This is an Author's Original Manuscript of an article whose final and definitive form, the Version of

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Working Outside the (Hetero)Norm? Lesbian, Gay,

Bisexual, Transgender and Queer (LGBTQ) Sex Work

Nicola J. Smith

University of Birmingham

Mary Laing

Northumbria University

Recent scholarship on sex work has highlighted the diversification of the sex industry

under late capitalism. There is now a wealth of research that interrogates and

documents how sex is sold in a plethora of spaces, through multiple mechanisms and

by a multitude of actors for diverse reasons (see for instance Sanders, 2006; Agustin,

2007; Kotiswaran, 2010; Cavalieri, 2011). By exploring the complexities of

commercial sex in analytical, empirical and normative terms, this literature has done

much to expose and challenge the entrenched polarities such as those between

oppression and liberation, violence and pleasure, and victimhood and agency that

have long underpinned political and philosophical debates surrounding the sale and

purchase of sex. For example, commercial sex has been theorised in terms of a wider

discourse of intimacy and central to this has been an emphasis on how

understandings, experiences and performances of intimacy are not fixed but instead

change over time and space (see especially Bernstein, 2007; Zelizer, 2011). It is thus

surprising that much of this varied scholarship remains focused on the sale of sex by
women to men, be it on the street, over the telephone, in a brothel, via escorting, on

the Internet or through a multiplicity of other means. While these debates are

extremely valuable in terms of their academic merit and often in terms of their policy

relevance, lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender and queer (LGBTQ) sex work is rarely

treated as an object of substantive concern. Although there is undoubtedly an extant

literature on men who sell sex to men (see inter alia Aggleton, 1999; Kaye, 2007;

Morrison and Whitehead, 2007; Padilla, 2007; Kong, 2009; Mai, 2009; Logan, 2010;

Whowell, 2010), other embodiments and performances of LGBTQ sex work remain

largely unexplored.

The overarching aim of this special issue is to shine a spotlight on LGBTQ sex work

and, in so doing, enrich the existing body of scholarship in four specific ways. First,

we hope to contribute to the literature in empirical terms, in particular by self-

consciously broadening the empirical focus beyond that of analyses which, whether

explicitly or implicitly, are predicated on the imaginaries of the female worker and

male client. The contributions to this special issue cover a whole diversity of

empirical case studies including lesbian exotic dance, male street work, transgender

migrant sex work and gay hospitality services that are drawn from a variety of

social and political disciplines such as history, geography, sociology, criminology,

and political science. As such, we aim to bring a multidimensional and

multidisciplinary voice to debates about the sex industry that moves beyond

preoccupations with commercial sex as a moral issue but rather attempts to document

empirically a rich field of human activities, all of them operating in complex socio-

cultural contexts where the meaning of buying and selling sex is not always the same

(Agustin, 2007: 403).

Second, by exploring sex work through the lens of non-normative sexualities, we wish

to interrogate the complex ways in which sexuality, intimacy and, importantly, sex

itself can be performed within the commercial sexual exchange. Our intention here

is to broaden the multifarious ways in which sex work can be conceptualised, not

least with respect to heteronormativity. For example, in her article Dancing for

Women: Subverting Heteronormativity in a Lesbian Erotic Dance Space?, Katy

Pilcher explores how the performance of erotic dance by women for women

reinforces and reproduces heteronormative prescriptions of femininity even as it

challenges and subverts them. Conversely, in Gay Hospitality as Desiring Labor:

Contextualizing Transnational Sexual Labor, Dana Collins discusses how gay-

identified hosts in Malate are able to negotiate the exclusionary relations of

gentrification and neoliberal gay travel precisely by constituting themselves as active

participants in the production of gay culture. Jody Miller and Andrea Nichols paper,

Identity, Sexuality and Commercial Sex among Sri Lankan Nachchi, provides an

important contribution to the literature on desire and subjectivities in sex work as they

explore the nachchi, who are described to be transgender and homosexual. Miller

and Nichols explore the sexual desire of the nachchi for men, their need to be desired

as men, whist being treated like but not as women. Some of the key themes

explored demonstrating the complexity of commercial sex in this context include

exploitation, violence and sexual desire through nuanced conceptualisations of gender

and sexual encounter.

Third, a key motivation behind the special issue, and a prominent theme to emerge in

many of the papers, is that of exposing invisibilities. This allows for a consideration
of how and why LGBTQ sex work has tended to be rendered invisible in debates

about commercial sex and it also encourages reflection on how current debates

concerning sexuality, inclusion and exclusion might be reframed in the light of

LGBTQ sex working. In The Fractal Queerness of Non-Heteronormative Migrant

Sex Workers in the UK Sex Industry, for instance, Nick Mai notes how the

reproduction of heteronormative understandings of gender relations and identities

serve to obscure the diversity of migrant sex workers experiences and identities,

including those of male and non-heteronormative people. Drawing on in-depth

interviews with male and transgendered people working as migrant workers in

Londons sex industry, Mai discusses the complexity of their life and work

experiences as they seek to navigate the queer, homonormative and heteronormative

worlds that they traverse through migration. Similarly, in Body Issues: The Political

Economy of Male Sex Work, Nicola Smith highlights the crucial contribution that

feminist scholarship on global sexual economies has made to the study of

globalisation and capitalism, but points to continued gaps and silences surrounding

the existence, experiences and status of male and transgender sex workers. She then

offers an example of feminist political economy research on male sex work through

discussion of her qualitative fieldwork with men working as gay escorts in San

Francisco.

Fourth, this special issue offers comment on the impact of formal and informal

regulatory and punitive actions taken by communities and official bodies in areas of

outdoor sex work. In Becki Ross and Rachael Sullivans incisive historical paper

Tracing Lines of Horizontal Hostility: How Sex Workers and Gay Activists Battled

for Space, Voice, and Belonging in Vancouver, 1975-1985 there is a discussion of

the historical decimation of street beats in downtown Vancouver by local anti-

prostitution campaigners. The paper demonstrates the lack of cultural, political and

social capital felt by street-involved sex workers as they were unable to fight back

against the homonomative, masculine and neo-liberal politics at play in a gentrifying

neighbourhood. Conversely in Walking the beat and doing business: exploring

spaces of male sex work and public sex Atkins and Laing explore a space of sex

work which also operates as an area used by men for public sex. They offer a richly

empirical conceptual analysis of how beat spaces are created, exist and dissipate

through embodied peripatetic and sexual practices.

With these four threads running through the special issue, we very much hope that it

will be of interest not only to scholars who are specifically interested in commercial

sex but also to a wider interdisciplinary audience, as the contributions featured

consider the overarching themes of (in)visibilities, regulation, practice, sexualities in

the city, spatial control, inclusion, exclusion, embodiment and sexual citizenship. We

would very much like to thank Sexualities and, in particular, Ken Plummer and

Agnes Skamballis for making this project possible, and special thanks must of

course go both to the contributors themselves and the colleagues who gave up their

valuable time to act as referees for the papers included.

References

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