Last night I had a glass of wine with Ceyenne to celebrate being so close to the finishing line for the Cooking in Heels Kickstarter campaign. We have 11 hours left, and we just hit $9200, which is truly stunning and amazing. 

This means we’ll definitely be able to produce a photo shoot and add full color photos of some of the dishes to the book. And if the pledges continue to climb over the next few hours, we will be looking at the possibility of creating a few episodes of a Cooking in Heels online cooking show, which will be available for free and would launch alongside the book in August or September. 

Folks here on Tumblr have been instrumental in making this book possible - not just by pledging, but by spreading the word about this project and making Ceyenne’s project visible. Thanks so much for your support! If you have already donated, it would be amazing if you could increase your pledge today (if just half of our backers chip in an additional $10, we’ll easily pass the $10,000 mark) - or just share the Kickstarter page and the amazing video that captures Ceyenne’s story.

Yesterday I spent a few hours talking about Cooking in Heels with Ceyenne and a longtime friend of hers, Jack (aka Flawless Sabrina), in the Upper East Side apartment where he has lived since the late 1960s. The apartment has lots of gorgeous antiques, and is cluttered with the objects that symbolize a life well celebrated: photos, newspaper clippings, wigs, a first edition of John Rechy’s City of Night. We talked about how things have changed and how they haven’t, about police violence and fabulous parties - and of course, we ate. Jack has been immensely important to Ceyenne over the years, offering refuge, support, and kindness to her when those things ran in short supply in her life. We showed him our Kickstarter video and he shed some tears and then clapped in glee at the end. There’s a dish in the book named after him, but he doesn’t know that yet.

Ceyenne prepared her signature quiche - in the Kickstarter video she talks about the first time she prepared it for her family. In her youth, Ceyenne’s quiche made her safe. Her parents were less abusive whenever she was cooking, because they needed her - and damn is she good at it. I stood in Jack’s kitchen with Ceyenne as she prepared the food, and took this shot of her kneading the dough for the quiche crust. 

Secret ingredient: pancake mix. The final product was fluffy and cheesy and amazing.

We told Jack about the success we’re having with the Kickstarter campaign and told him about our hopes for making a book with color photos of 5-10 dishes. That’s looking more and more like the reality of this project, as we steadily climb to $8000 in pledges, and beyond. Can we raise $10,000? Maybe $12,000? That would make it possible for us to produce episodes of Ceyenne’s dream online cooking show, which would be the same great quality as the video we produced for this campaign. 

So, please keep spreading the word! We’ve got just over two weeks left to see how big we can make this.

Speak Up! Doing Legislative Advocacy for Change in New York

For most issues that impact people in the sex trade within the United States, marching on Washington or asking the President to make a change is misdirected energy. States write their own criminal codes, as well as most public health, labor, and housing laws – all of which affect people in the sex trades. And cities have important powers too, regulating zoning, deciding how local money is spent, and making 

the kind of decisions that affect us on a day-to-day basis like how late parks are open or where police patrol. The language –often just a few words– included in bigger state and city laws can have major impact on the ability of public services and law enforcement to place restrictions on us and penalize us for trying to make a living. On the flip side, the absence of language that protects people in the sex industry can create space for law enforcement and public services to abuse us and violate our human rights. 

Being aware of how state and city law making works is important because it gives us the ability to engage in our democracy and demand change for ourselves and our communities. This guide serves as a primer on how the legislative process works and what opportunities there are for people in the sex industry and our allies to engage in making change. 

The Red Umbrella Project is a run and led by people who have wide-ranging experiences in the sex trades. We believe there is a lot of value in engaging in advocacy to change policies that negatively affect our communities, and that people with lived experience in the sex industry are the best people to do this work. But we’re not going to lie: there’s a lot stacked against us. The conflation of sex work and trafficking, not to mention the social and legal stigmas associated with the sex trade, make it really difficult to get our messages across. The truth is that getting rid of bad laws and getting better laws passed is slow work, and it is often discouraging. It’s unreasonable to expect that we will have big successes right away. But we are long-term optimists, and we believe that it is crucial that we invest time and energy in working for legislative change, and that it is vital for people like us to have seats at the table when our lives are being legislated. 

A note about the audience for this guide: This manual was prepared specifically for people in New York City and State who are interested in doing legislative advocacy and making change in state and city policies. State and city legislative processes vary widely, so although some of the strategies are transferable to other locations, the information about the process of how a bill becomes a law is very different in other cities and states. Please research your local situation before you engage in legislative advocacy!

If you want to talk about how it can be adapted for your local area, please email audaciaray@redumbrellaproject.org 

Download the PDF for free here: Speak Up! Doing Legislative Advocacy for Change in New York (15)

You might have noticed that the Cooking In Heels project is more than 100% funded on Kickstarter. That’s amazing, and it happened faster than we could have dared to imagine!

So why should you, not-yet-backer, pledge to a project that is already, definitely happening?

• Pledging the $30 level means that you are pre-ordering the book and helping us figure out how big our print run should be. The best -and right now the ONLY- way for you and all the people you know to get a copy of Cooking in Heels is by pledging to our Kickstarter campaign. We would love to pre-sell at least 250 hard copy books, which means we need about 175 more pledges at the $30 level to make that happen.

• More pledges will make for a better and more beautiful book, with full color pictures of food shot by a professional photographer. In our initial planning for the book, we were afraid to dream up a budget bigger than we could raise funds for, so our original $6000 doesn’t cover photography beyond the cover. If we raise more money (aka, sell more books plus some bigger pledges), we can afford to produce a photo shoot and get the book printed in full color.

• If our fundraising continues to blossom, we can produce a series of video webisodes, which will be free to watch and feature Ceyenne cooking dishes from the book and telling stories. Our first obligation, of course, is to making the book awesome. However, we’ve been getting A LOT of requests to produce a cooking show featuring Ceyenne. We would love love love to make this happen, and have the crew to do it: the video crew that produced Ceyenne’s Kickstarter video is Emmy Award-winning, and the director has directed episodes of food shows like Chopped and Man Vs. Food Nation. Creating a high quality and very entertaining web series is well within our abilities, we just need some more funds to make it a reality.

So for those reasons, and because Ceyenne is amazing, please do pledge what you’re able to, and encourage your friends and colleagues to do the same.

Meet Ceyenne Doroshow. 

I was introduced to Ceyenne in February 2011 by the women at the Sex Workers Project - her lawyers and colleagues in the fight for the rights of people in the sex trades. Ceyenne, they told me, is an amazing, funny woman who was piecing her life back together after a stint in prison on a prostitution conviction. And she had this idea - she wanted to write the first cookbook by a sex working transgender woman, a cookbook that would bring people together and make it ok to talk about these tough issues.

I had to meet her. 

After more than a year of collaboration on her book, which she’s calling Cooking in Heels, we launched a Kickstarter campaign Monday to raise the funds for Red Umbrella Project to publish it.

The response so far has been amazing - we are 85% of the way to the $6000 minimum we need to make the book a reality. Ceyenne and I have been blown away by the support and have started scheming about the ways we can make the book even more amazing than what we had planned. To be honest, we thought the combined forces of racism and transmisogyny (let’s face it, Kickstarter campaigns aren’t the most diverse of pursuits) would mean that we would be hustling hard to raise that six grand by our deadline, May 9.

Watch the video of her making paella on Kickstarter because me talking about her just isn’t anywhere near as awesome as watching Ceyenne in action. If you can spare a few dollars, please support the project and help us make this book bigger and better. $1 gets you access to backer-only updates, $10 gets you a personalized postcard from Ceyenne, $30 gets you a hard copy of the book when its available in August. If its within your means to donate more, there are rewards above and beyond what I’ve listed here. The more we raise, the more amazing this book is going to be.

Since February 2011 I have been collaborating with Ceyenne Doroshow, a black transgender woman from Brooklyn who while she was incarcerated on a prostitution conviction a few years ago, got inspired to write a memoir cookbook. We’ve made significant progress on the book: we have more than 50 recipes, plus an oral history about her life, and now we’re ready to start producing the book itself. We need $6000 to get it copyedited, pay for the cover photography, and have it designed and printed. This morning I hit the launch button on our Kickstarter campaign to raise that money.

Our rewards include signed postcards, copies of the book, baked goods, cooking lessons, and private dinners - all depending on the level you donate at. We need your support to make this book come to fruition. And really, any amount helps - the minimum donation is $1. If you don’t have cash to spare, please check out the video anyway - it really captures who Ceyenne is and why she’s amazing. Also, there’s paella and it is mouthwatering - we ate it at the shoot and wow.

If you think the project is cool, as I hope you will - please spread the word!

Here’s the Red Umbrella Project (RedUP) team with a crew of young people from Streetwise and Safe and the Hetrick Martin Institute, plus New York City Council Member Daniel Dromm (D - district 25) at our advocacy training on February 24, 2012.

Though there’s a lot of focus on national politics, especially in a presidential election year, for people in the sex trades, the laws that really impact our lives are made on the city and state levels. Criminal codes are state laws, and most states have lots of them, with little lines of legalese that make the lives of people in the sex trades, or people profiled as such, much more difficult. In the RedUP advocacy training we walk participants through things like the convoluted process of how bills become law, where ideas for bills come from, and how individuals and grassroots groups can make an impact on this process.

This year, our advocacy trainings are focused on getting New York State Bill A1008/S323 passed, which will make it illegal for condoms to be used as evidence of prostitution. In the training with the young people from SAS and HMI, we talked a lot about their concerns around profiling. They are especially concerned with the ways that the use of condoms as evidence intersects with the NYPD’s abusive stop and frisk tactics, and how the combinations of these two things creates harm for people of color, trans women, gender non-conforming people, and street involved youth. Their perspective on this bill is much needed, and a bunch of the members of the group will be lobbying in Albany in April. New York State elected reps really need to hear these voices.

And speaking of reps listening up - we were really excited to be joined for an hour by NYC Council Member Daniel Dromm, whose district 25 is in Jackson Heights in Queens. I met Dromm for the first time at the council hearing I testified at in December, and he’s a great ally who actually seems to get and care about our issues. I’m looking forward to working with him further, and I’m really excited that we’re starting to be able to get the ears and time of elected officials. He gave some really great advice, and really encouraged folks to speak their personal truths to legislators. Though we also emphasized the value of statistics and reports in making our arguments, he told us that connecting on a personal level with legislators is really important. He said that especially in cases in which the representative might not be on our side, the only way through is to appeal to their humanity and their empathy.

The RedUP advocacy trainings are part of our Speak Up! workshop program, which also includes our media training, which was our flagship program. The trainings are geared toward people who have had experience in the sex trades and who want to learn the skills to speak up for themselves in policy contexts, in public forums, and in both community and mainstream media.

All Red Umbrella Project programs are led by people who themselves have experience in the sex trades. This is a really important aspect of our work, because there are many service oriented agencies that provide support to sex workers, and its less common -but vital- for a group to be run and led by the population. This year, we’re doing three  advocacy trainings, and then we’re collaborating with other organizations to do a lobby day in Albany on April 17th. We have a short training on April 4 at the Gay Men’s Health Crisis that will just focus on talking points for the lobby day, and then on Sunday, April 15 at the Urban Justice Center, we have a full day training that will teach both content and strategy (more info here). I’m really excited that our work is growing in this way, and we’re becoming able to support more and more people in being awesome and learning the skills to speak up and fight back.

I’m excited about the Red Umbrella Diaries 2012 season, and about this illustration for our postcards, drawn by the very awesome Laurenn McCubbin. I’m trying something a little different this year, our third year of monthly storytelling events (whoa!): guest curators/hosts. Clockwise from the top left are Josh Ryley, Ceyenne Doroshow, Dominick, and Essence Revealed. I’m excited to see what they each come up with!

Also, if you’re reading this and might be interested in telling a true story about your experiences in the sex industry in front of a live (friendly!) audience in NYC, let me know. Unfortunately, I can’t pay performers, but can usually hook you up with meals and a place to crash, as well as support as you develop your story.

I am trying really hard to professionalize the Red Umbrella Project - we’ve built a board, we have a lawyer and have been going through the process of formalizing RedUP in the eyes of the state, and I have been researching and applying for grants. But in the meantime, it’s business as usual, raising money the way I know how. Every month at the Red Umbrella Diaries I “pass the boot” and collect donations. As a former sex worker, I think there will just always be something deeply satisfying about counting up cash.