An anonymous gay male sex worker—a man who started doing sex work after he was thrown out of the house as a teenager by his evangelical parents—explains how sites like Rentboy and myRedBook made sex work safer:
The federal prosecution of third-party advertisers like Rentboy and myRedBook—and, looming on the horizon, that pesky people-peddler Backpage.com—will not result in a world-wide financial crisis in the formal economy. But it will destroy an informal economy that includes many of us whom are undocumented, or don’t have a degree or other means to surmount the high barriers of entry to an occupation in the formal economy.
These advertising sites represent the most equalizing force in the sex industry in generations, because they allow for anyone (and their mother, if you’re into that kind of thing) to advertise their services for a small fee, from a position of safety and without paying 50% of your fees to agencies and other parasites. These platforms are directly responsible for moving many of us into safer working conditions, while the mounting pressures of prohibitionist campaigns and prosecutorial whack-a-mole instead open us up to policing and labor exploitation.
The prosecution of Rentboy is only one symptom of law enforcement’s far larger and more insidious efforts to criminalize people in the sex trades’ networks of mutual support and safety.
