There’s an American constituency of millions that’s never been the target of a concerted get-out-the-vote campaign—until now. They’re your neighbors, friends, girlfriends, maybe even your relatives. They’re sex workers: hawking clips on OnlyFans, shimmying at strip clubs, waiting at the curbside, and baring all in adult films.
This election season, various groups have been popping up to mobilize the sex worker vote. They include Erotic Performers and Allies United—or EPA United, for short—and Hot2Vote, two non-partisan groups founded by sex workers within the past few months. I spent time getting to know both in the lead up to polling day. “We know that our community has the power to shape history and to change an election, so I created a larger umbrella, where we are flexing that power,” Hot2Vote founder Siouxsie Q told me.
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The adult actress and director has also partnered with Streamate, a webcam streaming service, to create ‘Voting 101’ videos. She wants to corral the wide reach of cam girls and OnlyFans models, many of whom have millions of followers. “People who work in the adult industry and folks who consume adult entertainment, we are a powerful voting bloc,” she says. Co-founder of EPA United Savannah Sly created the organization not just to inspire sex workers to vote, but also “to show lawmakers how many of us there are.”
While the exact number of sex workers in America is unknown, estimates put it at around 2 million. “Before women could own property or bank accounts, the line between sex worker and wife was very, very tenuous… And a similar thing is happening now,” Siouxsie Q says. “How many single moms decided to sell feet pics to pay the rent last month?”
There have been partisan events happening, too. Adult actress Richelle Ryan put on gala night ‘We F*ck With Trump’ at Las Vegas’ Peppermint Hippo on November 2, alongside former stripper and current Trump supporter Amber Rose.
Why has mobilization been happening now, at this election? Sex work has been targeted by the Republicans, with anti-porn laws sweeping the US. Meanwhile, Democrats removed protections for sex workers from their platform. “On the left, you have people who think sex work’s not a valid form of labor—that we’re victims of the patriarchy or that we can’t consent [to sex work],” said EPA United member, and adult actress and director, Sinn Sage. “On the right, they’re just like, ‘[Sex workers] are evil… They’re trying to groom children.’”
Project 2025, an ultraconservative policy blueprint for any future Republican administration authored by The Heritage Foundation, declares unequivocally that “Pornography should be outlawed. The people who produce and distribute it should be imprisoned” and that porn “has no claim to First Amendment protection.” It also says porn’s “purveyors are child predators and misogynistic exploiters of women.” The document claims that porn is “as addictive as any illicit drug,” a claim debunked by sex researchers. In fact, Project 2025 is obsessed with sex, mentioning “abortion” 199 times and variants of the word “sex” 133 times.
Though Project 2025 talks authoritatively about porn, the authors didn’t consult with those in the industry (contributor Corey DeAngelis has appeared in gay porn, but now disavows the trade). EPA United member and adult actress Cherie Deville says this is common: “Ex-workers’ voices are still largely ignored by mainstream politicians due to societal stigma and the perception that our issues aren’t ‘worthy’ of legislative attention.”
Sinn Sage believes these views are caused by a misunderstanding of the industry, which is mostly independent: “It’s just a little person like me trying to pay my mortgage and have a vacation once or twice a year. There’s no nefarious agenda,” she says.
To combat Project 2025, Siouxsie Q and her husband—fellow adult performer Michael Vegas—partnered with Hands Off My Porn, to flood social media with ads warning users of the threat posed to their porno supply. In one video, Vegas stumps for Democrats while being pegged. As the sound of the dildo slapping his ass metronomes in the background, he stares straight into the camera, his dick flopping, as he declares: “Oh hey man, I see that you like jerking off. That’s cool. I like jerking off, too. Did you hear that right-wing politicians are trying to outlaw porn and imprison people like you and me? Unless you vote to keep Trump and his stupid friends out of office, you’ll never see me come again.”
Because of beliefs like those in Project 2025, sex workers are treated differently to other laborers. They are routinely denied bank accounts, kicked off of social media platforms, and fired from their day jobs. “We’re not seen as citizens of this country that vote and pay taxes,” Sage says. “We’re always talked about, spoken over, never spoken to.”
In response to these attacks, the sex-worker rights movement has more than tripled in size in the past decade. But many remain reluctant to vote. One reason is that their work can be (at best) only marginally legal. “A lot of us don’t feel safe when doing anything involving the government,” Sly says. “But we should still exercise our voices and our right to vote.”
Sex workers fear registering to vote because doing so makes their legal names public, and they survive by keeping those details private. So Hot2Vote and EPA United have educated them about programs set up to keep voters’ addresses confidential. At a recent Spaces chat on X—attended by about 70 sex workers, porn fans, and allies—speakers included porn stars, a dominatrix, a Harvard PhD candidate-cum-sex worker, and a First Amendment lawyer.
“Democrats and Republicans are not always great on sexual freedom issues,” says Sly, “so sometimes it can feel a little defeating to have to pick one party. But I think it’s important to show up. Voting makes us constituents.”
While the event leaned left, both Harris’ and Trump’s records on sex work were criticized, mainly in relation to FOSTA-SESTA—a 2018 law that holds websites liable for ads posted by its users. This led platforms used by sex workers, like Craigslist, to remove personal ads, making it harder for sex workers to vet clients and driving some to the dangers of street work.
While Trump signed FOSTA-SESTA into law, Harris co-authored it—yet all of the attendees who spoke in the Spaces chat thought Harris would be more willing to listen to sex workers and to change her views based on evidence. “Some people in this industry really believe that [Trump] is secretly ‘for’ us because he’s been a non-sex performer in a porn film—that and the whole Stormy Daniels thing,” said Siouxsie Q. “He had an opportunity to veto FOSTA-SESTA, something that would’ve really helped our industry, and he didn’t.”
Siouxsie Q said that Harris could be pushed to support full decriminalization, pointing out that when Harris was California Attorney General, she changed the law so that minors arrested for prostitution no longer faced criminal prosecution.
Mike Stabile, of adult industry lobbying group Free Speech Coalition, said that, when the Christian right is empowered, they invariably come after adult content. “It’s a way into a larger sort of censorship agenda,” Stabile said. “They believe that pornography, LGBTQ rights, women’s sexuality, are all tied together. And so if they can start hacking away at our rights to talk about these things, they can sort of take the whole bag.”
Queen Lo, a dominatrix and member of EPA United, told the audience she hadn’t just been trying to convince other sex workers to vote, but imploring her fans to as well, incorporating politics into her sessions. “I’ve actually had subs message me that they feel so good about voting with feminism in mind for the first time ever, and that it almost feels kinky,” she said.
While online advocacy like the event on X is important, boots on the ground work can be even more so, Siouxsie Q thinks. She’s visited swing states across the country to register voters at places like the Exxxotica Expo, an adult industry convention held in Scranton, New Jersey. “A handful of counties and a handful of states are going to decide our fate, so I wanted to make sure I was there,” she said. “[I’m] going into these spaces where people may feel disenfranchised… and just trying to get people inspired enough to take action and participate in democracy, because our lives really, actually depend on it.”
Hot2Vote is only a few months old, but Siouxsie Q’s voting campaign began six years earlier, in 2018, when her photographer husband was traveling with Stormy Daniels on a strip club tour. Siouxsie Q thought the tour presented the perfect enfranchisement opportunity: “Because if you support Stormy Daniels, I thought, we really want you voting, simple as that.” She joined the tour, meeting fans as they queued outside strip joints, helping them to register. She went backstage and helped dancers get registered, too. She and Daniels called the campaign Storm the Vote. This year, she broadened the campaign and rebranded it Hot2Vote.
Though Hot2Vote is bipartisan, she shared that she’ll be voting for Harris for both personal and political reasons. While most sex workers I spoke to for this piece supported Harris, pro-Trump sex workers do exist, though they’re in the minority. A poll of 200 sex workers by SWR Data, taken between October 18-23, found that 74 percent planned on voting for Harris, while 9 percent were voting for Trump. (The remaining were undecided or voting for third parties.)
Some of those I interviewed said they believed support for Trump was higher than the poll showed. Richelle Ryan, a Trump-supporting sex worker, said she thought about “30 to 35 percent” of sex workers agreed with her. Athena Parisi, a trans sex worker who supports Harris, said the number is even higher. “Most of the people in the industry I know are voting for Trump,” she said. “We are, like, the most hated group online right now… [but] 99 percent of the time, if I’m talking to a Trump supporter, they don’t treat me the way they treat me online.”
Parisi is participating in a voting campaign on November 5 called “Free the Cheeks.” The event is coordinated by Yotam Solomon, the CEO of Virtue, a genderless jockstrap company. He’s hired Parisi and sex workers to parade through New York on election day in butt-baring mint green and pastel pink jockstraps. “Fashion can be a force of freedom,” he says.
Ryan said she’s voting for Trump because he “supports the American Dream and the Constitution.” Ryan decided to organize an event for Trump after he was shot: “I was like, wow, we have to do something.” She first supported him publicly in 2016, posting a picture of herself at one of his rallies. “Next thing I knew, people were coming at me with pitchforks,” she said. However, since then many fans have messaged in solidarity, she says.
She’s not worried about the porn-banning claims in the pages of Project 2025, arguing that Trump has said several times that “he has nothing to do with it.” She doesn’t think Trump would try to ban porn. “The First Amendment guarantees my freedom of expression—that includes what I do for a living, and the adult industry is a business,” she says.
But most sex workers I spoke to fear that if Trump does win, he’ll ban porn and make their jobs illegal. “Imagine if the government was like, ‘Hey, we’re thinking about making it a crime to be an accountant.’ Like, how different would that be?” Sage says. “I just wish more people could put themselves in our shoes and realize, this is like, life and death for some of us.”
Follow Hallie on X @hallielieberman
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