From Los Angeles Times:
For eight years, I worked as a professional dominatrix. As a financially strapped graduate student for six of those years, I took sessions at hotels during academic conferences. At one such conference, I passed some time chatting with a woman on Tinder. She proposed that we meet at my hotel that evening and go to one of the city’s legendary strip clubs, with cheap drinks and female ownership, known to welcome a queer clientele.
We didn’t end up at the strip club that night. I was running late, still getting ready when the hotel’s concierge approached my date and told her that if she didn’t have a room key, she needed to leave the hotel lobby. My date walked outside and called me to explain what had happened, and that she knew what it meant. Then she left. This wasn’t the first and wouldn’t be the last time a Black woman was mistaken for a sex worker and accused of “loitering” in a hotel lobby, at an academic conference or otherwise.
Over the course of that weekend, I had escorted three middle-aged white male clients through that same hotel lobby. I wore a leather corset under a trench coat when I rode the elevator down to meet them. As a sex worker, I garnered no suspicion. My whiteness allowed me to move through the space undetected. Continue reading >>>
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