Star Light Ministries

Star Light’s Board of Directors concluded their meeting yesterday afternoon. Anyone who knows me, knows how much I really don’t like long meetings. Scheduled to end at 5:30, we finished about 4:00, which made me very happy.

We got a lot accomplished.

Following the Desiree Alliance’s conference in Chicago, I came home thinking about what seem to be the three biggest challenges of sex work: isolation, stigmatization, and economic disenfranchisement (what is the opposite of empowerment?). Star Light’s commitment is to fight these three challenges, by providing opportunities for sex workers to build community, by speaking up and out for sex workers who cannot, because of legal and societal restraints, always speak for themselves, and by providing educational and economic opportunities to sex workers.

The most important thing that I needed out of the Board meeting was a sense that the Board was behind the vision that I cast for the next five years. That vision includes two new staff people, continuing the Exotic Dancer, M.B.A., hosting sex worker retreats, a mentoring program, a secure on-line community for sex workers, and implementation of a sort-of case management program for folks in need. I’m psyched about all of that.

We had some interesting discussions. One of the major discussions was regarding a Board member Code of Ethics and Conduct. Privacy is such an important part of sex work, and Star Light is committed to preserving that right of all of its Board members.

We also, for the first time since I started Star Light seven years ago, have a strong understanding of who we need to add to the Board. We have committed to adding several Board members over the next year, and those members have to include expertise regarding sex work—an attorney, an accountant, an IT/New Media expert, and, most importantly, more sex workers.

It’s an exciting time at Star Light. I believe in what we do, because I believe in the amazing sex workers we serve. I am honored to work with such great people serving such a great population!

The Board of Directors of Star Light Ministries is meeting this weekend. Last night we met for dinner, introductions, and some good hanging out time. They are an amazing bunch of women.

At one point, they noticed that I kept using the phrase “sex workers,” which I’ve discussed here. One person asked, “Who does the term include?” Well, it includes porn stars, exotic dancers, erotic modeling, phone sex operators, escorts, street-level survival prostitutes, professional dominatrices, and many, many more.

“Why that term?” they asked. I replied, “The sex workers I have met prefer the term, it is a better descriptor of what they do, work, and it highlights the fact that many people in the sex industry work in several different places in the sex industry.”

Kit Heifner, a passionate Star Light Board member piped up, “Well, I guess we need to change our mission statement to say sex workers!”

I love these people!

I am sitting here getting ready for a Board meeting for Star Light. I want to take all the lessons I’ve learned from sex work bloggers and from the Desiree Alliance’s conference, Pulling Back the Sheets, back to my Board, as a much needed guide for our work.

Will you please answer these questions, and pass them on to anyone who you think would like a voice in our work? If you have a blog where you would like to post the questions, please feel free, and please feel free to send folks my email address (or publish it) to answer them. You can email me the answers or post them in the comments.

For those of you who don’t know, Star Light shares unconditional love and friendship with women who are exotic dancers so they will not forget they are also loved and valued by God. We help them build supportive communities and find resources for successful living.

1) What do you think are the most pressing issues for people in sex work? In what way could Star Light help meet those needs?

2) Our Mission Statement says, “build supportive communities and find resources for successful living.” What would a supportive community feel like to you? What are some resources you can identify that would make you more successful in your goals?

3) What response do you expect to get, given your work, from people who are from “the Church?” How would you like for that to change?

4) How do you, today, get your spiritual needs met? Do you feel like this is a need for you? Can you imagine a place where you might feel free to get those needs met? What would be some ways that those needs could get met?

5) What would you recommend that Star Light’s Board read in order to understand your experience? Shorter is better, and blog posts would be great. I’d like to compile a little reading list for them, so please point me to one of your posts (or one of you favorite blogger’s posts) that best explains your life and work.

All answers and respondees will be given complete anonymity (unless, of course, you post your answers on the blog!). My real purpose is to find guiding principles for Star Light.

Thank you so much for answering these! I can’t tell you how grateful I am for all the experiences I had at the Desiree Alliance, and for this amazing community of folks in sex work.

Lia

December 25, 2007

This year has been a wonderful one, and I am grateful to all of you for all your support, love and care this year. Over and over this year I have been amazed and humbled by Star Light’s volunteers and supporters. Thank you for caring about the women in the United States who are exotic dancers, and for caring about their children, their parents, their friends. Thank you for loving them.

I hope you all have a very Merry Christmas, and a wonderful and peaceful New Year.

October 12, 2007

I got involved with Star Light after I interviewed founder Lia Scholl for an article on human trafficking. Exotic dancers and clubs kept popping up in my research, controversially so. After all most women at clubs in the US are there by choice, right? Well, yes. Except for those who are increasingly trafficked in on the coasts. As for the rest, asked Lia, “How do you define choice?”

Lia and I will be the first to say that exotic dancing does not mean and should not be interchangeable with trafficking. Women (and it is mostly women), dance for many reasons, from paying bills to finding pleasure. Although it does make you wonder when so many women in the world’s wealthiest country find their most viable career opportunity in disrobing before strangers.

However the fact is that we now live in a much smaller world where its that much easier to traffic people into situations over which they have no control – increasingly clubs. Exhibit A: An entire set of scenes from the recent film, “Eastern Promises” where dancing for the UK’s Russian mob is the least objectionable thing in store for trafficked Slavic women.

This probably isn’t true for all the clubs you see advertised off highways between the coasts. But if you find yourself at a club in a major US urban area and a dancer has a foreign accent or “isn’t from here,” ask yourself – where did she come from? How did she get here? Where does she go at the end of her shift?

I’m a suburban mom with a toddler. Needless to say I’m not much of a club-goer. But you don’t have to be one to know or notice that clubs aren’t always in a red-light district with harsh neon-lit X-rated marquees. Many are discreetly tucked away around “respectable” neighborhoods, including the nice one I live in just outside Washington DC, also a major destination and transit point for traffickers.

So I’ve always wondered. About the people who go to clubs and the women they pay to strip. The lives both these (generally) law-abiding, tax-paying citizens lead. The families and friends the customers aren’t with. The childcare arrangements the dancers must need to figure out if they’re going to be home after last call. And how dancers make ends meet, especially if they’re paying all the FICA taxes you and I do, in addition to the cut the manager and the club takes. (What? You thought dancers get to keep all the singles tucked in their garters? Not so much.)

More than anything else, I wonder about the choices everyone’s made to get to this point, and the choices they’re left with if they want to stop dancing.

Partly it’s because of where I’m from, India – a major trafficking destination and transit point. And partly it’s because I grew up some in the Middle East – where choice, as we understand it from a Western perspective, is sometimes non-existent for both sexes. Both are places where “fallen” women have no way out of disgrace. There is no leaving the past behind, no fresh start. And what you do shames the whole family, sometimes for generations.

It’s different in the US, or at least it’s supposed to be. I lived in Los Angeles for ten years, the city of Angels, where there is less judgment for missteps and world arrives to reinvent itself, endlessly. Where you’re always a lucky break away from being the irrefutable next big thing. Where the legal, American-born dancers – unlike Slavic and Asian dancers in Hollywood and Koreatown – can always walk away, start over, leave their past behind.

Except, as former dancers will tell you, we now live in the age of the Internet, where the past is never behind you. And if you’re illegal, leaving the club is a whole other ball of wax.

Let’s say you do leave. Because there comes a point when you’re too sick, or too old, and no longer able to spend hours on end in insanely high heels. Where do you go? What do you put on your resume? How are you going to transition from one life to the other?

Let’s say you’re okay with the choices you made, at peace with the outcome, are you ready for what comes from those who aren’t? From those who might have been customers? Do you have what it takes to keep from going back to clubs simply because they’re known territory? Because you know that even if its not what you want, at least it’s a somewhat reliable paycheck?

Lia had asked me, “How do you define choices.” Sure makes you think twice about the word, doesn’t it?

Star Light shares unconditional friendship and love with women who are exotic dancers so they will not forget that they are also loved and valued by God.

The Hebrew Bible, or the Old Testament as many of us still call it, is filled with the exhortation, “Remember.” The Hebrews at Mount Sinai are told, “Remember the Sabbath.” Many times the Bible says, “Remember the Lord your God, who brought you out of slavery,” and many other things. Part of the reason that the people are told to remember is because they are so apt to forget!

It’s our nature to forget that God loves us. Perhaps it’s the tapes in our heads from our childhood. Perhaps it’s our own voice that tells us that we’re just not good enough. Or the voice that says that we’ve done something so bad, how could God love us?

Most of Star Light’s teams are in the South, what Flannery O’Connor calls a “Christ haunted landscape.” It’s difficult to be raised in the South without some experience of the church, whether through your parents or through friends, or even grandparents. But most of the women I’ve met in clubs don’t have happy memories of church. Their experiences range from feeling judged to being abused by the church.

If your dad was a deacon, but he beat you, would you remember the lesson from church about God’s love? If you were sexually abused by the youth minister, would you remember that God loves you enough to send bring forth a son to remind you of that love? And is the little voice in your head that reminds you, every now and again, that you are loved by God, loud enough to drown out the voices that tell you that you are unlovable?

Star Light teams stand as a reminder of that love. If you remember that I love you, by my presence in a club, can you remember that God loves you? I believe that it is the unconditional love and care of one person that can remind us that we are loved by God. It only takes one person.

Are you willing to stand as the person that reminds another that they are loved by God? Do you have to do it with words? Or can it just be mere presence? As St. Francis of Assisi said, “Preach the gospel at all times and when necessary use words.” Presence is enough.

Star Light shares unconditional friendship and love with women who are exotic dancers so they will not forget that they are also loved and valued by God.

In days of old, missionaries “brought” God to people. They visited the tribes of Africa, and they brought God with them. They went into “dens of iniquity,” bringing God with them. Now we know better. God is everywhere. We don’t “bring” God with us when we go visit a club. God is already there.

One former dancer told me, “Some days, I could see God working in the club.” Another woman says, “Every time I walked into the club, I could feel God’s presence. Sometimes it was protection. Sometimes it was in an act of kindness by a customer or a coworker. Sometimes the presence of God was coming through me as I helped clients and coworkers feel loved.”

If we’re not “bringing God,” then what do we bring? Star Light stands as a reminder to the women who are exotic dancers that they are not alone, and that there are people who do not judge them for what they do. The hardest thing to imagine as a dancer is that their are people outside of the clubs who do not think that they are worthless. On the contrary, we think they are amazing!

Lauren Bethell, an American Baptist missionary serving as a consultant on issues of trafficked women throughout the world, received an award for courage from the Whitsitt Society at the Cooperative Baptist Fellowship General Assembly in June. At the meeting, she talked about how she helps women create ministries to women who have been trafficked. She advises the teams of women to pray, “Help us discover these women’s greatest need.”

Star Light decided at its Board meeting in July to create an advisory Board made up of women who have been exotic dancers and women who are currently dancing, in order for us to “discover these women’s greatest need.” This group of women will guide Star Light in building our model for ministry and will advise us in reaching those needs.

Would you like to serve on this team? You can make a difference for exotic dancers and former dancers everywhere. Send me an email through the contact sheet on this website. The group of women will meet together regularly, probably by phone, to formulate ideas, think through concepts, and hold Star Light accountable to the women that we are serving. Come join us!