A couple hundred sex workers, allies and curious passersby gathered at Laurelhurst Park on a recent sunny Monday afternoon to celebrate International Whores’ Day.
The June 2 holiday honors sex workers around the world, and was started 51 years ago when about 100 sex workers took over a church in France to protest criminalization and exploitative living conditions.
This year marked Portland’s second consecutive event hosted by local sex worker-led groups to fight stigma, build power and celebrate community. While some event organizers around the globe dubbed their celebrations as marking “International Sex Workers’ Day,” many others, including those in Portland, used the reclaimed slur as a title of power.
One of the groups hosting Portland’s event was Haymarket Pole Collective, a sex worker-led project that provides aid and other supports to sex workers. Cat Hollis Bowe is its founder.
“We’re here together as coworkers, parents, caretakers, artists, neighbors and whores to celebrate our collective resistance to control and shame pushed upon us,” Hollis Bowe said over a megaphone to cheering attendees.
The day came as efforts to decriminalize sex work in Oregon have been stalled for now by Governor Tina Kotek, and as Portland area police continue a sting-heavy response to sex work that many workers say makes their lives harder and work more dangerous.
It also comes as local harm reduction programs struggle to survive revenue losses from huge Trump administration cuts to COVID-19 era funding that addressed racial health disparities, supported LGBTQIA2S+ health and used proven harm reduction strategies to help people get off opioids.
The Oregon Health Authority alone has lost at least $117 million, the agency announced earlier this year. And Hollis Bowe said Haymarket went from receiving the better part of $1 million per year at its 2020 peak, to about $200 per month now.
Despite the sweeping cuts, and the harsh impacts they have had on sex workers, the vibe of the event earlier this month was unmistakably celebratory.
Vendors sold their work, people danced and old friends caught up as music blasted in a shady clearing near the park’s pond. Attendees said the community building that defined the event makes them safer and happier.
A celebration
If the sea of beaming reunions wasn’t celebratory enough, attendees also got to experience a performance by Isaiah Esquire.
The internationally renowned dance teacher and burlesque performer got his start about 25 years ago as a 14-year-old letting loose on the dancefloor at Portland’s since-closed underage club, The Quest.
“I was supposed to be 16 but because I was tall, I was able to get in,” Esquire said. “And I was dancing, and to see how the room moved and responded to me was really powerful, and really healing for me, being that kind of odd kid that was still weird and different — but I was being celebrated versus being ostracized for it.”
The Laurelhurst event was something of a homecoming for him.
“I think it is someone’s duty to bridge where they are, where they’re going, with where they’ve been,” he said after a performance for the crowd. “And Haymarket Collective has been doing really great work, like a community, and when they put out the ask, I was like, ‘Absolutely, say less.’”
A little before the performance, Hollis Bowe blessed attendees in a different way.
“I’m going to pull raffle numbers,” they announced.
The raffle included hair products, gift baskets provided by Fantasy Hollywood, a one-hour hot soak from Common Ground Wellness Collective and other prizes.
Between performances and raffles, attendees got to know each other. Lawyer Madalína García was in the mix. She recently relocated her firm, Diablita Criminal Defense, to Portland. García said she held “know your rights” trainings for sex workers back in Texas, and also represented sex workers in court cases, and hopes to get connected here.
The event featured groups tabling for things ranging from sex work decriminalization to martial arts classes for queer and trans people. It also featured nearly a dozen vendors, who were mostly sex workers of color, offering everything from tea to Tarot readings.
One attendee was doing Tarot readings, catching up with friends and selling oils and candles. Risqué and Rye, whose pronouns are fae/faer, has been a sex worker for about 13 years.
“I mostly kept solo,” fae said. “It wasn’t until about three years ago that I started looking for community because I just kind of felt alone.”
Fae succeed, getting plugged in with mutual aid groups and joining a sex worker support group fae also sometimes facilitates. The group, and the broader community Risqué and Rye has built, has helped faer through rough times.
“I recently talked about how I was choked twice in two different strip clubs that I worked at in the last six-month period,” fae said. “The support that I got just verbally — people really verbally hold each other through those (times).”
The group also raised money to support faer after a miscarriage earlier this year. But that work has been made more challenging by the loss of many mutual aid groups after funding cuts. For example, the May closure of the Cupcake Girls — which ran a free store for sex workers and survivors of sex trafficking, as well as other types of support — has meant people like Risqué and Rye have had a harder time getting supplies out at the clubs they work and events they host.
“We are care workers. We provide a service that is very healing to people,” fae said. “Whether I’m making you laugh so hard you’re crying, that’s healing. If I am showing my own emotions — because I lost my mom last year, who was my mentor — if I’m crying and you’re crying with me, that’s healing. If I am being sexy and you’re so horny, you got to go home and you got to take care of that. That’s healing. These are all healing.”
Criminalization kills
Ey-Anna Shrishti is director of the Portland Sex Worker Resource Project. It’s a mutual aid group that distributes medical supplies, safer sex supplies, substance use harm reduction supplies and other things directly to sex workers. It’s also one of the groups that hosted the event.
Shrishti said it was amazing to see people coming together and experiencing joy.
“So much of the conversation around sex work is very focused on how difficult it is and the stigma that we do face,” they said. “And all those things are very important to talk about, but it is equally as important, if not more so, to celebrate what we are, and who we are, and what we do — because, without that celebration, we can’t break through the stigma.”
A 2024 study from Portland State University found Oregon’s criminalization of sex work is a key cause of that stigma. And that has serious impacts.
“Fear of legal repercussions forces many sex workers to operate in secrecy,” it found, “increasing risks of abuse, violence, and exploitation. The threat of arrest and prosecution discourages sex workers from reporting violence, which further enhances their isolation, making them even more vulnerable targets for those who cause harm.”
Hollis Bowe echoed that.
“Being a perfect victim before receiving compassion is a hurdle we still face today,” they said. “It is in the design to keep us unprotected forever. So we embrace the word ‘Whore’ because we should not have to die, disappear or become respectable before people decide that our lives matter.”
Elle Stanger is harm reduction project manager at Oregon Safer Workers Coalition. The group is made up of current and former sex workers and trafficking survivors. Stanger said it provides education to make sex work safer, healthier and happier for everyone.
They said the group is fighting for decriminalization so sex workers can be safer and have more economic freedom.
“Sex work, including prostitution, needs to be decriminalized,” they said, “so that people who are working it to survive are never arrestable, never targeted for harassment or extortion, never can be blocked from jobs or housing if they are currently or have done sex work, can’t have their children taken from them because they’ve been a sex worker — and that happens to choice workers all the time too, even custody battles, just because of stigma. So we’re really here to remind people that a lot of sex work is related to human rights.”
Paying it forward
The impacts of stigma are not abstract. In a 2020 Vogue article, Hollis Bowe said they had lost three Black sex worker friends to suicide that year.
They said losses like those, alongside things like the anti-Black racism and transphobia in Portland strip clubs, led them to found Haymarket Pole Collective in the wake of George Floyd’s murder by police in Minneapolis.
“As somebody who was previously homeless, who was previously in active addiction — I’m sober five years this July, and housed now seven — I really try to put in my mind, ‘What did I need at the time, what could I have used?’” they said.
“People are like, ‘Oh my god, this is exactly what I needed,’ and it’s because we’re the bitches who needed it,’” they added with a grin. “We know because we have dreamed the same dreams, we’ve hoped the same hopes, we’ve feared the same fears. So it allows us to be really distinctly qualified to do the support.”
Hollis Bowe said the June 2 event came partly out of that, and partly out of the desire to celebrate the legacy of Carol Leigh, an era-defining sex worker activist who coined the term “sex work” herself.
“When Haymarket started in 2020, I reached out to her and was like, ‘Hey, all of the sudden there’s this movement behind me, and I feel really unqualified because I’m just super fucking angry, and that’s all that I know.’” Hollis Bowe recounted. “And she said to me — and I thought about getting it tattooed on me — she said, ‘It’s okay to be angry, stay mad, but be mad enough to do something about it.’”
After Leigh died in late 2022, Hollis Bowe found out Leigh had provided similar support to others, and they all wanted to do something to honor her. That something became last year’s International Whores’ Day event in Portland.
This year’s was even bigger, thanks in large part to funding from Leigh’s trust, which allowed organizers to pay for things like the talents of DJ Ursa Major. Running Haymarket used to be Hollis Bowe’s full time job. With funding gutted, they now work a second full time job to support their family, while they continue the work of the collective.
Building power together
“I keep meeting mutuals I’ve had online, which has been really, really nice,” said Athame, a Portland dancer.
(A “mutual” is someone who you follow on social media who also follows you back. Basically, a friendly online acquaintance.)
Meeting online friends in person is especially important for sex workers because they face near-continuous online censorship and account deletion.
Studies have found that hurts sex workers’ ability to pay their bills and puts them in increasingly dangerous situations, while also imposing further isolation. The situation was worsened by a set of 2018 federal laws known as SESTA/FOSTA, according to the ACLU.
“They want us isolated and dumb,” said Preciosa, a dancer who had come to the event with Athame and Harlan Rose, a dancer and content creator.
Adding onto that, Rose said, “We want people to be able to operate safely, and to make informed decisions on what they’re doing. And so the censorship, keeping everything in the dark, adding that stigma to this line of work, it makes it ultimately harder for us to either stay in the industry if you want to, or even get out — it’s a double-edged sword.”
Emery Lune, a model and content creator, got talking to the trio during the event.
“Being a trans woman and a sex worker,” Lune said, “we’re already stigmatized, we’re already fetishized. And part of what I think is important about community like this is better educating and creating relationships with other types of performers and cis performers.”
“I love the idea of coming here and getting to know people,” she added. “Getting to express myself, getting to share important things about my experience and hearing everybody’s experience as well.”
The group talked about the similarities and differences between their experiences in sex work.
“I feel like what you’re saying is bridging the gap,” Athame said to Lune as the group nodded. “There’s other sex workers that would never have met each other if it wasn’t for events like this.”
Around that time, Hollis Bowe got on the megaphone to let people know the official event was over.
“You don’t have to go home, but you can’t stay here,” they said. “Our permit is up at five. Thank you all so much for coming. The rest of Laurelhurst Park is more than open to anybody who wants to stay.”
Athame, Rose, Preciosa and Lune left together into the park, now a quartet.
This article appears in June 10, 2026.
