TWUK (The Wh0re You Know)’s second birthday fundraiser took place on January 5 at Metro Gallery in Station North. The evening was full of dancing, celebrating, and fun — all for the noble cause of supporting sex workers — with live performances by Infinity Knives x Brian Ennals and Hormone, and DJ sets by Amsies, Syd, and Zephyr.
TWUK is a collective of sex workers who support other sex workers in Baltimore through programming and outreach. According to their mission, collective members “believe in changing the culture of the industry for the betterment of the workers.” Their programs include a podcast featuring sex workers’ stories as well as events like the recent fundraiser. The money TWUK raises goes directly to sex workers — particularly the most vulnerable who work on the streets.
Despite limited resources, TWUK has made strides over the past two years, helping keep sex workers safe and alive. “Our outreach efforts are kind of just direct and casual. We don’t have a big-overhead organization,” said Letty, one of TWUK’s four board members along with Missy (aka Zephyr), Zay, and Eden.
Despite limited resources, TWUK has made strides over the past two years, helping keep sex workers safe and alive. “Our outreach efforts are kind of just direct and casual. We don’t have a big-overhead organization,” said Letty, one of TWUK’s four board members along with Missy (aka Zephyr), Zay, and Eden.
Their ethos is to meet people where they are and without judgment or assumption. “I think our biggest outreach effort was this past winter,” Letty said. “We went on a walk to some spots where street-based workers work, at the hours that they work, and just kind of tried to meet people … [We] tried to get a feel for what’s up in the area. What do people need? We were able to hand out some cash assistance and some food, toiletries, and snacks.”
Whenever possible, they send money to sex workers who need it for various reasons. “I think directly giving people money is one of the best ways to support them,” said Missy. “But we also like to give out food, condoms, testing strips, narcan, safer sex supplies, stuff like this.”
Like many movements, TWUK started organically out of a specific need. Missy was living in New York City and feeling the absence of the community she knew and loved back in Baltimore. “I felt like New York was a lot more cutthroat. I felt that I was virtually hoping to seek community from other sex workers.”
She decided to host an online tax webinar in January 2022 to share knowledge and to cultivate community.
She said there was an immediate positive response from those who attended. “I felt like a lot of sex workers were like, ‘This is awesome. We should be talking to each other, we should be sharing knowledge and sharing our experiences together.’”
From that initial webinar, a community gathered swiftly. Shortly after, she started a podcast to share stories that other sex workers might relate to. When she realized other sex workers wanted to be featured on the podcast, she thought of ways to widen the audience and planned an event where, again, sex workers enthusiastically and affirmatively pointed out that they needed more spaces like this.
For Missy, TWUK is firmly rooted in solidarity. “I would not say that I created that event, or that I created TWUK. I would say that TWUK was just more something that happened in response to a need for sex workers to find solidarity and find community with one another … That was something I was seeking, but it turns out that a lot of other sex workers were seeking that too.”
Most of the funds they raised at the January event went to street-based sex workers, Missy said, because people’s need for food and shelter is higher in the winter. “The money is basically allocated in a way that’s needs-based. And we consider street-based sex workers and mothers some of our top priorities in terms of where our money is going.”
About halfway through its third year of existence, TWUK has been shifting intentions and energy away from events and toward direct mutual aid. As a collective of roughly 30 to 40, Missy estimates, there’s a range of concerns and interests. “We sort of had to reconvene and narrow down what our main focus is,” Missy said.
The collective wants to keep up the outreach and community-building, and so far TWUK has subsisted off of donations and fundraisers. “One thing that we really, really need is consistent funding,” Missy said. “That’s been a part of the problem of us not being able to be super consistent about our efforts.”
Since January’s fundraiser, TWUK has taken time to rest and radically imagine what is possible, to recalibrate, reconfigure and dream. Honing in on their mission, Missy said, “we’ve definitely shifted our focus towards one that’s more outreach-focused and community-focused. So we want to do events that are more exclusive to just sex workers.” They want to do public fundraiser events too, but organizing them quarterly led to burnout, so they’re still figuring out how to make the work sustainable.
Letty has performed at every TWUK event so far. “I consider pole dancing my art,” Letty said. She differentiates this from the more mainstream trend of pole dancing for fitness. “I follow a couple of pole fitness girlies for inspiration, but it’s just very far removed from what you would see in the club. Even just the simplest move is tweaked by a stripper for flair. Because when you’re dancing on stage, you have to play to the crowd, and play to the audience — not just the girls in the studio.”
For Letty, entertaining is an art, and she enjoys her work. “It’s fun to get people out of their shell. It’s fun to read people’s body language, especially at the strip club. It’s a very interesting environment. I can tell when somebody walks in, and they are sometimes very reserved because they’ve never been in a building with a lot of nude women that they don’t know. On the other hand, some people get very uninhibited. They get very comfortable, and it’s a skill to have to rein that in and predict somebody’s mood and temperament.”
Missy is a dancer and a DJ, but first started her artistic journey as a photographer. “I’ve been a photographer for, like, 10 years. I sort of moved here pursuing that — I moved here because I started working with the City Paper as a freelance photographer. That [photography] was my first love for sure.”
Missy regularly deejays at Aliceanna Social Club, in Fells Point, at an event called the Queers Upstairs. The day of our interview, Missy was getting ready to start a string of four back-to-back DJ gigs in Baltimore and D.C. “I really have grown to like DJing and making my own music with
computer code,” she said. She loves dancing too, but doesn’t always perform at TWUK events. “But I do love organizing, that is something that I feel is really fulfilling to me, and I’ve enjoyed that role within TWUK a lot.”
In the course of organizing, TWUK has been vocal about the realities of the industry, although some people try to glamorize it. “There’s levels to sex work, and there’s levels to this industry. And some levels are up here, and they can come off as very fun; you can put a Snapchat filter over it.” Letty said. “And then there’s other levels in other parts of the industry that are not fun, that are very painful for a lot of people.”
In a recent online conversation, Letty encountered a pro-sex work ally who aggressively insisted that no one can critique sex work unless they’ve been a sex worker themself. “On a surface level, I can see how that makes sense,” Letty said. “But then I chimed in to remind this person: you’re not entitled to know everybody’s experience with sex work. There’s a lot of people who are never, ever public about their dealings with sex work.”
People assume that they can read who you are as a person based on your social media. “I’ve been in this industry for I guess 12 years now, and I’m still surprised sometimes when somebody I previously knew comes to me and says, ‘I’ve done full-service,’ and I had no idea,” Letty said. “You don’t know everybody’s experience with this industry, and this kind of work, and you don’t know how they feel about it. I think sometimes demanding that people be public-facing with their experience stripping, sex work, or sugar-babying, or cam-girling, whatever, is not great.”
Letty, who has done online sex work including webcam modeling and OnlyFans, has noticed a broad shift over the last several years — especially since COVID — of people becoming more familiar with the term “sex work.” “Previously that was not really in the public lexicon,” she said.
The mainstreaming of online sex work, she said, has led to street-based sex workers — and the risks they face — being forgotten. “Those girls on the corner, they don’t have Twitter accounts, or OnlyFans, or smartphones sometimes,” Letty said. “They’re not being approached by VICE or the New York Times for edgy little interviews and documentaries.”
The mainstreaming of online sex work, she said, has led to street-based sex workers — and the risks they face — being forgotten. “Those girls on the corner, they don’t have Twitter accounts, or OnlyFans, or smartphones sometimes,” Letty said. “They’re not being approached by VICE or the New York Times for edgy little interviews and documentaries.”
She said she’s seen a shift in the past couple of years of more and more people being familiar with the term “sex work.”
For Letty and other members of TWUK, a lot of people could benefit from education and awareness of other sex workers’ experiences, whether positive or negative. “I also think that, even us as a collective, and all our allies, we could also maybe be flexible and understanding that everybody’s experience with sex work in this industry is complicated,” Letty said. “I think we’re pretty good about [recognizing] this industry can be very positive and very liberating, but it also sucks, like any job, sometimes.”
You can support TWUK’s mission by donating directly to their Cash App: $twukcollective.
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