Special Screening of Sex Work: It’s Just a Job
Promoting Civil Discourse Intellectual Dialogue Series Special Screening of Sex Work: It’s Just a Job SEX WORK: It’s Just a Job centers the voices of sex workers and organizers leading the growing movement to decriminalize consensual sex work in the United States. Every day, people across the country are arrested,
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harassed, denied housing, incarcerated, and threatened by police for engaging in consensual sexual exchanges between adults. The film asks a simple but urgent question: What if the harm comes not from the work itself, but from the laws that criminalize it? Sex Work: It’s Just a Job ultimately challenges audiences to reconsider long-held assumptions about sex work, labor, and morality—and to imagine a world where people are not criminalized for how they survive. Panel: Tami Kashia Gold, Alex Vitale, Molly Simons, Tahtianna Fermin and Marla Cruz. Moderated by Chris Mitchell ABOUT THE FILMMAKERS: Tami Gold, Producer and Director Born in the Bronx and shaped by formative experiences in Latin America and Cuba, Tami Gold brings a deeply political and visually rich sensibility to her films, combining movement-rooted storytelling with incisive social critique. Her acclaimed filmography includes Another Brother, Every Mother’s Son, Juggling Gender, Out at Work, Passionate Politics: The Life and Work of Charlotte Bunch and My Country Occupied. Her work has earned her Guggenheim, Rockefeller, and Fulbright Fellowships, a GLAAD Media Award, and the Tribeca Audience Award, and has been showcased at MoMA, the Whitney Museum of American Art, Sundance, Tribeca, and more than 200 festivals worldwide. A longtime professor at Hunter College (CUNY), Gold developed pioneering curricula in video production and LGBTQ+ media studies. She also directs the James Aronson Awards for Social Justice Journalism. Alex S. Vitale, Producer Professor of Sociology and Coordinator of the Policing and Social Justice Project at Brooklyn College and the CUNY Graduate Center. For the past 30 years, he has written extensively about policing and has consulted with community-based movements, human and civil rights organizations, and governments around the world. Vitale is the author of City of Disorder: How the Quality of Life Campaign Transformed New York Politics and the internationally renowned book The End of Policing. His scholarship on policing has appeared in Policing and Society, Police Practice and Research, Mobilization, and Contemporary Sociology. He is also a frequent essayist whose writing has been published in the New York Daily News, The New York Times, The Nation, Gotham Gazette, and The New Inquiry. GUEST SPEAKERS: Molly Simmons, featured in the film, is a full-service sex worker, organizer and co-founded Working Girls Press. Marla Cruz, featured in the film, is a full-service sex worker and sex worker activist. Tahtianna Fermin, featured in the film, i s a former sex worker, community organizer and model. MODERATOR: Chris Mitchell is a doctoral lecturer in WGS at Hunter College, where he has taught since 2013. Chris has a PhD in history from Rutgers University, and specializes in queer political economy. His work encompasses the relationship between illicit markets and queer history, with a particular interest in the ways in which sex work have fundamentally shaped queer history and politics. He is currently finishing a manuscript entitled From Gay Ghetto to Free Market: Entrepreneurship and the Transformation of Gay New York, 1945-1982. Chris also plays euphonium in the Queer Big Apple Corps and lives in New York City with his partner and a dozen or so houseplants.