REDUMBRELLABABIES
Sex work & Parenting, an anthology
Meet the Contributors
Shannon Williams became involved with the sex worker rights movement after being arrested on prostitution charges in August 2003 during a police sting in Oakland. Her outing as a school teacher garnered national attention and led to the formation of the Sex Workers Outreach Project. She died on Jan. 20, 2015 from a brain tumor.
Akynos Shekera is best known for her astounding burlesque shows performed as The Incredible Edible Akynos and for her curational abilities. She is an award winning over-sharer on FB and her writing has been featured at "A Kiss for Gabriela". Her contribution to Red Umbrella Babies reveals more about her experiences as a parent.
Gary Bullock grew up in a unique home where family kept no secrets from each other but kept a billion secrets from the world. He has held all sorts of jobs and careers throughout his lifetime from food, to nursing, to construction, to management, to state employment. Gary believes his parents’ lifestyle prepared him to love his four diverse children, one of whom is gay
Meet the Editors
Juliana Piccillo is the mother of two children. She is a filmmaker and a writer. Her documentary, "I was a Teenage Prostitute" has screened in the Tribeca Film Festival, the Los Angeles International Short Film Festival, Women in the Director's Chair, and others venues. She holds an MFA in Creative Writing and has worked as a freelance journalist. Her essay "Vice" appears in the anthology, Hos, Hookers, Call Girls and Rent Boys. She is currently completing a documentary, "Whores on Film".
PJ Starr is a parent, filmmaker, photographer, writer, researcher and advocate for the rights of sex workers, transgender communities, immigrants and people living with mental health concerns. PJ is the director of the film NO HUMAN INVOLVED (a film about Marcia Powell, a mother who was incarcerated for prostitution for more than 2 years) and she has made a number short of films about the experiences of trans people and people in the sex trade. In addition to sex worker rights, one of the most important philosophies in PJ's life is AR/AO and she will continue the study of how to dismantle racism and oppression for as long as it takes.
Yola Gomez is a queer Xicana feminist, activist, and former sex worker. She lives with her two children and coparent. She graduated from the University of AZ with a double major from Middle Eastern and North African Studies, and from Gender and Women’s Studies and is currently an MFA candidate at Oregon State University. She has three new poems coming out in Nat. Brut and is working on a book of poetry, prose and personal essays.
Mama B is a passionate Human Rights Activist. She fights to show love to people whom society wants to forget. She is a Loving Mother, creative Story Teller, Artist, and Sex Worker. She wants to the world to know the sum of all her life experiences make her a better Artist, Mother and Sex Worker. She invites all the world to listen more closely to people who may not have a voice.
Michelle Lee Escobedo was born and raised in El Paso Texas. Her work has been described as real, dark, breathtaking, "Words that move, challenge, and teach." She's been published in Paraphilia and Space and Time Magazine. When not writing Michelle can be found performing her art in and around Tucson, AZ.
Howie Gordon aka Richard Pacheco appeared in more than 100 x-rated films and videos. He has won multiple adult film awards for Best Actor, Best Supporting Actor, and Best Director. He was Playgirl magazine's Man of the Year in 1979. He retired from the industry in 1984.
Gina Robinson entered sex work as a homeless 18-year-old fleeing an abusive marriage. She is now a human rights activist who has been sex working for 30 years—and she doesn't think of herself as a victim.
After 5 years in the sex industry, Avery Day is now an activist and advocate for women and their children. She is the mother of three herself, and lives in Colorado, where much of her work is currently based.
EMK's mother was a successful portrait painter in Montreal. While pregnant with the writer, she fell, or was pushed, down a flight of stairs. A head injury and partial paralysis left her unable to work as an artist. She became a sex worker, and though she was unable to sustain a consistant parenting role, she was a source of love and tenderness.
Anna A is a sex working mom of two amazing daughters. She is an activist for sex worker and drug user rights and is a proud member of a local collective of sex workers in Montréal. Anna loves gardening and enjoys getting her hands dirty.
Emma Marcus writes about appearing on the Phil Donahue show when she was a single mother working as an escort. Her daughter Stella, who was a pre-teen at that time and is now grown and a mother herself, shares her memories of the experience as well.
YIN Q. is a BDSM educator and writer whose kink practice combines eroticism, spiritual ritual, and celebrations of the taboo. A graduate of Barnard College at Columbia University, she has been an activist for sex workers, feminism, and LGBTQIA issues for over twenty years. Website: www.YINQ.net
Matthew Jakalinski is the director of the short film Frida's Informal Economy. He lives and works and raises kids in the Southwestern United States.
Emy Fem is a Berlin based sex worker, performer, workshop facilitator, mother and international activist, who works on the topics of sex work, sexuality and gender on various levels.
Kind Seawright For many years Kini worked in administration in the Phoenix, AZ area, until she was unable to continue due to a degenerative health condition and grief over her son Dana Seawright's death. Dana was murdered in July 2010 in Lewis Prison. In 2012 Kini founded, in partnership with Peggy Plews, the Seawright Prison Justice Project in honor of Dana. The project provides space for those who care about prisoners and prison abolition to come together to share their experience and strategize everything from how to help individual prisoners and their families, to how to reduce gang violence and make the DOC obsolete. Kini is also an artist and writer. She has experienced incarceration herself after being convicted for theft of $125 worth of baby formula and sentenced to more than three years in Perryville Prison in Arizona.
Bisexual art activist Juba Kalamka is best known for his intersectional work as a member of performance troupes Sins Invalid and Mangos With Chili, as co founder of "homohop" group Deep Dickollective (D/DC) and owner of the micro-label sugartruck recordings. He has appeared in numerous queer porn features since 2003 and began doing outcall work in 2014. He lives in Oakland, California with his partner of 13 years,Their daughter, a neurotic standard poodle and an enthusiastically territorial rescue dog.
Rachel Grace Almeida is a Berlin and London-based journalist with experience across a wide range of digital and print media, including editorial, styling and public relations.
She's worked with: VICE, Dazed & Confused, Nylon, Crack Magazine, Bandcamp, Universal Music, Black Butter Records, Boiler Room TV, Gay Times, Lacoste, Ellesse, Nicce London, and more. She is currently Music Editor of Dojo – a city discovery app based in London and Paris.
Ceyenne Doroshow is a transgender lady of color, a former sex worker, and a native New Yorker. She has seven children from within the trans, gay and wider community. In 2012 “Cooking in Heels,” which intertwines her love of food with her challenging family history, was published by the Red Umbrella Project. Ceyenne appears in Major! a documentary about the life and campaigns of Miss Major Griffin-Gracy and gives back via the River Fund of NY that serves thousands of people monthly to fight hunger and poverty.
Dahlia is a determined and strong willed leader for her son, her daughter-in-law and grand-daughter Willow. Her story is written by her sister Chanelle Gallant, an advocate, writer and organizer in feminist and sex working communities in Toronto.
Page Campbell is a second generation sex worker. She has stripped at classic divey clubs in NY and CA. She's a yogia, extrovert, and self proclaimed bar stool philosopher. She’s been writing for as long as she can remember-poems and journals, stories and love letters. She ardently believes in storytelling as self-empowerment and the fastest route to empathy building.By day, she is an actor, director, and theater educator who uses her artistic talents towards building community and working for social justice. Her favorite cocktail is an old fashioned. Buy her one and settle in for one hell of a conversation!
Kym and Nat are out and proud career sex workers, mothers, and platonic life partners who coparent by choice. They have four kids, and between the two of them are pretty sure they could survive an apocalypse. They have skills in nutrition, herbal medicine, massage therapy, minor surgery, cooking, auto repair, fitness, yoga, circus, hiking and climbing, social justice organizing, and more. They have both survived a lot, and are deeply grateful for their beautiful dreamy life on a daily basis. They are lucky to have cultivated incredible family and community who are loving and supportive of their radical lifestyles.
Vivian Ward tried sex work as a 19 year-old after reading up on it at the library. She initially worked the streets of LA and Phoenix. After taking a break from sex work to train for a career and start a family, she became an online escort. She now works her straight job by day and makes art by night. She writes about creating the perfect GFE while juggling teenagers.
Juniper Fitzgerald is a mother, writer, and professor of liberal propaganda. Her less jargony work has appeared in Tits and Sass, Seafoam Magazine, Mutha Magazine, Pacific Standard, Bitch Magazine, Nerve, and Jezebel.
M.P. Baretta has done sex work for the majority of her adult life in different forms. Although she has done other jobs including ones that could impress traditional audiences, sex work is the one she most identifies with. Hoping to one day live in this world, where that could be admitted and responded to with respect from not just the margins, but also the center.
Zoé lives with her parents in Berlin and is about to do her abitur exams. She is 18 years old and is interested in lots of topics like feminism, antifascism, alternative lifestyles, gender and school politics. She writes about the experience of being "unschooled" as more anxiety provoking than being raised by a sex working mom.