Decriminalised Futures

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Decriminalised Futures

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07/14/2025

‼️😨The Maiden Tribute of Modern Babylon😨‼️(1885) can be understood as one of the first s*x trafficking panics.

🩸Written by editor William Stead, it prompted protests that led to the Criminal Law Amendment Act.

🩸The Act criminalised trafficking and grooming - but only applicable if an ‘innocent’ woman had been trafficked.

🩸This is an example of how demands to end exploitation in the s*x industry can morph into repressive measures without addressing actual exploitation.

🧐Does this sound familiar when thinking about our current legislations and attempts to bring in client criminalisation in the UK? Because it is. This Act and the campaigns surrounding it launched an unprecedented legal crackdown on prostituti0n that is still in effect today in Britain.

📜The lecture recording and full transcript of ‘A History of S*x Work Criminalisation in the UK’ with Dr Julia Laite, as part of our 2021 Lady of the Night School series is available on our website. 🔗in bio.

📖 Recommended reading: The Disappearance of Lydia Harvey (2021) by Dr Julia Laite

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Alt text:
1. An old newspaper cover from 1885 featuring an etching of a young woman, with the text ‘The Maiden Tribute of Modern Babylon: to be warned of an evil is the first step towards safety’.
2, 3 and 4: Text infographics with a quote from Alison Neilans.
5. Sepia portrait of Alison Neilans, who has short hair and glasses and wears a button up shirt.

07/09/2025

📚While we are all about archiving and documenting SWer movement history, we think it’s equally important that we are given the space to dream about our futures.

💭 It’s essential for us to create our own representations and interpretations of our lived experiences 👁️

✍️Writing Our Futures was our creative writing workshop. Hosted over 5 weeks in 2021 and 2022, it gave us the opportunity to get creative and politically active while building community and solidarity with other SWers.

✍️Participants learned about SW representations in TV and film, discussed the history and future of SWer rights movements, explored different storytelling techniques, and created their own piece of work on a story they want to tell.

📖Here’s a small selection of work from the WOF zines. You can find the pdfs of both zines on our website. WOF was a joy to run and the work that came out of it was very beautiful. We want to run it again - soon, we hope! 💞💞💞

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Alt text:
1. Artwork by Audrey Whorne, featuring a brown SWer with green hair lying on a pink bed.
2. A light green background with two paragraphs of black text from the second Writing Our Futures zine.
3. The cover page featuring a screenprint of a peach from the second Writing Our Futures zine, with design by Jay Bernard.
4. A peach-coloured background with slanted black text listing the contents of the second Writing Our Futures zine.
5. A light green background with a black ink drawing of bodies hanging from meat hooks. The black text in the top left hand corner reads: 241 Tuesdays £5.99. By Lotte Latham.
6. Handwritten poems and drawings by Celeste, against a yellow background.

07/07/2025

🏳️‍🌈🏳️‍⚧️HAPPY (belated) PRIDE! 💪💪

❣️Before Stonewall, there was Gene Compton’s cafeteria riot:

🍽️ In 1966, a group of trans women in San Francisco stood up to police inside Gene Compton’s Cafeteria, an all-night restaurant in the Tenderloin neighbourhood and popular q***r gathering spot.

🍽️ A trans woman fed up with the harassment and abuse is said to have thrown a cup of coffee in an officer’s face, sparking a chaotic riot and unprecedented moment of trans resistance to police violence.

🍽️ “These ladies took the bullets for us,” said Donna Personna, a performer and activist who went to Compton’s Cafeteria as a teenager in the 1960s and now lives down the street. “Everyone in our community stands on their shoulders.”

💬 Text via ‘Compton’s Cafeteria riot: a historic act of trans resistance, three years before Stonewall’ by Sam Levin for The Guardian, 2019.

🎬 Recommended film: Screaming Queens (2016) by Susan Stryker & Victor Silverman. Available on YouTube.

🫶 Thank you Morgan M Page for bringing this story to our attention in the lecture Trans S*x Workers Through History, part of our our Lady of the Night School popular education series.

📸 First and second images via Asha Ayanna.

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Alt text:
1. Portrait of activist Donna Personna against a green and white brick wall.
2. San Francisco’s Tenderloin district at night time.
3. A grey, stone plaque with a paragraph of text commemorating Gene Compton’s Cafeteria Riot of 1966, dedicated in 2006.

06/30/2025

💪In May 2019, SWARM *xworkhive hosted a three day festival to celebrate ten years of SWer organising.

💪This consisted of panel discussions across a wide range of topics that impact on SWers, and connect and intersect with SWer rights organising as well as broader struggles for justice.

✨The conversations and discussions from that festival lay the groundwork for the Decriminalised Futures project, where we are today! ✨

🫡 We are delighted to host an archive of the SWARM conference on our website, with links to all the talks. This includes topics such as:

- Radical Transfeminist Activism
- Cops Don’t Keep Us Safe: When Survival Is Made Criminal
- SWers on the Nordic Model
- How Do Disability and SW Intersect in the UK Today

… and much, much more!

🔗in bio to browse all the topics of 2019 SWARMCON 🔥

📸Image credits: first and second images by Juno Mac

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Alt text:
1. A very sweet dog with big eyes and brown hair rests their head on top of a table as they sit on someone’s lap. A copy of SWARM Decriminalised Futures programme guide is on the table.
2. Merch table at SWARM 2019 conference, with books, badges, prints and tote bags.
3. SWARM 2019 conference poster, with the text ‘celebrating 10 years of SWARM 2009-2019’.

06/23/2025

🌹Yes, the red umbrella is a symbol for SWers rights. But how did this come about 🧐??

🥁In 2001, the Solvenian artist Tadej Pogačar presented “CODE:RED” at the 49th Venice Biennale of Contemporary Art, Venice. This work consisted of a public action that involved marching through the city holding red umbrellas.

🔴CODE:RED is described as “a multidisciplinary, multimedia, collaboration project, which discusses and researches the informal economy models, self-organisation, global SW and global trafficking [. . .]” - Tadej Pogačar

ℹ️For more information, images, and resources on how the red umbrella became a ubiquitous symbol of SWers rights - head to the page ‘SWer Art and Creative Practices’ (June 2022) on our website.

♥️This lecture was part of our Lady of the Night School series, with a talk by Yves Sanglante .nausea and seminar by Tamara-Jade Kaz. It covers many other fascinating examples of how creativity has played a role in our struggles for change.

📸Image credits: first image via P47 Gallery. The rest via the Museum and Galleries of Ljubljana.

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Alt text:
A woman with red hair and glasses is walking down the street. In her red gloved hand she holds a sign that says ‘stop the wars on the wh0res’.
A woman with red hair walks through a plaza on a sunny day in Venice. A large rectangle of fabric is draped over her shoulders that is printed with different flags.
A group of approximately 12 people walk down a sunny street in Venice holding red umbrellas.
A woman with bobbed blonde hair is turned away from the camera. She’s wearing a red top with an a4 sheet of paper on her back that says ‘LA PRESIDENTE PUTTANA’

06/18/2025

🤓 Introducing the team!

⚡️Our final intro is:

🔪 J (she/they) is a writer, artist and gardener based in the Republic of Ireland. You can follow their work (and occasional hot takes)

❤️‍🔥

⚡️DF is made up of a small team of producers who all hold experiences in grassroots SWer organising. We all work only one day a week.

⚡️Our current focus as part of relaunching the project is to find more funding. Fingers crossed for bringing back a new and exciting series of programming for SWers! 🤞🏼

❤️‍🔥

Alt text:
A woodcut print of Aileen Wournos smiling with the text ‘I’m sailing with the rock & I’ll be back’.

06/16/2025

🤓 Introducing the team!

⚡️Our second last intro:

🙋🏻‍♀️ BETTY (she/her) is a visual artist based in Glasgow working across performance and photography. They were previously branch organiser at and committee , find them .castratrice 🧚🏻‍♀️

⚡️DF is made up of a small team of producers who all hold experiences in grassroots SWer organising. We all work only one day a week.

⚡️Our current focus as part of relaunching the project is to find more funding. Fingers crossed for bringing back a new and exciting series of programming for SWers! 🤞🏼

Alt text:
- An East Asian woman stands on the street wearing thigh high white boots with a bikini that says ‘father, son, Holy Spirit’. She is holding an umbrella with ‘decrim’ written on it.

06/11/2025

🤓 Introducing the team!

⚡️Up next!!

✌🏼YVES (he/him) is an artist, designer, co-curator of the 2022 Decriminalised Futures exhibition, p**n press boy, and harm reductionist (aka drug nerd) …amongst approximately 100 other odd jobs. Follow him .nausea ✨

⚡️DF is made up of a small team of producers who all hold experiences in grassroots SWer organising. We all work only one day a week.

⚡️Our current focus as part of relaunching the project is to find more funding. Fingers crossed for bringing back a new and exciting series of programming for SWers! 🤞🏼

Alt text:
1. A black and white image of a man in a black T-shirt, wearing a spiked latex mask and drinking wine.
2. A screenshot of Yves bio from the Decriminalised Futures website.

06/09/2025

🤓 Introducing the team!

⚡️First up:

✌🏼 ELIO (they/them) - is an artist, producer & community organiser. They co-founded DF & they’re great at spreadsheets. Follow them on 🪼

⚡️DF is made up of a small team of producers who all hold experiences in grassroots SWer organising. We all work only one day a week.

⚡️Our current focus as part of relaunching the project is to find more funding. Fingers crossed for bringing back a new and exciting series of programming for SWers! 🤞🏼

Alt text:
1. Beautiful organic jellyfish forms float against a deep blue background.
2. A screenshot from the decriminalised futures website introducing our ICA exhibition.

06/03/2025

💻 Over the past few months we have been so lucky to work with Rodrigo Nava Ramirez .ene.erre for our new website design!

Rodrigo (he/they) is an artist and computer programmer from Mexico City. For our website, they were inspired by sci-fi police force aesthetics and judicial records archiving practices. The design and function of the new DF website shapes and works as a systemic occupation, as means to challenge these oppressive structures.

♥️ Made with support from Disrupt Foundation ♥️

05/30/2025

🫀Annnnnnd we are back!

It’s been a hot minute - 🔥but DF is relaunching!🔥

🧚🏼‍♀️With a new production team behind the scenes, we’ve been re-organising and documenting our previous projects on a brand new website! This will serve as an archive detailing SWer movement history.

💋Thank you Rodrigo Nava Ramirez .ene.erre for the website design. Rodrigo (he/they) is an artist and computer programmer from Mexico City 💻. For our website, they were inspired by sci-fi police force aesthetics and judicial records archiving practices. The design and function of the new DF website shapes and works as a systemic occupation, as means to challenge these oppressive structures.

🫶Over the next few weeks we will be sharing some highlights from our archives and introducing our new team. Watch this space, baby! 🥰

📩 To keep up with our work - join our mailing list. Website 🔗 in bio - take a peek! 👀

💋

Alt text:

1. A screenshot from the new Decriminalised Futures website with an illustration of a brown person and introductory text.

2. A short screengrab video, scrolling through the archive section of the new website.

10/21/2022

Extremely proud that - an artist from our 2022 exhibition at - is now featured in the collection.

This is a massive achievement. Seeing work that connects thematically with s*x worker perspectives and experiences being recognised as a significant cultural contribution feels very meaningful 💙

Our struggles are all connected!

Via .official

Address

Ellis And Leavenworth 519 Ellis
San Francisco, CA
94102

Website

http://decriminalisedfutures.org/

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