privitization of sex

One of the major problems with the push for same-sex marriage, as I wrote about in somewhat more detail before, is the complicity with the privatization of sex, which has been at the core of most of the so-called major gay “civil rights” advances since 2003 when the US Supreme Court overturned anti-sodomy laws in Lawrence v. Texas.

Queer and trans sex, at least since the late-1800s, has been routinely conflated or associated with sex work both culturally and legally, and anti-sex work laws have in many places been used to target and criminalize queer and trans sex, both public and private. Toronto’s 1981 police bathhouse raids are a great example, where almost 300 gay men were arrested by police and charged with either operating or being “found in” a “bawdy house,” the Canadian legal term for “brothel.” Today, trans women, especially trans women of color, are still routinely harassed and arrested by police for “looking like” a sex worker, simply for existing-while-trans.