BROOKLYN, N.Y. — Lorelei Lee has been announced as one of the 2021 recipients of the Whiting Foundation's prestigious Creative Nonfiction Grant, which will allow them to continue work on their upcoming HarperCollins book, “Anything of Value.”
“Organizer and sex worker Lee’s 'Anything of Value' blends memoir, history and critical theory to reevaluate our cultural understanding of sex work and its intersections with class, race, gender, labor, bodily integrity and the law — and ultimately argues for sex work decriminalization,” the Whiting Foundation stated in its announcement.
The jury adjudicating the grants extolled Lee’s project this way: “Armed with personal experience, activist chops and a law degree, Lorelei Lee is a triple threat to public misperceptions of sex work. Their work maps the complicated spaces between sex workers and ‘civilians,’ dissolving stigma and well-worn stereotypes, insisting powerfully on the dignity of the individual. ‘Anything of Value’ dismisses old tropes that sort sex workers into two categories — exploited and empowered — and opens the door onto a more rational, complex, and humane conversation.”
The Whiting Creative Nonfiction Grant of $40,000 is awarded to writers “in the process of completing a book of deeply researched and imaginatively composed nonfiction.”
The Whiting Foundation “recognizes that these works are essential to our culture, but come into being at great cost to writers in time and resources. The grant is intended to encourage original and ambitious projects by giving recipients the additional means to do exacting research and devote time to composition.”
The announcement included an excerpt from Lee’s work regarding their activism during their time as an adult performer.
“In 2014, when the California State assemblyman Isadore Hall authored a bill to mandate the use of condoms as well as state-recorded testing of performers in adult films, my coworkers and I took buses and trains up to the state capitol to testify against the bill,” they wrote. “The elaborate, community-driven testing regimen we relied on had prevented even a single onset transmission of HIV since 2004, and it would be seriously undermined by the proposed legislation. Perhaps worse, Hall’s bill would have created a state registry of performers’ legal names and health information. We gathered the signatures of more than 600 performers, a thick ream of paper that I carried clutched to my chest, shielding my body from the Senate Appropriations Committee with this physical evidence of our collective will. I remember Hall testifying to the committee that he had written this bill because someone needed to be ‘a voice for the voiceless,’ and that person would be him.”
“I sat beside him at a podium microphone. My coworkers stood in a long line at a microphone behind him, waiting for him to stop so we could speak.”
Lee holds a law degree and is a writer, sex worker activist, adult performer and organizer. They are also a Justice Catalyst Fellow, co-founder of the Disabled Sex Workers Coalition, a founding member of both the Upstate New York Sex Workers Coalition and Decrim MA, and a researcher with Hacking//Hustling. Their writing has appeared in n+1, the Columbia Human Rights Law Review, Buzzfeed, WIRED, The Establishment, Denver Quarterly, The Feminist Porn Boo, and elsewhere.
Their n+1 essay “Cash/Consent” is considered one of the best pieces of writing about the “war on sex work.”