"What the signers didn’t say was that criminalization does the same thing. When trading sex is made illegitimate, the people who do it are also made illegitimate. Criminalization increases barriers to safety in every form—housing, health care, child care and parental rights, and familial and social support. We live, here and now, in a country in which trading sex is more criminalized than in nearly any other country on earth, and where sex workers have little legal recourse when we’re assaulted. When we’re assaulted, under criminalization, we have to weigh the possibility that going to the police will mean being arrested. If we go to the police, they can refuse to investigate our rapes. Often the police themselves are our rapists." - Lorelei Lee
"We're still describing trading sex as slavery and I think there is a harder conversation to be have about when force labor should be call slavery in the modern era, and I think that's very complicating and I am not saying that we shouldn't never used that term. But I think in the United States we have this history that has created a conversation of modern slavery that centers whiteness, and centers these sort of saving of white women or white women's purity, and that is a white nationalist notion and that it underlines the regime of anti-trafficking laws in the United States." - Lorelei Lee
Have a safe call. Have community. Today, I help write these guides. I help disseminate them. There are so many ways we can have each other’s backs. - Lorelei Lee
"To say that I needed the money is not the same as saying I could not choose, and to say that I chose is not the same as saying it was always good. I have been harmed in sex work and I have been healed in sex work and I should not have to explain either of those experiences in order to talk about my work as work." - Lorelei Lee