Badass Activist Friday presents: Audacia Ray

It’s Friday, and we all know what that means! Interviews with your favorite badass feminists and activists. Whether social media queens and kings, creative artists, sex educators, or just kick-ass personalities, these people harness righteous anger, instigate movements and inspire cultural change. We’re here to honor them and their work, but more importantly, to highlight how we can all get up, plug in, and Just Start Doing.

This week, the wonderful Audacia Ray agreed to speak with us about her work as an activist, writer and sex worker rights advocate. She was the author of Waking Vixen, a highly acclaimed sex blog that was active between 2004 and spring of this year, and is now running the Red Umbrella Project, which aims to make the authentic voices of sex workers heard. But let’s let her tell us about it herself. Here’s what she had to say to us:

On your blog, you describe yourself as a sex worker rights activist. How would you summarize your work, and how did you come to do it?

I work to amplify the voices of people who have experience in the sex industry, whether they arrive at that experience through choice, coercion, or circumstance. My main focus is cultural activism, creating spaces for sex workers to speak up in public forums and through various media production adventures. I started doing this work in 2004, when I was a sex worker and feeling isolated. I was seeking community and wanted to talk to other people who had similar experiences. I found the nascent $pread, a magazine by and for sex workers that was in the process of being launched, and I signed on. I became an editor and was involved with the magazine for about four years. A lot of my projects over the past few years have grown out of that experience.

In your work, you combine new media and outreach by taking advantage of several different mediums (podcasts and blogs, as well as in-person workshops). Why do you think it is important to reach people via these different venues? Do you think that this approach is tailored to your project, or are there ways in which activism in general could benefit from using different platforms?

I think the main thing that I’ve learned about the different mediums is that they are, well, different. When I started it was with the attitude of – I just need to get my stuff out there and then people will know about it! For an activist web project I did last year, I did an exercise of thinking up all the types of people who might come to the site, how they’d get there, and what they’d be looking for, and what we’d want them to take away. It’s a good exercise and definitely made it really clear that there is no “general public” – you have to get more precise than that.

The people who read blogs aren’t necessarily the folks who look for podcasts on iTunes or browse the video shows on Blip TV or hang out with their friends on Facebook. This is a good thing, but sometimes it means you need to make a choice and pick one or two ways to reach out instead of being everywhere all the time. Unless all you do is spend time on the internet – which is definitely where I was at a few years ago, but now I do a lot of work offline, as well, so I have to be more selective about my engagement. 

Your main project is the Red Umbrella Project. Can you tell us more about this project? What are you doing, where did the idea for this originate, and what do you hope to achieve?

The Red Umbrella Project reframes the public dialogue on the impact of stigma and discrimination on people who trade sex for the things they need, through the lens of lived experience. We provide training and support to people who wish to engage with media and in public forums to tell their stories about issues that affect them. The main programs are a media training intensive called Speak Up!, which is designed for sex workers to learn the trickery of the mainstream media, plus how to do messaging and interact with hostile/clueless journalists (sometimes it’s hard to tell the difference between those). I also host a live monthly storytelling series, the Red Umbrella Diaries, which takes place on the first Thursday of the month at Happy Ending in NYCs Lower East Side, but we will be expanding to new cities in the coming year. We’ve also been doing a legislative training for the last few years for sex workers to learn to do advocacy in New York State, and have a few other programs that we’ll hopefully be rolling out in 2012.

You closed your blog WakingVixen earlier this year, after having been online with it since 2004. Can you explain your motivation for closing the blog? You’ve been a pioneer and in the vanguard of online community, advocacy and storytelling. How do you see the field changing? What excites you? What do you miss?What has it been like to move towards an increase in live events, and what motivated this decision?

My relationship to the internet -and of course, the internet itself- has evolved considerably since I started writing about my life on Blogger in 2004. I found that I kept intending to write long personal and/or analytical posts on my blog, but kept not getting around to it, and was instead hanging out on Twitter, reading group blogs, watching videos, and listening to podcasts. With media, you really have to adapt or die, and I felt like I was letting my blog crumble and die. So I killed it, and I adapted. Now I post short stuff on my Tumbler, I obsessively track my reading on Goodreads, I tweet, I host a podcast (search for Red Umbrella Diaries on iTunes) and occasionally produce and post videos. Lately I’ve been doing a lot more listening and learning online instead of always pushing out new stuff. It’s definitely as important to listen as it is to talk.

What’s been on your mind lately? Have you been reading a new blog? Discovered an awesome book? Or is there a news story that really inspired you? Please share with us!

I’ve been thinking a lot about the long-term effects of being committed to doing activism in a deep way, and the ways it’s worn me down over the years. I am coming to appreciate self care and down time more than I allowed myself to several years ago. And I’ve also come to realize that activist work is about taking steps forward and steps back, and that’s the fight. Over a short period of time, it seems like nothing changes, but over the years, there is a shift. When I first started doing activism, I felt like we were just on the cusp of radical change. I don’t feel that way anymore, and I feel a little sad that I’ve lost that. But at the same time, I think I’ve gotten a bigger appreciation for the work that goes into making change, shifting culture. And I’m in it, I’m signed up. It’s just interesting to have my vantage point shift in that way.

 

Thank you so much for those wonderful, thoughtful answers, Audacia!

 

 

Tags: activism, advocacy, Audacia Ray, interview, sex worker rights