The Girlfriends: Spotlight, E18: Antonia Pickets the Lusty Lady

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Hey listener, this episode we're going back to

1990s San Francisco and a peep show called the lusty lady is the story of some incredible dancers who stuck it to the man and

Along the way, there'll be some bad language

It's nighttime in San Francisco and Antoneer Crane is dancing in a fish ball

Literally, it was just visually like kind of a circle with glass and on the corners of the fish ball

Where the one way mirrors or the one way glass where customers could see us, but we couldn't see them

Antoneer moves her body slowly to the music on either side of her or other dances

Twisting and grinding in stilettos their silhouettes

Multiplying in the reflective glass. It was hip-to-hip shoulder-to-shoulder with like seven people next to me

This is the lusty lady a peep show and a San Francisco

Institution plans calm and pay a few quarters to sit behind the glass and watch the new dancers inside the fish ball

But today something is wrong

One of the other dancers star gets Antoneer's attention. She said see that little red

Red light blinking there

Star points to one of the corner booths

Your butthole is being filmed right now move over. Oh my god

Antoneer moves downstage away from the little red light and

Stars strides over to the corner booth and blocked the glass with her body

She yells at the guy over the booming music and tells him to turn the camera off

This isn't the only time someone has tried to film the dancers without their knowledge or consent and they're sick of it

They would sneak it in under their jacket

And they would go into the booth which was a private booth your naked body like closer than you and I are right now to our screen

That's how close they were to your body filming it. Mm. It was just like oh hell now

That moment lit a fire in Antoneer once she's carried with her ever since she spent decades

Advocating for the rights of sex workers and strippers and fighting for their stories to be heard

And it all started here at the lusty lady

Antoneer knew something needed to change but she couldn't do it alone

She and the other lusties as they called themselves banded together

They stood up for one another when the outside world didn't believe in them

Together this incredible group of women and femmes

Transformed the lusty lady they won hard-fought victories that are still having an impact today

Plus they did it in six-inch heels and a selection of incredible wigs and I call that some truly iconic girlfriend's behavior

I'm Anderson field and from the teams at novel and eye-harp podcasts

This is the girlfriend spotlight where we tell stories of women women

Today

Antoneer pickets the lusty lady

Antoneer Crane has so many different talents that it's hard to know exactly how to describe her

So I'll let her do it

My favorite way to describe myself is basically a queer homicidal

fierce fighter

activist writer

PhD candidate at USC. I'm a lover. I'm a fighter and

I'm a queer sex worker and writer amazing. I didn't mean for that to rhyme, but it's I mean as a writer it comes naturally, right?

Antoneer is very very cool

Today she's wearing these big statement glasses and a tight red knit sweater with tattoos poking out of her sleeves

She's just completely nailing that riot girl turned academic look and I am here for it

But back in the early 90s she was still that artsy punk kid just 20 years old and living in California

Would you be able to kind of paint a bit of a picture of what your life was like in San Francisco before you started at the lusty lady?

It was a gritty time in San Francisco

There were a protest in the streets every weekend whether it was food not bombs or a protest against

domestic violence against women. I was really broke a lot of my friends were really broke

back in 1992

I was doing a lot of drugs

I was also at Mills College and I was studying what we called back then

women studies

And to survive in San Francisco, I thought, you know, hey, I'm just gonna work in the lap dancing clubs and

Take down the patriarchy one lap dance at a time and a lot of my dyke friends were doing that and it was

You know back then it was performance art

Yeah, and you'd walk into the clubs and get hired on site and

See these women doing these incredible acts just together or separately and just it was definitely in the air

feeling that

We could use our bodies in a way that was empowering and that our bodies were a sight of revolution in

The lap dancing clubs and to near-made friends from all walks of life

But the working conditions left a lot to be desired

It was a very exploitive environment

We would go to work and be charged to work and they would call it these fees and the fees and the fines would have different titles

These fees they had no caps. I'd go to work and it would be $80 and then the next for four hours

Then I'd go to work in the next thing. It would be $180 for four hours in the same place correct

Wow, and if you wanted to work and get on the schedule, you had to pay these exorbitant fees

In 1995 Antonia took a break from dancing because she was recovering from addiction

And a lot of the clubs people were taking drugs out in the open and she wanted to avoid the temptation

But then a friend recommended she tried the lusty lady. It was less frantic

It's like working in a factory

You have a locker kind of like a gym you you clock in

In a in a time clock from the wall and at the lusty lady they have the audacity to put you on a schedule and they have the audacity to

To give you a paycheck, which is unheard of yeah kind of in the sex industry

This could be the stability that Antonia needs to get back into the dancing scene a friend drops her off at the club

Antonia strides past the glowing neon sign of a naked woman outside and into her audition

Soon she's clocking in for her first shift behind the glass walls of the fishbowl and that glass

It's another thing that made the lusty lady different from the other clubs

There's a separation between you and the client and

So there was less of a I call it high impact hustle

High impact hustle is just that it's your body and their body and you're negotiating the space and it's really fast and furious

Whereas if it's behind glass, there's that separation kind of like

The difference between being a bartender and being a stripper

There's a wall between you and the other person. Yeah, it reminds me of I used to work for like nine years as a singer in clubs and stuff and

I used to hate it when I turned up at a venue and

The stage was just floor level

Because it meant that all the punters could come right up to you and the amount of times I had like

You know guys being real sneezes and stuff with me and kind of breaking past my barrier of like

I'm here performing and you're not meant to touch me was because I was on floor level

But as soon as you put me on even a small stage

They knew the bound was there, you know, yeah, I felt way safer and more comfortable and like I could just perform

You know, I didn't have to think about anything

Absolutely, I mean that floor show and the the space between you and another person

Especially with sex work. It's a constant negotiation and it's an art form

as well

That also meant and this is the important part also of the barrier is that it made me closer to my co-workers

When they dance side-by-side in the fishbowl or get changed in the locker rooms

Antonia and her colleagues get to know each other

we would talk about

What was going on that day in our lives and

You know what I was going on with the customers and what they were doing and how we felt about it

Was it just like lovely to have the camaraderie of the rest of the work is around you?

It was absolutely lovely

You know, remember I was newly sober before that I was hoovering mountains of meth

And when I got sober I put on 35 pounds in three months and was healthier than I had had ever been

Maybe and I was next to these phenomenal women who had savings accounts and skateboards and pets and

Some of them had kids and some of them had partners and a lot of us were members of actor

That's the AIDS coalition to unleash power an activist group that was founded in the late 80s

It was just one of the causes Antonia and her colleagues got involved with so it was this um

Really incredible combustible collection of people in San Francisco

Who were kind of I think primed to be activists. I mean it sounds like a really

incredible

Collection of women. It was was it all women at the lusty lady? Yes. It was all exclusively women or a fems

In any kind of performance you have to create an identity for your own stage persona

And it sounds like Antonia and her friends at the lusty lady had a lot of fun with it

I think that sex work is really drag

And so we had a look at a tremendous amount of wigs and personalities at the lusty lady

And I was bald at the time and I wasn't the only person who was bald at the time and so

Everyone was very funny about their drag and had like these wild different wigs and different looks

And you could have a lot of different personalities

So you could come with one wig and be one name and come with another wig and be octopussy

Or Sicilian or valvita and have like a totally different look

That's marketing

Yeah, for real. Yeah, it was it like Mondays you got octopussy, Tuesdays, you got

Yeah, exactly. I love that

As she settles in at the lusty lady in 1995 Antonia is finding her feet

She's making money and she has a new set of kick ass colleagues and friends

But it's not all plain sailing

Antonia begins to notice something she doesn't like about how the club is run

If you were one minute late you didn't get your raise that week

One minute one minute. Oh my god

When it comes to hiring and firing or allocating shifts the problems run even deeper

There were some things that were happening that were really um that were not okay with us

There was something called private pleasures, which was

Separate from the fishbowl. I'll say it was down the hall

And only certain people would have shifts in private pleasures

They would not allow women of color and black women

Uh

To have as many shifts in private pleasures

You could make a lot more money from working in the private pleasure section

So women of color didn't get the same opportunities to earn as the white dances

And they also

tokenized

People according to race and would have like only a one or two or three

Black women on a shift and those women would have to always um cover each other's shifts

Right because you're the same person

Exactly

So that was organized in a really fucked up way and then also body type so

If you were small breasted you would have to find another small breasted person if you were thicker you'd have to find another thick person

And of course the skinny white women with boobs had the most shifts and they had the most um ability to

To cover their shift if they were sick or needed surgery or needed to travel

There was definitely favoritism

There was definitely a hierarchy

According to beauty standards racist beauty standards and

Abolus beauty standards and ageism and things were according to that hierarchy at the time

And we were having open conversations about that at the time

See open Brooks one of the other dancers urged the bosses to change their racist policies

They made some noises about rotating black dancers through the schedule more

But then they held a staff meeting to ban political literature

in the dressing rooms

Because the lusties were such a tight-knit community they shared their complaints with each other

When they were hip-to-hip dancing in the fishbowl or after work getting dinner

The straw that broke the camel's back per se was the filming

Antoneer is standing in the fishbowl

Her friend star has just pointed out the glowing red light of the camcorder

And she is pissed

We were just like what the hell no, absolutely not

I'm not going to be recorded and be put on some sort of DVD being sold somewhere in some shady-ass

Back garage basement without my knowledge or consent

And there's nothing wrong with doing porn. It's just that this is this job in this place

This is what I'm being paid for here

Star was next to me. She was 19 at the at the time. She stormed off stage

It went and talked to the show director and said um, we don't like being filmed

And of course the manager show director said you can go work somewhere else. They always say that

Yeah, you don't like it here. You can go work somewhere else. It's like no, no, no, no, no. I work here

And so Star came back to stage and said I'm gonna change things around here

And I said okay

I

After the break the lusties get organized

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But also has them using their brains and that is why I love lingo kids

It's an absolute blast and perfect to keep them engaged in thinking

It's a world of interactive games music. They'll want to sing along to and stories that spark their imagination

It's high energy vibrant and it keeps them actively playing rather than just zoning out and ignoring my pleas to come to dinner

Whether it's a rainy afternoon or a weekend morning

It's the fun they're looking for and the quality you want

Lingo kids everything kids love see why millions of families love it

Download the lingo kids app on your phone or tablet now for free

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After the showdown in the fishball

Antonya and her friends aren't about to let the customers get away with violating their privacy anymore

So they take matters into their own hands

Star said I'm gonna change things around here

And then she started to talk to the other dancers and started to

Say well, let's let's post up pictures. Let's make a Xerox copy of a sign that says

No cameras like a camera with a line through it

And post it on the one-way booths. This doesn't seem too wild to me

I mean after all it's just like the sort of poster that you get in any theater or cinema

And you'd think that the lusty ladies management would want to stop the filming as well

But things don't go to plan

The show directors would tear those posters down. Why would they just tear them down

Because of the irrational fear of workers having any power

I really think that's what it is. I mean, what else is it? It's totally irrational for sure

They're used to stepping all over us. It's quite aggressive. It's a taboo. It's aggressive

It is it's aggressive. The message is clear the bosses aren't going to step in to stop the filming

But tearing down the signs doesn't stop the lusties from organizing. It fires them up

So the dancers start meeting at a Chinese restaurant next door to the club to strategize

And they start talking to the other employees at the lusty too

We had a thing called support staff and they were artists and they were

Dies who worked at the front desk

And they would buzz us downstairs and they were security and they would also escort us from the dressing room to the private pleasures

Which was down the hall

Now that's a really good opportunity to talk about working conditions

They were also

frustrated by

The clientele bringing in cameras and making a mess and acting out and they were also frustrated with management

And so we actually were able to

Get them on board with our movement

The dance is hold a mating with the support staff to hash out plan

We said well here are our grievances and here's what's going on and

Everyone had a lot of ideas about the things that they were frustrated with in the workplace

And after discussing it

We realized that if we brought these grievances

To management we were just all going to get fired

They need protections to stop the bosses from being able to retaliate against them

We decided that we had unionized

I can't imagine how nerve-wracking that decision must have been

If they succeeded in unionizing they could negotiate a new contract with the bosses and properly address the issues at the lusty lady

But if this went wrong they could all lose their jobs

If they went public they also risked outing themselves as strippers and sex workers at a time when that was extremely stigmatized

There had never been an official recognized union of strip club workers in the USA before

But as Antonia points out

Sex workers have always fought for their rights

We just don't often hear about it

It's not common knowledge

Because there's a lack of scholarship around it and there's a lack of sharing that scholarship

I've always kind of bought into the idea that sex workers are this marginalized

Labor group that are on the margins of society and

And kicked to the shadows and

That is true in a sense, but also if you look at history

We have always been here

We have always been at the beating heart of society

And labor and at the forefront of feminism

We are the oldest profession and we've always organized with each other

And built coalitions

And I think the scholarship just needs to catch up

In that meeting the workers at the lusty lady decided to take a risk

They were determined to stand up for what was right

A lot of people are like, well, we'll get fired

If we say anything, we'll get fired, we'll get fired

Well, guess what? You're going to get fired

You're going to get fired anyway

If you have no protections, you're going to get fired

So the contract will get you protections

And when you're organizing, you have protections

They knew they had a fight on their hands

So the lusty's decided to look for support

We joined with SCIU

Which is a giant union here

SCIU stands for the Service Employees International Union

Today, it represents almost two million workers in all sorts of jobs

From healthcare to window washes and janitors

The lusties wanted in

But it wasn't going to be easy

The head of the SCIU said now

And why was that?

Because stigma

Respectability politics, they didn't want strippers

To be part of SCIU

And just really

You know, we were left at

The dancers had to jump through a series of hoops

Just to prove that they were even eligible to unionize

A lot of strippers are hired as independent contractors

Rather than employees

Which makes it a lot harder to legally unionize

The lusty lady was different

The dancers were officially employees

They got a paycheck and everything

But to begin with, it was still hard to get the bigger unions to back them

So the dancers teamed up with an advocacy group

Called the exotic dancers alliance

And got to work convincing their local SCIU chapter 790

To let them in

Local 790 said yes

They would have been stupid to not accept us

And we would have made a huge stink about it

And so we were like, no, no, no, no, no

We are union, you are local

So we became SCIU local 790

The exotic dancers alliance

We had our list of demands

And we met with management

And they started calling mandatory meetings

They cried

And they said, please don't do this

It was just the emotional blackmail

It was literally just emotional blackmail

They put us against each other

They made the union sound like this terrible entity

That was out to get us and rip us off

And they made it sound like

Having a union was going to turn management against us

And make our jobs harder

That unions are racist, that unions are exploitive

That you're going to be writing this big check to the union

It is really divisive

And it's using the language of social justice

In order to divide and conquer the workforce

And to pit people against each other

But what happened with us

Is that we were such a close-knit group

That once they started doing that

It just made us angrier and stronger

Because we just knew it was bullshit

In the summer of 1996

The lusties line off at the club

To vote in their union representatives

And officially launched the exotic dancers union

We had members of SCIU

Sit at the table and it was just like a traditional ballot box

Where you fill out a card

And you put it in the envelope

Each ballot cast is a landmark step

For workers' rights in the sex industry

We were the first

Strippers to unionize in the United States

It was a powerful moment

Then newly elected shops do as they're announced

These are the people who represent the workers to management

Those people were Sorcia, Velvet, Tory, Poly, Star, and Decadence

And Jean also, they just wanted to say their names

And now the fight really begins

The dancers need to negotiate a contract

If they actually want to change things around here

We wanted anti-discrimination policies that had teeth

We wanted no cameras

We wanted more freedom and fluidity

About changing our shifts with anybody we wanted to

We wanted more people of color

We wanted more regular raises

We wanted just basically

Have an anti-discrimination policy

That was current and modern

And aligned with our culture

Now they have the formal protection of a union

They can ratchet up the pressure on their bosses

The open Brooks falls a racial discrimination claim against the club

And the dancers take direct action to protest about their working conditions

One thing that we did is no pink day

And so like if you're working in a pencil factory in your finding against your boss

One thing that you want to do is you want to slow down production

Like pump the brakes on production

So what we did is we had no pink day

And so what that means is we covered our bodies

And we covered our

Nether regions

With skirts

Yeah

While you were dancing

Yeah we covered our junk

And so that was no pink day

So we refused to show our junk

And I think that's just really creative

Yeah and like genuinely sort of outrageous

From what people were expecting right

Yeah the audacity

Yeah

Of live new dancers to cover their junk wall dancing

And we wrote on our hands, you know, unfairly repractices

It showed it in the mirror through the glass

Cool that's punk

The lusties are letting the world know that they're not happy

And it causes a star

I have the San Francisco Chronicle clip in front of me

And it says North Beach strippers unite

And this is from August 14th

1997

Dancers could be the first in the country to unionize

It goes without saying that the bosses did not appreciate this

And it wasn't long until they struck back

Antonea says they started firing people just for being late

They started being

Trigger happy with firing people

You're supposedly allegedly have protections

If you're unionizing

So it's retaliatory

But they'll use oh you were two minutes late

And then one woman named Summer

Who was a single mother was fired

So we walked out

together

Antonea and the lusties were not about to let this ship fly

They strode out of the club

And management locked the doors of the lusty lady behind them

Coming up, the fight for rights gets dirty

This is Janna Kramer from Windown with Janna Kramer

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I've got you, I've got you, I've got you, I've got you, I've got you

Antonia and the other dancers

are locked out of the lusty lady

But they're not about to give up their fight

Just to get back in

Luckily, Antonia's friend Star

Has a plan to get them another source of income

I think she's like 5, 10

And she attracted more um

Submissives, right

So she had this client of hers

Who wanted, what did he actually want

I mean, that's maybe um

Maybe a topic for an essay

But it's gonna say a whole new podcast for that

Yeah, a whole new podcast

But anyway, so she was like, hey, I have this client come and meet me

We're gonna go meet in this place

He's gonna meet us in a Jeep

And take us out to his construction site

And he wants us to pose in mud

And he paid us several hundred dollars a piece

To go meet us in San Rafael

Which is like 20 minutes outside of town

We all piled in his Jeep

Okay

Now, when I do that today, no, I would not

But this is 1996, 1997

And we just were unafraid

I don't know, there was just something about the 90s

Where I was just like, sure, I'll get in the car with you

And drive in the middle of nowhere

I have eight badass women with me

What is he gonna do?

Like, he's outnumbered

I mean, to be fair, he is outnumbered

To be fair, he was outnumbered

I mean, we could have all taken him

We were all tough ass bitches, right

And so

We're in the middle of nowhere

In this construction site, it's all mud

And we're all rolling around and posing

He wanted us to pose in mud and take photos of us

And I think of that as our portrait

Our family portrait

Of us completely covered in mud

With our arms around each other

And stacked on top of each other

And appeared in a bid

That's our lesty lady family portrait

Oh, I love that

Yeah, and then I remember spending the next two days

Washing mud out of my ears

While she's locked out of the lesty lady

Antonya picks up shifts at the other lap dancing clubs in the city

The other strippers would just roll their eyes

And shrug their shoulders and kind of laugh at us

But they really?

They didn't other strippers

Yeah

Yes, they did not get it

Antonya isn't bothered by the skeptics

Their movement is gathering momentum

They rallied the local community

And other local unions

And staged a two-day picket outside the club

We handed out condoms

We handed out contraceptives

We were dressed to the nines on the picket line

And then

One colorful thing about our group

Was our willingness just to have fun

And just turn the picket line into a party

They hold up signs that say things like

Do not enter unfair to labor

And bad girls like good contracts

They also had some really incredible chance

Like two, four, six, eight

Don't go into masterbay

stunning

And how did the normies in the street respond

To all of this

When they were alone, they would hop

When they were with their girlfriends or wives, they wouldn't

Yes

Surprise, surprise

Yeah

But generally walking by, people were really supportive

Dancers also filed a lawsuit

Under the Unfair Labor Practices Act

Which was supposed to bar employees

From firing and suspending workers

Without legitimate reason

And it works

We got some of her job back

Oh wow

And so you just went in and you demanded

Someones to get her job back

That was our demand

Is that we needed to get her

Her job back

And we did that

And we just literally were

Very fierce

With our if anyone got fired

We walked out

It's clear talking to Antonya

Just how to term in she and the other dancers were

And the more the bosses crack down on them

The more resolved they became

We had a vow of

We didn't engage

With the emotional blackmailing

It made us angrier and more solid as a group

The contract negotiations were fierce

And they dragged on for months

I remember hearing about it

From decadence

Our shopstours

About how they would stay up all night negotiating

And I remember we would go and have sit-ins

Where they were negotiating

And just sit and wait

About what they accomplished that day

I remember it being exciting

More than anything

I was just like wow

This is really intense

This is cool

And just feeling really proud

Just feeling proud of my co-workers

And proud of their ferocity

In April 1997

The exotic dancers union

Finally came to an agreement

With the lusty ladies' management

The new contract won them a pay rise

Sick leave

An enter on my glass

A ban on video cameras in the club

And the ability to switch shifts with any of the dancers

Not just the ones that looked like them

It actually got us a lot

It served as a blueprint for other workers

It got us a seat at the table in labor

It has created many thinkers

And ferocious labor rights individuals

In the sex industry

Back then there was a lot of stigma

And we were really behind

And we were really like

Not open about our sex work

As much

But I think that changed it

I feel like that was the turning point

Whereas like oh, guess what

All workers honorable

Sex workers honorable

We deserve rights

We deserve

An anti-discrimination policy

We deserve the right to organize

And talk back to the boss

To celebrate that victory

The work is through a very lusty lady party

It's what we call play day

Where we open up the rooms

And the dancers kind of walk around the area

And we

We give lap dances kind of out of the open

And we celebrate and we're all on costume

And we have like

Food

And I remember just being like this really fun

Like we got our contract celebration

Yeah

So I do remember that moment

Just it being like a really celebratory moment

After a few years at the club

Antonia danced her law shift at the lusty lady

Now that she was secure in her sobriety

She was making more money at some of the other lap dancing clubs

I felt that I had left the lusty lady in really good hands

And I definitely had

Because they decided to become a union collective

And that was the first stripper union collective

Also in the United States

When the owners of the lusty lady threatened to close the club in 2003

The dancers club together and bought it off them

It became the first worker-owned strip club or peep show in America

Antonia went on to become a writer

She's currently doing a PhD at the University of Southern California

And she's not the only lusty lady alum to go into academia

A lot of lusty ladies have written books about this experience

It was like such a professor incubator

When I said these were phenomenal people

I was not kidding around

Yeah, yeah, I like the idea of that as some sort of like academic accelerator experience

Just go dance at the lusty lady

And then write a book about it and then become a PhD

There's three of us literally out of like 12 of us than a PhD

You should open your own school

We should open our own school

Yeah

The lusty lady incubator school of sex work organizers

Perfect

In the three decades since the lusty lady first unionized

Antonia has seen conditions get even tougher for strippers and sex workers

The fact that the corporations and the owners of strip clubs have been allowed to continue to get away with

retaliating shutting down breaking labor laws

It's just been open season for corporations to just like run a muck and wreck

Organizing efforts

And the fact that they've just been continuing to get away with that is just criminal

Even the lusty lady couldn't last forever

In 2013 the club was forced to close

It was really a historically important

Union collective of strippers and they only won the country

And so they priced us out of our rent and we lost the building and we lost our lease

On the night at close the dancers held a funeral procession for the club

They carried a pink bejeweled coffin through the streets to mark the end of an era

But Antonia has carried on the fight that began at the lusty

In 2018 she founded Soldiers of Pole which later became strippers united

It's a labor organization that helps dancers unionize

Antonia also runs another group called the stripper worker center

We continue the fight every day is a battle

I really think we need to mobilize the working class needs to mobilize more

And just have faith that you know if we get everyone together

That's how you change things

Some of the other dancers have also gone into labor-organizing full-time

Decadence who was my friend also became a labor lawyer and still is a union labor lawyer

That's great

When we started to organize she was talking to the lawyers and she just thought you know I'm smarter than these people

And went to law school and became a labor lawyer

And she's proved it

And she's proved it

Because sex workers are really smart

During the pandemic Antonia helped run some events at Stargarden

A strip club in North Hollywood to inform dancers about their labor rights

In 2022 the dancers there went on strike

And after a 15-month battle with their bosses they unanimously voted to unionize

Another really successful thing that the Stargarden dancers did is their relationship with the media

Was so incredibly positive

And I just cried watching it happen

Like watching them get interviewed over and over again on media outlets

Seeing how media was talking about strippers and talking about their

labor war and talking about working conditions like they weren't considered a joke

I'm very pleased to see that you think it's better

I mean allowing sex workers to tell our own stories is

It's such a pleasure and an honor and it's such a fun experience

And I hope that more sex workers are brought to the table and feel able to freely openly speak about their honest experiences

And feel safe doing so

You know it's people being sensitive and really listening and um

It's really just about humanity

It's just about our shared humanity and when we can come together and be like you know what let's just share our humanity

Thanks so much to Antonya Crane

If you'd like to know more about her incredible life you can check out her memoir spent

Antonya also kindly recommended a couple of other books if you want to learn more about some of the themes that we've talked about today

There's the ethical stripper by Stacey Claire and unequal desires race and erotic capital in the stripping industry

That one is actually by another lusty lady alum and someone you heard about in this episode

Professor Siobhan Brooks

If you've enjoyed this conversation you can find loads more incredible women on our feed do check them out

And please do spread the word and tell your friends about us

We want as many people as possible to be part of the girlfriend's gang

Next time on the girlfriend spotlight

Layla becomes visible

My mom hugs my biological mom my dad hugged my biological mom and they went up to her and I gave her hug

And then we started crying

You

This season the girlfriend spotlight is supporting the charity women kind worldwide

They do amazing work to help women's rights organizations and movements to strengthen and grow

If you'd like to find out more or donate to help them secure equal rights for women and girls across the globe

You can go to womenkind.org.uk

The

The girlfriend spotlight is produced by novel for iHeart podcasts for more from novel visit novel.orgio

The show is hosted by me anacinfield this episode was written and produced by Caroline Thorneum

Our assistant producer is Lucy car our researcher is Zayana Yusuf

The editor is Hannah Marshall Max O'Brien and Craig Stracken are our executive producers

Production management from Joe Savage, Sri Houston and Charlotte Wolfe

Sound Design mixing and scoring by Nicholas Alexander Daniel Kempson and Dan King

Music supervision by Jacob Tyvich, Nicholas Alexander and Anna Simfield

Original music composed by Luisa Gerstein and Gemma Freeman

The series artwork was designed by Christina Lemkoon

Willard Foxson is creative director of development

And special thanks to Katrina Norville, Carrie Lieberman and Will Pearson

at iHeart Podcast as well as Carly Frankel and the whole team at WNB

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