“Capitalism is this never-ending carnival and you’re just there laboring, working the machine.”
What Rachel Rabbit White Wants:
The decriminalization of sex work
To take care of her friends
A lumpen poetry
I first read Rachel Rabbit White when I moved to New York City in January of 2018; her Garage column Sex Scenes has some of the best writing on sex and culture that I’ve read. After a year in the city, Rachel and I had developed a large group of mutual friends in both sex working, poetry, and queer circles. As with many people our age, we witnessed one another living parallel lives through our tweets and our Instastories until eventually Rachel invited me to a party in Williamsburg last winter. I remember being so nervous as I approached the bar; she’d had been someone I had admired creatively and ideologically for so long. Her poetry spoke to the lived realities of a queer and sex working community that I had grown to love, and that had taken care of me in my hardest moments. Once Rachel herself arrived to the party, I understood what everyone was waiting for: she has a magnetic energy that makes it difficult to look away. She has a confidence that influences everyone in the room.
Rachel’s work doesn’t just represent a community not often portrayed in the mainstream, it depicts experiences that have often been fetishized, misconstrued, or outright ignored by most circles in publishing. Rachel Rabbit White’s work is revolutionary for a multitude of reasons, both for the leftist politics layered throughout her poems, but also because she is an out-sex worker who embraces qualities that literary institutions often reject.
When I arrived at Rachel Rabbit White’s apartment in October to discuss her new book of poetry, Porn Carnival, I could not have predicted how much of what we discussed would serve as a response to party coverage for her recent book launch: coverage which made a community that’s actively organizing politically (for the decriminalization of sex work, harm reduction practices, the anti-carceral movement, and a multitude of other issues that impact queer and sex working communities) come off as frivolous and shallow. Many on Twitter, hearing a description of the launch, criticized the hedonism, the sex, and the absurdity of the party antics without considering the fact that queer sex workers who write don’t need to have parties that appeal to the respectability standards of those who have never traded sex for money.
As a person who attended the Porn Carnival launch (and the after-party, even though...
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