Sex Work Videos

Melissa Petro is a researcher, writer, educator, feminist and former sex worker. She is published in Research for Sex Work, Post Road and the forthcoming anthology Sex Work Matters: Power and Intimacy in the Sex Industry. She earned an MFA from the New School in 2007 and is currently at work on a memoir.

Lauri Shaw skipped out on college and the American dream in favor of NYC s colorful nudie bars of the late 90 s, right before Mayor Rudy Giuliani took his pickaxe to Times Square as we knew it. She never regretted her transfer to the world-famous School of Hard Knocks, and she graduated Magna Cum Laude.

Zoe Hansen came to New York as a runaway teen in 1984, with two hundred dollars and a heroin habit. She lived in the Lower East Side when burnt out buildings were the norm and everyone went to Save The Robots and Danceteria. She entered the sex industry at 17 years old, My American Dream ~ Going Down in Gotham .

Sou Southevy(Vy) is in her 70's and is a founder of the sex workers and transgender movements in Cambodia. Vy is one of the few transgenders who survived the Pol Pot-Khmer Rouge regime in Cambodia from 1975-1979. She is now preparing, with the assistance of APNSW, to lodge and official complaint about mass killings of transgenders and lesbians during the regime. She also witnessed a massacre of female sex workers during the evacuation of Phnom Penh and will give testimony on this. Vy sold sex to survive during the Pol Pot period for the only currency in circulation in Cambodia at that time- food. This video is a re-enactment of her arrest after being caught for illegally receiving food and for breaching "Revolutionary Morality" It also depicts her escape to Vietnam where she survived until the liberation of Cambodia in 1979. The film was shot on location in her village in Takeo province. This is the village where Vy was sent after the forced evacuation of Phnom Penh. The canal she and Son are digging in the video is the canal that she and the real Son where forced to work on when they were imprisoned. Vy and Son were separated during her escape and he was never seen again. It is assumed by Vy and his mother, who still lives in the village that he was murdered during the escape. Vy hopes that her complaint to the Khmer Rouge Tribunal will lead to an investigation into the extermination of Cambodia's transgender and lesbian communities by the Khmer Rouge. She also hopes to highlight the mass murder of sex workers. If you or your organisation think you can assist in anyway with a global publicity drive to highlight this case in relation to state violence against sexual minorities and sex workers then please contact apnsw.