something that paid more reliably.
It was a really shitty year. At the end of it I decided not to renew the lease on my apartment and move back to the Southwest with the assumption that I would settle back in at my old club a few times a month, fly back to the city once a month to produce a big event, and have a much easier time covering my bills in a smaller, more affordable place.
Which isn’t what happened. I didn’t get my deposit back to cover a new place to live or hired back at my old club and ended up spending 3 months bouncing between staying with family members, at hotels, and camping across 2 states before finally finding a place that I could afford with the money I had pulled together dancing at the club that would hire me (now shut down) with a landlord who didn’t look too hard into my rental history and took my word that I could pay in cash on time every month as acceptable income verification in one of my last options of areas to live. The next year also ended up really sucking.
Not making enough money at my new local club I was back to commuting several hours to try to audition at clubs that wouldn’t even put me on stage before turning me down and secretly seeing clients and trying to sugar date in more affluent cities north and south of me for much lower rates than I ever thought I’d be working at. This was also the year SESTA/FOSTA passed and backpage shut down, an event that many onnour industry still haven’t recovered fully from.
The next year also really sucked when I finally got hired at a minimum wage job that pushed me to a point of being extremely apathetic about my health and safety to actively wanting to kill myself, employment that was somewhat ultimately fortunately ended by the start of the pandemic and my first bought of covid which both qualified me for pandemic unemployment and left me house and very frequently bed bound for the year after that.
I tried to make a serious go at online only work that year and it was obvious that even if the clubs were open I wouldn’t have the strength to work in one since I couldn’t even put on my shoes and dance for more than 15 minutes at a time but it’s always been hard for me to work regularly in an entirely self employed without a schedule type capacity and trying to get a large enough social media following to actually net enough subscribers for online work to provide enough income to actually cover any of my bills has never been something I’ve been great at. When the vaccine rollout started I was fully prepared to figure out trying to do full time independent sex work when I got hired for a surprisingly good job that I felt extremely unqualified for and I’ve somehow managed to not quit or get fired this long.
I’ve made a lot of healthy changes in my life since the pandemic started. Even though the overall circumstances have been bad I (out of long covid related necessity) managed to finally quit drinking which I had been unsuccessfully trying to do for years and the time on pandemic unemployment gave me a chance to play with my branding and more gender fluid expression in ways I hadn’t been brave enough to try while working at the club and having a hard time making money.
These are ultimately good changes but I’ve definitely coped with some parts of them by throwing myself wholeheartedly into work and other people’s problems in a way that I feel myself hitting a wall with and while I’ve always been relatively visible and face out about sex work there have been a few major red flag incidents since starting my job that have made me consider a need to approach the way I approach sex work much differently now.
