At a recent protest, sex workers claimed that efforts to control their trade in the name of public safety are forcing them into riskier situations. Photograph by Leah Carroll / Refinery29

On a recent Thursday at a bar in Crown Heights, Brooklyn, Jacq the Stripper was warming up a small crowd of ten or fifteen people who had come to attend a fund-raiser for the Black Sex Workers Collective. Jacq, who wore a T-shirt that said “TIP HER” on it, is not a black sex worker. “So I’m a stripper, I’m a white stripper, a cisgendered, white stripper,” she said, by way of introduction. “I have, like, all the privilege in the world, so I’m going out to support a lot of people who do not have privilege right now.” She was talking about the effects of the government crackdown on the Web sites that sex workers have used to advertise and screen for clients. On April 6th, the government seized Backpage, which the Justice Department described as “the Internet’s leading forum for prostitution ads, including ads depicting the prostitution of children.” Five days later, Donald Trump signed HR-1865, the bill known as the Fight Online Sex Trafficking Act (FOSTA) and the Stop Enabling Sex Trafficking Act (SESTA). The new law amends Section 230 of the 1996 Communications Decency Act, the “safe harbor” clause that until now gave Web sites full protection from liability for the content they host. Under the new terms, the owner of any Web sites that “promote or facilitate the prostitution of another person”—wording that could concern not only traffickers but anyone who advertises sexual services online—can face up to ten years in prison.

Victims’ advocates and politicians celebrated the passage of FOSTA and the ninety-three-count indictment against Backpage, which was charged with facilitating prostitution and money laundering, as a victory against human trafficking. For sex workers in the business by choice, however, the most ubiquitous and affordable advertising platform was now gone.

“Backpage has been shut down, which means, which basically means your job has been taken away from you,” Jacq explained.

Backpage is not the first sex-work-advertising platform the government has shut down—there was MyRedBook, in 2014, and Rentboy, in 2017. Craigslist voluntarily shut down its erotic services section in 2010, in response to warnings from the Justice Department. But the passage of SESTA and FOSTA make it far less tempting for other Web sites to replace Backpage as a major advertising platform. The list of sites that have gone offline or blocked U.S. users since the passage of the law includes Craigslist’s personals section; the Reddit threads Escorts, Male Escorts, Hookers, and Sugardaddy; advertising sites like CityVibe, Nightshift, and Men4Rent; and several platforms and bulletin boards that sex workers and their clients used to screen, review, and verify each other, including Eccie, VerifyHim, the Erotic Review’s U.S. boards, and P411. The changes have affected even those sites used mostly by non-professionals—the kinky social network FetLife changed its terms of service to ban the advertisement of escorts and “consensual blackmail and financial domination” fantasies. Instagram is hiding some posts tagged #lingerie.

In the aftermath of the new law, sex workers have claimed that efforts to control sex work in the name of public safety are forcing them into riskier situations—working with unknown clients, who they can no longer screen, or on the streets, where the risk of violence is greater. An oft-cited study by researchers from Baylor University and West Virginia University found that, from 2002 to 2010, when Craigslist’s erotic-services site was active and solicitation moved indoors, the female homicide rate fell by seventeen per cent. As Caty Simon, an editor at the sex-worker service-journalism Web site Tits and Sass and a sex worker who used Backpage to advertise, wrote in April, “many of us will die, some of us have already died because of the damage SESTA’s done . . . And the victims will more often be trans workers, disabled workers, workers of color, and trafficking survivors—those of us who never had many options to begin with.”

In New York, working on the street also increases the likelihood that a sex worker will be charged with what is known as “loitering with the intent of prostitution,” a statute that is currently at the center of a class-action lawsuit filed against the City of New York and the New York Police Department in September, 2016. The lawsuit, filed by Legal Aid with the pro-bono assistance of the law firm Cleary Gottlieb, claims the law unfairly targets women for arrest “based on race, gender, ethnicity, gender identity, and/or appearance”—including the phenomenon that advocates call “walking while trans.”

At the bar in Crown Heights, after a burlesque routine to George Michael’s “Careless Whispers,” M.F. Shekera, the founder of the Black Sex Workers Collective, took the stage. Shekera, who grew up in New York City and began working as a stripper to support herself at seventeen, after the birth of her first child, also works as a house cleaner and is a graduate student in a low-residency M.F.A. program at Goddard College, in Vermont. She wore an Elizabethan brocade dress and a pair of red fur angel wings.

“Thank y’all so much for coming,” she said to the assembled crowd. (Shekera guessed that the disappointing turnout was due to a last-minute venue change: the owner of the previous venue had objected to the words “whore” and “stripper” in a promotional flyer.) “This is a tiny benefit for the Black Sex Worker Collective, a small grassroots organization that was my brainchild for the past few years,” she said. She had bought a domain name and started social-media feeds several years before, envisioning a mutual-care fund that would offer emotional support and help with financial emergencies for black current and former sex workers in New York. Since SESTA, the mission had become more urgent. “This is going to support people with exit strategies to get out of the industry if they want to do so, because you should have that choice if that’s what you want, as well as supporting them with transportation and other services like helping them pay rent or storage fees or food or what else can come up for these people affected by these fucked-up laws,” Shekera said.

The Black Sex Worker Collective fund-raiser was only one event in what has in recent weeks become a large-scale mobilization of sex workers across the country. The activism has ranged from practical financial and legal assistance to calls for decriminalization. After a long history of being sidelined by the feminist, L.G.B.T.Q., and labor-rights movements, sex workers are now demanding recognition in progressive circles and in public manifestations, such as the Women’s March and gay pride demonstrations, as well as organizing among themselves. At another fund-raiser I attended in Brooklyn, in May, for a sex-worker emergency fund called the Lysistrata Mutual Care Collective and Fund, kink enthusiasts bid on a silent auction with items like a custom-made leather dog collar or a one-hour whip session while a performer hung upside down from the ceiling in a rope-bondage performance. The night after the Black Sex Workers Collective fund-raiser, I attended a know-your-rights legal training, hosted by the Sharmus Outlaw Advocacy and Rights (SOAR) Institute, for sex workers adjusting to the new legal reality, where sex workers helped themselves to soda and white wine while attorneys from the Legal Aid Society of New York explained the importance of encrypting communications and not consenting to a search if arrested.