Don't Look Back in Cringe

Don’t look back in cringe

During lockdown I had become involved with raising money for Dutch sex workers, many of whom didn’t qualify for government aid. Neither were they allowed to work.

We got the idea to make a zine that we could sell to raise more money for the sex workers. We worked together queers and sex workers and queer sex workers to come up with some ideas of what the zine could contain.

We realised after we had put weeks of work into the project that zines don’t tend to make any money and that people were struggling to make it through the day in the current restrictions and didn’t have the creative energy to pour into the project. It was promptly abandoned.

I still feel bad that we wasted everyone’s time and that we approached fund raising in such a naive and silly way. The only thing we did right was actually involve the sex workers so the work was done collaboratively not subjectively.

Knowing what I know now I would apply for a subsidy from the Snelgeld or something and pay the workers up front. I wouldn’t asked an already marginalised group to pour limited resources into something that might not work. But do sex workers qualify for subsidies? We don’t really know. Some of our communities projects like Maggie Saunders Striptopia have gotten funding but we were never sure if it was based on the more artistic qualities of the project or if it was related to the increased safety and agency for sex workers the project focuses on. And that’s the other thing about queer project work in the Netherlands. It’s heavily subsidised by the government and as a result it tends to take on an “acceptable” quality and cannot therefore be as radical as we would like.