$pread: the DIY magazine for sex worker rights

Hey there!

This week, I’m taking you back in time a couple of decades to look at how grassroots media can help build a stronger sense of identity for a community that could otherwise be pushed to the margins. 

It’s March 2005 in New York. In a packed burlesque theatre on the lower east side of Manhattan, a launch party for a new magazine is kicking into gear. A Time Out reporter scribbles down a quote from one of the organisers: “It’s not intended to arouse, but people are aroused by all kinds of things so maybe someone will be turned on by sex workers fighting for social justice.” 

$pread was made by sex workers for sex workers. Among the throng of press, performers, workers and activists that night was Rachel Aimee, one of the founding editors of the magazine. “Those fundraising parties were chaos,” she told me when I caught up with her recently. 

Back in the noughties, Rachel worked as a stripper. She’d moved to New York from London and “the sex worker rights movement felt like kind of an underground movement at the time,” she said. 

Rachel started getting involved with local meetings, where she met Rebecca Lynn and Raven Strega. The three bonded over a shared frustration: that most writing about sex work was academic and not accessible to the average person, including most of the sex workers they knew.

So the three of them decided to start a magazine. They didn’t know anything about making one, but that wasn’t going to stop them. 

“It was all very DIY and very exciting,” Rachel told me. They handed out flyers asking for submissions at strip clubs, brothels and outreach centres.

The trio were stunned by the response. As their email inbox and PO Box stacked up with submissions and notes of encouragement, they realised what they were doing had the potential to end the isolation that many sex workers were feeling.  

It gave an added weight of responsibility to their Sunday editorial meetings, held in East Village coffee shops and health food stores. As the launch approached and the team of volunteers grew to about eight, they camped out in a Brooklyn apartment watching one brave new recruit teach herself how to use design software to lay out the first issue. 

They covered their first set of printing costs by flogging hand-printed t-shirts and running benefits, where bands, burlesque performers, emcees and spoken word artists donated their time. 

When the first issue arrived it had no margins and the word prostitution was misspelt in several places. But they’d done it. 

And the magazine already had made a name for itself. At the post office, “as I was putting the stamps on the envelopes, a girl came up to me and asked me if that was $pread magazine,” Rachel remembers. “She said she’d heard about it and she wanted to subscribe.”

While the team may not have known a lot about making a magazine from the get-go, they were clear on its purpose. 

“Community building was always a big part of $pread's mission,” said Rachel. Their team’s core value was self-determination and they wanted to address stigma. For $pread to be a real community building tool, it had to be a forum for all sex workers, not just a privileged few.

To achieve this, $pread adopted quite a radical editorial strategy: it would not take positions on political or ethical issues. In order to belong to all sex workers, the team made space for the full range of experiences and opinions. “We still published a lot of political content, plenty of calls to action. And we still showed up in political spaces and distributed the magazine. We just couldn’t sign onto any particular campaigns as $pread.”

That approach was exemplified in the magazine’s regular “Positions” column, where two sex workers would debate questions like, “Can we justify working for pimps?”. “It showed that sex workers don't always agree on issues,” Rachel told me. “We’re far from one homogenous group.”

Other regular features included “Indecent proposal”, a popular illustrated section where sex workers described their weirdest requests from clients, and “The cunning linguist”, which defined speciality terms. Rachel was particularly pleased with magazine’s media reviews, which drew attention to the careless ways many authors and filmmakers brought sex workers into their stories for shock value. “Our critiques showed that sex workers are real people and called bullshit on all that,” she said.

As the magazine established itself, the team was able to move into a closet-like office, sublet from an anarchist newspaper in a cult-owned Midtown building. Team meetings were exercises in multitasking, stuffing envelopes with the current issue while planning the next one.  

I was struck by how the team stuck to the mission of the magazine and held themselves accountable. They knew that running a volunteer magazine that couldn’t pay writers created a bias towards richer or more privileged workers who could afford to give up their time. The first reader survey highlighted that $pread wasn’t reaching trans women or cis and trans men. Porn performers and street based sexworkers were also underrepresented in the data. 

“I think in the end we were a bit naive in thinking we could create a magazine that represented all sex workers,” Rachel said. Nonetheless, they made an admirable go of it. Instead of gunning for new distribution contracts that could have seen $pread stocked in bookshops, they ploughed resources into shipping 30% of each print run to mobile outreach vans, shelters and needle exchanges, hoping to reach sex workers who couldn’t otherwise afford it. 

It worked. Submissions came in for how-to articles on safely injecting hormones and drugs, as well as pieces on sex workers organising against police “move along” powers.

$pread eventually stopped publication in 2011, but its legacy lives on today – as PJ Starr explains further down.

“I’m proudest of all the letters we received from sex workers over the years, saying how much $pread meant to them – how much it meant to hear the voices of other sex workers,” Rachel told me. 

$pread also brought Rachel some amazing friends. “The community that it gave me, probably changed my life.

 “Even if you're lucky enough to have supportive friends and family, there's nothing like having a community of peers who really get it. In the days before social media, we gave that to people who didn't have anywhere else they could go for that community.”

“I was part of Different Avenues, a service founded by sex workers and trans people in the District of Columbia for health and rights. I was doing some organising there, and some of the folks within my organisation had heard about $pread, were interviewed for it, and were very excited about it. 

Around that time, sex workers were being affected by a number of new policy regimes. A major point for me was the development of the US Global AIDS Act in 2003, which led to worldwide funding for HIV medications but also put in a limitation on organisations promoting the practice of prostitution.

~ Lucy here: The US Global AIDS Act meant that US funds could not be used to promote or advocate the legalisation or practice of prostitution. Organisations also had to have an explicit anti-prostitution policy to access funds. ~

You know, when you try to oppress communities, communities resist. There was a new wave of sex worker rights organising. There were all kinds of more connected forms of organising happening – national convenings and conferences starting to come together for the first time.

In the United States at that time, there wasn’t a current magazine like that, so it was seen as a step forward in organising and something that people were really, really, really, really proud of. Everybody in the Different Avenues office was reading this magazine, passing it around and using it to build. They were extremely happy because it was taking back a space in the media for sex workers without apology. So there was great joy and celebration. 

At the root of it is the understanding that sex workers have rights – a radical thought at the time! It would have been so easy for the producers of the magazine to make $pread a very elite item. But if you look at the people that they interviewed, if you look at the folks that they connected with, $pread was designed to represent sex workers in different spaces and inspire this idea of rights in the salon. 

The legacy of $pread magazine is everywhere in libraries and archives. So in the future, in 20, 30, 40, 50 years time, some sex worker will find $pread in an archive somewhere. 

A major part of being a sex worker and being an organiser is the fight against the constant desire to erase sex workers. Materials online can be very easily scrubbed from history and I think organisers are seeing that impact in today’s organising. With that many copies of $pread out there, it cannot be erased.  

It will pop up like a weed and inspire rights work and revolution in the decades to come.”

That last line from PJ got me thinking of the artist Bee Nicholls, whose work looks at the body's relationship to the built environment. Her art celebrates weeds that disrupt tarmac and hair that disrupts the gaze as little acts of rebellion.

That’s it for this week. If you’re interested in learning more about $pread, track down a copy of this best-of collection that Rachel and others put together. It’s a great read! 

And if you’ve seen grassroots journalism projects shaking up media narratives and building solidarity – let me know!

Take care,