SICK: A Year in Our Bodies

Our bodies may be sick. Our lives are not over. Our stories deserve to be seen.

SICK: A Year in Our Bodies is a fundraising showcase centering Portland-area sex workers living with chronic illness and disability—and the ways we have learned to survive in a world that wasn’t built in our favor.

For many disabled and chronically ill people, traditional employment demands something our bodies cannot always promise: the same energy every day, rigid schedules, eight-hour shifts, limited rest, and the ability to simply push through. Sex work can offer something different—the ability to build work around our bodies instead of constantly punishing our bodies to fit the expectations of work.

We are dancers. Performers. Artists. Providers. Mothers. Hustlers. Creators. Disabled people. Chronically ill people. Survivors.

This night brings our community together for performances, vendors, entertainment, and unapologetic visibility while raising funds for Rose and Pistolita to create SICK: A Year in Our Bodies—a calendar featuring 12 iconic Portland-area sex workers living with chronic conditions.

Each month will put a real body and a real story behind invisible illness. Not as tragedy. Not as inspiration porn. Not as bodies to pity.

As bodies that adapted. Bodies that worked. Bodies that survived. Bodies that are still fucking here.

This project is about what survival actually looks like when your body refuses to cooperate with the rules of an able-bodied world. It is about the ingenuity of people who found another way when conventional systems failed them. And it is about refusing the shame that so often surrounds both disability and sex work.

We are taking the bodies society tells us to hide—and putting them on the fucking calendar.

Twelve workers. Twelve bodies. Twelve stories of adaptation, resistance, sexuality, illness, labor and survival.

Come celebrate the people who learned how to make a living on their own terms. Come support chronically ill and disabled sex workers telling their own stories.

Sick people are strong people.
Disabled bodies are worthy bodies.
Sex workers are workers.
And survival deserves to be seen.

SICK: A Year in Our Bodies
November 21 • 8 PM • Dante’s • 21+